Time, Magick, and
Calendrics: How
micro-calendars can liberate the formation of nascent consciousness by
Zephyr
Time is a dance, and when I say this, it is not a metaphor. It is quite
true. True Time, which is not in any way distinct from matter, space,
God or nature, is the fundamental music of being. It moves with a
rhythm, and everywhere on that rhythm is elaborations, choruses,
infinite nested sub rhythms. The planets cycle as such, so do the
seasons, the ecosystems, the biology of every living thing pulses to
this strange, endless dance which unnerves us precisely because its
fundamental beat is beyond our Humanity. And as humans, we have another
aptitude: we are the world creators. We are the world creators because
we are the rememberers. The calendar crafters. Time for humans is about
our memories, and by being about our memories, it is about our desires,
about our will-to-experience. Past and future have the same substance.
The future is a vector charted from the depths of the past, which aims
to decide how new pasts are generated from out of the present.
Time forms for humans in two key stages: first the cycles are mimicked
or captured by the drum beat, then the skeleton of the beat is
enfleshed by resonant, mythic melody. Memory forms like this. A rhythm
is drawn from nature or True Time: the seasons, the day, the moon,
whatever. The cycles of Nature return. They return. They return. But in
the Shaman's drum beat, at each point of return, there is a
reconstitution of the self. The drum beat CREATES the self. The
present. This self changes over time, but those changes follow a
cyclical arc that return to a point. Again. Again. Time. Time. The drum
beat extends the moment of return, where we recall past moments, past
selves, past memories and past presents. It extends the moment of
return far beyond the actual sound of the drum into an abstract
eternal future and an abstract eternal past. It is because of rhythm
that we can establish the existence of Moments-Before, and
Moments-After. The Shaman captures the seasons in the drum, and speeds
them up dramatically, pushing them towards the speed of eternity as the
dancers find that they can anticipate the flow of the music with their
bodies. When we dance, our bodies sense the music as a language,
because they intuit themselves at every point of return. Like Shiva,
who becomes eternal through the dance. And once the shaman has captured
the cosmic time within the drum, then the other instruments mesh with
the beat, and flesh it out into harmonies, melodies. Now we have both
the beat, which is the skeleton of pure consciousness in time, and
melody which is the qualitative flesh: the imaginal images that
populate that beat and give it particular, unique emotional contents.
It is not enough simply to have eternity: we must populate it with
stories, myths, hybrid imaginings, flora and fauna. We are
world-makers, time colonizers.
Drum, dance, and memory. Calendrics is an art and a science. It has a
technical component, and an aesthetic component. The beat is science,
the melody is Art. And they ARE one, but they profit from being
understood as two. Memory forms on rhythm, so the rhythm must be
correct. It must be synchronized to the cycle that is its ground. We
need our calendars to auto-calibrate as best they can, to the planetary
cycles that they are expressions of. But the beat sets a frame: 365.24
days per annum. The melody chooses how to subdivide that frame through
aesthetics, and then extend that aesthetic out into inter-annual time.
Beat tracks time, Melody sings all of time, both intra-and
extra-annual, into grand coherence. Memory, in meeting the beats
necessarily requires imagination: imagination firstly to draw an image
from the past into the present (re-collect), and second to construct
new hybrid images that exist purely in the imagination (re-envision).
As the drum beats on, the dancers perform a strange alchemy of images:
on the structure of the beat, the expression of imagination, art, and
associative thinking grow. On the basic planetary calibration of
a calendar, an aesthetic program, culturally unique, yet not arbitrary,
will grow to flesh out time on the bones of its rhythm.
The present is indeterminate: it is microscopically, impossibly
miniscule, yet it spreads out from that focal point into all of time:
the Omnipresent NOW. But its point of indeterminacy: the micro-zone in
which the dancer does not think, but acts, wills and creates purely:
that is where the whole of time congregates into an individual, a
singularity, a star. The present is a zone of indeterminacy with the
capacity to dance to the beat however it will. It is not that it “can”
choose, but rather that it IS choice. When the harmony follows the
beat, then the mind, the soul, the culture, and the inner vision spread
out from that individual point and grow on the frame of time like
grapes on a lattice. Magical time grows from freedom, and spreads to
encompass the past and the future through healing and prophecy.
But what if the science of time and the art of time are turned against
one another: if the music being generated is somehow skewed between its
rhythm and resonance? If the beat is accurate, but the harmony is
distorted, then the dancers are shackled and impoverished. They cannot
extend vision out into time, but must hold desperately onto what little
of it they can hold before the next round of off-kilter cycles sweeps
the rest away. Such has occurred with the calendar which we now follow
as the Gregorian count. Its origin is in the old Roman calendar of 10
months, but at the time of Julius and Augustus, this was standardized
into a twelve month year. July and August offset the Septem, Octo,
Novo, and Decem months into the 9th 10th 11th, and 12th positions. The
months are carved up so as to follow no intuitively coherent pattern.
