Months created by women?

[delilabell]

I saw a sandi toksvig quote yesterday and it got me thinking. It was about how 28bdays had been marked on a prehistoric bone. So possibly it was women marking tjebdays of their cycle.
Womens cycles are generally a month long. As are months. So does this mean women created months?
Or are months based on the moon so our cycles follow the moon. Which again I think is amazing.
I know this is random ramblings but it all just popped into my head the other day.

Focussing on the Britons, the Druidic religion that was here before the Roman conquest (Romans were pagan then too), did not have written records as the sacred knowledge was done orally over some twenty years of training. We do know that the Celt leadership were the nobles and the druids, both of which included females, but were overall still patriarchal in nature. The druids were priest/priestesses and also acted as judges and keepers of law. The invading pagan Romans didn’t care much about the Britons religion except to be disgusted by and outlaw human sacrifice which the Druids were recorded to be rather fond of doing. The Romans also did not like any competition for the role of law giver/judge and so eventually ended up sending legions to slaughter all druids and druids in training at the Druidic Centre- the Holy Isle of Angelsey. (The Roman battle report lists female druids in black flitting among the defenders’ ranks ). They then killed any Druid male or female on sight while occupying and colonising. This was the start of persecution of “witches” as any woman with the skills linked to druids was suspect.

During colonisation, religion in Britain underwent the same pattern as other Roman colonies. Temples were built to joint British/Roman Gods & Goddesses where there was natural overlap and the populace were encourage to adopt Roman “names” for the Gods/Goddesses they’d always worshipped. For example, the complex at Bath included a temple to Minerva Sulis…Minerva being the Roman name for the Goddess of wisdom and Sulis being the Celtic name for the Goddess of water and healing. The Romans often set up these dualities where one of their Gods/Goddesses was marketed as being the same God/Goddess as what the natives worshipped. Then they’d build temples to this God/Goddess with both their Roman and Celtic names and iconography so that a worshipper in the temple at Bath was worshipping the Goddess Sulis Minerva…two in one.

And yes of course, wealth and domination mattered both to the Celts and the Romans. The elite Celtic women (nobles and Druids) had more freedom & public power before the Romans. After the Romans the women druids ceased to exist and the Celtic women nobles were pushed into the same box as the Roman women nobles. However, Celtic women did not by our standards have anything close to equality with Celtic men. It was still a very patriarchal society.

The story is different in Ireland as the Romans never got there….so the Druidic religion continued until Christianity appeared. But Christians (St Patrick & company) didn’t wage a genocide against the Druids like the Romans had in Britain. There was no military occupation to do so. It was peaceful missionary type of conversion. There are accounts of a Druidic Priestess of Brigid (who was called Brigid in honour of the Goddess) who converted to Christianity and became one of the first Abesses and was later canonised as the Saint Brigid. So the Druids themselves stayed as religious leaders in the new religion.

The Celtic church was a serious competitor to the Roman Catholic Church and that’s a long discussion in and of itself as to how the Roman church snuffed out the Celtic church. Suffice to say that early crusades involved killing other ‘heretic’ Christians as much as nonChristians.

Yeah, the idea that Christianity was a militaristic converting religion wherever it went just isn't particularly accurate. Often it appealed to people precisely because it was less violent and more gentle than what they already had, that's why it especially appealed to people like slaves and women.

I think sometimes people get confused because there was much more focus on leaders converting and their followers going along with it - but that really reflects a different approach to individualism. Religion wasn't seen as personal to the degree we see it.

Well in the nicest possible way I disagree it's preposterous. Imagine back before there is such a thing as a calendar. Mankind's earliest known effort at a calendar in a piece of bone with 28 notches on it.

Sandi's (male) lecturer called it 'Man's first primitive attempts at a calendar' and a lecture hall full of students didn't query or argue. But later thinking about it and who precisely it is in this band of stone age hunter gathers who would have so invested in knowing when 28 days had passed Sandi rather wondered whether it might not have been more appropriate to call it 'women's first primitive attempts at a calendar'

Complicated stuff comes from simple stuff. Tracking seasons is agriculture, tracking things by the moon - 28 days is at least in part about periods

Exactly. In some cases it absolutely was forced conversion, such as the Jesuit missionaries in New Spain when the Spanish conquered and colonised most of the American continents. There it was definitely a militaristic conversion backed up with genocide and the infamous atrocities of the Spanish Inquisition. Religion caused most of the Native American rebellions in New Spain.

