13 - The Gregorian Calendar : Back in Time

Today we talk about the Gregorian Calendar. I did want to do an episode on all calendars but that would take multiple episodes...I decided against that. I narrowed it down to our current calendar (in the States and the calendar most countries use for at least business needs). Still snuck a little early time evolution in here but for the most part we're getting to our calendar and that is the Gregorian Calendar. So let's burn one and chat about why we call this time what it is today, and what wild rascals decided it needed to be fixed in the first place.

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Transcript

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Wes 0:00

The calendar is intolerable to all wisdom, the horror of all astronomy, and a laughing stock from a mathematician's point of view. Roger Bacon, twelve sixty-seven. I'll be your stoned host, Wes Ranson, and today we'll be chatting about the Gregorian calendar. Originally I wanted to do an episode about all calendars, but that quickly became extremely challenging. Seems that there are 40 main calendars that are in use today, but every civilization has created a way to get from day to day and year to year. So how many calendars has mankind created? How many civilizations have there been? A fuck ton. So for the sake of keeping my sanity, I'll just be talking about the most widely used calendar today, the Gregorian calendar. And for this research, we use Calendar by David Ewing Duncan. And I've got to say, for a book about time and how it evolved, this was an awesome read. David really explains the history of time and the events that caused the formation of the calendar we use today in an informative and entertaining way, or the calendar that most of us use. So if you want to dive a bit deeper yourself, I really recommend this book. Okay, so before we get into days, months, years, and leap years, let's get high. And today I'm going to be smoking a strain from the brand Abundant Organics, and the strain is called Nine Pound Hammer. It's an Indica, and the grow I got is 24.39%. And it was hard for me to get my hands on this. I ordered a couple times, two times before I ordered this. I always pre-order before I get to the dispensary. And then I get there and they were sold out of it. So I finally got my hands on some, and it's not bad, bud for sure. In my personal opinion, the kind of weed snob part of me about it. Uh I do believe that the buds are a little kind of harder than I personally kind of want. But other than that, it smokes really good, it tastes really good. And uh we're gonna look and see what it says about it on allbuds.com. When I got one of the best descriptions here, it says uh Indica dominant hybrid, 80% indica, 20% sativa. Now, obviously that's gonna depend on your particular grow. I don't really know exactly how strong Indica this particular one is, uh, but it's probably somewhere around there. So it says 9 pound hammer is an Indica dominant hybrid strain created as a potent cross between the infamous Gooberry crossed with Hell's OG, crossed with Jack the Ripper strains. This stink bud boasts an insanely high THC level that ranges from the 18 to 23% on average, leaving you with the feeling that you were hit over the head with a hammer. Users describe the nine-pound hammer high as having an immediate onset of a happy, euphoric, and uplifting cerebral high that is stimulating and pain relieving. This is followed by a slow drift into couch-locked sedation that leaves you completely relaxed in both mind and body with an overwhelming sense of sleepiness. As the high fades, you'll be eased into a deep and peaceful sleep. And due to these potent effects, nine-pound hammer is said to be ideal stream for treating patients suffering from conditions such as chronic pain due to injury or illness, stress, insomnia, and eye pressure. Alright, so just looking at leafly real quick, uh, talking about the the it has a pretty big description here as well. I'm not going to go through all that, but the type effects it says are sleepy, relaxed, and tingly. I don't see tingly there often. And the flavors, it says lime, earthy, and berry. And it only has one meter here. It doesn't have a THC meter on leafly, but it's just an energizing, calming meter, and it has it pretty much all the way calming. It's just like a little, little, little line on the end. But that's what we're going to be smoking tonight. So if you're going to leave me a comment or send an email and let me know what you're smoking when you listen to the show. Yeah, very earthy flavor on this one. But it's nice. All right. So

The Meat

Wes 4:31

we're gonna start out with the earliest known calendars. And like I mentioned in the opening, every civilization on earth has created some way to tell time, at least for their social goals or religious purposes. And at first these calendars were not something you could hold or stick on a wall. Early civilizations did not have a need for a seven-day work week or to pay monthly bills. Early civilizations needed to know the seasons, when to plant and harvest crops, and when game became more or less dependable for the group was pretty much the only thing they had to worry about back then, you know, staying alive. Calendars back then were huge structures built like Stonehenge. And I know there's a lot of debate on what Stonehenge really was, or what it was built for. But what we do know is that the summer solstice, the sun rises behind the hillstone in the northeast part