To divide the solar year is to divide a circle; this is intuitive, but also aligned with the physical reality of the matter, although the Earth’s journey around the Sun is in reality an ellipse rather than a perfect circle. However, conceptualisation requires a “rounding up” of reality into the nearest clean diagram. In this I didn’t only follow my own inclination as an artist, but took my cue from medieval scholars who developed beautifully conceived diagrams based on their detailed observations.
One Year
Independently of its other associations, the snake eating its tail is used in the Middle Ages to represent the solar year with its cyclical nature. My representation was directly inspired by the medieval original below. It opens this book because it’s also one, a single unit, the beginning of a progression in which the year is divided into smaller and smaller units.
Four Seasons
This page introduces the four points of the year, perhaps the one universal constant in all our timekeeping: the solstices and equinoxes. The Summer Solstice occurs when the noontime sun is the highest it’s been all year, making it the longest day, while the Winter Solstice sees the noontime sun at its lowest, and the day is the shortest. The Autumn and Spring equinoxes are the two midpoints where day and night are of equal length. The icons I use to represent them recur through the book, usually in their simplest “pie chart” form. Here, for their first appearance, they include a visual cue to suggest the strength of the sun at these different points in the year. Note also the colour key, so obvious it can go unnoticed, of primary yellow for day and indigo blue for night, as it will return in less obvious places.
As for the seasons themselves, it’s only in some parts of the world that they lend themselves to a four-fold division, and even then there are various ways of defining them. Meteorologically, for instance, Winter starts on December 1st, Spring on March 1st, Summer on June 1st and Autumn on September 1st. Astronomically, the solstices and equinoxes each mark the beginning of their titular season. But solar timing, which is the one I used, is based on insolation (the amount of sunlight) and sees the four points of the year as being the mid-points of the seasons; e.g. the Summer Solstice is Midsummer.
While the four points of the year are marked by conceptual icons located outside the circle, inside the circle itself I’m using intuitive visuals* to describe the season: pink blossoms, green grass, red leaves and pale blue snowflakes. They constitute another colour key that will reappear later.
* Intuitive in those parts of the world where this manifestation of the seasons applies. In complete contrast with the solstices and equinoxes, which are a celestial matter, the seasons are very much a place-dependent earthly matter.
In medieval cosmology, all things are made up of the four elements, themselves based (according to Aristotle) on pairs of the sensible qualities: dry, wet, hot, cold. Each of the four seasons corresponds to an element based on similar qualities. Also aligned with these are the four humours that were believed to determine the health or ill-health of the human body. This gives us the following set of correspondences:
- Hot + dry: Fire, summer, yellow bile;
- Hot + wet: Air, spring, (red) blood;
- Cold + dry: Earth, autumn, black bile;
- Cold + wet: Water, winter, (blue) phlegm.
Without straying too much into that territory, I wanted to offer a glimpse of this order that is meant to underlie everything. “Glimpse” and “underlying” are literal as you have to lift a flap to catch just a little peep of this diagram hidden beneath.
Another colour key is introduced here, which I based on the humours listed above, as there doesn’t seem to have ever existed an official colour scheme for the elements. Note the difference with the seasons: the elements’ palette is made up of primary hues, while the seasons’ palette is all secondary hues and admixtures, each appropriate to the level of reality they operate on.
(While we’re on the topic, the threads used to lift the flaps are silk yarn dyed especially for this purpose.)
Elements and humours may feel like we’re straying from the subject of time, but in the medieval worldview all these things are closely connected in a whole system I find quite beautiful. For reasons not covered here, medecine depended on a solid understanding of the calendar, and every pocket calendar I examined included medical diagrams (such as the Zodiac Man below), though we would not accept them as such today.
Twelve Months
Though the month as a unit of time really arose from the lunar cycle, the year’s division into 12 months aligns them neatly with the 12 equal sections into which the ecliptic, the apparent pathway of the Sun around the Earth, is divided. I say “neatly”, but our calendar has been nipped and tucked a great deal since its Babylonian ancestor, so dividing the months equally and aligning them with the zodiac is an artistic license, imagining an “ideal” model long gone awry.
The correspondence between month and zodiac sign was already picked up by medieval artists. They were frequently commissioned to create calendars, in a tradition that emerged in late Antiquity, flourished in medieval Europe, and was still going strong when that era was drawing to a close in the sixteenth century. In this tradition of the “Labours of the Months”, each month is symbolised by a typical agrarian occupation alongside its dominant zodiac sign. These occupations can vary a little, or occur earlier or later from calendar to calendar, but overall are comfortingly predictable, which is what an agricultural year should be.
For this section, I directly used this imagery, because successful agriculture, the basis of human survival, was the oldest and most urgent reason to understand the solar year and make calendars in the first place. The processes depicted may feel far away from us today, but the truth is they are the same processes we depend on today for food, even if they have been mechanised and take place largely out of sight. To the human figures busy at their work, I added animal friends and other natural elements, a reminder we are part of a greater society all dependent on the Earth.
