Chronology

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CHRONOLOGY

CHRONOLOGY . The tendency to describe time in human terms inevitably leaves its mark on the various systems used for signifying time in all its widely varying forms and dimensions: from the identification of the period of light and the period of darkness within a day, to the artificial groupings of several days (seven-day week, ten-day week), the month (lunar or solar), the seasons, the year, cycles of many years, and the era. This tendency is found within the most diverse cultures and in everyday life as well as in the world of mythical traditions.

Scholars have long been gathering and analyzing a superabundant documentation relating to the concrete systems (mathematico-astronomical, economic, sacral) that in specific historical situations have been used to signify time. Unfortunately, scholars have not always asked themselves why such an activity should have been necessary. Rather than continuing to collect data of a phenomenological kind on the various methods of describing time, it seems more important to examine closely the ideology underlying them. Very useful for this purpose are historico-religious studies of the calendar, which have now made clear the decisions made in every type of culture to distinguish, within the otherwise vague, indistinct, and insubstantial temporal dimension of reality, that which is elevated to the rank of sacred from that which is deliberately left as profane.

Sacred time is saved from the anonymity of assimilation either to the perpetual self-renewal of nature or to the motionless stability of the mythical world, and is thereby rendered eternal in its periodic ritual scansions. Unlike profane time, sacred time tends to abstract not only from nature's inexorable rhythms (which it seeks in some way to control) but also from the rarefied and static character of the period of origins (which has now been left behind) and from the atmosphere of the festival (which, being out of the ordinary, is not congenial to it). As a result, sacred time always shows a face that is entirely its own, though in forms that vary according to the cultural environment and the historical situation. The phenomenology of sacred time ranges from the relatively simple impositions of taboos at specified times (which are thereby automatically removed from the everyday), to the prudent development of festive parentheses (inserted into profane existence as a means of linking this to the period of origins), and on to the infinitely more complex restructurings of calendrical rhythms. (The motives behind these rhythms—astronomical, economic, political, and/or social—are redeemed at the religious level, while the beginning and end of these rhythms are linked in the celebration of the New Year.)

History, for its part, presents us with well-defined instances of sacral descriptions of the temporal dimension. These include the dedication, in the true and strict sense, of limited periods of time to supreme beings (the "days of the gods" in ancient Egypt and the "week" of the bolon ti ku or "lords of the underworld" among the Maya); the indication of such days and months by name (as in the Zoroastrian religion and in the Roman, in which January was named after the god Janus, and March after the god Mars); and finally, the constant tendency to identify the beginning of linear time (time that is supremely profane by reason of the uniqueness of each instant) with events of exceptional religious importance. Such events included, for the Hebrews, creation and, for a more restricted period of time, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple; for the Romans, the inauguration of the sanctuary of the supreme god, Jupiter Optimus Maximus; for the Western world, the birth of Christ; for Buddhist India and Indochina, the death of the Buddha and his attainment of nirvāṇa; and for the Islamic faithful, the emigration of Muḥammad from Mecca to Medina.

On the other hand, the consecration, and therefore surrender, of a period of time (which is thus removed from the crises of everyday life) brings the redemption, for man and for his existential needs and cultural requirements, of the remaining part of the temporal dimension, which is usually the larger part and which he seems anxious to regain possession of as soon as possible. In this context we may think of the care with which, by means of suitable indications on their epigraphical calendars, the Romans set apart the days that were fasti (i. e., on which it was permitted to administer justice), to the point of distinguishing within the twenty-four-hour period the time during which such activity was licit between the two phases of sacrifice. The Japanese set apart the kannazuki ("months without gods"), during which they, convinced that during these periods the Shintō kami neglect their faithful, consider it a duty not to waste time in cultic practices. Similarly, the civil authorities of various countries have brought mounting pressure to bear on the religious authorities to reduce the number of feast days and thus increase the number of workdays. The time that human beings reserve to themselves can—and by reason of existential difficulties must—be henceforth structured in a well-defined functional relation to productive activity.

