“a year should have 13 months”
Marco Visscher |March 2005 issue
What’s wrong with a 12-month year?
“Our current calendar is completely absurd. It was conceived by a caste of male priests who were looking for an instrument to ensure we’d pay our taxes on time. The word ‘calendar’ stems from the Latin word ‘calends’, or accounts book. That’s an indication that the calendar has nothing to do with natural harmony.”
Should it?
“Twelve is a more easily divisible number for classifying time and is very suitable for making a spatial distribution, but time is a dimension unto itself, as Einstein understood. Twelve is static, the source of an artificial determination of time. But 13 signifies change, movement. Thirteen is the number associated with natural cycles. In the time that the earth revolves around the sun—a year—the moon circles the earth 13 times. We are also familiar with the 28-day cycle of a woman’s menstrual period. A 13-month calendar was used by the Druids, Celts, Incas, ancient Egyptians, Polynesian peoples. Thirteen moons of 28 days is simply the cycle of Mother Earth.”
Wait a second: 13 times 28… That’s 364, you’re missing a day.
“That’s the Day Outside Time: a beautiful moment to look back over the year. The year can begin on 26 July, as it did for the Egyptians and Mayans, because on that day the earth, sun and Sirius line up, the only conjunction between two heavenly bodies that are located in the same place at the same time every year. It’s a universal point of calibration.”
I see… But what’s really the problem?
“The planet is being cheated out of a natural, cyclical calendar. We’re saddled with a calendar based on linear time. Linear time means growth is only possible along a straight line where everything collects: more knowledge, more production, more technology, more people, more of the same. But cyclical time implies that years, seasons and days return again and again, bringing depth and thus quality. In order to save the earth, we have to return to a calendar that aligns our biological rhythms with the natural cycle. Then we can once again be lovely co-creators of creation, instead of fear-spreading exploiters.”
Peter Toonen wrote Wat wisten de Maya’s? (What did the Mayans know?) and De natuurlijke tijd (The nNatural time). He regularly gives lectures and workshops on time and the 13-month calendar. See also: www.natuurlijketijd.nl.
