Monday, March 31, 2014

Why not?

The celestial diviners who employed the Ideal Calendar were perfectly aware of this fact and relied on it to generate calendrical anomalies that were considered ominous. Though it was modeled on an idealized concept of time division, this did not mean it could not be modified. When intercalation schemes, for example, are mentioned in celestial divination texts, they have little practical calendrical value and instead tend to reference the aversion of a bad portent by changing the month in which it took place. For example, the namburbî ritual involving intercalation described in The Diviner’s Manual 66–71 is specifically designed to avert evil rather than properly align the lunar and tropical calendars.—Poetic Astronomy in the Ancient Near East, pages 30-31, footnote

<idle musing>
I love it! Don't want the bad omen to happen this month? Simple, just change the month! Good thing we can't do than anymore—I can just see some politicians manipulating the calendar to make the bad news old news : )
</idle musing>

No comments: