Lunar Calendars by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor

Lunar Calendars

From "The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth"
by Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor (pages 144-149)


The first engraved rocks and stone tools date from 300,000 BCE. This was at the very beginning of Homo sapiens, during the early Neanderthal period in Second Interglacial Europe. These permanently marked stones are believed to be time markers - moon time markers - and were, however, engraved by females.

Thousands of similar pieces of stone and bone have been found, dating from the later Old Stone age, circa 30,000 BCE. These are marked with long and often complex sequences of notches and scratches - an elaboration of the earliest Neanderthal engraved stones. Many "pre-historians" have dismissed these marks as decorations. Alexander Marshack, an America archaeological writer, found the signs to be deliberately made, the tiny grooves cut in differing depths, widths and shapes. Marshack concluded that the marker changed to a new tool, often cutting at a new angle, with each change of moon phase. One piece of bone records six months on one side, six months on the other.

This system has been undergoing refinement since the Neanderthal engraved rocks of 300,000 BCE, hundreds of thousands of years before what is called "true writing" appeared in the Near East sometime in the late 4th millennium BCE.

Marshack has studied another form of time-keeping, the lunar calendar stick. Originally perhaps carved from bone, later of wood, the sticks were an elaborate "record of the lunar year". One such calendar stick that Mardhack spotted in an 1828 portrait of a Winnebago Chief was 53 inches long, with four sides, or faces. "Vertical marks are etched into it at regular intervals; above them are small crescents and dots". These sticks were complex lunar tally sticks that marked the lunar year, brought the lunar year into phase with the solar year, and noted the times of rituals.

Such sticks appear in Palaeolithic cave paintings dating from 50,000 BCE. They are held by women and shamans, and as a lunar measuring instrument, the stick derives from women's earliest moon-phase engravings on rock and bone. In Thompson's words, "the owner of the baton is not man the mighty hunter, but the midwife".

The midwife, of course, because it was her job, and the job of every pregnant woman, to know exactly when babies are due. Anthropologists have described the keeping of lunar calendars, especially by women, among Australian aborigines, Siberian tribes, and the Yurok Indians of North America. Australian women used notched sticks. Among past and present day Siberians "pregnancy had the duration of exactly 10 lunar months", and it has always been women who kept the lunar calendars marking those months off toward a safe full-term birth. Yurok women kept menstrual calenders (and were certainly typical in this of other Native American women of both hemispheres). The Yurok count was kept by "dropping a month" stick each lunar month into a second basket until they reached a count of ten". With this method they could predict births to within a day - a crucial accuracy among early hunting and gathering people on the move. The count was also useful in connection with abortion.

It is perfectly reasonable to assume that menstruation, lunar calenders, and midwifery are as much or more at the foundation of human science than man the great killer. The anthropological (male) belief that human life and the human brain evolved through the inventions, discoveries, and experiences of the male hunter alone, is wrong. Human life, and therefore human intelligence, begins at birth, with the female's experiences of surviving pregnancy and bearing children, and then keeping them alive.

The possession by the Winebago Indian Chief of a lunar calendar stick as part of this insignia of power, along with an axe and a neck pendant, shows that this ruling power derives from the ancient time of female power. Priests and shamans must always dress as women to take on women's original magick, and that aboriginal men worldwide were put through imitation childbirth and menstruation rituals for purposes of initiations. The fact that the baton was taken over by men in the militarist cultures of patriarchal civilisation may, in fact, indicate that they took it over because it was a most ancient symbol of feminine power".

Therefore, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, Neanderthal women apparently knew that lunar periods were of a certain length, were repeated regularly and that the phases were roughly predictable within a day or two. Cro-Magnon women, in 30,000 BCE had formed a conception of a lunar year and were working out a lunar calendar. By the end of the Palaeolithic age (circa 10,000 BCE) they could predict the seasons of the year, the phases of the moon, the annual migrations of animals, birds, and fish.

When Neolithic people settled in village sites, they began building their calendars, stone circles that were to be used for lunar and solar observations, as well as religious ceremonies. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Perhaps the ceremonial observations, these power centres formed of fixed points of stone, were the loci that gave rise to the settled farming communities that replaced the nomadic food-gathers and hunters.

It is not far-fetched to think women invented symbolic and abstract notation, observational science and early mathematics. Early woman's though processes (early man's too) were still organic, still rooted in nature and practical experience - not alienated or born of a desire to "conquer Nature". Organic rational thought emerged from a desire to cooperate with the natural world, and from a real integral observance of the needs and rhythms of the personal self and the human community. It also emerged from a mind free of inhibitions, blocks, and dogmas imposed by later patriarchal religions and cultures.

The implications of this association of women and the moon would suggest that women were the first observers of the basic periodicity of nature, the periodicity upon which all later scientific observations were made. Woman was the first to note ta correspondence between an internal process she was going through and ane external process in nature. She is the one who constructs a more holistic epistemology in which subject and object are in sympathetic resonance with one another. She is the holistic scientist who constructs a taxonomy for all the beneficial herbs and plants; she is the one who knows the secrets of the time of their flowering. The world view that separates the observer from the system he observes, that imagines that the universe can be split into mere subjectivity, and real objectivity, is not of her doing. The reason the Venus of Laussel or the modern Virgin of Guadalupe are pictured with a crescent moon is that women and the moon are a single mystery".

This mystery is, and was, a reality, and all original real mystery was observed, studied, pondered, and participated in by original real human beings. Mystery was not used as a tool of fear or oppression, of obfuscation and power, but was used gratefully as ceremonial food by the evolving human intelligence, led by the observational intelligence of women.

In The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara Walker reminds us that the word "mathesis" (Ma-thesis) means "mother wisdom", ad originally referred to divination by the stars. Worldwide, in ancient and modern languages, the word "ma" means "mother".

In circa 500 BCE Pythagoras introduced "logical reasoning" (rather than organic reasoning) into the domain of religion and ritual, laying the foundations for the later "intellectual theology" of Christian scholars and the Western world in general. This combination of mathematics and theology characterises religious philosophy in classic Greece, in medieval Europe, in Reformation and modern times. Consequently, "God" was no longer intuition or ecstatic vision, not profound, ontological experience, but a kind of rational machine "explained" by a few scholarly men. Plato, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descates - all inherited this numerical philosophy, and shared a logical admiration of the "timeless" and static, utterly transcendent and aloof "pure spirit" of the Father God. Utterly abstracted from flesh and earthly cyclicity, this Father God was as unappealable as pure number. Pure number is always elevated above the messy world of mere life.

During the witch hunts in Europe, this rationalistic theology was used as a legal and clerical weapon against what still remained of the ancient women cultures. Medieval scholiasts not only debated endlessly, and in dead earnest, about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; during obscene torture, priests and civil judges also hounded their female victim with obsessive questions about the precise number of imps she employed, the total number of times she had intercourse with the Devil, the exact size and length of his "member", and so forth. The dogmatic insistence on number was supposed to cast an aura of "rationality" and "objectivity" around their otherwise bizarre and sick proceedings. In modern times, eg psychological measurements, behavioural norms, notions of quantifiable "sanity" and "adjustment", deified number is still used as a power-tool against "social deviants".

In contrast, Eastern mysticism, like European pagan orientation, and primal orientation everywhere, understands mathematics as one part of our conceptual map. It is a means of apprehending one part of reality, but not an abstractible feature of reality itself. Reality is undifferentiated, constantly moving and cyclic - like the moon.