The year of the gods

Janus has done it again. He has opened the door – or gate if you want – to this new year of our Lord 2012. But, maybe we should rather call it another year of the gods, because the gods of the ancient Greeks and the Romans feature very prominently in the names that were given to the months in our modern calendar.  In fact the gods even pre-date the calendar.

According to Greek mythology everything on earth really started with the ageless god Chronos (the Latin spelling was Chronus, with Khronos as a variant) who took on the form of a serpentine with three heads: of a man, a bull and a lion. Chronos was believed to have fathered the first generation of gods, who would shape the world from chaos.

From Chronos  also came a whole family of words, including most commonly: chronology, chronometer, chronic, anachronism, and chronicle.

Over time, Chronos or time itself often became portrayed as an old, wise man with a long grey beard – sometimes referred to as Father Time. Exactly how and when this mutation took place is not certain, but it might have developed from Greco-Roman mosaics which depicted him as a man turning the Zodiac Wheel. The Zodiac Wheel of course, as the year has 12 months, has 12 sections of 30° each to make-up the 360° of the complete circle.

This figure, at the wheel so to speak, was also sometimes called Aeon, which means eternal time and has become an independent word in the English language.

The word month itself comes from the moon which in really ancient times, before calendars gave us a handle on the flow of chronology, people kept track of the days by watching the phases of the moon. A full cycle of the moon’s phases lasts approximately 28 days and is close to the amount of time we today know as a month.

Just to square things up every now-and-then and compensate for the “in-exactness” of the moon’s cycle we have every four years, on year-counts that can be divided by four like this year, a leap year with an “extra” day in February.

Names of the months

Janus, the god of doors and/or gates from which January got its name, is a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to the modern calendar.

The original Roman calendar had only 10 distinct periods – or months if you want – starting appropriately for a war-mongering empire in March, the month named after Mars the god of war. The original 10 months were followed by the dead of winter when not much happened in terms of extending the might of the empire or on the agricultural front.

Only by 700 BC Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome added Januarius and Februarius. He also moved the beginning of the year from Marius to Januarius and changed the number of days in several months to be odd.

After Februarius there was occasionally an additional month of Intercalaris (inter-calendar), which was later taken care of by the creation of the leap-year day every fourth year in February by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.

February, although it does not derive its name from a god as such, is closely related to the religous practices of the Romans in ancient times. The name derives from the Latin word februo which means purify. This was the Roman month set aside for sacrifices and purification.

Having paid their dues to the gods, March was the time for the imperial action to start and is also where the modern word comes from to describe the advance of an army on a target as in marching on.

Mars, the god of war after whom March was named, was also said to have been the father of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.

By March the worst of the cold was over, the training at Campus Martius or field of Mars next to the river Tiber was done, and it was time for the real fighting to start again!

But, even for the ancient Romans springtime was a time for love, romance and maybe some amorous adventures as well. The month of real springtime in the northern hemisphere, April, was called after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

During the next month of May, the blooms and sprouts of April turned into growth, and got its name from Maia, the goddess of growth. During the Middle Ages people went out Maying on the first of May – going to the fields and woods, collecting flowers and enjoying the sunshine.

To this day the first of May is a popular day for a public holiday throughout the world and you might still find some people dancing round a maypole.

After Aphrodite has done her thing during April and after all the merrymaking of May one should probably not be surprised that the next month was named after Juno, the wife of Jupiter, king of the gods and therefore their queen. She was also the goddess of women and marriage.

But then the men, and especially the leaders of the ancient world, were also not free of vanity. When Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar (the reason why our calendar is called the Julian calendar) in 46 BC, he used the opportunity to rename a month after himself, and we got July.

And, just to prove the point about vanity, when Augustus Caesar clarified and completed the calendar reform of Julius Caesar, he also used the opportunity to immortalise hίmself by giving his name to a month.

September, October, November and December are the names that survived from the original 10-period Roman calendar. September from septem, meaning seven; October from octo, meaning eight; November from novem, meaning nine; and December from decem, meaning ten.

A final thought

Looking at the long shadow of a looming global financial crisis, with its roots in the debt levels of many nations, the year 2012 just might become a true calendar-year.

The word calendar comes from the Latin word for an account book, which was calendarium. The Romans called the first day of each month kalendae, or calends. Debts were due on this day, so books to track payments became called calendarium.

Piet Coetzer