Astronomical Myths Part 21

The year commenced with the new moon nearest to the 20th or 21st of June, the time of the summer solstice; it was composed in general of twelve months, each of which commenced on the day of the new moon, and which had alternately twenty-nine and thirty days.

This arrangement, conformable to the lunar year, only gave 354 days to the civil year, and as this was too short by ten days, twenty-one hours, this difference, by acc.u.mulation, produced nearly eighty-seven days at the end of eight years, or three months of twenty-nine days each. To bring the lunar years into accordance with the solstices, it was necessary to add three intercalary months every eight years.

The phases of the moon being thus brought into comparison with the rotation of the earth, a cycle was discovered by Meton, now known as the Metonic cycle, useful also in predicting eclipses, which comprised nineteen years, during which time 235 lunations will have very nearly occurred, and the full moons will return to the same dates. In fact, the year and the lunation are to one another very nearly in the proportion of 235 to 19. By observing for nineteen years the positions and phases of the moon, they will be found to return again in the same order at the same times, and they can therefore be predicted. This lunar cycle was adopted in the year 433 B.C. to regulate the luni-solar calendar, and it was engraved in letters of gold on the walls of the temple of Minerva, from whence comes the name _golden number_, which is given to the number that marks the place of the given year in this period of nineteen.

Caliphus made a larger and more exact cycle by multiplying by four and taking away one day. Thus he made of 27,759 days 76 Julian years, during which there were 940 lunations.

The Roman calendar was even more complicated than the Greek, and not so good. Romulus is said to have given to his subjects a strange arrangement that we can no longer understand. More of a warrior than a philosopher, this founder of Rome made the year to consist of ten months, some being of twenty days and others of fifty-five. These unequal lengths were probably regulated by the agricultural works to be done, and by the prevailing religious ideas. After the conclusion of these days they began counting again in the same order; so that the year had only 304 days.

The first of these ten months was called _Mars_ after the name of the G.o.d from whom Romulus pretended to have descended. The name of the second, Aprilis, was derived from the word _aperire_, to open, because it was at the time that the earth opened; or it may be, from Aphrodite, one of the names of Venus, the supposed grandmother of aeneas. The third month was consecrated to _Maa_, the mother of Mercury. The names of the six others expressed simply their order--Quintilis, the fifth; s.e.xtilis, the sixth; September, the seventh; and so on.

Numa added two months to the ten of Romulus; one took the name of _Januarius_, from _Ja.n.u.s_: the name of the other was derived either from the sacrifices (_februalia_), by which the faults committed during the course of the past year were expiated, or from _Februo___, the G.o.d of the dead, to which the last month was consecrated. The year then had 355 days.

These Roman months have become our own, and hence a special interest attaches to the consideration of their origin, and the explanation of the manner in which they have been modified and supplemented. Each of them was divided into unequal parts, by the days which were known as the calends, nones, and ides. The calends were invariably fixed to the first day of each month; the nones came on the 5th or 7th, and the ides the 13th or 15th.

The Romans, looking forward, as children do to festive days, to the fete which came on these particular days, named each day by its distance from the next that was following. Immediately after the calends of a month, the dates were referred to the nones, each day being called seven, six, five, and so on days before the nones; on the morrow of the nones they counted to the ides; and so the days at the end of the month always bore the name of the calends of the month following.

To complete the confusion the 2nd day before the fete was called the 3rd, by counting the fete itself as the 1st, and so they added one throughout to the number that _we_ should now say expressed our distance from a certain date.

Since there were thus ten days short in each year, it was soon found necessary to add them on, so a supplementary month was created, which was called Mercedonius. This month, by another anomaly, was placed between the 23rd and 24th of February. Thus, after February 23rd, came 1st, 2nd, 3rd of Mercedonius; and then after the dates of this supplementary month were gone through, the original month was taken up again, and they went on with the 24th of February.

And finally, to complete the medley, the priests who had the charge of regulating this complex calendar, acquitted themselves as badly as they could; by negligence or an arbitrary use of their power they lengthened or shortened the year without any uniform rule. Often, indeed, they consulted in this nothing but their own convenience, or the interests of their friends.

The disorder which this license had introduced into the calendar proceeded so far that the months had changed from the seasons, those of winter being advanced to the autumn, those of the autumn to the summer.

