Temporal Numerology

or Arithmology, if etymology’s your thing.

Numerology refers to occult, supernatural, or mystical association between numbers and events: birthdays, dates of deaths, volcanic eruptions and so on. It can be useful, however, in linking numbers to common uses, and in so doing, generate a common meaning.

24-7-365 is one example, drawn from the 24-hour day, the 7-day week, and the 365-day year. We don’t have an idiom for the month, as it isn’t so definitive: the lunar month has 29 or 30 days, the Gregorian calendar month has 28 to 31 days. theAbysmal Calendar has such a variety of measures that it’s unclear how any of this might be meaningful.

That’s not to dissuade one from trying.

Experimental Time

Experimenting with possible calendars. There’s lots to play with.

I’ve been tinkering for a while with the various ways we can organize the 365 days of the year. I’ve been focused on the 13-month calendar which divides the year in several ways: 52 x 7-day weeks, which can further be organized by fortnight, month, quarter, and semester; 28 x 13-day weeks, which can further be organized by double, house, quarter, and semester.

There are any number of ways to divide the year: the Gregorian’s irregular 12 months, the more regular 13 months of the Persian calendar, the lunar months of any number of systems, the various market weeks of diverse systems (2-day weeks all the way to 20-day weeks). What else is possible?

I’ve discovered two possible structures: one that reflects the change in daylight throughout the year in the higher latitudes, and the other that is simply an ongoing experiment in trying to evoke a little chaos.