The twelve months are spread over twelve pages to make the most of the sequential nature of books, which here creates an animation-like effect as you turn these pages. The animation is particularly visible in the disc of the Sun that is visible over each medallion, which moves around the circle of the year as we leaf through it. Just below the disc is a small zodiac symbol, identifying its position on the ecliptic for that given month.
Finally, the sun is inscribed in the name of the month, written in Kufi. The months are known by different names around the Arab world, for the simple reason they are alien to Muslim culture (which originally ran by a strictly lunar calendar) and have no native Arabic names. Much of the Arab world uses arabicised Latin names for them now. But in my native Lebanon, as in the rest of the Levant and in Iraq, we still know the months by names older than Islam or Rome, names going back to the Babylonian calendar. These are the names used here, going back to the roots.
- January / Kānūn كانون ٢ / Capricorn: Feasting and keeping warm. Outside, squirrels are active among the snow drops.
- February / Shbāṭ شباط / Aquarius: Digging ditches while a hopeful robin perches by singing to himself.
- March / Ādhār آذار / Pisces: Hedging or pruning, using a bill-hook. A singing wren announces spring.
- April / Naysān نيسان / Aries: Reveling in the year’s first blooms, enjoyed by rabbits too.
- May / Ayyār أيّار / Taurus: Gathering flowering branches from the mayblossom (hawthorn). A badger out to forage.
- June / Ḥuzayrān حزيران / Gemini: Shearing sheep. A blackbird extracts a worm from the ground.
- July / Tammūz تمّوز / Cancer: Hay-making with a scythe, whiel a kingfisher is on the hunt.
- August / Āb آب / Leo: Harvesting wheat with a sickle, a hopeful wood pigeon nearby.
- September / Aylūl أيلول / Virgo: Wine making, picking grapes and crushing them. A fox is curled up for a nap.
- October / Teshrīn تشرين ١ / Libra: Sowing seeds, followed by an expectant jackdaw (based directly on the 13th-century Easby Church murals).
- November / Teshrīn تشرين ٢ / Scorpio: Pig feeding, by knocking acorns off oaks. A jay, lover of acorns, partakes in the feast.
- December / Kānūn كانون١ / Sagittarius: Baking bread, a cat enjoying the warmth of the oven.
The different tools used above sometimes become shorthand symbols for the months themselves. In this manuscript from England, the column for motnsh is entirely made of these symbols. You can spot the bill-hook, scythe for July and sickle for August among others (my choice of images varies a little from the norm, so here you find the much more traditional falcon for May.)
Twelve Signs
The animated months then resolve into the 12 signs that are their celestial equivalents (if we ignore the slight shift). Triangles of coloured thread connect them three by three, and you may remember we have encountered these exact thread colours earlier: they identify the elements associated with the signs. Each icon is accompanied by the small symbol that prefigured them in the months section, in yellow or ingido: the colour key I use for day and night. This is because each sign is considered to be “positive” or “negative” in Western terminology, but in Arabic the (less loaded) terms used for this are “of the day” and “of the night”.
The iconography of the signs is from the Islamic cultures of Central Asia, where between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries there flourished a whole artistic tradition for astrological imagery that drew on traditions ranging from Greece and Harran to India. The resulting images are far more interesting, and contain more encoded information than the flat and tired standard zodiacal images of today. While this isn’t the place to discuss them in detail, I wanted to include them to breathe new life into the topic: several of these clearly have unfamiliar stories to tell.
Thirty-Six Decans
The Signs unfold into the Decans, a system with roots in ancient Egypt of dividing each sign, or month, or 30º of the circle of the year, into 3 periods of 10 days. Each decan is ruled by a planet, but again the Arabic terminology differs in that decans are called وجوه “faces”. This gave me an excuse to portray the planets in a way visually linked to their full portrayals in the Planetary Time volume. At the same time, I’m also introducing the tiny planetary symbols you can see under each one, of which I’ll say more later.
The planets alternate in a cycle (based on an order we’ll encounter again), but you can’t divide 36 decans by 7 planets. The result is Mars appears twice in a row, right at the Spring Equinox. Why at that time of the year? This is left over from the days when this date marked the beginning of the year. As early as the Accadian calendar in the second century BC, the month of Nisan (April) began the year. Even in parts of Europe including England, New Year’s day was celebrated on March 25 for centuries, as late as the sixteenth century in some places. This survives in the way the sign of Aries is still seen as the first in the Zodiac, but it also survives in… the tax year. So at the Spring Equinox, the old year ended with a Mars-ruled decan, and the new year started over from the same.
The idea of using the decans came late during my planning of the book, so that I caught this detail too late. Otherwise I should have liked to begin the 12 months with April to match! (I will get my wish in the limited edition reproduction, thanks to some digital editing.)