The fetes were celebrated in seasons different from those in which they were inst.i.tuted, so that of Ceres happened when the wheat was in the blade, and that of Bacchus when the raisins were green. Julius Caesar, therefore, determined to establish a solar year according to the known period of revolution of the sun, that is 365 days and a quarter. He ordained that each fourth year a day should be intercalated in the place where the month Mercedonius used to be inserted, _i.e._ between the 23rd and 24th of February.

The 6th of the calends of March in ordinary years was the 24th of February; it was called _s.e.xto-kalendas_. When an extra day was put in every fourth year before the 24th, this was a second 6th day, and was therefore called _biss.e.xto-kalendas_, whence we get the name biss.e.xtile, applied to leap year.

But it was necessary also to bring back the public fetes to the seasons they ought to be held in: for this purpose Caesar was obliged to insert in the current year, 46 B.C. (or 708 A.U.C.), two intercalary months beside the month Mercedonius. There was, therefore, a year of fifteen months divided into 445 days, and this was called the year of confusion.

Caesar gave the strictest injunctions to Sosigenes, a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer whom he brought to Rome for this purpose; and on the same principles Flavius was ordered to compose a new calendar, in which all the Roman fetes were entered--following, however, the old method of reckoning the days from the calends, nones, and ides.

Antonius, after the death of Caesar, changed the name of Quintilis, in which Julius Caesar was born, into the name _Julius_, whence we derive our name July. The name of _Augustus_ was given to the month _s.e.xtilis_, because the Emperor Augustus obtained his greatest victories during that month.

Tiberius, Nero, and other imperial monsters attempted to give their names to the other months. But the people had too much independence and sense of justice to accord them such a flattery.

The remaining months we have as they were named in the days of Numa Pompilius.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 57.--THE ROMAN CALENDAR.]

A cubical block of white marble has been found at Pompeii which ill.u.s.trates this very well.

Each of the four sides is divided into three columns, and on each column is the information about the month. Each month is surmounted by the sign of the zodiac through which the sun is pa.s.sing. Beneath the name of the month is inscribed the number of days it contains; the date of the nones, the number of the hours of the day, and of the night; the place of the sun, the divinity under whose protection the month is placed, the agricultural works that are to be done in it, the civil and ecclesiastical ceremonies that are to be performed. These inscriptions are to be seen under the month January to the left of the woodcut.

The reform thus introduced by Julius Caesar is commonly known as the _Julian reform_. The first year in which this calendar was followed was 44 B.C.

The Julian calendar was in use, without any modification, for a great number of years; nevertheless, the mean value which had been a.s.signed to the civil year being a little different to that of the tropical, a noticeable change at length resulted in the dates in which, each year, the seasons commenced; so that if no remedy had been introduced, the same season would be displaced little by little each year, so as to commence successively in different months.

The Council of Nice, which was held in the year 325 of the Christian era, adopted a fixed rule to determine the time at which Easter falls.

This rule was based on the supposed fact that the spring equinox happened every year on the 21st of March, as it did at the time of the meeting of the Council. This would indeed be the case if the mean value of the civil year of the Julian calendar was exactly equal to the tropical year. But while the first is 36525 days, the second is 365242264 days; so that the tropical year is too small by 11 minutes and 8 seconds. It follows hence that after the lapse of four Julian years the vernal equinox, instead of happening exactly at the same time as it did four years before, will happen 44 minutes 32 seconds too soon; and will gain as much in each succeeding four years. So that at the end of a certain number of years, after the year 325, the equinox will happen on the 20th of March, afterwards on the 19th, and so on. This continual advance notified by the astronomers, determined Pope Gregory XIII. to introduce a new reform into the calendar.

It was in the year 1582 that the _Gregorian reform_ was put into operation. At that epoch the vernal equinox happened on the 11th instead of the 21st of March. To get rid of this advance of ten days that the equinox had made and to bring it back to the original date, Pope Gregory decided that the day after the 4th of October, 1582, should be called the 15th instead of the 5th. This change only did away with the inconvenience at the time attaching to the Julian calendar; it was necessary to make also some modification in the rule which served to determine the lengths of the civil years, in order to avoid the same error for the future.