of the horizon, and its first rays shine into the heart of Stonehenge. And on the winter solstice, the sun sets on the southwest of the Stone Circle. So without a doubt, I believe at some level Stonehenge is or was an ancient calendar. And as civilizations advanced, there became more need for smaller amounts of time, especially when religion became an important part of society. They needed to remember and celebrate religious days and to have a method to collect taxes and debts also caused the need for more specific calculation of time. When trade and commerce extended past one society to several, was also a cause for a more uniform system of time. But like all things, everyone has an opinion on how it should be done. Should it depend on the sun or the moon? When did time start? Is this what they were really trying to figure out? I believe at the end of the day, that's kind of an arbitrary thought, like the expiration dates you see in the grocery store. No one knows when time started. Just like no one knows exactly how long the ground beef in your fridge would be good, but we try. Archaeologists found a 13,000-year-old eagle bone the size of a butter knife with carefully carved notches running vertically along the bone. The notches appear to be distinct groups of similar symbols that change in regular patterns, possibly corresponding to the phases of the moon. The groupings contain seven marks apiece, which is a close approximation of the moon's progression through the new quarter, half quarter, and back to new. Did this Stone Age astronomer create the first handheld calendar? Probably not. But was this even the calendar to begin with? Skeptics insist that the markings and other similar bones are not calendars but decorations, or possibly even just random scratches, maybe left when ancient hunters were just sharpening their knives or something along those lines. But over the years, archaeologists keep finding the same or similar patterns on stones and bones from Africa to Europe. They found one bone dating back to 30,000 years that's covered with round gouges that seem to represent the moon's course over a two and a half month period. And if these are in fact calendars, just like our calendars today, are both conscious efforts to organize time and write it down. But what do we use? The sun or the moon? The moon at first glance seems like a perfect clock. Roughly every 29 and a half days it passes through its phases from new moon to full moon and back again. And it has a steady celestial progression. The twelve cycles of the moon are also not too difficult to figure out. Many ancient cultures from Greece to Egypt worship the moon, and even today, some Eskimos, some Afghans, and others still celebrate the moon with feasts, dances, and rituals during new moon phases. Some cultures have used natural cues for the seasons. And these must come from a long and close study of the local surroundings learned and passed down over generations. Like in Siberia, the Ugric Ostiak still base their calendar in a natural cycle with names like spawning month, ducks and geese go away month, and wind month. Trying to find the best way to organize a calendar has been written about almost as long as civilizations have been writing as well. The Greek poet Hesiod wrote his local oral calendar in a long poem in 800 BCE called Works and Days. Hesiod's most important time guide was the moon. The Greek year was based on the 12 lunar months, averaging close to 29 and a half days, making it 354 days long. From ancient Sumer to China, we find several variations of this 354-day year. But unfortunately, our solar system and planet, amazing as they are, did not cooperate well at dividing into perfect even numbers for us. Our planet doesn't care about numbers at all, but we do. It just does. The ancient Greek year was running roughly 11 days fast, and this over time would cause a disarray in the seasons, flipping the summer and winter solstices in around 16 years. This was obviously unacceptable for anyone using the calendar for farming or knowing the proper season for sailing, building houses, or God worship, pretty much anything you can think about. I mean, the every every year it's 11 days fast. So every year it's just, I don't know, it's a date for you to pick to do something. I guess you know when the sun comes up tomorrow, I'm doing this. But apart from that, this is in the calendar you can use for anything. I'm not going to get too crazy with the numbers here, but I am going to throw a few at you now. It is important to know for this uh the true length of a lunar year, the true length of a solar year, the true length of a day, and so forth. So a true lunar month is not 29 and a half days, but 29.5306 days. And a lunar year isn't 354 days long, it's 354.3672 days long. And this seems minute, this extra time, and from one year it is. But as the world continues to turn and years turn into more years, this adds up, and over decades the extras really matter. Compared to the lunar year and the solar year, which is 365.242199 days long, and you can understand how difficult and frustrating it must have been for astronomers to link these two together. And it goes without saying, I'm sure, but there were tons of failures in attempting a solution for this. Ancient Babylonians around 432 BCE figured out seven years of 13 lunar months followed by 12 years of 12 lunar months would equal almost 19 solar years. Holy shit, how long did this take them to figure out? With this extra 242.199 days thing, it's always always or almost