It seems almost superfluous in our day to call attention to the important influence of various economic motivations on the progressive establishment and stratification of calendrical systems in the most diverse civilizations. Certain widespread phenomena in this area are obvious: the coincidence of the beginning and end of the year with the period when consumer goods are most available; the strategic location of festive periods in relation to essential work periods; and the close relation established between annual and seasonal rhythms and the needs created by human fatigue. I shall therefore only remind the reader of three considerations. First, the specific character of a calendrical structure is often determined by an agrarian economy (e.g., in ancient Egypt, where the New Year coincided with the flooding of the Nile, which was essential to the grain cycle and with which the three seasons of inundation, emersion, and repair of the irrigation system were likewise closely connected). Second, within one and the same civilization there are often several calendrical systems, each of which, with its different set of characteristics, looks to a different economic component of the society in question (e.g., at Rome, where the spelt harvest became fully available only in February, thus determining an agrarian-type New Year in March, whereas April 21 signaled the beginning of the work year for those engaged in pastoral activities). Finally, the names of the months often echo particular rural occupations (e.g., "The Garlic Harvest" in the Iran of the Achaemenids; "The Heaping of the Harvest" in pre-Columbian Peru; "The Sowing of the Rice" in China).

Our consciousness of the influence exercised by the economic factor on the cultural description of time is, moreover, such that we can see it already reflected in the sacral traditions of primitive cultures. In these cultures, myths abound showing that primitive man's anxiety focused not so much on the need of having time as on a concern that the time available be suited ("long enough" or "with daylight enough") for hunting (the Paiute of Nevada; the Caddo of eastern Texas) or for salmon-fishing (the Tlingit of the Northwest Coast).

But whether sacred or profane, time is essentially a reality that is conceived, planned, and activated in service of human beings and therefore must be adapted to their needs. Humans view as habitual and secure the limits represented by the day (among some peoples, only the period of daylight), the month (in some cultures, only the period of the waxing moon), the year (in some societies, only the seasons, which are defined in economic terms), and, sometimes, the century. Beyond these limits, human beings seem to feel displaced, lost, threatened, and crushed by the unnaturally vast dimensions that time appears to take on whenever it is geared no longer to them but to suprahuman beings who live in a "different" time or, more precisely, are thought of as "outside of time." Thus human beings can make nothing of a "day of Brahma," which in Hinduism is equivalent to an incommensurable kalpa, just as they cannot render useful to themselves, except in an ultimately apotropaic way, the vast eras in which, according to certain higher civilizations (Vedic India, the classical world, pre-Columbian America), phases of dissolution usually, and in significant ways, preclude a renewal of cosmic reality or even a termination of human reality. In the final analysis, human beings would even have a struggle appreciating properly the decidedly more restrained yet barely sufficient three millennia that, according to the Zoroastrian religion, the creator Ahura Mazdā needs in order to establish and then annihilate creation, after having imprisoned and destroyed evil within it.

The fact that time should be geared principally to man, tailored to his measure and defined in function of his needs, both existential and cultural, is constantly made clear precisely in those mythical traditions that, from time to time and in one civilization after another, emphasize this point at levels that are diverse but that, in every case, deal with the common necessity of turning absolute time into a human category. To begin with, great importance is attached in myth to the active role played by the human race in the acquisition of time during the period of origins, as compared with the more passive role played by the suprahuman powers. Those who request, take, conquer, or otherwise obtain time may be, according to circumstances, the First Man (natives of Vanuatu; the Sulka of New Britain); the earthly wife of the moon (the Aleut of Alaska); a child (the Micmac of Cape Breton); the carpenter and his sons (the Bambara of the Sudan); the shaman (the Caddo); or mythical kings (Rome and China). Or the social group in its entirety may play this active role by determining to couple peacefully in the dark (the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego); by turning in need to Wild Duck against the negative action of Coyote and the ineptitude of Wolf (the Paiute); by paying Bazzagro to keep the sun in the sky, while Coyote appears to play a secondary role in the entire event (the Pomo of California); by crying out their desire for "long days" so that Maikaffo, the master of atmospheric phenomena, cannot but hear and heed (the Hausa of the Sudan); or by claiming and obtaining a certain course of the sun through the sky, while the creator limits himself to granting their desire (the Tsimshian of the Northwest).

In short, individuals or social groups adapt time to their own use, whereas otherwise it would have other proportions, dimensions, and characteristics. There would, for instance, have been as many months of winter as there are hairs in the trickster's fur coat, instead of winters of only seven months (the Assiniboin of Canada); ten cold moons and, for sole nourishment, soup made of refuse, instead of two such moons, with sunflower seeds, roots, and berries to eat (the Atsugewi of California); lunar months of forty days, as Porcupine wanted, instead of months according to rule (the Tsimshian); excessively short days instead of "long days" (the Hausa); periods of either light alone or darkness alone, with either sleeping or fishing excluded, instead of the indispensable alternation of day and night (natives of Mota in Melanesia and the Tlingit).

