“What time is it?” Have you ever wondered why the New Year starts in the middle of the winter? Who decided that there were seven days in the week and fifty two weeks in a year, and what’s that leap year thing about anyway?

Every week people in this society go about their business without questioning something as simple as the reason why they celebrate certain holidays and rest and worship on the days that they are told. While we go through our lives oblivious to the impact that this has upon our minds and our existence, we can see that other cultures of the world that still have some identity of their own celebrate their holidays and work from a calendar that is a part of an ancient teaching that originates deep within the basis of their culture. Indeed, the calendar that you use is one of the most visible signs of the culture that you follow.

We know that people are orthodox Christians because they celebrate Christmas and Easter on different days of the year from the rest of society. People who follow the Jewish faith have their own holidays and those who follow Islam have a set of their own as well. Those who follow the old cultures of China have their own new year whose significance we see in every enclave of Chinese culture around the world. Any culture that has meaning to its people has a calendar of its own.

Most of the calendars mentioned above are based on religious and political events. For over 2000 years, what we see as the modern world has been following calendars created by the Roman Empire. The calendar that we follow today is called Gregorian. This is because the calendar, which was created by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius, by the decree of Pope Gregory XIII, was forced upon all of the people who must serve the Roman Catholic Church. This calendar is a reformulation of the Julian calendar which Julius Caesar introduced in the year 46 BC.

Why are we even referring to the date as “BC”? BC means Before Christ, and this too is an obvious religious and political reference. Are we really accurate in agreeing that our world began only with the birth of Jesus Christ, a man who has no archaeological or historical significance except as dictated by a group of men in southern Europe? Are we willing to relegate all that came before to some dark age of time that we no longer think about except in obscure academic journals?

The Roman Empire is distinguished in modern history as the one that was most successful at enslaving the world. Since the rise and supposed fall of this empire, every nation state of Europe has attempted to conquer the same territory that Rome once held and also to extend that territory so that it includes the entire world. The question that we should ask, however is this: “Has this Empire ever really fallen?” If all people in the world live their lives by the dictates of the Roman culture, how can we say that we are free of the enslavement that Ancient Rome brought into the world?

As a child of the Kemetic Diaspora (a child of enslaved Africans), I was raised to fight for my freedom. I was raised to admire the efforts of the great freedom fighters of the civil rights movement like Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but it was not until I was exposed to the Sidereal calendar that I became aware of how deeply slavery had impacted my mind and soul.

Every calendar that I had been exposed to until this time always had some political or religious significance, or was just not accurate enough to relate me to anything but the seasons as they changed from spring to summer and fall to winter. The Sidereal calendar connects me with more than all of these. This calendar has allowed me to reconnect myself with the universe as a whole.

Unlike other calendars, the Sidereal calendar is based on observations of stars far from Earth in deep space. By comparing the motions of the Sun, the Earth and the Moon to these distant stellar points of reference, we are able to relate every aspect of our lives to the existence of everything in the universe that we see. We are capable of functioning with an awareness of our place in the Cosmos instead of the mere slaves of some political entity that dictates our comings and goings only as a means of controlling our lives.

In this very newspaper, you will find an Earth Center Events Calendar that is laid out in a grid of ten day weeks. You will see important holy days and spiritual days that relate to the Kemetic culture.

September 11th of the Gregorian Calendar coincides with the beginning of the four hundred and fourteenth seasonal year (cycle of the seasons) since the most recent Helical Rising of the star that the colonial society now knows as Sirius. The Helical Rising is that moment when the Sun and the star Sirius rise at the same time in the same place on the horizon. It is a great conjunction between the Sun, the Earth, the Moon and Sirius that occurs only once every 1461 years. Measuring time from this event is very accurate and allows us to calculate the relationship between the Earth and the rest of existence. We reset our calendar every time this rising occurs. The selection of this astronomical event has been a matter of human survival for tens of thousands of years. Kemetic culture has used it to measure our relationship to time in the form of the Sidereal Calendar for over 56,000 years.

Any persons who can free their minds from enslavement can become truly free. It is a very dishonest society that presents the idea to its people that they are free, when they are actually more enslaved than they ever were. Enslavers know no skin colour in such a society, and it is only the knowledge and respect of a reality-based culture that will break the chains that bind us all. Though it is obvious that we are trapped into the seven day week by our need to survive in this society, we can begin to pry our way out of this jail cell that has been placed around our minds by acknowledging and living by this authentic calendar that all of humanity once followed.

The Sidereal Calendar is still used by our brothers, sisters and elders deep within the bush of Meritah (Africa). It is also used by Kem people all over the world, including those who are students of the M’TAM schools of The Earth Center.

The first step to reconquering the self is to know what time it is.

Happy New Year.