The origin of the Egyptian calendar is fraught with controversy and uncertainty. Egyptologists are constantly split as to when it was invented and even whether there existed more than one calendar running at the same time. The subject is so vast and so controversial that it is well outside the scope of this book to do it full justice here. Only a cursory view is possible. We have already dealt in Chapter Two with the debate regarding the origin of the Egyptian civil calendar, so we will leave that issue aside. Suffice here to say that the consensus is that the civil calendar was put into practice - if not actually invented - in 2781 BC, when the heliacal rising of Sirius coincided by fluke with the summer solstice and the start of a Sothic cycle. The Egyptian calendar - indeed as all other ancient calendars - was not intended for pedestrian usage such as the public administration of agriculture or tax levies, as is often claimed, but for purely religious purposes, and above all to keep track of the many annual feasts and ceremonies that were associated with the cycles of the sun, moon and the constellations. At first most Egyptologists were convinced that the ancient Egyptians had three calendars operating side by side: an old lunar-Sothic calendar that was regulated with the heliacal rising of Sirius; and a 365-day civil calendar regulated probably by the annual solar cycle but left to drift or ‘glide’ through the season at the rate of ¼ day per year, and a second lunar-civil calendar that was attached to the 365-day civil calendar. Even though the Egyptologists themselves readily admit that there is precious little evidence to support this three-calendar hypothesis, they nonetheless argue that if only the civil calendar was operational then it would have been impossible to fix dates for all those religious feasts linked to seasonal events, such as the feasts related to the inundation of the Nile. Whereas by assuming the existence of an old lunar-Sothic calendar that kept in line with the seasons, the problem was solved.
The originator of the three-calendar hypothesis was the chronologist Richard Parker, who published his finding in 1950. In Parker’s own words:
Exactly when the second lunar calendar was introduced remains uncertain, but it was probably not too long after the divergence of the two forms of year (civil and lunar) became apparent. A good guess might be to put it in the neighbourhood of 2500 BC. From that date the Egyptians had three calendar years, all of which continued in use to the very end of pagan Egypt.
3
In recent years, however, several chronologists have challenged Parker’s three-calendars hypothesis. The Spanish astronomer Juan A. Belmonte Aviles even went as far as to claim that only one calendar was operational throughout Egyptian history, and that was the civil calendar of 365 days.
4
It is not, however, my objective here to discuss the merits or faults of the many calendar theories regarding ancient Egypt. We can all agree that the civil calendar had existed since at least 2781 BC, and also, in my opinion, that an older lunar-Sothic calendar was also used for the purpose of keeping the date of religious feasts in line with the seasons. I think that the argument I have presented in Chapter Six regarding the ‘jubilee date’, strongly supports (if not proves) the hypothesis that such a lunar-Sothic calendar was in use by temple priests for their religious needs.
At any rate, it is known for certain that the civil calendar was operational in Egypt from
c
. 2781 BC until Roman times. Legend has it that in October 48 BC the young and beautiful queen Cleopatra VII introduced herself to Julius Caesar by rolling out of a carpet totally naked. Caesar was then a ripe 52, she a tender 22. The Roman poet Lucan (AD 39-65) claims that it was love at first sight between Caesar and Cleopatra, and that the couple made love that very night. A few weeks later Cleopatra threw a sumptuous party in honour of Caesar, where she dazzled everyone with her beauty by wearing a dress made of Sidon fabric that revealed ‘her white breasts’ and her hair decorated with garlands of roses. It was during this opulent Alexandrine soirée that Caesar was told about the Egyptian civil calendar by the scholar Acoreus. According to David Ewing Duncan, author of the bestselling book
The Calendar
: ‘It was during this conversation that Caesar heard about Egypt’s reliance on the sun for its year - measured by the annual rise of Sirius in the eastern sky and by the flooding of the Nile, which, the Alexandrian sage (Acoreus) said, “did not arouse its water before the shining of the Dog-star (Sirius).”’
