The Coligny Calendar: An Ancient Celtic Measure of Time, Moon and Seasons
The Coligny Calendar: An Ancient Celtic Measure of Time, Moon and Season From the Hedgewitch Journal Long before the modern calendar divided our lives into neat boxes of weeks and months, people measured time by the movements of the heavens, the turning of the seasons, and the rhythms of the natural world. The waxing and waning moon, the return of spring, the movement of livestock to summer pasture, and the gathering of the harvest all helped determine the passage of the year. Among the most intriguing surviving records of this ancient relationship with time is the Coligny Calendar , a remarkable bronze tablet discovered in France in the nineteenth century. Dating to the Roman period, it preserves a calendar written in the ancient Gaulish language and offers a rare glimpse into the astronomical knowledge of the people we call the Celts. But what exactly does this calendar tell us? How did it work? And how does it compare with the traditio...
