Daily Note: 12.22.2022
Calendars and convergences . . .
I’ve just realized this will be the last day for more than a century in which the date contains only zero, one, and two.
It’s also the last 22 of 2022—so of course I’m already thinking that I didn’t enjoy the previous eleven 22s enough. And scandalously, it appears I’ve only posted on one date 22 this whole year before now.
What was I thinking?
But at least I’m making today count. And reflecting on calendars, I realized that it’s probably not very often that Hanukkah and Christmas coincide so closely. Christmas occurs on the same day every year (December 25), and Hanukkah begins on the same day every year (25th day of Kislev). But they are fixed days on different calendars, so their co-incidence is quite variable.
The “lunisolar” Hebrew calendar is way to complicated for me to summarize, so I’ll just send you to Wikipedia. Suffice it to say that in relation to the more familiar Gregorian calendar, Hanukkah might fall anywhere from late November to late December.
Here’s a snapshot:
Since Jewish observances generally begin at sundown, they overlap only partially with the solar days that govern daily life for most of us.
That highlights the importance of calendar constructs. We take for granted a communal plan for slicing/dicing time—regardless of whether (or not) it fits lived experience. And since “time” is an integral aspect of Tarot divination, that’s worth thinking about.
The neatly organized Gregorian calendar didn’t take final form until 1582, at least a century after the earliest Tarots. Assuming someone conceived the Tarot trumps in the mid-15th century, that person observed communal time according to yet another calendar. Named after Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar had been around since 45 BC, representing the very best efforts of astronomers and mathematicians to create a functional representation of how time passes.
Pope Gregory gave his name to a “reboot” of the Julian calendar, meant to correct certain mathematical problems that had resulted in an accumulation of errors. And it works like a charm, to this day!
But it’s far removed from the seasonal patterns that had been for used for so long in agriculture and spiritual practices.
I don’t think we can overestimate the difference between the 15th and 19th centuries, in terms of how people thought about the world. And that difference is reflected in the contrast between the artist/philosophers who created the late medieval version of Tarot, and the scholar/theorists who reinterpreted the Major Arcana in relation to Jewish mysticism.
That theme will soon reconnect my thoughts about Tarot and Kabbalah. But in the meantime, if you want an expanded understanding of life and thought in the Middle Ages, the London Review of Books is offering a series of podcast lectures titled “Medieval Beginnings.” Here’s a sample.
See you tomorrow. C