The Goddess Calendar: Previous Version

A discussion, or at least a mention, of the Goddess Calendar may be found in two books published in 1998:

David Duncan writes (pp.239-240):

One of the many more recent ideas is something I saw on the Internet. Called "The Goddess Calendar," its proponents advocate a 25-month calendar of alternating 29 and 30 days; with each of the months named after a female deity: Artemis, Bast, Cybele, and Gaia, to name a few.

This is an older version of the Goddess Calendar, developed in 1994. This has been superseded by the present version.

Lance Latham provides details of this previous version on pp. 408-412 of his book, including the average length of the calendrical year as "738.2647 days, or slightly more than 2.02 tropical solar years."

I was dissatisfied with this property of the previous version of this calendar, since it did not allow the Goddess Calendar to be an accurate count of solar years, and so in 1996 I revised the calendar so that the average length of the calendar year more exactly matched the average length of the Gregorian Calendar year, implying that the Goddess Calendar could be used to count solar years (so that it becomes a solar count lunar calendar). During this revision the number of months in a year was reduced from 25 to 12 or 13. To some this might seem unfortunate, since the Goddess Calendar now honors only thirteen goddesses instead of twenty five, while to others the restoration of the customary connection between the average calendar year and the seasonal year is sufficient compensation.


Since the above was written an excellent book on calendars has appeared, Duncan Steel's Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar (John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471298271).


The current version of the Goddess Lunar Calendar is described here.

Hermetic Systems Home Page