Disaranged Months in chinese poetry.

[dragonsteeth]

I have just rejoined as a Member of SIS.. In May I picked up a book of Chinese poetry which included a poem on work and months like Hesiod's 'Works and Days'.

The opening line is 'In the seventh month, the Fire Star passes the meridian,'. It is quite a detailed poem and lists certain months several times over, while the reference to the stars and the meridian suggests the poet was familiar with the constellations of the night sky.

The feature of poem which surprised me was that it only mentions ten months.

Even though he appears to be discussing the whole of the year there is no mention of an eleventh or twelfth month. I wonder if other Members know anything about the origin of these verses. This poem from the Song Of Songs is meant to be one of the earliest from China dating to the late 2nd Millennium or early 1st Millennium bce.. If a more exact dating of around 8th Century bce, could be established this poem should be of special interest to anyone who has looked at Velikovsk's work on Disarranged Months, Worlds in Collision Ch VIII.

For some reason the loss of 2 of the 12 months does not seem to have been regarded as worthy of comment in the notes accompanying the poem,

[Peter]

I am very pleased to see calendar change as a forum subject, because it is an essential element of and also evidence supporting Velikovsky’s theory about an unstable Solar System in the quite recent past. In chapter 8 of part 2 of his book, World in Collision, Velikovsky wrote about the year length once having been 360 days and about how, following a serious cosmic catastrophe in the second quarter of the 1st millennium BC, the year length was increased to around 365 days. He maintained that evidence suggests that the catastrophe involved a change in the Moon’s orbit and that for some decades the lunar month was around 35 1/2 days long with the calendar year made up of 6 months of 35 days, 6 months of 36 days and an intercalated 10 days. He claimed that a second cosmic catastrophe in the 7th century BC saw the length of the lunar month reduced to 29 1/2 days and that, thereafter, the calendar year was one of 12 lunar months plus an intercalated 11 days.

The first half of Worlds in Collision was an analysis of the Exodus story. According to Velikovsky, prior to the Exodus Venus was in a highly elliptical orbit and was on its way to its orbit perihelion when it passed in front of the Earth on its shorter, but faster orbit. At the time Venus was quite young and was trailing a tail of debris, a legacy of its recent birth. As the Earth plunged into the debris tail it experienced the first of the Biblical plagues. During the plague days of darkness the Earth was probably eclipsed by Venus while the plague hurricane force winds were probably experienced during a Warlow inversion.

Velikovsky thought that prior to the Exodus the Earth’s orbit was within the current orbit of Venus and that its year length was increased as a result of 4 close encounters between the planets in the months between the Passover and the Day of the Lawgiving. Orbital dynamics suggest that the two planets of similar mass and travelling at similar speeds were forced apart four times before the Earth achieved a longer orbit than Venus. Following the Exodus, Lucifer / Venus was cast down and the comet had become a planet. Note that Velicovsky did not claim that the Exodus event was the first time that the planets came close enough to cause damage; in Worlds in Collision, chapter 10, Venus moves Irregularly, he identified the Mazzaroth mentioned in the Book of Job as Venus which implies that the catastrophe reported in the book was a Venus catastrophe; he also mentioned Venus as having been involved in the Sodom and Gomorrah catastrophe.

Although the Chinese practice of deifying their ancient kings makes allocating the stories between cosmic events difficult, it is clear that more than one Chinese mythological story tells of the Exodus catastrophe. The Yellow Emperor, Huang Ti, was born after a pregnancy that lasted for more than a year and a half and ruled for 100 years. When he died, he ascended to heaven on the back of a dragon accompanied by all his ministers and 70 of his ladies. The length of both his pregnancy and his reign implies that he lived before the orbit increase at the time of the Exodus, while the involvement of a dragon in his death suggests that he, his ministers and his ladies all died during the Exodus catastrophe.

Another semi-mythological emperor, Hsuan-t’ien Shang-Ti, or Pei Ti, must have lived at the same time, because his pregnancy also lasted a year and a half. However, he apparently survived the Exodus, because he is credited with having defeated the dragon. Interestingly, Emperor Hsuan-t’ien Shang-Ti was a ruler of the first dynasty confidently recorded, the Shang, whose conventional dating is from 1525 to 1028 BC.

An Egyptian myth that says that “Ra the Creator hath one period of life; with him periods of 120 years are but as years” suggests to me that a Velikovsky Venus cycle of almost 52 current years took 120 pre-Exodus years. This implies that a pre-Exodus year was almost 160 days. As we have an Egyptian report about the Hyksos adding 6 days to the calendar and evidence that the year length was 360 days when Solomon built his temple, it is likely that the post Exodus year length was 354 days. The best indication I have of the length of the year during the period when the Earth had a year of 10 lunar months is a report on page 126 of the book, Calendars and Years, edited by John M Smith that mentions a measure of 364 1/2 days and says the next measure was one of 365.10 days. If these measures are accurate it means that the last increase in the length of the year post-dates the 7th century BC.