uh equal. You know, this is a number that has proved extremely difficult to divide by. Uh but this Babylonian cycle would later be known as the Metonic cycle. And over time, cultures have tried a lot of different ways to compensate for this extra time annually, and this has become known as intercalating. Leap days of today are also known as intercalary days, and the ways we've added these days have been interesting looking back. The Greeks added an extra 90 days every eight years to compensate for this, though, and months weren't always added on schedule, causing some issues, understandably. And the Chinese added seven months to the lunar calendar every 19 years, but still some cultures went a different route. The Sumerians developed a system with a 360-day calendar. They rounded off the lunar month to 30 days. The numbers were based off of 6 and 60, which equal 360 when multiplied, and they like these numbers a lot. The Babylonians refined this system and divided the day to 24 hours, which is divisible by six and divides evenly into 360. Egyptians seemed to be the first civilization to embrace the sun to correct the errors of the moon almost 6,000 years ago. They figured out a solar year was very close to 365 days. This led to a calendar with 12 months or 30 days, with an additional five days, and these five days became the birthdays of Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nephis, possibly, and Set. That Nephys word, N-E-P-H-Y-H-Y-S. Who the fuck knows? The Egyptians were an amazing civilization, but I'm not sure they were ever known to be great astronomers. That being said, the most plausible explanation for them figuring this out was the Nile. The Nile was responsible for the crops, the commerce, and the continuity of Egypt. From flooding in late June till late October, the Nile brought rich silk to crops to be grown from October to February and harvested from February until the end of June. Hence the three seasons of life in Egypt were flooding, growth, and harvest. The Nile was a gift of life, but it was also an enormous clock, over 4,000 miles worth. And all an Egyptian had to do was to plant a tall reed in the mud along the riverbank, cut a notch to measure the high point of the floods, and count the days until the water reached the mark again. This would be almost exactly a year later. This simple device called a nilometer was then the most accurate calendar in the world. And Sirius, the dog star, the brightest star in the sky, also helped. Sirius's appearance happened to coincide with the Nile's annual flood, and this also became the first day of the month, Thoth, the Egyptian New Year's Day. Egyptian astronomers eventually realized the solar system was roughly a quarter day longer than the 365 days, so they added a quarter day to the year, and this was revolutionary. It brought the Egyptian year within 11 minutes and 24 seconds, roughly. I feel like I always have to add that from now on, just understand at all times, always roughly, I'll stop adding that, but they have this hard fraction to divide by. And the Egyptians came to this 2,000 years before Caesar. The Egyptian priests didn't want to mess with their calendar, though, and they thought it was sacred, so they never added the quarter of day to their calendar until Augustus forced them to align with the Julian calendar. That's almost me. Another ancient suntime ran culture was the Maya. The Maya invented a calendar system so accurate that when the Spaniards conquered them in the 16th century, the Julian calendar the Spaniards had was less accurate than theirs. The Maya actually had three calendar systems, and without going too deep into these, there was a 365-day, a 260-day, and a 360-day calendar. Alright, the Julian calendar. The Julian calendar, this is, I mean, really, this is a true predecessor. And once you hear about it, I mean it's so close to what we use now. It's almost the same. The Julian calendar is the closest to the calendar we use today than any other calendar we've talked about so far. Even though the days of the week have changed a bit, I believe that there was an eight-day week during Caesar's time, and that seven-day week didn't come along until after Christianity started to spread more. I think uh Constantine or whatever, I mention it later. Alright. Alright, the Julian calendar. And this is really a true predecessor to the calendar we have. The Julian calendar is the closest to the calendar we use today than any other calendar we've talked about so far. And even though the days of the week have changed a bit, I believe during Caesar's day there was an eight-day week. The seven day week didn't come along later till Christianity had spread quite a bit. So one October night in 48 BCE, a boat traveled quietly through black waters past Egyptian and Roman warships. The boat had on it cargo that would not only have major effects on two great empires, but also lead to a revolution in measuring time to the calendar we use today. There was a Sicilian named Apollodorus who exited the boat, carrying a coverlet. I've also heard this being a rug or carpet, but they use coverlet in this version. And there was tied by each end, this coverlet he was carrying. And he entered Alexandria's royal palace with the coverlet over his shoulder and went to an apartment, being accompanied by Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome. Upon entering, he unfurled the coverlet, and inside was a woman, Cleopatra VII. It said that Caesar was instantly attracted to her, and I believe she was about