The Cycle of Knowledge & The Calendar

Now the prosecution of individuals and esoteric groups started to get into full swing. In 389 CE flames finally destroyed the library of Alexandria. Hypatia, the famous daughter of Theon of Alexandria, who wrote some of the commentaries on Ptolemy’s Syntaxis, embodied as a true victim of the times the end of Alexandrian science. In 415 CE, on her way to a lecture, she was brutally murdered by a mob of fanatic monks, who pulled her through the streets by her hair, peeled off her skin with seashells and hacked her to pieces before she was burned alive. Violence and atrocities are always the direct result of human ignorance, a severe lack of compassion and a great loss of spiritual wisdom.

As a crucial turning point in the history of mankind’s spiritual path of evolution, the fifth century saw further decline and chaos as the Roman Empire collapsed, and with it came the complete disappearance of the true knowledge of the ancient Egyptian Sothic calendar. Sirius and his companion play a central role in the Isis & Osiris mysteries, the sacred teachings of the ancient Egyptian culture which date back to at least 3100 BCE. These teachings remain a well-guarded secret as only the initiated priests had access to the “hermetic knowledge” – i.e. a hermetically sealed wisdom. But already with the invasion by the Persians around 525 BCE the hermetic priests had to disappear. They went into hiding and none of the later rulers of Egypt or any of the descendants of the Romans supported their re-appearance.

During these times people fought for pure survival and were no longer interested in a calendar that accurately kept track of time. According to the Yuga cycle theory of ancient India (www.thegreatyear.com), by 499 CE the intellect and state of man reached its lowest point (Kali Yuga) in the Sun’s great cycle of about 24,000 years. It seems that man’s state of awareness and his knowledge about the astronomical basis of the calendar is being reflected by the perfection of the calendar itself.

For the next thousand years or so the “civilized world” completely forgot how to keep the calendar in tune with the seasons, despite the fact that prehistoric monuments continue to exist in Europe (e.g. Stonehenge in England or the Externsteine in Germany) to observe the equinoxes and solstices. But these ancient observatories were regarded as cult places used by heathens for the worship of their pagan Gods. Europe was in the age of “witch hunts” and the systematic prosecution of heretics - an age during which more than a million innocent people were killed or burned alive at the stake.

Ptolemy was dead, long live Ptolemy! And he did - at least until about 1600 CE, the year Giordano Bruno, the Hermetic philosopher, was violently executed by the Church for his belief in an infinite universe. But that year also marked a further transition in the cycle of time – a slow but renewed awakening.

After the calendar reform of 1582 CE the days of the months were now counted in a cycle of 365.2425 days instead of 365.25 days. While the 4th of October 1582 was still the same day for both the Julian and the so-called Gregorian calendar, the next day (October 5th Julian) became October 15th in the Gregorian calendar. This reformation ensured that for the next 3320 years the spring equinox will be celebrated on March 21st, just as it occurred in the century before the year 325 CE when the Fathers of the Church discussed their Easter problem at the Council of Nicaea.

This implies that one could use the Gregorian or our modern civil calendar, which is almost identical to the duration of the tropical year, to go back and forth in time by thousands of years and the equinoxes will remain within a day on or around March 21st and September 21st, and the solstices on or around June 21st and December 21st.

So far so good, except that historians and astronomers still prefer to use the Julian calendar, projected backwards, to express dates in history as the inexact leap day system of a 365.25-day calendar avoids some of the complexities of the modern civil calendar. Nowadays, there are a number of computer programs available that make the conversion between the different calendars quite easy. For instance, if we have a June 21st 3420 BCE (Gregorian), it would correspond to the day July 19, 3421 BCE (Julian). Since the Julian calendar does not include the year 0, the year 1 BCE is followed by the year 1 CE, which makes it somewhat awkward for arithmetic calculations. Instead of using BCE dates, astronomers usually write the year 1 BCE as year 0 while the year -100 corresponds to 101 BCE, etc.

Sirius & The Origin of the Ancient Egyptian Calendar

Remember we were told that the ancient Egyptians ‘did not derive their calendar from astronomy’. But they did have a calendar, and the majority of Egyptologists have accepted the year of the calendar’s establishment around 4200 BCE. This date is not related (at least one would hope so) to the primitive medieval view that the world in general began six thousand years ago. On the contrary, this date is based on the Pyramid Texts which commenced in the year 2800 to 2600 BCE and which in an archaic style (i.e. from the beginning of the empire) provide us with numerous references to Sirius, revealing a profound knowledge of the heavens:

Pyr. 965: “Sothis is your beloved daughter who prepares yearly sustenance for you in this her name of ‘New year’.” (Pepi 189, M.355 and N. 906)

R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, “Sacred Science”, Inner Traditions (1982)

This implies that astronomical knowledge of the yearly motion of Sirius and regarding the day of the “New year” in the calendar predates the texts themselves.

