Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar (Book A) Free PDF available at Mago Bookstore.
28 DAY MENSTRUAL CYCLE
The moon’s tidal lock is no astronomical phenomenon that concerns celestial bodies only. Women’s menstruation cycle is also locked to the calendric cycle of 28 days or 4 cycles of 7 days. The 28 day cycle refers not just to the lunar motion. It also indicates women’s menstrual cycle. Because the lunar calendar that moderns are familiar with is of the 29.5 day cycle based on the waxing and waning phases of the moon, even women themselves tend to see their menstruation cycle to be 29 or 30 days. However, this can be reconsidered. Statistics and researchers report that its average length of duration is 28 days.[18] When it comes to the 28 day calendric cycle, the cyclic synchronicity between the moon and women is of no coincidence. It is a given by nature, the fulcrum of the Magoist Calendar.
At the core of the Magoist Calendar is the primordial consciousness that women’s fertility cycle is synced with the lunar cycle. They synchronize not only numerically but also symbolically. Enabling and nurturing life on Earth, they, the lunation and women’s biological rhythm, unfold the Mago Time in which all other members of the inter-cosmic reality mutually synchronize. Humans and human cultures enter the standard intergalactic time through the moon-women calendric cycle.
The word, “menstruation,” is etymologically linked with “moon” and “month” in many languages of the world including English, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Greek. In the English language, the terms “menstruation” and “menses” are derived from the Latin “mensis” (month), which is also related with the Greek mene (moon) and the roots of the words, month and moon.[19] Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo note the linguistic and semantic connection of the moon-menstruation-month words and writes:
And both words [moon and menstruation] are related, through Indo-European roots, to the Old English word, mona (moon), deriving from me, which meant both “mind” and “measurement.” All are cognates – moon, mind, measurement, month, menstruation – since it is the moon mind that establishes measurement, including calendars.[20]
The case is similar in the Korean language. In Korean, dal 달 or wol 月 means both moon and month. Women’s menstruation is called dal-geori 달거리 (lunar occurrence) or wol-gyeong 月經 (lunar weaving). The calendar is called dal-ryeok 달력 (the moon calendar). Although its etymology is unknown, it is highly plausible that ddal 딸 (daughter) is derived from dal, the moon. Also Dal 달as affix means land, place, and a celestial body. The dal-related words show a broad range of meanings. Such verb as dal-da 달다 (to weigh or to be sweet), dal-i-da 달이다 (to boil down), dal-a-o-reu-da 달아오르다 (to get hot, to reach an apex, to flush) and dal-ri-da 달리다 (to run) share the root, dal.
There is more evidence about the 28 day cycle of the moon-month-menstruation in Korean traditional culture. We hear even today that Koreans count the period of pregnancy as 10 months not 9 months. Precisely, 10 months (40 weeks, which is 280 days) reflects the practice of the Magoist Calendar in which a month has 28 days. Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo also note that “pregnancy has the duration of exactly 10 lunar months”, and that midwives in many indigenous cultures of the world used the lunar calendar stick to calculate the period of pregnancy .[21] When all is said and done, the moon, month, and menstruation, linguistically, numerologically, etymologically, and cross-culturally refer to the 28 day cycle of the Magoist Calendar.
The 28 day periodic synchronization of the moon and the menstruation is the key to the pre-patriarchal gynocentric calendar. Robert Graves in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth maintains that the Coligny Calendar was of 13 months and 28 days based on the luni-menstrual cycle and writes:
Moreover, twenty-eight is a true lunar month not only in the astronomical sense of the moon’s revolutions in relation to the sun, but in the mystic sense that the Moon, being a woman, has a woman’s normal menstrual period (‘menstruation’ is connected with the word ‘moon’) of twenty-eight days.[22]
Graves rightly notes that the synchronization of the lunation and women’s menstrual cycle undergirds the structure of the Coligny Calendar and assesses that “[it was] possibly brought into Britain by the Romans of the Claudian conquest”.[23] From this, we may infer that the 13 month calendar was spread to Britain by the Romans around the first century CE.
The connection between the lunar calendar of 13 months and menstruation is also made by John Kellermeire. In particular, Kellermeire infers that “the lunar calendars would not have been merely methods of keeping time but also reflective of the resonance between the phases of the moon and the sacred menstrual cycles of women”.[24] To be accurate, it is not the phases of the moon per se but the motions of the moon that the ancients considered in sync with the menstruation. Kellermeire’s insight goes further to connect the 13 cycles of the moon and menstruation. According to the researchers, he says, in the relief the “Venus of Laussel” found in France, dated 25,000 to 20,000 BCE, the bison horn with 13 notches that she holds, indicates the number of lunation and/or the number of menstrual cycles in one year. Kellermeire, after such feminist scholars as Mor and Sjoo and Grahn, goes on to attribute women to the inventor of mathematics.
