Martin P. Nilsson

“ We see that at this stage the number of months is indifferent: the question how many months the year has simply does not exist, and consequently there is no need to make the series of moon-months fit into the solar year. There are peoples who do not even extend the reckoning by moons to the whole year. There is a time ‘in which nothing happens’, which is quite without interest and in which no one takes the trouble to observe or name the moons. Such a period is e. g. the depth of winter in the far north, when people only vegetate, as well as they can. ”

“ POPULAR MONTHS OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLES. In ancient times, and even at the present day in lands which lie outside the path of the great leveller, civilisation, the months taken over with the Roman calendar are not numbered divisions of the year, the names of which are a matter of indifference, but are concretely conceived and named as seasons. They are, in fact, nothing but seasons, the number and duration of which are determined by the conventional calendar. ”

“ The night is the time of complete darkness and rest, and therefore the frequently mentioned expression, ‘sleeping-time’, corresponds to night. Seldom is the whole time during which the sun remains below the horizon to be understood by it. ”

“ The Moanu of the Admiralty Islands use the stars as a guide both on land and at sea, and recognise the season of the monsoons by them. When the Pleiades (tjasa) appear at night-fall on the horizon, this is the signal for the north-west wind to begin. But when the Thornback (Scorpio) and the Shark (Altair) emerge as twilight begins, this shews that the south-east wind is at hand. When ‘the Fishers’ Canoe’ (Orion, three fishermen in a canoe) disappears from the horizon at evening, the south-east wind sets in strongly: so also when the constellation is visible at morning on the horizon. ”

“ A priori, indeed, we might venture to state that a system is always based upon previous data: unsystematic indications of time precede the system of time-reckoning. These modest beginnings have been obscured from view by the prejudice in favour of the systematic technical and astronomical chronology. The only absolutely necessary thing is a clear idea of the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies, i. e. the sun, the moon, and the most important of the fixed stars, and of the phases of the climate and the life of animals and plants, which give the units of the time-reckoning. ”

“ As long as the human race has existed, man’s attention must have been drawn to the moon. The course of the moon, thanks to the rapid revolution of the planet round the earth, forms a shorter unit, which steps in between day and year. The shorter interval of time defined by it, unlike the too lengthy period of the year, is easily kept in mind and taken in at a glance. This unit has further its peculiar characteristics. In the first place it has nothing to do with the natural phases conditioned by the course of the sun: it is in fact incommensurable with the seasons. ”

“ But the relation to a solitary historical event, by which rather more highly civilised peoples denote the years, can hardly, or only in isolated instances, be applied to the month: for the life of primitive peoples is very monotonous, and is not so rich in events which make an impression upon the mind that one of these will occur in every month, and even supposing that such events could be found, the months in a human life are too numerous for it to be possible to keep a series of this nature in mind. ”

“ A phenomenon peculiar to the peoples of the far North is that the winter is the time of the festivals. The summer is the good season, when supplies for the winter must be collected; it is therefore a very busy time, when each family has to work for itself and has no leisure for festivals. The winter is the time of rest, in which the people live on the supplies already collected ”

“ The time between going to sleep in the evening and waking in the morning appears as an undivided unit, a point. It offers for reckoning a convenient basis in which no mistake or hesitation is possible such as can occur in the various occupations that fall within the period computed. The method of reckoning in nights is merely an outcome of the necessity for a concrete unmistakable time-indication: it is a typical example of the pars pro toto principle and time-reckoning, which, on the psychological grounds just mentioned are especially favoured in the counting. ”

“ Hence it is evident that if we indicate the exact interval of time between the culmination of the sun and that of one particular star, or name the star with which the sun precisely culminates, we can determine the day of the solar year. This is the principle of one method of computing time which was very common among ancient and primitive peoples, but has entirely dropped out of use in modern times owing to our paper calendar. The stars are so to speak the stationary ciphers on the clock-face and the sun is the hand. ”

“ From the phases of the moon no quadripartite division can arise: the brightest phase of all, the full moon, has an unnatural position in such a division. It can only be understood as a halving of the halves of the month, and this presupposes that the moon’s variation in light is regarded as a unity and divided into parts. The primitive peoples however start not with the abstract unity but with the concrete phases, proceeding at first quite unsystematically, and only subsequently combining them into a system. ”

“ The day itself, with its various occupations, offers no such point of reference unless the reckoning is based upon the daily appearance of the sun, which is also actually done in certain cases. However in the daily course of the sun, as we have already seen, two features, its duration and the changing position of the sun, stand out prominently: but it is easier to reckon from points than from lengths, which divert the attention from the number. Now the sleeping-time is necessarily bound up with each day, yet it has no separate parts, or acquires them only later among certain peoples. ”

“ Only through their union does the complete year arise. Every natural year however offers on the whole the same phenomena following one another in definite succession, and thus the circle of the year has its prototype in Nature herself. Nevertheless the uniting of the different seasons into a complete year only takes place gradually by means of a selection, systematising, and regulation of the seasons. It must be carried out according to a principle—we shall see that this is as a rule the lunar reckoning—but the occupations of agriculture also serve as a handle. ”

“ When it is remembered that the months are counted not only continuously but also by the appearance of each new moon [849] , it becomes clear how the word chodesh has come to mean ‘month’, and this is also a sure evidence for the practice of counting the months, though not from a definite point of departure. The latter process, i. e. the numbering of the months, is much later. The earlier books of the Old Testament provide interesting material for the significance of the word [850] . Chodesh means ‘new moon’, ‘feast of the new moon’ in the old narrative of Jonathan and David [851] ”