thirty years younger than him. I think she was twenty one and he was fifty-one, fifty-two, something around there, maybe he was fifty, somewhere. It was close to thirty years. And now I know this seems like an unlikely situation that would change time for millions of people, but while Caesar stayed in Egypt, making a baby with Cleopatra eventually, he spoke with a scholar of the royal court, Acris, who shared with Caesar their calendar. Later, Caesar would take this knowledge back to Rome. Rome's lunar calendar was having some major issues at the time, running several months fast against the solar calendar. The Roman year was composed of ten months early on, we believe, and we're talking about way before earlier than Caesar's time, for a year that totaled 304 days. And this may also have something to do with December, derived from a Latin word meaning 10 and not a word meaning twelve. Again, I don't have a lot of information about that. Maybe there's not a lot to be found, but we do kind of, I don't know, smart people believe that. This is not coming for me. Around 700 BCE, it said that King Numa added two more months, Januarius and Februarius, and this brought the year to the standard lunar year. 354 days, but they ended up adding another day for some superstition about even numbers. And this now 355-day year was an improvement, but it did not take farmers long to realize the flaws in this calendar. They attempted a lot of ways to fix this, adding an extra month every two years, but they messed that up somehow, getting an average at 366 and a quarter days. Pretty freaking close. And then they adopted the Greek way of adding an intercalary month every uh eight years. This in theory brought them to 365 days, but the priests would often forget to slip these extra months in. Politicians also played an important role. If the length of the year could change, the powers to be could use the intercalary month to extend or decrease someone's time in office, and this obviously didn't help in the sense of accuracy of time. So Caesar decided he wanted to fix this. Caesar called the best philosophers and mathematicians of the time, and honestly, to me at least, the answer they came up with was pretty freaking amazing. So amazing that when I hear it initially, it sounds exactly how we do it today. There is a tiny bit difference. And I I was a little kind of confused a bit by this, by the numbers of how a longer year would make us behind, but it completely makes sense. If you're let's just say you're adding an extra day every year to make it super easy to understand, uh, if you're as dumb as I was, uh, you know, if you're adding the 29th of February every year and it should be March 1st, then every year you're going to be behind another day because when it should be March 1st, it's not. It's the 29th of February, and then your March 1st is March 2nd, and then so forth. You know, every year it'll be behind. So the new of the year was 365 and a quarter days long, and to get the quarter of a day, they would add a day to 365 every four years. Bam, 365 and a quarter days. And this calendar was so good, so accurate, and again, it took effect January 1st, 45 BCE, that by the time we developed the system we use today, this was 1582, the Julian calendar was only off by 10 days. Meaning that if we never developed the Gregorian calendar today, it would only be off by 13 days, three days since 1582. And you gotta give them credit, right? As primitive as people seem to have been back then, they were really advanced in a lot of ways. If you really hear about Rome at their height and all the shit that they had there, uh you'll know that they were really advanced. And yeah, for over 1600 years this is the main calendar. And why did we update it or give a shit about the accuracy? Was it a quest to find the absolute truth for the development of the humankind? No. It was Easter. But we're gonna back up just a bit from the Gregorian thing. I opened this episode with a quote from Roger Bacon. Who is that? Well, Roger was a sickly English friar who risked being labeled a heretic and addressed Pope Clement IV in 1267 that the calendar year was off by some eleven minutes than the solar year, meaning at this time they were nine days off from real time. If left unchecked, eventually March would drift to the dead of winter, and even worse is the fact that they had been celebrating Easter and every other holiday on the wrong fucking day. Nearly two years Roger worked on his epic treatise to Rome called Opius Maius, Major Works, and in this he traced the flaws of the calendar to Julius Caesar himself. He wrote that Julius thought the year was 365 and a quarter days, but it's just a hair less than that. But no one really listened to Roger Bacon, and they more or less just kept using the Julian calendar until old Gregory came along. I did want to mention before we move to the next evolution in our calendar that before Caesar's reforms, the Roman calendar began in March. I know before Caesar's time, Romans would just have December all winter long, and then they would start over in March. And I believe their leap days were even added to the 28th. It wasn't the 28th and 29th of February, it was just two days long, the 28th was. All right, the Gregorian calendar. Hugo Bon Campagna, that's how I'm gonna do it, born in fifteen oh two, was the son of a noble family in Rome. He became a prominent lawyer and senior papal official before being elected Pope Gregory the Thirteenth at age seventy on May 14, 1572. I'm not sure that Gregory