5
Caesar then asked the court astronomer, Sosigenes, to create a new calendar for Rome based on the Egyptian civil calendar.
Sosigenes was the author of several books about the stars (all now lost) and was thus well-aware of the ¼-day difference between the true solar year and the civil calendar. But he also knew that the Egyptian priests had always refused to tamper with the calendar because of the sacred oath they had taken. In spite of this, he advised Caesar to add an extra day every four years (the ‘leap year’) in order to keep the calendar in line with the solar cycle and the seasons. This produced the so-called Julian calendar, which was in use in Rome and throughout Europe until the late sixteenth century. In 1582, however, it became obvious that the calendar had again slipped away from the seasons by about 10 days. This was because the true solar year is 365.2423 days and not, as Sosigenes had assumed, 365.25 days. The Julian calendar had thus increased by 11 minutes each year so that by the sixteenth century it was 10 days ahead of the seasons. Under Pope Gregory XIII the Julian calendar was reformed, and this produced the Gregorian calendar we are still using today. The Gregorian calendar is basically the same as the Julian calendar except that every so often a fine-tuning is needed in order to keep it in line with the seasons.
6
Contemporary texts make it certain that in Cleopatra’s time the ‘New Year’s Day’ was celebrated at the heliacal rising of Sirius.
7
This conjunction was also associated with Isis, so it is not surprising that Cleopatra, like many Ptolemaic queens before her, considered herself the reincarnation of Isis. In 48 BC, when she ascended the throne, the heliacal rising of Sirius took place on 22 July according to the then-newly introduced Julian calendar. In Ptolemaic times Isis was closely identified with Hathor, goddess of beauty, love and healing, whose great temple at Dendera had just been founded by Cleopatra’s predecessor, Ptolemy Auletes. Cleopatra herself was represented on the walls of the Dendera temple as the goddess Isis. It was at Dendera that special celebrations took place for the New Year’s Day on the heliacal rising of Sirius (22 July in the Julian calendar), when the star rose in alignment with the small temple of Isis located at the southern end of the Dendera complex.
Much later, when Rome became the centre of the new Christian religion, many of the attributes of Isis were allocated to the Virgin Mary. Indeed, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, the cult of Isis had already spread far and wide, and many temples of Isis are known to have existed in Rome itself, as well as in Gaul (France) and even as far north as Oxford in England. Isis was the archetypal of the paragon of motherly devotion, and she slipped easily into the shoes of the Madonna. It is also likely, however, that in the primitive Christian Gnostic tradition, the combined goddess Isis-Hathor was identified with Mary Magdalene, the companion - perhaps even the lover, according to some accounts - of Jesus, whose ancient archetype was the dying-resurrecting man-god Osiris. It is perhaps not a coincidence, therefore, that the feast day of Mary Magdalene was also fixed on 22 July, the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius. This feast day was certainly established when the Julian calendar was still in use and, most probably, in Gnostic times. For it is known that the Gnostics had a special devotion for Mary Magdalene, and among the so-called Gnostic Texts found at Nag Hamadi in 1946 was a complete Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Nag Hamadi, interestingly, is located only 40 kilometres from Dendera, where the goddess Isis-Hathor (whose feast day was determined by the heliacal rising of Sirius on 22 July) was venerated. As an aside, it is perhaps significant that when, in 1129, the Papal armies under the leadership of Arnold-Amalric attacked the Beziers stronghold of the Cathar ‘heretics’ - who are believed to have practised a primitive form of Christianity much resembling Gnosticism - they chose to storm the town on 22 July and rounded up the Cathar leaders in the church of Mary Magdalene where they had taken refuge.