“ So men were led to the only practical method, that of simply counting the years and marking them by figures, by which means everyone without more ado became quite clear as to the dates of earlier or later events, whether these were expressed in olympiads, in ab urbe condita etc., or in the countless local eras of antiquity. It was long before it was seen that the starting-point is a matter of indifference, and that the only essential is that all should use the same starting-point. In this respect the old reckoning in epochs long continued to influence the minds of men. ”

“ The days are joined into months and the months into years; only more rarely are the seasons interposed as regular units of time. The system is like a chain the links of which run into one another without gaps: each link is equivalent, or as nearly as possible equivalent, to every other link of the same class, and therefore need only be given a name and counted, not necessarily conceived in the concrete, although this is not excluded. This is the only genuine system, a system of continuous time-reckoning, which excludes all gaps in the chain and all links of indeterminate length. ”

“ In ancient Greece the New Year’s Day was of no great importance: its position varied greatly in each of the small states; it was little more than the day on which the annually changing officials entered upon their terms of office. In the case of the primitive peoples the new year need not in itself be regarded as a very important division of the calendar: it has however become so among more highly developed peoples. For instance, the enumeration of the seasons or the months must begin somewhere ”

“ It is the sailor’s business to know for how many hours a star can serve him as compass, so that immediately after the apparent turning of the star from east to west he may choose another. Of great interest also is the idea of the connexion between the atmospheric and other phenomena and the stars. Certain periods of bad weather recur every year with tolerable regularity, so that the sailors attribute them to the immediate influence of the stars. ”

“ Common bases for reckoning are afforded by important and striking events which have been impressed upon everyone and are present to all men’s minds: through their relation to the age of some person they serve as a guide to the chronology. The Aino, for example, do not count the days, but always refer to events; if it is asked how old anyone is, the answer will be that he was born after the catching of the very big fish, or perhaps in the year when there was so much snow [436] . Here once more we see how concrete time-indications always precede the abstract numerical counting of time. ”

“ Then come the months of calm, when three moons are named from the un, palolo: first the un rig, the little un, or the bitter, un gogona, when at the full moon a few of the annelids appear. It is now the tau matua, the season of maturity; yams can be taken up and eaten, and if the weather is favourable, a second crop is planted. The un lava, the great palolo, follows, when at the full moon for one night the annelids appear on the reefs in swarms; the whole population is on the beach, taking up the un in every vessel and with every contrivance. This is the moon of the yam harvest ”

“ But all these indications of periods of time are found among more developed peoples: the primitive peoples pay little or no attention to them.
Both in the case of the day and in that of the other time-units this clinging to a natural basis long proved a hindrance to a rational system of time-reckoning, which could only be achieved by breaking away from natural phenomena. For there are no fixed natural limits of day, but if morning and evening, or still more clearly sunrise and sunset, are chosen as the limits, these must change every day and the days will vary in length. ”

“ In the tropics to reckon by the cold season is rare: the Guarini of Paraguay however reckon in roi, i. e. ‘seasons of coolness’, ‘winters’ [401] , and the Bakongo occasionally by sivu, the cold season, though more often by mou, ‘season’ [402] . The reason for the reckoning of the years in winters is the same as that for the counting of the days in nights. Winter is a time of rest, an undivided whole, which practically becomes equivalent to a single point: it is therefore more convenient for reckoning than summer, which is filled up with many different occupations. ”

“ When it is said that something happened at the previous harvest, or will happen at the next dry season a counting of the years is no less implied, although seasons are reckoned instead of years, i. e. the pars pro toto method is used. Thus it is, in fact, with all primitive and many highly developed peoples, and that not only when an event that took place at a definite time is spoken of, but also where the number of years alone is in question: in the latter case the reckoning is only performed from a favourite, conventionally selected season. ”

“ In regard to the more accurate determination of the days of the moon-month up to the point when each day has its separate name, it is possible to proceed in two ways, either to develop more and more elaborately the concrete descriptions from the phases and positions of the moon, until every day thus takes its name from the shape or the position of the moon, or else simply to number the days. ”

“ When he has seen ten harvests, he is ten years old: when nine new moons have risen after conception, the nine months of pregnancy are at an end: whoever has slept six nights on the way has undertaken a six days’ journey. As counting-points the times of rest—the nights and the winters—are especially employed. Linguistically this method of counting still exists, as when in most languages the complete day of 24 hours is expressed by the word ‘day’, which also means day opposed to night, or as in the Hebrew word for month, which really means ‘new moon’. ”

“ The difficulty however arises that every day the stars gain about four minutes on the sun; the stars must therefore be accurately known, and the observer must either be acquainted with their positions at definite times of the year or else be constantly choosing a new star as his chronometer. Not many peoples have got so far as that. Although the science of astronomy was very well developed among the Polynesians, we are told of the Tahitians that to distinguish the hours of night by means of the stars was a science with which very few of them were acquainted [181] . ”

“ As well as the sun and the fixed stars the moon appears in the heavens. It does not entirely vanish before the sunlight like the fixed stars, in the night-time its light eclipses that of the smaller stars. Its shape, the strength of its light, and the time of its appearance vary quite perceptibly from day to day. ”