It is also significant that time is made available in periods that are keyed to specifically human existence. In fact, time alone makes possible the existence of beds and sleep (natives of Mota); fire and the eating of cooked foods (the Sulka of New Britain); the present manner of making love (the Pomo and the Selk'nam); and death (the Luiseño of California and the Bambara). Prior to the acquisition of time, human beings had not yet carved out a special—that is to say, human and cultural—place for themselves that would differentiate them from the suprahuman and subhuman worlds. As long as time did not exist, either absolutely or in its definitive forms and with its definitive characteristics, mythical beings exercised governance (Rome); the gods were not yet born (Egypt); it was possible to marry the moon (the Aleut); men were still like the animals (the Tsimshian); and, finally, it was possible to use the channels of communication between earth and heaven (the Bambara, the Sulka, and natives of Vanuatu).

As for the acquisition or conquest of time as a function of elementary human needs, here, too, there is a widespread and much accentuated mythical motif. Claim was laid to a winter that was not too long and that was mitigated by the summer so that humans might endure the cold (the Assiniboin and the Micmac). There was a desire for daylight in order to obtain food and cook it (the Paiute, Caddo, Tlingit, and Atsugewi), and for the darkness of night in order to safeguard personal privacy (the Selk'nam) and to rest (the Caddo, natives of Mota, and the Sulka). And all manner of efforts were made to divide the year into months in order to have rest from fatigue (the Bambara) and to be able to commemorate the dead (the Luiseño).

Finally, one also finds a marked awareness that the acquisition of this human category of time had immediate and lasting repercussions in relation to the world of nature, which now received its definitive shape. With time, light first appeared (the Tlingit, natives of Vanuatu, Israel), and darkness as well (the Tlingit). With time, the moon rises and begins its successive phases (the Luiseño, Pomo, Aleut, Tlingit, and Bambara), and plants and animals come into existence (the Tlingit and Sulka, natives of Vanuatu, Iran, Israel) and take on their definitive traits (the Paiute, Tsimshian, Tlingit). The gods can now be born and, in turn, generate the world (Egypt), and death comes upon the earth (the Bambara and Luiseño).

Paradoxically, time marks the real beginning of history and opens the way for nature to exist. Nature would otherwise have been different or would not even have existed at all. This enables us to understand how, among the rich and complex systems used for describing time in both primitive cultures and the higher civilizations, those systems that give material embodiment to time by specifically human and cultural means acquire special prominence. One such means in widespread use is the voice. In its most diverse forms, time can be announced in a loud voice to the collectivity by the qualified sacral personnel, or at least by individuals of exalted religious standing. We may think here of the solemn public proclamation of the new moon (on the basis of which the month now beginning acquired its special structure) by a pontifex minor (minor pontiff or subpontiff) in Rome; or of Muḥammad's reestablishment in Mecca in 631 of a lunar year uncontaminated by intercalations of any kind. Actions of this type, usually ritualized in various ways according to the particular cultural environment, seem to be found in a significant degree in those cultural traditions in which time has not yet become an integral part of the order of things. Time may make its first appearance as something announced and proclaimed (the Luiseño, Atsugewi, Paiute), but remember also Genesis 1:1–5, where God says: "Let there be light!" Or time may be repeated (the Assiniboin and Atsugewi), discussed (the Assiniboin, Paiute, Atsugewi, Nandi of northeastern Africa, and Tsimshian), or even obtained by shouting (the Maidu, Tlingit, and natives of Mota) on the part of suprahuman beings or primitive humankind.

Another system of circumscribing time is that represented by work and, in particular, the manual labor of craftsmen. In archaic societies such work soon acquired a properly creative value in relation to realities that are in themselves abstract and difficult, if not impossible, to regulate, as witnessed by the well-known Roman saying that the individual is the faber (creator) of his own destiny. The labor of a handworker and, more specifically, of a weaver, a carpenter, or an engraver—that is, the labor of individuals who are accustomed to using fibers, nails and hammer, or chisel and burin in order to produce something that is new, different, and, above all, irreversible (cloths; various objects; and marble and/or metals that are shaped and moved from one place to another) in relation to the raw material that human labor has now immobilized in a given form and thus rendered usable—is the kind of labor that seems to show through, even if sublimated to a henceforth symbolic level, in conceptions of time as something knotted, nailed, chiseled, or engraved. One can cite the knotted cords used for measuring time among various primitive peoples, as well as the "binding of the sun" into the arc of the seasons or into cycles of many years in pre-Columbian America; or the ritual hammering in of the clavus annalis ("nail of the year") at Rome, and the comparable way of marking the passage of the years in Etruria; or various epigraphic calendars.