8
Recently the cult of Mary Magdalene has experienced a curious revival with the publication of Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
. Dan Brown had popularised the controversial theory that Mary Magdalene was the favoured thirteenth apostle, and probably the secret wife of Christ, with whom he had a child and whose bloodline or ‘holy blood’ is none other than the true significance of the words Holy Grail, which in the defunct Cathar language can be transliterated as
sang real
, or ‘holy blood’. In Dan Brown’s book, much is made of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece,
The Last Supper
, in which, it is claimed, the young beardless person with long hair seated on the right hand of Christ is, in fact, Mary Magdalene. Other researchers have seen in Leonardo’s more famous masterpiece, the
Mona Lisa
, a pun on ‘Monad Iside’, i.e. ‘Isis the One and Only’. Whether all this has any historical truth is a matter for endless debate. What is more interesting to me, however, is that Isis and her star are still very much entrenched in the collective psyche of humanity. And if we couple this bizarre phenomenon with the fact that many of the Christian feasts are linked to the solar cycle - Christmas at the winter solstice, St John’s Day at the summer solstice, Easter at the spring equinox, and so forth - and that this in turn is linked to the calendar whose origins lie in ancient Egypt and the rising of Sirius, then it could be argued that the cosmic order that so much affected and regulated the religious life of the ancient Egyptians is, through a circuitous route and curious twist of fate, still very much with us. The symbol of Sirius was the five-pointed star, which adorns the Nativity scenes and Christmas trees of millions of Christians around the world in late December. It is, at the very least, a strange irony that this very ancient archetypal star goddess is still lurking behind the veil of religious myth.
APPENDIX 5
The Death of the Living God
If the Divine Man grew old and became weaker, the Spirit within him also grew weaker . . .
Margaret Murray,
The Splendour that was Egypt
She who reckons the Life-Period, Lady of Years, Lady of Fate . . .
G.A. Wainwright, ‘Seshat and the Pharaoh’
Regicide
Many ancient people regarded their leaders or kings as having descended from a divine lineage, usually a pantheon of sky-gods. The king was thus seen as the direct link between the earthly and heavenly worlds. As such, the people felt duty bound not only to venerate him as a god but, paradoxically, to ensure that his godlike qualities were not despoiled by old age, which often entailed subjecting him to a ritual killing or ‘regicide’.
1
This sacrificial death of the king was, no doubt, to be rewarded by a ‘rebirth’ among the divine ancestors in the sky. This gruesome custom probably originated in deep prehistory and was modelled on a mythology usually involving a man-god who had sacrificed himself by willingly accepting being put to death for the benefit and prosperity of his people. In Phrygia (modern western Turkey) this dying-resurrecting man-god was Attis; in Phoenicia (modern Syria) he was Adonis; in Greece he was Dionysos and in Persia (Iran) and Rome he was Mythras; in ancient Egypt he was Osiris; and finally, in Christianity he was Jesus.
2
Archaic kings readily identified themselves with such ‘dying and resurrecting’ gods, and, in some extreme cases, willingly endured a sacrificial death in their prime for the salvation or affluence of their people. In his acclaimed book
The Golden Bough
, the distinguished anthropologist Sir James Fraser explains this macabre impulse:
Now primitive people . . . sometimes believe that their safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally, therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard for their own. But no amount of care and precaution will prevent the man-god from growing old and feeble and at last dying. His worshippers have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best as they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is dependent on the mangod’s life, what catastrophe may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death. There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay . . .
3
According to Fraser, the ritual killing of a king before the inevitable ageing process could weaken or cripple him and thus jeopardise the welfare of his kingdom was a common occurrence among ancient people. Many primitive tribes in Africa and Asia seem to have practised regicide in one form or another. Fraser draws attention to the primitive tribes of Cambodia, of the Congo, of Ethiopia, of the Shiluk of the White Nile and of the Dinka of Southern Sudan, as well as many others in central and southern Africa.
4
Fraser also gives particular attention to king-killing rituals practised in the ancient kingdom of Meroe near Egypt, where the rulers were once worshipped as Egyptian pharaohs: ‘. . . whenever the priests chose, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die, and alleging an oracle of the gods as their authority for the command. This command the kings always obeyed . . .’
5