The Zodiac icons for each set of three decans are still visible, but in a much-reduced form that is once again based on a historical example: the minuscule, punched signs I encountered on a series of sundials made in Nuremberg in the fifteenth century, such as this gorgeous example made to fit in your hand.
Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days
Finally, the year is fully divided into 365 days. Of course there is in reality an extra quarter day to account for, but if I wanted to be technically accurate I would have to differentiate between synodic and tropical years – and then we’d fall into a rabbit hole that gets much worse when we reach the duration of a month. For my illustrative purposes, 365 is good enough.
Around the circle, 365 fine lines grow from shortest to longest then back again, visually describing the length of the day from solstice to solstice. This is underlined by a colour gradation from cool to warm, and also expressed in the colour of the gold: I used white gold leaf for Winter, which gets gradually warmer until the warm yellow gold of Summer.
As for what we see inside the circle, it’s a slight departure from my principle of sticking to tradition, but I really wanted to include a reference to a strikingly beautiful timekeeping object: the clog almanac.
These perpetual calendars, still used in Europe in the 19th century, descended from Viking runic calendars. Each face of the block of wood encompasses 3 months. Notches are carved bearing symbols that for the most part are numbers, the same I used here, to indicate the day in the month. Finally, a host of symbols that required familiarity with the principal saints of the church marked feast days.
I wanted to keep the focus on natural phenomena, but there are none, save the regular ones we have seen, that would cause specific days of the month to be highlighted. So I used environmental observances instead; there are so many of them, and it was a chance to bring attention to them. The first in this calendar is January 5: Bird Day, followed by January 31: Zebra Day, then February 2: World Wetlands Day, and so on.
Twenty-Four Hours in a Day
Having divided the year into its basic integral components, which are days, we now zoom in to a single solar day with its own divisions: the hours. This page shows a twofold 24-hour clock. The sun icon at the four cardinal points is now red (a medieval alternative to gold for this luminary) and turns into a moon icon, so the division is now from day time to night time with sunrise/sunset in between.
The static clock face at the centre is directly based on the manuscript above, together with its peculiar numbering system. Around it are the Arabic names for the 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. This is a very old tradition that hasn’t been used in a thousand years, though some of these names have entered the language to indicate less precise moments in time, such as “early morning” or “the dark of night”. But the list of names still reemerge here and there, and I first encountered them on social media, in one of these posts that present something as fact with no context or source, so it cannot be verified. I had wanted to use these names ever since, but not before found a reliable source to verify them. I did trace the post back to a rather odd book dedicated to lists of Arabic words – an entire volume of them, but still without context. It’s not until I had access to the Bodleian’s resources for this project that I was able to find proper information, and several variants on that list, so that I can now confidently work with them.
Variable Day, Variable Hours
The volvelle that makes up this page is based on a diagram that seems ot have been well-known in medieval times as I came across it in several places. This is a beautiful and rather sophisticated conceptualisation of the path of the Sun at the solstices and equinoxes. It depicts both the changing length of daylight and the changing place of sunrise through the year. Of course it’s only accurate for a certain latitude, but it conveys this notion in a simplified way for Northwest Europe.
- At the Winter Solstice, the sun (lowest arc) rises in the South-East, passes low across the sky, and sets in the South West. The day is very short.
- At the Equinoxes (middle arc) the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, reaching an intermediate height and creating a day of intermediate length.
- At the Summer Solstice the sun rises in the North East, passes high in the sky and sets late in the North West. The day is very long.
I adapted this into a volvelle so we could see the sun’s movement, enhanced by clues indicating the seasons and the sun’s strength. Yellow indicates day and indigo night, with a colourful transition when the sun rises or sets. In essence, it’s a comparative animation of daylight at the height of each season, where you can directly see how the winter day lags behind the summer day, and so on. (This model could easily be adapted to visualise the length of daylight at other latitudes.)
What should also strike the observer, is that this is the configuration on which clocks were designed. If you look at the 24-hour dial of early clocks, the small hand is showing you where, on the diagram above, the Sun is positioned at that exact moment. Or to put it visually:
The final page in the Solar Time volume is the previous diagram in a more abstract form: translated into hours. Today our hours are all the same length: this is the middle circle, which corresponds to the clocks and watches we know. But in the past the hours were variable. The day was divided into 12 equal hours and the night into 12 equal hours; in summer, day hours were long and night hours were short, and vice versa. It’s only at the equinoxes that the hours are all equal. With this dial we can see this in operation, and note that for instance, the first hour of day in summer is the ninth hour of night in winter.
The Arabic numerals I used look a little different from what we’re used to, as they follow the form used in the medieval manuscripts I looked at — and also on one of Merton College’s own astrolabes:
On to Lunar Time or Planetary Time
or
Back to Circles of Time