The Origin Of The Sidereal Calendar
What we perceive in the universe is rhythm but what does this rhythm have to do with us? The rhythm of the universe can only have meaning to the human being if we can find it within the human being himself. But for now we’re having a problem here because we can try to understand this only if we have the assurance that somewhere within this notion of rhythm there is a space where we can place a human being because that will make a human being a universal being. It will allow us to become aware of our place in space. If we have our place in space it gives our life some understanding.
In a human beings life we need something we can look at to guide us. But there’s so many rhythms. We started by checking the ones we see more often, which is mostly the sun. But we have a problem with the sun, astronomically speaking, because when the sun finishes its rhythm you can’t call it a cycle. The rhythm is different from a cycle. To have a cycle, the sun would have to rise in the same place you saw it yesterday. If not, it looks like a spiral. Today it rises here, tomorrow it rises there, etc. so you can’t call it a cycle. A cycle will be when it ends up the same place you saw it the first time, then the cycle is complete. With the sun you would have to wait over 56 years to have the sun rise in the same exact position. If we call the cycle of the sun a day, it means I’m not a day old yet. That causes a serious problem to a human mind. If you have to wait over 56 years to have the sun rise in the exact same position. It’s impossible to set a calendar on that.
So we move to the other celestial body we see: the moon. The moon gives us more room because we observe eclipses. So if we could use one of the eclipses as a line to start counting until that eclipse starts again, that would be once cycle. But then you would have to wait 18 years and 11 days. So if we base it on the moon cycle, I would be 3 years old. It doesn’t work to make a calendar based on that, unless you cut corners like the religions and others do, but then it’s not a knowledge any more.
So what our ancestors did is to look and study every cycle and see which cycle offers the precision we need so that we could advance in our quest for knowledge. They found the cycle of Sothis (Sirius Star): 1460 years. The two celestial bodies that we could have as a direct reference don’t work for us so now we have to look for a sidereal position. A sidereal position is a position that you don’t see directly like the sun or moon. It includes a third part like the position of Sothis, the sun, and the Earth.
We talk about the Sothis cycle. It appeared to be much longer than that (56 years and 18 years). We noticed one thing, whichever part of the planet where you notice the presence of this star it happens to trigger the rainy season. Depending on the positioning of the Earth, you get the rainy seasons when when the sun rises close to it,
The leap year has everything to do with the Sothis star. To have a leap year, you have to understand what a year is. We’ve been breaking the notion of the cycles. The cycles of the sun and the moon don’t work, same with the notion of the year. What we call 365 days is not a year. We just call it a year because there is a seasonal cycle in it: winter, summer, spring, autumn. Because it fits in that, we choose to call it a year. In Kemet that’s what we call a farmers year. That’s what farmers go by because it rhythms their production: the period of inundation (flooding), the period for plowing, etc. Astronomically speaking the year is 1461 days, which makes it exactly 4 times 365.25. That’s why, at the end of four seasonal years, they decided to add one day. If you add 4 times 365, you come short by one day so you add that day one way or another. Why a year is this long, now that takes us to the cycle of Sothis. On the Sidereal Calendar, we explained one fact. I’m too young to witness it. You will have to leave 2000 years but from the archives of our ancestors it is very documented. Once every 1461 years the sun eclipses the Sothis star. It creates a very huge disturbance of the energy on the whole planet. It’s like one page of human history. Even some species die and get wiped out. A lot of things happen. It happens when the sun eclipses this Sirius star (Sothis star or Septet). You remember we were saying that this star has a link with the rainy seasons. So when the sun eclipses it that’s how much huge disturbance it is on Earth. In many parts of the world you won’t find any drop of rain for a whole year. It creates a huge disturbance, from what we have in the archives, that is really a new world. But then it happens only once every 1460 years but then it goes a whole seasonal (365 day) year like this. For example, for those who are of Christian background you would hear biblical stories about some droughts that happened when all the animals died, sicknesses, etc. For us is that it is enough of a disturbance for it to be monitored and understand what is happening. After that it became clear that when the sun eclipses that star, that’s what happens, so it becomes for us, a cycle. When you divide 1461 years by 365, you get 1461 days. Every day will represent one year. 1461 days becomes our year because it has everything to do with monitoring that phenomenon.
- This passage is an excerpt from Master Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig’s lecture on the Sidereal Calendar and Traditional Time Division