The Roman Catholic Church was very militarily aggressive and that’s how they got dominance over the other Christian Churches in many parts of the world. They did formal crusades against the Celtic Christian Church, the French Cathars, the Orthodox Greek Church, the Nicean Church and the Coptic Church. Once Protestantism started, they initiated wars between Catholic countries against the Huguenots and Calvinists (ie. French and Spanish invasions of the Netherlands) and also the Anglicans (England).

In a lot of ways, Henry VIII Church of England was a return to the Celtic church much of the British kingdoms had before the Roman Catholic Church became supreme. As one key feature of the Celtic church was that priests could marry and abbesses were just below/reported direct to bishops. In the Roman Catholic Church, priests had to be celibate and an abbess was of lower rank than the most junior priest.

I think what’s interesting about the ancient Romans is that they also brought Gods/Goddesses from other parts of the Roman Empire to Britain. They were not fussed about everyone must worship this one God or one set of Gods/Goddesses. Mithras was a Persian God, and the Romans adopted him and there was a temple to Mithras built in London to worship Mithras. They also brought over Isis, an Egyptian goddess, as evidenced by devotional lamps found scattered about Britain and an altar dedicated to her in London.

You literally can’t track seasons without tracking the moon. That’s why ancient cultures had agricultural based names for each moon of the year even after they adopted solar calendars.

Prehistoric cultures likely had names for moons too but based around the migration patterns of the herds they hunted and the wild plants they gathered. Because you literally cannot track when the herds would be in their summer grazing areas without tracking moons.

No prehistoric woman is going to need to know 28 day cycles. The 28 day cycle for menstruation was literally invented by a Victorian doctor who decided that this was the average cycle length for women, and the average gestation was also 40 weeks. He did this with no scientific study whatsoever. Then when the BC pill was invented, the manufacturers simply used this 28 day “standard” pulled out of some man’s arse number to artificially induce a 28 day cycle on women. Today, we think this is natural…it’s not. It’s a construct. An artificial overlay.

We know that actual natural menstrual cycles vary from 25-32 days. They are not 28days. We know too the prehistoric women likely had very irregular periods due to malnutrition and STIs, so the idea of prehistoric women even having a regular period of any number of days is preposterous.

The moon, however, was a regular, infallible 28 day cycle in prehistory (extending to 29 days by Ancient times) and tracking it was necessary to know when you need to migrate to location x to hunt the migratory herds, to know when to be in location y to harvest the wild rye or yams or whatever, to know when to scatter the wild seeds for next year, to know when the fish would start coming up the rivers in spring. You can’t know this without tracking the moons.

Stonehenge is a lunar and solar calendar, it’s not tracking periods. The handheld scored bone and stone lunar calendars were for easy transport to take with you. The prehistoric equivalent of having a watch instead of going to London to look at Big Ben.

Prehistoric women wouldn’t have had periods every 28 days. As recently as 100 years ago it was commonplace for women to have a period only once every 3-4 mths. Prehistoric women started their periods at 18/19, had a menopause in their mid-twenties, and if lucky, lived to 30. Periods were rare. Fertility was rare. That’s why prehistoric communities worshipped birth. It was only after agricultural communities began to form and our diets changed that fertility patterns increased.

My partner’s and my periods have never ‘synced’, despite us having spent pretty much 24 hours together, 7 days a week throughout lock down. Only anecdotal, of course, but I imagine there are equal number of anecdotal accounts on each side.

Yes I am asking YOU that. You said ' one of the reasons pagan's disliked christianity was because it was perceived of as weak.' I am asking YOU where that is recorded and how you know it - is there evidence of that or is that just someone's theory? Did you just read it somewhere on the internet once?

The reason I ask is I find utterly amazing is how my musings/understanding/ interpretations are shot down as 'utter rubbish' and then concrete statements are made with nothing backing them up other than 'I've looked into it'.

Either have a discussion where we can share our interpretations respectfully or provide the evidence of your superior knowlege and truth.

Information has also passed through down through oral traditions: songs, fables and ceremonies. Part of which allows us to make interpretations and discuss possibilities.

And no, I don't really think ''that people in pre-Christian Britain were lacking in interest in power, control, domination, the collection of wealth? And that these things were unrelated to their religious worship and beliefs ''

Have I said that? Im getting quite sick of having words shoved in my mouth so people can take some sort of higher intellectual ground.

Of course those things have always been a part of humanity in varying degrees, however the Roman catholic church was very good at dominating, taking land and wealth. Look at the gold adorned buildings they have left behind, every where, look at the vatican, where all the wealth flowed.