So the Pope determined that in each 400 years there should be only 97 biss.e.xtile years, instead of 100, as there used to be in the Julian calendar. This made three days taken off the 400 years, and in consequence the mean value of the civil year is reduced to 3652425 days, which is not far from the true tropical year. The Gregorian year thus obtained is still too great by 000226 of a day; the date of the vernal equinox will still then advance in virtue of this excess, but it is easy to see that the Gregorian reform will suffice for a great number of centuries.

The method in which it is carried out is as follows:--In the Julian calendar each year that divided by four when expressed in its usual way, by A.D., was a leap year, and therefore each year that completed a century was such, as 1300, 1400 and so on--but in the Gregorian reform, all these century numbers are to be reckoned common years, unless the number without the two cyphers divides by four; thus 1,900 will be a common year and 2,000 a leap year. It is easy to see that this will leave out three leap years in every 400 years.

The Gregorian calendar was immediately adopted in France and Germany, and a little later in England. Now it is in operation in all the Christian countries of Europe, except Russia, where the Julian calendar is still followed. It follows that Russian dates do not agree with ours.

In 1582, the difference was ten days, and this difference remained the same till the end of the seventeenth century, when the year 1700 was biss.e.xtile in the Julian, but not in the Gregorian calendar, so the difference increased to eleven days, and now in the same way is twelve days.

Next to the year, comes the day as the most natural division of time in connection with the earth, though it admits of less difference in its arrangements, as we cannot be mistaken as to its length. It is the natural standard too of our division of time into shorter intervals such as hours, minutes, and seconds. By the word _day_ we mean of course the interval during which the earth makes a complete revolution round itself, while _daytime_ may be used to express the portion of it during which our portion of the earth is towards the sun. The Greeks to avoid ambiguity used the word _nyctemere_, meaning night and day.

No ancient nation is known that did not divide the day into twenty-four hours, when they divided it at all into such small parts, which seems to show that such a division was comparatively a late inst.i.tution, and was derived from the invention of a single nation. It would necessarily depend on the possibility of reckoning shorter periods of time than the natural one of the day. In the earliest ages, and even afterwards, the position of the sun in the heavens by day, and the position of the constellations by night, gave approximately the time. Instead of asking What "o'clock" is it? the Greeks would say, "What star is pa.s.sing?" The next method of determining time depended on the uniform motion of water from a cistern. It was invented by the Egyptians, and was called a clepsydra, and was in use among the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The more accurate measurement of time by means of clocks was not introduced till about 140 B.C., when Trimalcion had one in his dining chamber. The use of them, however, had been so lost that in 760 A.D.

they were considered quite novelties. The clocks, of course, have to be regulated by the sun, an operation which has been the employment of astronomers, among other things, for centuries. Each locality had its own time according to the moment when the sun pa.s.sed the meridian of the place, a moment which was determined by observation.

Before the introduction of the hour, the day and night appear to have been divided into watches. Among the Babylonians the night was reckoned from what we call 6 A.M. to 6 P.M., and divided into three watches of four hours each--called the "evening," "middle," and "morning" watch.

These were later superseded by the more accurate hour, or rather "double hour" or _casbri_, each of which was divided into sixty minutes and sixty seconds, and the change taking place not earlier than 2,000 B.C.

Whether the Babylonians (or Accadians) were the inventors of the hour it is difficult to say, though they almost certainly were of other divisions of time. It is remarkable that in the ancient Jewish Scriptures we find no mention of any such division until the date at which the prophecy of Daniel was written, that is, until the Jews had come in contact with the Babylonians.

Some nations have counted the twenty-four hours consecutively from one to twenty-four as astronomers do now, but others and the majority have divided the whole period into two of twelve hours each.

The time of the commencement of the day has varied much with the different nations.

The Jews, the ancient Athenians, the Chinese, and several other peoples, more or less of the past, have commenced the day with the setting of the sun, a custom which perhaps originated with the determination of the commencement of the year, and therefore of the day, by the observation of some stars that were seen at sunset, a custom continued in our memory by the well-known words, "the evening and the morning were the first day."

The Italians, till recently, counted the hours in a single series, between two settings of the sun. The only gain in such a method would be to sailors, that they might know how many hours they had before night overtook them; the sun always setting at twenty-four o'clock; if the watch marked nineteen or twenty, it would mean they had five or four hours to see by--but such a gain would be very small against the necessity of setting their watches differently every morning, and the inconvenience of never having fixed hours for meals.

Among the Babylonians, Syrians, Persians, the modern Greeks, and inhabitants of the Balearic Isles, &c., the day commenced with the rising of the sun. Nevertheless, among all the astronomical phenomena that may be submitted to observation, none is so liable to uncertainty as the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies, owing among other things to the effects of refraction.

Among the ancient Arabians, followed in this by the author of the _Almagesta_, and by Ptolemy, the day commenced at noon. Modern astronomers adopt this usage. The moment of changing the date is then always marked by a phenomenon easy to observe.

Lastly, that we may see how every variety possible is sure to be chosen when anything is left to the free choice of men, we know that with the Egyptians, Hipparchus, the ancient Romans, and all the European nations at present, the day begins at midnight. Copernicus among the astronomers of our era followed this usage. We may remark that the commencement of the astronomical day commences twelve hours _after_ the civil day.

Of the various periods composed of several days, the week of seven days is the most widely spread--and of considerable antiquity. Yet it is not the universal method of dividing months. Among the Egyptians the month was divided into periods of ten days each; and we find no sign of the seven days--the several days of the whole month having a G.o.d a.s.signed to each. Among the Hindoos no trace has been found by Max Muller in their ancient Vedic literature of any such division, but the month is divided into two according to the moon; the _clear_ half from the new to the full moon, the _obscure_ half from the full to the new, and a similar division has been found among the Aztecs. The Chinese divide the month like the Egyptians. Among the Babylonians two methods of dividing the month existed, and both of them from the earliest times. The first method was to separate it into two halves of fifteen days each, and each of these periods into three shorter ones of five days, making six per month. The other method is the week of seven days. The days of the week with them, as they are with many nations now, were named after the sun and moon and the five planets, and the 7th, 14th, 19th, 21st, and 28th days of each month--days separated by seven days each omitting the 19th--were termed "days of rest," on which certain works were forbidden to be done. From this it is plain that we have here all the elements of our modern week. We find it, as is well known, in the earliest of Hebrew writings, but without the mark which gives reason for the number seven, that is the names of the seven heavenly bodies. It would seem most probable, then, that we must look to the Accadians as the originators of our modern week, from whom the Hebrews may have--and, if so, at a very early period--borrowed the idea.

It is known that the week was not employed in the ancient calendars of the Romans, into which it was afterwards introduced through the medium of the biblical traditions, and became a legal usage under the first Christian Emperors. From thence it has been propagated together with the Julian calendar amongst all the populations that have been subjected to the Roman power. We find the period of seven days employed in the astronomical treatises of Hindoo writers, but not before the fifth century.

Dion Ca.s.sius, in the third century, represents the week as universally spread in his times, and considers it a recent invention which he attributes to the Egyptians; meaning thereby, doubtless, the astrologers of the Alexandrian school, at that time very eager to spread the abstract speculations of Plato and Pythagoras.

If the names of the days of the week were derived from the planets, the sun and moon, as is easy to see, it is not so clear how they came to have their present order. The original order in which they were supposed to be placed in the various heavens that supported them according to their distance from the earth was thus:--Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon. One supposition is that each hour of the day was sacred to one of these, and that each day was named from the G.o.d that presided over the first hours. Now, as seven goes three times into twenty-four, and leaves three over, it is plain that if Saturn began the first hour of Sat.u.r.day, the next day would begin with the planet three further on in the series, which would bring us to the Sun for Sunday, three more would bring us next day to the Moon for Monday, and so to Mars for Tuesday, to Mercury for Wednesday, to Jupiter for Thursday, to Venus for Friday, and so round again to Saturn for Sat.u.r.day.

The same method is ill.u.s.trated by putting the symbols in order round the circ.u.mference of a circle, and joining them by lines to the one most opposite, following always in the same order as in the following figure.

We arrive in this way at the order of the days of the week.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 58.]

All the nations who have adopted the week have not kept to the same names for them, but have varied them according to taste. Thus Sunday was changed by the Christian Church to the "Lord's Day," a name it still partially retains among ourselves, but which is the regular name among several continental nations, including the corrupted _Dimanche_ of the French. The four middle days have also been very largely changed, as they have been among ourselves and most northern nations to commemorate the names of the great Scandinavian G.o.ds Tuesco, Woden, Thor, and Friga.

This change was no doubt due to the old mythology of the Druids being amalgamated with the new method of collecting the days into weeks.

We give below a general table of the names of the days of the week in several different languages.