The moon has been hitting the headlines briefly, for something that happened 40 years ago. It was in the ancients’ minds (and sights) all the time.
The ancients were farmers, and farming is season-dependent. So, determined to keep the gods smiling benevolently on their activities, they tied many of their most important religious rituals to the seasons in the hope that this would ensure their crops flourished. But ritual had to be conducted in the same way, place and time, and this was the problem.
The ancients knew that the seasons coincided with the time it took for the sun to complete its annual course (the ‘solar’ cycle of 365.25 days). But they counted time by the moon, and the average ‘lunar’ month lasts 29.53 days (‘moon’ and ‘month’ in English derive from the same Germanic root).
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