Calendars and Revolution
From Ceasar issuing is own calendar, to the Jacobins changing the Christian seven-calendar day to the atheistic ten-calendar day (and months with exactly the same number of days), or the adoption of the Papal calendar by Meletius Metaxakis, to the most recent replacement of Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day, revolutionaries have always been fixated on altering the calendar.
Many, case by case, explanations can be given for all the above calendar changes, from anything as benign as “leaving one’s mark”, and an obsession with orderliness, to the more nefarious attempts at ecumenism, or cultural effacement. Yet, what we are looking for is the universal significance of calendars, a significance that draws revolutionaries from all eras, all locations, to it.
One possibility is that a calendar is universal. Everyone under an authority (be it political, or ecclesiastical) is commanded to follow the authority’s calendar, if only for practical reasons. It is hard, and impractical, to organize troops, or celebrate a feast day, if there is no universal standard by which all in the domain can appeal to. Particular calendars would not make the trains run on time as it were. With something so universal, and since calendars, by their nature1, remember events or people worth remembering, those who make a calendar get to decide what, and who, is, and is not, worth remembering. Changing, or even reinventing, a calendar is revolutionary in this sense, as it either changes, or reinvents, a territory’s values. Furthermore, should there be no resistance significant enough to prevent the change, then the populace can be said to implicitly agree with the revolution.
There is a deeper possibility, a possibility which makes these revolutionaries metaphysical, and all the more menacing.
Calendars mark time. Talking of a calendar’s significance, then, must involve a discussion on the nature of time. Despite the success of physics, time is not the object of its measurement. “What is measured”, says Rene Guenon, “is never really a duration, it is the space covered in a certain length of time in the course of a movement of which the law is known; and as any such law expresses a relation between time and space, it is possible, when the amount of the space covered is known, to deduce therefrom the amount of space covered in covering it; and whatever may be the artifices employed, there is actually no other way than this whereby temporal magnitudes can be determined.”2 We can measure the relationship between time and space, but time as such is not quantifiable. Distorting our relationship to space (something as “soft” as marijuana can do this, though the more potent psychedelics will be more effective) will alter our sense of time, precisely because our relationship to time is mediated by our relationship to space.
Time, in addition to having a quantitative part (if you may excuse me speaking of time as if it were a compound), also has a qualitative part. Again, from Guenon, “periods of time are qualitatively differentiated by the events unfolded within them, just as the parts of space are differentiated by the bodies they contain; it is not therefore in any way justifiable to regard as being really equivalent durations of time that are quantitatively equal when they are filled with totally different sequences of events.”3 Almost everyone has experienced this phenomenon. Waiting at the DMV for thirty minutes is significantly longer than having sex for thirty minutes. To speak of these periods of time as “equal” would be confusing how we measure the Earth’s orbit with time itself. Sitting in a hellhole is slower than being with a lover. What I am getting at, via Guenon, is that quantity (how we measure time in physics) is like unto a box, and the quality (the essence of time) is the contents. However important form (the box) may be, the content has at the very minimum a modifying function.
At this point we must add to what Guenon says, and speak of an ascent. Let us imagine calendar days like the stars of heaven. This is not too far a stretch, as the stars were used to mark the seasons. Certain people, certain, events, have been glorified by civilizations, as these people and events shown forth as models of virtue. During a feast day, we are drawn up to a particular star, whose feast it is, and out of the love we have for it, ascend to its heights in the attempt to partake of its light. After the festal activities, as we re-enter the ordinary week, we descend with this light, with the hope of making it our light. A civilization is the love between people and their constellations. If the soul can reach up to the stars, then a calendar is not only a tool of remembrance. Yes, we remember our heroes, joys, and sorrows, but we also (have the ability to) connect with them, emulate them, and testify to their constant presence. What is celebrated on the calendar is not simply a matter of what is valued, but a matter of what we are being initiated into.
Revolution, true revolution, means creating a new man. To create a new man necessitates moldable clay, and a new initiation. Old initiations have to be removed, and forgotten, and new initiations have to be set in their place. Changing a calendar is more than a flex, or an idiosyncrasy, it is metaphysically revolutionary.
If we were to imagine a calendar which did not have remembrances, we would be imagining a planner, not a calendar. You could certainly use it to plan your work week, or your school assignments, but it would be your planner, planning your time, and not have the same function as a calendar, which is something everyone (under a given authority) follows.
Guenon, Rene. Translated by Lord Northbourne. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Sophia Perennis Press. Hillsdale, NY. 2001. 38
Guenon, Rene. The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Sophia Perennis Press. Hillsdale, NY. 2001. 40