ok so the first calendars were lunar calendars, 28 days, and a woman's menstrual cycles are 28 days. The implications of this are staggering, like isn't it conceivable that women were the first to recognize and implement time as a concept as a matter of survival just based on having to plan for one's period every month? and her observation that the moon's phases roughly correlates to her period could be one of the earliest breakthroughs of abstract thinking. what if she believed the moon controlled her cycle? First deity, first worship. Why would prehistoric men need to conceptualize time in the sophisticated way women clearly did? Men did not need to plan for periods, pregnancy, or raising children into adulthood. They had no reason not to scamper around the wilderness pissing on trees and ejaculating into the nearest holes they can find for the rest of time because they never had to plan long-term for monthly uncontrollable bleeding and keeping infants alive for years. Why would men look at the moon's phases and see anything other than the moon's phases? He cannot biologically realize how the moon is intrinsically connected to him, how he and time are intertwined, how one is all.
We are the timekeepers. This blood built society.
Yes!!!!! There is even an amazing "official" term/theory about it
We are so metal!!! Grahn is also amazing and I recommend reading anything you can get your hands on written/said by her.
OMG! Reblogging for this great addition
âMenstrual Calendar Two conflicting calendars were used through most of the Christian era in Europe: the church's official, solar, "Julian" calendar, and the peasants' unofficial, lunar, Goddess-given menstrual calendar. The thirteen annual lunations of the latter produced one of the contrasting answers to the nursery-rhyme riddle: "How many months be in the year? There be thirteen, I say." Christians produced another answer: "There be but twelve, I say." The lunar calendar's thirteen 28-day months had four 7-day weeks a piece, marking new, waxing, full, and waning moon-sabbaths in the ancient form. Weeks are still lunar, but they no longer fit neatly into the solar month system. Thirteen lunar months gave 364 days per year (13 X 28), with one extra day to make 365. Nursery rhymes, fairy tales, witch charms, ballads and other repositories of pagan tradition nearly always describe the full annual cycle as "a year and a day." It has been shown that calendar consciousness developed first in women, because of their natural menstrual body calendar, correlated with observations of the moon's phases. Chinese women established a lunar calendar 3000 years ago, dividing the celestial sphere into 28 stellar "mansions" through which the moon passed. Among the Maya of central America, every woman knew "the great Maya calendar had first been based on her menstrual cycles." Romans called the calculation of time mensuration, i.e., knowledge of the menses. Gaelic words for "menstruation" and "calendar" are the same: miosach and miosachan. The new-moon sabbaths of ancient Latium were kalends, possibly related to the Aryan name of Kali. For fear of disrupting the Goddess's transitions, activities of some kinds were forbidden on the seventh day of each lunar phase; thus sabbaths became "unlucky" or taboo. Because it was the time-honored custom, even the biblical God was forced to "rest" on the seventh day. One of the prototypes of Yahweh was the Babylonian god Marduk, who divided the maternal "waters" into those above and below the firmament (Genesis 1: 7). Marduk claimed to be the creator, but was not yet so patriarchal as to abandon his Mother's lunar calendar. Babylonian priests said Marduk established holy days and seasons by the moon. Yet older traditions said the menstrual calendar was instituted in Babylon by the god Nabu-Rimmani, the biblical Baai-Rimmon, a phallic deity united with the Great Mother's yoni in the form of a pomegranate. The Chinese explained their menstrual calendar with the myth of the holy calendar plant, lik-kiep, on which a pod grew every day for 14 days, then a pod fell off every day for 14 days. When the months became confused by solar reckoning, the Chinese added extra days when "a pod withered without falling off." According to another story, the menstrual calendar was called Hsiu, "Houses." The Moon Mother rested each night of the lunar month in a different one of her 28 houses, which were kept by the 28 warrior-hero consorts she had placed in heaven to attend her. The ancient Hebrews took their calendar from Chaldea, legendary home of Abraham, whose older name was Ab-sin, "Moon-father." Chaldeans were credited with the invention of astrology, now largely based on the movements of the sun; but the Chaldeans didn't study the sun. They were "Moon-worshippers," believing the moon determined the fates of men by her movements through various "houses" of the zodiac. The same lunar myths were found in Egypt, northern Europe, Greece, and Rome. Latin kings were sacrificed at the threeday dark of the moon period called ides, to insure the Goddess's safe return from the underworld. Greeks similarly made offerings at the Great Sabbath called Noumenia (New Moon). The other Great Sabbath was Dichomenia (Full Moon), when the Goddess stood at the peak of her cycle. Early attempts at calendar reform left Greek city-states quarreling among themselves about sabbaths and intercalary days. Aristophanes' s The Clouds makes the Moon-goddess complain that her reckoning of the days was not being correctly followed. Time-spans in myths became confused. Adonis was born after "ten months' gestation," which really meant ten lunar months, the normal 280 days. According to the Book of Maccabees, every