Judy Grahn ascribes menstruation to the parameter of human civilizations. Grahn’s insight that time measured through the cycles of menstruation is necessarily cyclic rather than linear and quantitative is precisely in accordance with the spiraling nature of time perceived in the Magoist Calendar. Grahn asserts that Paleolithic women themselves, the menstruant, were likely the originator of the 13 month lunation system. Furthermore, she maintains that the rite of menstruation gave rise to the measurement of time and the lunar notation and writes:
[O]ur ancestors may have learned to think numerologically through their recognition of relationships between groups of numbers that were also units of time measured through menstrual rite […] Menstrual rite measured durations of the time that were witnessed by the people as a whole, beginning of course with the menstruant’s relation to the presence and absence of light. Logically, the original sacred number would have been one menstrual cycle, which was commonly countered as twenty-eight days – twenty-five of the moon’s light and three of the moon’s dark – or thirty days.[25]
Grahn documents instances in which ancients of the world deemed Nature through the lens of a menstruating female and writes, “[Ancients] were ordering spatial events with menstrual logos. People also applied menstrual logic to time, especially with the New Year’s celebrations. For many peoples, New Year marks the confluence of at least two cycles, the solar and lunar.”[26] Grahn’s insight on New Year offers a definition of the New Year’s day. It marks the point of time/place that a 13 times completion of women’s menstrual cycles led by the moon coincides with the completion of the Earth’s one revolution around the sun (365 calendric days). It refers to a conjunction where the accumulated motion of the moon-women-month cycles meets the Earth’s one year cycle. In the Magoist Calendar. New Year is celebrated with one intercalary day that comes one day before the New Year day.[27]
The lunar cycle in sync with women’s menstrual cycle should not be mistaken as an indication that the Mgoist Calendar is the lunar calendar. True that it is a luni-centric calendar. However, its luni-centrism does not imply in a solipsistic way. If we need to name it, the Magoist Calendar is the luni-terrestrial-solar-stellar calendar or the inter-cosmic calendar. For the Magoist Calendar is the text for the movements of celestial bodies that work like a conglomeration of cogwheels. While each cogwheel turns on its own time in relation to its own neighboring stars, it comprises the time of the Mother, the Mago Time. Mary Daly sees the interrelated nature of the Mago Time, when she writes:
As Fates, Fey women bound and bond biophilically with each other, and with the sun and the moon, the tides, and all of the elements. Our Time is relative to this ever moving context.[28]
The sidereal time that the Mago Time is based on represents diversity (galactic times) in unity (the standard intergalactic time). Thus, the Mago Time is neither static nor monolithic.
In order to disconnect the moon cycle and women’s fertility cycle, patriarchal calendars removed the 13th month and made 12 months in a year. That consequently reshuffled the number of days in a month. The Gregorian Calendar has an irregular number of days from 30 and 31 with 28 or 29 for February. The Sinocentric lunisolar calendar placed 29 or 30 according to the synodic cycle of the moon. To avoid the 13th month, both calendars have resorted to a considerable degree of discrepancy to be covered up with leap days and leap years in a complicated manner.
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To be continued.
(Meet Mago Contributor, Helen Hye-Sook Hwang)
Notes
[18] “Menstruation and the menstrual cycle fact sheet,” Office of Women’s Health, USA, accessed July 12, 2017, https://www.womenshealth.gov/a-z-topics/menstruation-and-menstrual-cycle/. Chiazze L, Brayer FT, Macisco JJ, Parker MP, Duffy BJ. “The length and variability of the human menstrual cycle” in JAMA (February 1968), 203 (6): 377–80. Also I was aware of my own cycle close to 27.3 days, the lunar sidereal period.
[19] Kevin Allen, The Reluctant Hypothesis: A History of Discourse Surrounding the Lunar Phase Method of Regulating Conception (Lacuna Press, 2007), 239.
[20] Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, Great Cosmic Mother, 151.
[21] Ibid., 145.
[22] Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Gramma of Poetic Myth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948, 1952, 1997), 166.
[23] Ibid., 167.
[24] John Kellermeire, “How Menstruation Created Mathematics” (2009), accessed June 15, 2017, http://www.tacomacc.edu/home/jkellermeier/Papers/Menses/Menses.htm#self/.
[25] Judy Grahn, Blood, Bread, and Roses, 157-8.
[26] Ibid., 200-1.
[27] The fact that Yutnori, Korean traditional game, which is a cultural appropriation of the 28 Constellations (the 28-13-7 calendar), was played on the day of New Year among villages and families can be reassessed for its calendric meaning, to be treated in my forthcoming book, Magoist Calendar.