was a great Pope, but today he's mostly known as the Pope that fixed time. Pope Gregory, along with a doctor and a Jesuit astronomer, walk into a bar. No. Uh they changed time forever. And the doctor was Aloysis Lilius, and the Jesuit astronomer was Christopher Clavius. Just like Bacon, 300 years earlier, they noticed the calendar was off, and getting Easter right was the most important thing ever. Everyone might go straight to hell when they die if they didn't fix this enormous issue. And their solution, as simply as I can explain it, was basically the same as Caesar's and adding a leap day every four years, but skipping every hundredth year that isn't divisible by 400. And this might sound a little confusing, but the simplest way to explain it is 2000 was a leap year because 2000 is divisible by 400. But 1700, 1800, 1900 did not have leap years because they are not divisible by 400. So 2100, 220, 2300 will also not have leap years. Making our year an average of 365.2425 days. And this is extremely accurate. So accurate that it'll be year 4909 before the calendar is off one day. And if we're still using this calendar, they'll probably just add another leap day and start it all over. And that's how we made it to the calendar of today. But almost as interesting as the calendar itself is how and how long it took the world to accept it. It took a while. It wasn't just like, hey guys, this is the right calendar, and everybody was just like, yeah. I mean, areas uh you you uh at the time the world was nowhere near as connected as it is. It was pretty connected. I think it was more connected than people probably give it credit for. Uh, but people in certain areas were just used to their calendar and they didn't give a shit if it was wrong. For instance, in 1908, here's an example of uh one that did not change. The Russian Olympic team arrived in London 12 days late and were unable to participate in the Olympics that year because they still used the Julian calendar. And there are stories of prominent figures leaving the country one day and arriving at their home days before they left in the first place. And that's why a lot of these old histories are really hard to put together because you know you read different sources and the dates are different. So you wonder are they talking about different, completely different people, or uh is it just one of these kind of different calendar situations? And once they decided to adopt a new calendar, how they corrected it is also pretty interesting. Uh, for this, we'll go back to Rome for a second to fix the beginning of the calendar, January 1st, 45 BCE. The year 46 BCE ended up being 445 days long. And Caesar called this the last year of confusion. Uh, he had a Latin name for it, but that's what it meant. And for Gregory, they couldn't decide whether to just skip 10 days or add a leap day every four years, and that would take 40 years. In the end, they decided to just skip 10 days. So in 1582, the day after October 4th, that was a Thursday, was Friday, October 15th. And maybe Gregory just wanted to see it in his lifetime. I mean, he was 70 years old. Throughout the next four centuries, almost the majority of other countries jumped on board, Britain being one of the last major European countries to adopt it, and China resisted until 1912. I think I read that Greece was 1923. I think they were one of the very last uh kind of major countries to adopt it. Some tried different ways to connect the calendars, with most ending in failure and just skipping the days to the correct date. But eventually we got there. No, this still isn't perfect. I believe by 4909 we will be using a different calendar, by the way. They already had another calendar in the late 18th century launched in 1792. The calendar of reason was designed by French Jacobins. This calendar had 30-day months and 10-day weeks and three-week months. Ugh, this is like a mind fuck for me, this to even try to understand it. But I guess a day was 10 hours long, with an hour being 100 minutes and a minute being 100 seconds. So you have to erase everything you thought you knew about hours and minutes. It said that this was a great improvement somehow, but Napoleon reinstated the Gregorian calendar, and that was that for the calendar of reason. I guess people never stop thinking about time and how to make it fit into our lives properly. So that's pretty much how we got to where we are now and how our current calendar came to be. But before we go our separate ways, I did want to mention that though the Gregorian calendar is the most widely used calendar, it isn't the only one. According to the Ethiopian calendar, it's the year 2018 right now, in 2026. I suppose for myself it really doesn't matter what year we call it. I'm not religious and I can hide eggs for my kids whenever I want, but it is nice to have a way to measure my time while I'm here, and I'm glad that it's accurate. So I for one could say I'm glad these guys gave a shit about Easter so much. I mean, if they hadn't, my birthday would be 13 more days away, right? Well, thanks for hanging out. Let us know what you thought about the episode by leaving a comment or a review. If you have something else to say or a good subject to explore, send us an email at stonedatepod at gmail.com, like us on Facebook at the Stonedate Podcast with Wes Ranson. And if you prefer YouTube for your podcast, we're at youtube.com slash at the stone datepod. We'll have links for our socials and a link to our Patreon down below. Thanks again and have a chill day.