It would appear that the possibility of calendar change in the past is rejected by most SIS history revisionists and chronologists, because if the year length at the time of Solomon was 360 days the Egyptian coffin texts that mention a year of 365 days must post date the catastrophe that Velikovsky dated to around 700 BC. Likewise the Prince Osorkon, Karnak text that mentions sacrificing 365 bulls must post date this catastrophe. In my opinion the catastrophes and consequential calendar changes provide a critical anchor for chronological revision.

[dragonsteeth]

Peter widens the discussion with regard the 360 day year. A problem for Velikovsky's arguments for a 7th or 8th Century close encounter with Venus or Mars are the Hindu records mentioned in Worlds in Collision (p 338 ) giving Bronze Age synodic periods for the five planets. At first sight they appear to support his 360 day year, but if they date from before the 8th Century BC they would establish that Venus and Mars were already on the present orbits. I think Michael Reade makes this point, perhaps in his 'An Introduction to the Evidence of Pandasiddhantika'.

The second issue concerns the nature of a 360 day year. Was it produced by a slower spin rate for the Earth or, as many of Velikovsky's supports favour, by the Earth being on a shorter orbit?

If the Earth is on a quicker orbit but with the same spin rate it takes Venus the same number of days to reach the expected synodic position but if the Earth is on a quicker orbit it will already be ahead of this position. So instead of taking less days for their synodic periods the inner planets will need a few extra days to catch the Earth.

If the 360 day year occurred because the Earth's spin rate was slower in the Bronze Age this problem does not arise, and if the Hindu figures date from before 1,000 BC. they not only show that an Earth Year was completed in 360 days, they also show any difference from the modern 365 days was due to a change to the rate of spin.

The Hindu figures indicate that the real time taken to complete a year has remained unchanged. Any difference is due to the change the length of the a day.

[Peter]

Over a number of years I had quite a few discussions with Michael Reade at SIS meetings and a fairly extensive correspondence with him about our differing ideas about cosmic catastrophe and historic calendar change. Before writing this forum posting I reviewed his written work and our correspondence and can confirm that we agreed that the year length was once one of 360 days and that the increase to its current level was due to one or more cosmic catastrophes. We also agreed that the world was inverted in the past and that the Senmut tomb ceiling depicts an inverted night sky with Venus shown subtending an angle of about 8 degrees which implies a disturbingly close approach by Venus.

Reade believed that the Senmut tomb ceiling shows an ancient sky and dated what he called the Phaeton inversion to sometime between 1350 and 1000 BC. However, I maintained that the ceiling depicted the sky that Senmut grew up under and that an inversion occurred late in the reign of David that was responsible for the distress that David displayed after he had numbered his people late in his reign. While I was, and remain, fully in support of Velikovsky's identification of Senmut as Solomon, Reade did not commit himself about this. I thought, and still believe, that the Book of Isaiah tells of a later inversion that I now date to 674 BC and that both the Phaeton and the Iliad stories are about this later catastrophe. I date a final inversion to Halloween 623 BC.

This late dating for 2 final inversions in the 7th century BC was unacceptable to Reade and much of our correspondence was about this. Despite his opposition to my late dating for the calendar change from 360 to 365 days he gave me considerable advice about how I might present my ideas for publication by the SIS, not that it has helped me to get any of my history revision ideas published. I am, however, very grateful for the publication of my papers, Birth of the Moon, in SIS Workshop, 2007:2, and, World Ages, in SIS Workshop, 2011:1.

I see nothing in either Velikovsky’s or Reade’s written work that contradicts my dating of the Late Bronze Age and the period when the Earth had a year length of 360 days to the centuries between Venus catastrophes in 988 BC, late in the reign of King David, and in 674 BC. Everyone, I think, agrees that the Iliad catastrophe saw the demise of Late Bronze Age III; the problem they have is dating this Schaffer magnitude destruction.

[Phillip]

Just as a matter of interest Paul Dunbavin pushed back the 360 day year to the period prior to 3000BC. Moe Mandelkehr doesn't appear to have thought there was a shorter year length post 2300BC - or even prior to 2300BC. He looked into most things associated with an event at 2300BC and if he had found evidence of a shorter year no doubt he would have used this information to support his catastrophic theory. There is good reason to think a 360 day year prevailed at some point in the past - and Sumerian civilisation was fairly advanced prior to 3000BC - and it is from this part of the world that the 360 day year may have originated.