We are going to talk about stars and deep time today. There is no reason we shouldn’t. The wise realize that small practical things, like dead simple tips for making tallow, are also rich in meaning. And big things, like mankind’s relationship to time and the stars, turns out to be necessary and practical.
We are going to talk about colonizing—or recolonizing—the calendar.
Sacred Time
In the morning of most every civilization we know including ours, time was sacred and based on the movement of the heavens. Astronomy, time, and holiness were all together.
Think Stonehenge, Babylon, the Magi. Early Christian councils and heresies over how to calculate the date of Easter. Pope Gregory XIII announcing a new calendar more in keeping with the movements of the sun around the earth—to be met with spluttering rage from Protestant Europe and the Orthodox East. Time and calendar were the spiritual order.
Time and the calendar were also at the root of the political order. Julius Caesar marking the new Imperial era with a new calendar. The captain of a wooden ship, the autocrat of every man there, approving the turning of the hour glass and the ringing of the bells that mark the hours . . and the sightings of the sun and the stars to confirm the ship’s time. The French Revolution decreeing new months and new weeks for the new revolutionary man.
There’s too much there to be a coincidence. We should be aware that there is some deep human feeling about time, and the calendar, and sacredness, and order, that is tied together on a level that we experience more than we can say. We are dealing with an anthropological truth. Anthropological truths cannot be ignored.
In a real sense, steading is lived anthropology.
Time Now
Turn your attention to modern times. It started with clocks in town squares. By the churches, or even in them. There was a new order rising. Bourgeois, mercantile, city-based. Punctuality and industriousness were now sacred, and therefore also the minutes and the seconds, where only the days and the seasons had been sacred before.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run . . .
Britain ruled the waves, and so did Greenwich Mean Time.
Then it was the age of steam, and telegraph, and there was railroad time. The clock in the tower no longer reflected the sun above that particular town. It reflected the railroad time tables and the clock down at the station. Which clock was set to keep the same time as clocks in other towns.. It was standardized. Time and the calendar still rolled on in their solid, reliable way. But they were no longer quite reflected in local skies.
Then there was daylight savings time. Now jump your clock ahead, now jump it back. It saves electricity.
Daylight Savings Time.
When you see the abomination of desolations, standing in the holy place. . .
Think about what Daylight Savings Time means. The sacred eternal order of the heavens, now jump ahead, now jump back.
It means that saving electricity and being managed, by experts, is what is sacred to us.
Or it means that our society deliberately has taken one of the basics pillars of meaning and eliminated it.
Or it means—because time and the calendar are also at the root of the political order—that we are going through a ritual of submitting to our rulers twice every year.
No one deliberately thought this when they made DST (I hope). But that’s what’s happening down in the inner layer of the human soul where meaning and archetypes and culture comes from.
None of this is far-fetched. It sounds far-fetched because we are used to what we are used to. But the logic is simple and straightforward, as simple as making tallow to put in a jar. When you think it through, you see that there is some kind of huge break between how our society treats time, and how all the others did.
People hate the swapping back and forth because it feels unhuman and unnatural, because it is. We were not meant to relate to time as if it were a corporate brand.
What to Do About It
On the practical side, first, don’t go crazy. Even Jack the Giant-Killer didn’t launch himself at every single giant he saw. Sometimes its enough to be informed, file away the wisdom for later, and move on.
The ideal side would be the compound stead or neighborhood stead or clan stead of an extended network of family and friends, deeply tied to each other economically and emotionally and socially and spiritually, who keep their own private time based on the sun and the stars in their own locale. Be warned, though. When you get in a position to do this, whatever your surface intentions are, whether in your minds its just a LARP or not, creating your own private time is inherently a declaration of independence and sovereignty. It’s a declaration that you are creating your own order. And whatever you think consciously, down deep you and everyone else involved will know this. You will find your emotions and your subconscious impulses changing accordingly.
In between the purely practical and the ideal, we have things like being aware of local sunrise, local sunset, and local noon. I have heard of a man developing an app for that, which would be an example of technology making our life more human, not less. Go outside and observe them sometimes, by yourself or with family and friends. You can look up your local times here. Be aware of the phases of the moon. Be aware of the night sky. Spend some time looking at it. Connect with the heavens.
Or like a man I know, stubbornly keep one clock in his house on standard time all year round.
Here’s the critical suggestion. Have a personal and family calendar. Have a shape to your week and your year. Have at least one day that belongs to you and your little tribe.
Mental exercise
Now that you know how the calendar creates and anchors power and the sacred order, look at the history of US federal holidays: what they are and what they are called. Pretty insightful.
What kinds of national holidays and remembrances would a society-stead have?
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Next we return to our series on simple steps to deal with the coming food shortages and continued price inflation.