gestation lasted ten months. This wasn't ignorance; it was just lunar reckoning. Even the saints' days of the medieval church were established by menology, literally "knowledge of the moon." The church's so-called movable feasts were movable because they were determined by lunar cycles, not solar ones; thus they drifted erratically through the months of the canonical calendar. The most important of them, Easter, is still determined by the moon (first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox), at a time when the Goddess slew and re-conceived the Savior or vegetation god for a new season. More confusion was created by the fact that menstrual calendars reckoned the day from noon to noon, with the midnight hour in the central position; but solar calendars reckoned the day from midnight to midnight. The Saxon word den (day) really meant "night." In Shakespeare's time, people said goodnight by wishing each other good den, literally good moon-day. Old French nursery rhymes greeted the moon rising in the evening with "Good morning, Madame Moon." The meridian or high point of noon used to indicate the full moon overhead at midnight: hence its name Meri-Dia or MaryDiana, the Moon-goddess. Superstitious folk talked of the daemonium meridian urn, devil of the meridian, a diabolization of the Goddess. She was probably the second of the Slavic trinity of Fates (Zorya), called "She of the Evening, She of Midnight, and She of Morning," in that order. Pagans held their festivals at night, by moonlight: a custom that might be traced as far back as ancient Egypt, where major religious ceremonies were nocturnal, as listed in the Book of the Dead: The night of the battle and of the overthrow of the Sebau-field in Tattu ... , the night of making to stand up the double Tet in Sekhem ... , the night of establishing Horus in the heritage of the things of his father in Rekhti . .. , the night when Isis maketh lamentation at the side of her brother Osiris in Abtu ... , the night of the Haker festival when a division is made between the dead and the spirits who are on the path of the dead ... , the night of the judgment of those who are to be annihilated at the great festival of the ploughing and the turning up of the earth.â Pre-Christian Europe also gave night precedence over day . . Germanic tribes, Celts, Gauls, druids, the ancient Irish calculated "months, years, and birthdays in such a way as to make the night precede the day." Caesar noted that the Celts measured time by nights instead of by days. Christian holy days were copied from pagan ones, displaced by 12 hours in their solar reckoning; therefore the older, heathen version of each festival was celebrated on the "Eve" of its Christian counterpart. From this arose the so-called devilish rites of May Eve, Midsummer Eve, Lammas Eve, All Hallow's Eve, and Christmas Eve which was taken from the pagan Yule, and to a late date was still called the Night of the Mother.'s Witch persecutors pretended the witches copied their sabbats from Christian feast days in deliberate mockery of the church; but in fact the copying had gone in the other direction. The church took over the pagan feasts of Halloween, May Day, Lammas, lmbolg, Midsummer, Easter, Yule, and so on, then claimed to have invented them. However, of the two rival festivals on the same day, the Christian one was invariably the newcomer. May Eve was the Saxons' Walpurgisnacht, the Celts' Beltain, announcing the opening of the Merry Month of sexual license and "wearing of the green" in honor of the earth's new spring garment. The occasion was still marked by pagan ceremonies in the late 16th century. (See May.) Midsummer Eve merged with St. John's Day, but the solstitial rites remained more pagan than Christian. Lammas Eve was a witches' Great Sabbat because it was formerly the pagan Feast of Bread (Hlaf..mass) in honor of the Corn-mother. Halloween was All Hallows' or All Souls' eve, from the Celtic Samhain or Feast of the Dead, when pagan ancestors came forth from their fairymounds, and Christians called them "demons" who attended the witches' feasts. The thirteen months of the menstruat calendar also led to pagan reverence for the number 13, and Christian detestation of it. Witches' "covens" were supposed to be groups of 13 like the moonworshipping dancers of the Moorish zabat (sabbat), to whom thirteen expressed the three-in-one nature of the lunar Goddess. Some said thirteen was a bad number because Christ was the thirteenth in the group of apostles, thus the thirteenth member of any group would be condemned to death. Actually, it was the church's opposition to pagan symbolism that brought opprobrium on the number 13. Some even feared to speak its true name, and it was euphemized as a "baker's dozen," or sometimes "devil's dozen." The heathen tradition persisted in such symbols as the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, probably lunar-month signs taken from a primitive list of zodiacal constellations. They were defined as a sword, basket, drinking horn, chariot, halter, knife, cauldron, whetstone, garment, pan, platter, chessboard, and mantle. The thirteen menstrual months were symbolized in the Tarxien temple on Malta as a sow with 13 teats, like the Celts' Sow-goddess Cerridwen. Thirteen "moons" of the menstrual calendar were suggested also by the English Twelfth Night custom of kindling twelve small fires and one large one, to represent the moon of the New Year. In general, the symbols of ancient matriarchy came to be known as night, the moon, and the number 13, while those of patriarchy were day, the sun, and the number 12.â
- From Barbara G. Walker's âWomen's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secretsâ