Given the well-known fact that the specialization of trades appears with the rise of the higher civilizations, conceptions of the kind cited can be found only sporadically in primitive cultures, whereas other cultures give them a privileged place. In the myths of primitive peoples, the kind of toil by which time in its various forms is acquired is far from being the labor of a craftsman; rather, it is related to the habitual activities of the various sectors of these societies. In these stories time is hunted down and captured with bow and arrow (the Caddo); hoisted up by brute strength and ropes (the Aleut and Sudanese); ferried in a canoe (natives of Mota); given new form by means of an obsidian knife (natives of Mota); or even looked upon as something to be traded—for example, "bought" with a basket of pearls or a little necklace or even a pig (the Pomo, Paiute, and natives of Mota, respectively).

A further method of circumscribing or actuating time is even more human and cultural by comparison with the other systems. This is the system that actualizes time, in forms that vary constantly from civilization to civilization, through the more or less massive display of ludic activity. Scholars have long known and studied rituals in both primitive and higher cultures that focus on spectacle. Less well known, on the other hand, is the fact that such rituals (usually celebrated to highlight the salient moments of human, social, and cosmic existence and to create or recreate them from time to time at the sacral level) often specifically signal the passage of time by materially describing, characterizing, influencing, and even "realizing" its several and diverse forms and modalities. Among the Witóto, for example, the ritual game of soccer, in which the ball is identified with the moon, is played in precise relation to the various phases of this heavenly body. In the same context the Shasta of Oregon, try to "strike the moon" by hitting the ball with twelve vertebrae of a salmon, and thus to help the moon increase so that, month by month, it may travel the entire arc of the year; this action, in their view, even accelerates the moon's course in winter. The Pygmies of Africa annually dance around a fire to bring about the succession of the seasons; at the spring feast of Ysiah, the Yakuts of Siberia stage a combat between winter and the salutary season; and the Delaware of Oklahoma assign a clearly solstitial character, value, and purpose to the game of soccer.

Examples of this kind help us to grasp the ultimate function of the countless elements of spectacle (dances and songs, games and contests of every kind, dramatic representations, etc.) that, as is well known, are a constant component of New Year festivals both in the most widely varying primitive cultures and in the archaic higher civilizations. Even in these last, in fact, ludic activity, though tending to become what in the modern world is now simply sport and theatricals, still to a degree seeks to shape the varied and manifold formulations of time by describing its rhythms in the form of spectacles. To multiply examples here would carry us beyond the limits set for this article; we need only think of the Assyrian determination of the years by means of a game of chance, or the Greek custom of dating time in relation to the Olympiads celebrated every fifth year. Reflect, too, on the wealth and complexity of the elements offered by the inevitable projection of motifs of this kind in the mythic traditions of these civilizations. One can cite the Egyptian story told by Plutarch, according to which the five days added annually to the other 360 were made up by the god Thoth out of the fractions of time he had acquired by playing chess with the moon. Thoth's purpose in thus composing these days was to create a specific chronological space that would at last allow the divinities to enter the world, since the sun god Re would not allow them to be conceived and born during the regular year.

Given the limitations of space, I shall restrict myself to a brief consideration of how all this was verified in Roman society, where there were many rituals of a spectacular kind. If we keep in mind that the rotation and revolution of the heavenly bodies, which regulate the course of time, were assimilated in Roman culture to the special movement proper to ludus ("play"), we will readily understand the imposition of a complex astronomical symbolism on the space occupied by the circus, where every chariot race was intended to mime the course of the sun through the heavens. We will also see a more specific meaning in the fact that the periodic ludi served to mark in a solemn manner the expiration of fixed periods of time. Thus, the lustrum, or purificatory sacrifice, defined a regularly recurring cycle of four years; the ludi saeculares, or centennial games celebrated the end of a saeculum; and the various New Year festivals—the Saturnalia, Feriae Annae Perennae (festival of the goddess of the year), and Palilia (festival of Pales, the tutelary deity of shepherds and cattle)—abounded in spectacle.

When thus reduced to a mere product of a game, time seems to be rendered completely subordinate to a given culture. This does not mean, however, that time is undervalued in the slightest; on the contrary, there is always the greatest esteem for it, independent of cultural contexts and historical situations. The value assigned to time is extremely high in comparison with other categories, as seen in the widespread conviction that time is something "precious" that "must not be lost." This evaluation is independent of oscillations in value when moving from a merely economic level (in myth, time can be "bought," while in the modern world it becomes "money" pure and simple) to a highly ideological level. Thus time is equated with the uniqueness of existence in some myths (the Assiniboin, Luiseño, Bambara) in which the conquest of time has been made possible only by someone's sacrifice, suffering, and death.

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