The Gregorian reform improved the leap-year calibrations of the Julian
calendar, and thus ensured that the beat itself would continue, synched
with the sun, for a long time. But what about the factor of resonance,
melody? It is more than neglected. If the beat, or technical side of
calendar design is about accuracy, then the aesthetic side is about
expression of memory extended through time. The greatest weakness of
the Gregorian calendar is the unevenness of the months. This creates a
“crooked frame” that does not allow the natural extension of memory out
onto a regular rhythm. It distorts the mind, yet hyper-accelerates the
blind accuracy of quantitative measure. The music is offset, or
encrypted from the beat (by a factor of 28). If the physical components
of a culture evolve alongside the technical elements of its calendar,
then the spiritual components flow into the aesthetic divisions of
months, days, weeks. In calendars where this is highly regular and
meaningful, such as that of the Maya, an extraordinary spirituality can
grow onto the frame of time itself. Yet we have become armed to the
teeth, and bat-shit crazy. Out of touch with ourselves. Converted into
“calculable” beats, encrypted to ourselves, but mapped institutionally
by the Catholic Church.
Liberation: we live in many times... there are a million musics in the
world and our cultures' music is one song, the song to which our
society dances. It has been proposed that this song be replaced by a
better one: the league of nations proposed a 13 month calendar: 13
months of 28 days, plus an extra day to bring it to 365. This was
scrapped in part by pressure from the Vatican, who are always making
sure they have monopoly over the temporal Harmony. But this is an issue
of replacing one macro-calendar with another. Surely a worthy goal, but
what are the conditions of its possibility? Given that time is
monopolized by relatively few organizational bodies (the religions,
mostly), how does one attain True Time, and also a contingent, human
time that really sings: that is elegant, that cultivates science and
culture as a singular movement of growth? I suggest that
macro-calendric change will only happen after the monopolies of time
have been broken by the proliferation of microtimes. If we stop and
look at the history of the world, we notice something interesting: a
civilization IS a calendar. There has never been just one human time.
Calendars are the meta-individuals, and the so-called “clash of
civilizations” is the clash of distinct calendars. The French
Revolution succeeded because they wrote a new calendar, and eventually
failed because they abandoned it. How then do we transform History? How
do we prepare it for an renewed apprehension of True Time, time
uncoded?
Micro-calendars. As we live in many times, it becomes less necessary to
worry about what time we are ALL in, so much as what times we occupy
ourselves with. Our souls are made of time, and so we can greatly
enrich them by making the music ourselves. How would one construct a
micro-calendar? On what rhythms would such a song be made possible? The
beat can be any natural oscillation. A heliocentric ephemeris will
furnish you with the position of every planet in the solar system, as
well as data on when their cycles begin and end. If the year of True
Time begins as an orbiting body crosses the meridian of its centre (an
equinox), then one need only know where the heliocentric “nodes” of a
planet are, in order to track them as a count. Of course one should
know also how long such an orbit takes. Mercury orbits the sun in 88
earth days. Mars in 687, Venus in 226.7.
This is the technical side of things: 1) Using a Heliocentric
Ephemeris, find a cycle 2) determine a NATURAL point from which to mark
it (north or south node). 3) Determine its length in units. earth-days
are best for ritual calendars designed to be used by people on the
earth. Otherwise, make the units the day-length of whatever
planet your are physically on. 4) Design a “recalibration function” or
set of appropriate leap-days to keep the calendar accurate (or just do
it manually). Do note that as cycles slowly “slip” from their natural
starting point, it becomes harder to be sure you are counting
accurately, since the actual “equinox” that marks the beginning of the
year, may in later years not be on the same day as the cycle begins. To
keep things accurate until such a time as the calendar either naturally
or manually re-calibrates, it is useful to employ the Julian Day
calendar to ensure one has kept the correct count. One should note the
Julian number of the first day of the new calendar, and then
periodically check to make sure the current day is accurately related
to the first. For example, if I assumed that today was the 6th
day of the 34th year of planet x, but wanted to make sure, I would find
the day number of the first day, take the period of the planet x
calendar (say 210 days), find the Julian number of the current date,
and then make sure that there were ((33x210)+6)=6936 days between the
first number and the second. It this was inaccurate, I would know I had
made a mistake, and adjust the count accordingly.
The aesthetic side of calendrics is to take the cycle and divide it
into parts: Mercury is perhaps the best (first) candidate. There are
eight, eleven day cycles in the round of mercury. An auspicious number
indeed, if one wished to assign tarot trumps (for example) to the days
of Hermes' year. One can then find methods of organizing the years into
clusters in order to accomplish larger projects over time. Venus's
cycle allows for 32, seven day weeks continuously with an additional 7
day week every ten Venutian years to recalibrate the count. Mars is 687
earth-days, allowing for a broad range off possible aesthetic
sub-divisions. It is interesting that the precession cycle of Mars is
93 000 years. The aesthetic aspect of calendar-making uses the rhythm
as a frame to establish visual images and meanings which then are
instrumental in the formation of memory, and thus consciousness. My aim
here is not to go into exhaustive detail about a particular calendrics,
but rather to spark some thought, to suggest to others that this may be
a rich space for artistic and magickal work, and to put out the whisper
into the ear of the world: many times, many times, many times. Why
many? Because infinitely many become One as they open up into forever.
What we need most now is a space of circulation. Break the monopolies,
and open up the flows.
It is my intention to stimulate the creation of magickal calendars, and
also to salute those who already have them. The calendar is society's
primary mediation, its first dance... change the tune and you change
the world. Sing a new tune, and you birth a new world. May there be
infinitely many worlds dancing in their own ways. May many, many
calendars be born. Let it be said, and understood that the times have
come.
