By Stout Cortez
This essay is being published on March 2nd, which means that we’ve successfully made another dismal trudge through the calendar’s worst month — February.
Let’s state the plainly obvious: February sucks. The days are their darkest on December 21st, but we had three months of slowly cooling weather to acclimate to that. And the wintery days in December are novel, and the clean-falling new-year snows of January are refreshing and blank with promise. February, as the kids say, hits different.
But hark! For those of you who have similarly struggled through the snowy seasons' senescence, I have some good news: I’ve completed a trip through the month’s history, and I think I’ve found a solution for its problems. And for those who don’t mind February at all — or who aren’t in my target audience of fellow North Americans — I still think I have a good story. If you’re totally disinterested, well… too bad. I’m the one who compared cryptocurrency to a giant statue of a penis, and therefore I’m the one holding the speaking conch today.
Early calendars.
Let’s go back to a time before time, or at least a time before the calendar was invented.
Every Earth calendar has to agree two competing concepts for tracking time, the lunar and the solar cycles, which are both logical structures to use but are hard to synchronize together. Having a year reset every time the Earth completes an orbit makes complete sense, because you want the length of the day and the weather on Day 1 in Year 1 to be similar to Day 1 on Year 2, which also helps you easily count years. However, 3,000 years ago, people didn’t generally have the tools or the ability to reliably keep track of 365/366 days at a time, and the more reliable tracking mechanism was the lunar cycle. All you had to do was look up, see a big silver circle and know that it had been 29.5 days since the last big silver circle. Creating one calendar that can use the lunar cycle to track the solar cycle, however, is difficult.
The first iterations of the modern (Gregorian) calendar that we use now were unattributable early Roman/late Greek efforts, and they made a basic innovation that our calendar still uses: a month system that follows the lunar cycle and resets the solar year when the list of months ended. Within a month were the following lunar periods: the “Nones” at the end when the moon is waxing full, the “Ides” in the middle when the moon is new, and the “Kalends” at the beginning when the moon is waning full (thus: Kalendar, or calendar).
The early calendar didn’t completely phase in with the solar cycle, so it wasn’t a perfect system, but it did a good job of using the lunar cycle to keep track of time during a solar cycle. The solution our calendar’s ancestor used to fix this issue was elegant: a 10-month year beginning on the spring equinox (great because Roman numerals reset on 10), and ending with a whole mess of uncounted winter days until the equinox came again. This calendar is often called the “Romulus Calendar” after the mythical founder of Rome, and it looks like this:
- Martius (from “Mars,” Roman god of war): 31 days
- Aprilis (from “Virilis,” later “Venus,” Roman goddess of love and beauty): 30 days
- Maius (from “Maia,” Zeus’s baby-mama of Hermes): 31 days
- Iunius (from “Juno,” goddess of all Roman goddesses): 30 days
- Quintilis (from the Latin word for five): 31 days
- Sextilis (from the Latin word for six): 30 days
- September (from the Latin word for seven): 30 days
- October (from the Latin word for eight): 31 days
- November (from the Latin word for nine): 30 days
- December (from the Latin word for ten): 30 days
- ~~about like 61 days that aren’t counted~~
There are a lot of familiar month names in there, which remain until this day. Also, the decision to just chalk up winter to a loss and not bother counting its days is brilliant, though sadly impractical for scheduling. Another knock on this system is that it completely loses the ability to phase in with a 29.5 day lunar cycle, but hey… a year starts on the spring equinox. This makes total sense, and really is the way a calendar is meant to be. The year should start with the spring equinox.
The year should start with the spring equinox.
The year should start with the spring equinox.
Everything is ruined.
Around 700 BC, a Roman emperor named Numa Pompilius reformed the calendar so that the months were shorter (more in phase with the lunar cycle), threw in a leap month to be used periodically to sync back up with the solar cycle, and also added two other months, January and February, and look — nobody really knows what happened.