Eduard Meyer, one of the earlier German Egyptologist who developed his ‘Sothic theory’ based for the most part on the information he found in Ptolemy’s Almagest and on the classical evidence of Theon of Alexandria, concluded in his work ‘Ägyptische Chronologie’:

“We can therefore affirm in all confidence that the Egyptian calendar was created to reflect that condition of the seasons which is presented to us in the year 4241 BC.”

In the year 4241 BCE the “flooding of the Nile” occurred from July 19 to November 15 (Julian calendar), or as we know better from June 15 to October 12 according to our civil calendar. Meyer was convinced that for the entire beginning of the empire a perfect coincidence existed between the start of the flood season and the Sothic cycle marked by the so-called heliacal rising of the star Sirius. In order for his Sothic cycle to properly work, Meyer theorized that the Egyptians never corrected their 365 day calendar with regards to the seasons, and that all dates repeat every 1460 years. In other words, the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius would fall successively on each day of a "365-day" year. Any correction on the part of the ancient Egyptians before Roman times would, of course, invalidate his theory on the Sothic cycle.

The astronomer Richard A. Parker, who worked with Otto Neugebauer on the Egyptian Astronomical Texts yet rejected some of his notions on the 365 day calendar, refuted Meyer’s Sothic theory and asserted that throughout dynastic times the Egyptians kept three calendars "two lunar and religious, one civil", none of them based upon Sothis. He was, however, convinced that in pre-dynastic times the first Egyptian calendar had to be luni-stellar. Realizing that a lunar month must begin with some observable phase of the moon, Parker was seeking for a lunar phenomenon associated with the morning of the Egyptian day.

It is clear that such information obtained from ancient records, which mainly depend upon classical sources, remains vague and contradictory. Fortunately, the ancient Egyptians referred often and plainly enough to Sirius! Thus it seems, Parker had no problem to assume that “whatever it (the original calendar) may have been in prehistory, the first Egyptian calendar of record was lunar, and it was based upon the heliacal rising of the star Sothis.”

R. Parker, "The Calendars of Ancient Egypt", Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, No.26 (1950)

Since he found literary references* that primitive tribes in Mexico, New Zealand and Africa also used constellations and stars like the Pleiades, Orion, Rigel and Sirius to determine the beginning of the year which they divided into lunar months, it became immediately apparent to Parker as to why the Egyptians chose Sirius as the starting point for their "Nile-lunar calendar".

* “Immediately after the discovery of America it was already reported of certain tribes on the Mexican coast that they began the year at the setting of the Pleiades and divided it into moon-months. In Loango (West coast of Africa) the months are counted from new moons, but Sirius, the rainy star, offers a means of correcting the reckoning sidereally.”

Nilsson, “Primitive Time-Reckoning”, (Lund, 1920)

"In the winter season, the position of the Pleiades is observed to tell time. They are first at their zenith, later a bit past it, at sunrise. At the end of the winter season, they set when the sun rises. After the winter season, Orion's Belt (atanu) is used for time-keeping; the onions are sown when Orion rises at sunset."

Marcel Griaule & Germaine Dieterlen, "Le Renard Pâle",1965 - (English Edition "The Pale Fox", Continuum Foundation, 1986)

Obviously, Parker did not hear or read anything about the West African tribe of the Dogon and the detailed astronomical knowledge they possess about Sirius. He and his contemporary peers could have blamed their ignorance on a lack of information, since (according to the imaginations of some modern experts) in the 1920s a certain Maté and other missionaries from the 'White Fathers' decided to convey such detailed knowledge only to the chief priests of the Dogon and not to the rest of the scientific world.

Although Parker tinkered with the idea that a lunar calendar based on Sirius is "either due to Egyptian influence or is a cultural survival out of the ancient Hamitic substratum of eastern Africa, from which Egypt drew so much", it was sufficient for him to establish the fact that “the first Egyptian calendar need not have been the product of a highly developed culture. It had common roots with many other primitive calendars and must be characterized as quite normal and unspectacular. [...] How long a period passed before the formulation of the lunar calendar as suggested can only be guessed at.”

R. Parker, "The Calendars of Ancient Egypt", Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization, No.26 (1950)

After explaining the food-producing lifestyle of the earliest Egyptians in rhythm with the river Nile, Parker surmises that some time in the fifth or fourth millennium BC the brightest star of all, Sirius, “came to be recognized as the harbinger of the inundation.”

And since no grandmother ever told us otherwise, we learned by rote that in ancient times the highly irregular flooding of the Nile was associated with the extremely predictable celestial motion of Sirius. Our scholars believe - beyond a shadow of a doubt - that some 6000 years ago the position of Sirius in the sky was very different from what it is nowadays. Sirius does move - the question is, relative to what?

For many of the so-called primitive tribes a certain position of Sirius in the sky in relation to the Sun has always marked the first day of a calendar based on the seasons. Yet for the advancing Egyptian culture the various lunar calendars governed by a 365-day agricultural calendar moved forward through the season without ever being corrected throughout the entire Egyptian history to the seasons or to the important first day of the first month of the solar year. How primitive, indeed! As cultures evolved, their knowledge of accurate calendar time-keeping declined.

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