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Time Keeping with the Stars: this week on The Storyteller's Night Sky

A calendar is a brilliant mechanism formulated over centuries of sky watching that works with the magic of a time machine. Just think of it, tiny black boxes aligned in neat rows, each row divided into seven parts, each part named in accord with a classical planet and all in a particular order that reveals a deep wisdom, allowing us to access the past, stay attuned to the present, and plan for the future, all while being held in the boundaries of what we call “day and night.”

So why talk about this now, at the beginning of October? It’s because it’s right here that 11 days vanished from the calendar to accommodate a reform that moved through the world for the next several centuries before it became universally agreed-to. This was the Gregorian Calendar Reform, or the inter gravissimas, which means “amongst the most serious.”

It was 1582, and after decades of work by a great calendar commission that included theologians, mathematicians, and philosophers, a system was formulated that allowed for aligning the high holy days to the cosmos. This wasn’t the beginning of such a system, but its culmination, following on centuries of reforms, all incorporating the time keeping methods of various cultures.

But what’s with the ordering of the days of the week? Whether you consider the Earth to be the center of the system or the Sun, the order doesn’t comply. And here’s the deep wisdom, because the days are ordered according to the planets in an alternating rhythm of one that is between Earth and Sun to one that is beyond Earth and Sun, and so on, which allows for a beautiful weaving between planetary forces that are connected to our destiny, and those that liberate us to our higher nature.

Something worth considering during these Gregory Days (October 5-15), which, once upon a time, fell away into a new world.

Mary Stewart Adams is a Star Lore Historian and host of “The Storyteller’s Night Sky.” As a global advocate for starry skies, Mary led the team that established the 9th International Dark Sky Park in the world in 2011, which later led to her home state of Michigan protecting 35,000 acres of state land for its natural darkness.