By Brian Boone
Today, the calendar system which most people use is the Gregorian, introduced in 1582 and so named for the politically powerful Pope Gregory XIII who instituted it. It very closely adheres to the cosmic schedule the Earth follows, but it isn’t perfect. Here are some other proposed calendars that never quite flipped the page.
The Positivist Calendar
Proposed in 1849 by French philosopher Auguste Comte, the Positivist Calendar is segmented into 13 months, all named after historical figures including Moses and 19th century surgeon Marie Francois Bichat. Each month is made up of four seven-day weeks. That all adds up to 364 days, and to keep the social calendar aligned with the scientific one, a 365th day was added at the end of the year; two in leap years. Every week started on Monday.
The International Fixed Calendar
Moses Cotsworth’s 1894 calendar changed every month to 28 days and added another month, Sol, between June and July, and a 365th day at the end of December. The League of Nations considered adopting and perpetuating it in 1923, but ultimately passed. George Eastman, head of the Eastman Kodak Company, adopted it for internal use; Kodak did so until 1989. Some quirks that people didn’t like: Every month began on a Sunday, giving every month a Friday the 13th, and the way the timing worked out, the Fourth of July would’ve fallen on Sol 17.
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Dreamspell
In 1987, New Age spiritualists Jose Arguelles and Lloydine Burris Arguelles introduced the Dreamspell. Taking elements of the Haab, the ancient Mayan 365-day solar calendar, the Arguelleses claimed that it was really derived from an extra-dimensional mathematical concept called the galactic spin, with a heavy focus on the number 13. There are 13 months named after a different galactic tone, including Magnetic, Lunar, Overtone, Resonant, Planetary, and Cosmic. Certain dates have their own names, like Blue Galactic Monkey, which Jose Arguelles said he got from an alien being.
The Soviet Calendar
As a way to re-enforce communist ideals even more, the early Soviet Union government established a new calendar in 1929. It broke down into 72 five-day weeks; that makes for 360 days, and the other five were special holidays commemorating big moments in Communist Party history. It was all just a mathematical manipulation to force the nation’s laborers to work more. In the Gregorian calendar, the weekend amounts to 28.6 percent of the time. In the Soviet Calendar, workers got one day off every five days, a leisure rate of 20 percent. All that extra human work meant the means of production had to run more, too, and so much of it broke down that by 1931, the Soviet government abandoned the system in favor of a standard six-day work-week.
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