While we are unsure of the origin of the weekly cycle, there is no doubt about where the month comes from. The moon intrudes itself upon us, displaying its variability in shape, light, and position as well as a reversibility in its cycle. The moon is the epitome of continuous time reckoning, for its behavior suggests both continuity and duration; yet its changing aspects make it nature's ideal event marker as it exhibits noticeable differences from night to night.
Not only does the moon seem to beg for our attention—especially if we live in the country and can see it unimpeded by tall buildings— the menstrual period tied the human body to its light early in the distant past. Our word menstruation signifies "moon change," the Latin mens meaning "moon." German peasants call the menstrual period simply die mond-, in France, it is le moment de la June. For every woman the position of the moon in her cycle is different; but for a given woman, it is generally the same. At some point early on, a mental connection was made between a woman's failure to menstruate at the appropriate lunar phase and the birth of a child nine moons later. The Maya tzolkin, or 260-day cycle—the most important time unit in their calendar—was likely related to the nine-moon (265.7 day) interval between human conception and birth (see chapter 6).
At first, there was no attempt to count the full complement of days in a month, for people needed to know not how long one actually was, but only when an event would take place. Like the sunsets that move from day to day along the horizon, the moon is its own time indicator. To those early observers, when it came the month began, and when it was gone, the month ended. Meantime, the thickness of its crescent or the bulge of its gibbous phase was enough to mark the time between. When people first applied arithmetic to the creation of a time-reckoning system—which, as we have seen, may have happened over 20,000 years ago—it must not have been difficult to discern that the full cycle of lunar phases transpired in about 29 or 30 days. Our ancestors probably initiated the tally with the appearance of the thin crescent of the "new moon" in the west after sunset, which many tribal cultures greeted with great joy, and still inspires moon watchers in our own culture. At least, this seems the most logical and decisive point to begin the count cycle: either you see it or you don't. In respect to the full moon, it is not always easy to decide on which of two nights its disk most closely matches a perfect circle. Our modern versions of where the cycle commences makes even less sense: that is, the point of conjunction or the time when the moon in its orbit passes directly between sun and earth, which we call "new moon" though the moon is not actually visible then. The first thin crescent is the young moon. We know for sure that in the ancient Middle East the month began with the actual observation of the first crescent. Astronomers were delegated to stand on a high place and peer low into the west at dusk to spy the visible signal that would indicate that they did not need to add a 30th or a 31 St day to the present month but instead could wipe the slate clean and begin the cycle over again with "day 1." Imagine the difficulties we would have today—paying rent, collecting debts, meeting deadlines—had such a system persisted!
For some the first crescent is a symbolic representation of the resurrected old moon—the one that returns after having become obscured in the light of dawn a day or two before. For our ancestors, the phases became celestial parallels in micro-time of the waxing and waning cycle of the hero's life in the old succession myth. In one version, the visible young moon conquers the devil of darkness as he waxes to maturity: you can even see the face of this man-in-the-moon who blazes forth triumphantly at the peak of his career—the full moon. But then the devil begins to eat away at him, and he starts to wane, lose power and wither away in old age. His feeble remnant falls from the eastern pre-dawn sky, and he disappears. During the time of new moon, some tribes used to say, "The moon is dead." But soon his son returns anew to avenge the death of his father.
That we number the days of this cycle suggests we prefer to deal with time abstractly. In most tribal societies, the phases are broken down into units that, rather than being numbered, are listed and named after concrete descriptions of the phase and position of the moon or of the way other parts of the living world behave at that time of the cycle. The very name of the day of the month gave away information about where the moon was in its cycle. This kind of naming system is laden with natural qualities. In the East Indies, for example, "little pig moon" and "big pig moon" correspond approximately to the 11th and the 12th days of our cycle, when the moon is well into the gibbous phase: it is at this time that the pigs, excited by the lunar light, are likely to break out of their pens and scramble about the fields. The 14th day is "lying," an apt description of the way the full moon rests on the horizon when it rises in the east at sunset. The 16th is "burner" because the pre-dawn moonlight shines through the door of the house. They call the 26th and the 27th days of the phase cycle "long tree trunk" and "short stump," respectively—words that may simply represent the declining shape of the crescent. Perhaps woodcutting activity might once have been associated with that time of the month. The anthropologist who gathered the data before the turn of the twentieth century seems not to have asked. "Going inside" and "inside" refer to the last visible crescent (day 28) and the next night's vanished moon because, the natives say, "they are going back to their house to rest." In Polynesia, the 3rd day after full moon, when it rises well after dark but still remains luminous, has a beautiful and descriptively apt name: "the sea sparkles at the rising." Also in parts of Polynesia, the first crescent meant "to twist" because it looked like a thread; the second day of the month was "crescent"; the third and fourth, "the moon has cast a light," because you have seen your shadow by it for the first time; the eleventh, "conceal," because the sharp points of the crescent are lost; the thirteenth, "egg," which describes the roundness at this stage of the gibbous phase; and so on.
Our division of the month into roughly four weeks seems unimaginative, even casual, by comparison with these indigenous calendars that reveal a people who operate close to their natural world. Indeed, it seems to be a general rule that the more complex a bureaucracy, the more abstract and contrived the month calendar. Where the Romans preferred a non-uniform three-fold division into seemingly inconvenient calends, nones, and ides, the earlier Greeks were more exacting, dividing the month into 3 decades, or periods of 10 days*— perhaps a derivative of counting on the fingers. The names of these intervals, however, retained the old descriptive elements; the Greeks called them "waxing," "middle," and "waning"; and the middle period may have consisted of time borrowed from the halves of an even more natural 2-part lunar-phase cycle. Whatever the case, this uniform method of dividing lunar time possesses certain advantages for the conduct of state business: each decade becomes an exact measure of the 30-day month; also, the number of the day of a decade is connected to the number of the days of the month: for example, the 3rd of a decade is the 3rd, the 13th, or the 23rd of the month. Compare this scheme with ours in which the name of a day of the week has no obvious connection with the number of that day in the month. When we reckon by weeks and then try to switch over to the time of the month, we need to consult a calendar in order to determine on what day of the week the month begins.
World History
