Celtic calendar
The Celtic calendar was and remains a way to reconcile lunar and solar years, for purposes of ritual.
The oldest material Celtic calendar is the fragmented Coligny calendar, which was discovered in Coligny, France, in 1897. It uses Roman numerals and dates to the 1st century, BC or AD, a time when the the Roman Empire imposed use of the Julian Calendar in Roman Gaul. The astronomical format of the calendar year that the Coligny calendar represents, is likely to be far older, for among cultural entities, calendars are even more conservative than rites and cults.
An engraved stone found at Knowth, Ireland, is a graphical representation of a lunar calendar that operates on the same principle as the Coligny calendar (Brennan 1994).
The Coligny calendar registers a cycle of lunar months, divided in a "bright" and a "dark" half-moon or fortnight each. The months were taken to begin at full moon, and a 13th intercalary month was added every two or three years to align the lunations with the solar year.
The first part of the year started at Samaine or Samhain, which was around the first of November, never far from what would become Halloween and the following All Saints Day in our modern solar calendar. The second part of the year started at Beltaine which was around the first of May. The Coligny calendar is now in the Gallo-Roman museum of Lyon.
Celtic days began at sundown: "they keep birthdays and the beginnings of months and years in such an order that the day follows the night," their adversary Julius Caesar observed Gallic Wars. Longer periods were reckoned in nights, as in the surviving term "fortnight."
See also
External links
References
- Brennan, Martin, 1994. The stones of time : calendars, sundials, and stone chambers of ancient Ireland. Rochester, Vermont. : Inner Traditions.
- Brunaux, Jean-Louis, 1986 Les Gaulois: Sanctuaires et rites. Paris: Editions Errance.