Calendar days named for planets

By Alan Linda | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, May 6, 2008

It’s almost impossible to comprehend how goofed up we once were about time. We take calendars pretty much for granted. It certainly wasn’t like that for a long, long time.

Time-wise, humans first keyed themselves to the cycles of the moon. Unfortunately, back then, predicting and measuring the seasons, rather than the months, was the big problem, and the moon didn’t help. Perhaps we were confused because the moon and women’s menstrual cycles seemed so similar, and seemed to indicate bigger reasons for measuring our activities by the moon’s cycles. The word “moon” is actually based on ancient words meaning “measure.”

What we needed, folks back then decided, was something to measure the seasons, and the fact that a solar year is 365 and 1/4th days, and bears little connection to the moon, well, that’s when humankind dug way down deep and came up with all kinds of calendars.

The ancient Babylonians came up with one first, about 3000 years BCE. They used a 19-year cycle, with seven of the years containing 13 months, and the remaining 12 containing 12 months. Obviously, this did little to accurately label the seasons for planting. The Greeks kept this same calendar.

Croesus, a rich man around 400 BCE, was told by Solon, a recognized wise man commenting on the ridiculousness of the calendar: “In man’s 70 years, not one of his days will produce one like any of the rest.”

As early as 4000 years BCE, Egypt cued a calendar to the Nile, and its seasonal flooding that annually enriched the soil that fed them. They used 12 months of 30 days, and tacked on five days at the end to make things work out. With that quarter of a day ignored, this calendar wandered through the centuries, and repeated itself every 1,460 years. Since no one lived that long, they shrugged and said so what.

Christianity changed all that, with the need to fix a repeating date for Easter, which they said should be the Sunday after the Friday of the crucifixion. Pope Gregory XIII in 1572 (Yes, the confusion of the Egyptian year went on that long.) set the calendar straight by stating that every Oct. 4 was to be followed by Oct. 15.

I will spare you the math involved, but leap days were omitted from years ending in hundreds, unless they were divisible by 400. Whew.

The Protestants weren’t about to follow the Pope, and resisted this calendar until 1752, when their adoption of the Gregorian calendar mentioned in the previous paragraph changed everyone’s birthdays, including Ben Franklin’s, who said: “Regret not to … lie down in peace on the second of this month and wake up on the morning of the fourteenth.” Workmen and servants and employees, when they found that their paychecks that month were shrunken, complained loudly.

Not to be outdone in the creative calendar category, in 1752 the French held a meeting and went metric by turning a seven-day-week into 10 days, each day of which was divided into ten hours, each hour of which held 100 minutes, with 100 seconds in each minute. There were, of course, three weeks in one month. That didn’t last too long.

The Russians, in the throes of the Great Revolution of 1929, obviously couldn’t follow any calendar based on some religious folderol, and went for a 5-day week, with four to work, one off. That lasted until 1940.

Our present seven-day week calendar seems unconnected to ancient Greeks, who had no week at all, and ancient Romans, who had an eight-day week. Speculation that the seven hills around Rome led to a seven-day week change, or maybe the seven deadly sins of Christianity, or seven wonders of the world led to the seven-day week are just that, speculation.

Perhaps the Jews, and the Sabbath, the seventh day for rest, caused the final duration of the week. Perhaps the Romans caused the Sabbath to be the rest day. No one knows for sure.

Or perhaps it was the fact that seven planets were observable by man, which allowed the structure of astrology to form, a structure that governed man’s lives by the influence of the planets--perhaps that is the basis of our week.

Romans, around 300 CE, made use of the planets by naming the first hour of each of the seven days of their week after one of the planets, thinking that the gods that governed man from those planets affected the day by influencing the first hour.

And that’s how we ended up with: Sunday, after the sun; Monday, after the moon; Tuesday, after Mars (Italian “martes.”); Wednesday after Mercury (Italian “mercoledi.”); Thursday after Jupiter (Italian “jueves.”); Friday after Venus (Italian “viernes.”); and Saturday for Saturn.

There you have it. We live by a Christian calendar based on ancient beliefs in idolatry, which in turn was based on the planets and the stars.

What about telling the time of day, so religious clergy would know when to worship? That’s for next time.

Alan Linda writes from his home in New York Mills