Night watch
Of months and moons
E arly cultures used the moon to measure out the seasons. In Old English, mona means moon and monath means month. We can therefore deduce that “month” and “moon” share a root word, and that the lunar cycle is intrinsically linked with our calendar year. But where did the names of the months come from?
Perhaps you’ve wondered why we add an extra day to February in a leap year. Why is October the tenth month, when oct is Latin for eight? In the same way, deci means 10, although December is the twelfth month. Confusing indeed…
The names as we know them were founded during Roman times. The original Roman calendar year only consisted of 10 months. Because they were so preoccupied with conquering and war, it made sense that the first month of their year was named after the god of war, Mars (March).
April is named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and May finds its origins in Maia, the Roman goddess of springtime (northern hemisphere, remember). June refers to Juno, wife of Jupiter and the Roman goddess of marriage and childbirth.
Then we find a human reference: Julius Caesar. The famous Roman emperor exerted his power and inserted his own name into the calendar, thus we get the month of July. Augustus Caesar followed suit (August) and made a few modifications of his own.
The rest of the months refer to numbers. September literally means “the seventh month”, October, the eighth month, November, the ninth and December, the tenth.
January and February are the “newest” additions to our calendar, added by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, in circa 700. January is named after Janus (see image above), the Roman god of doorways and transitions. He is often depicted as having two faces that look to both the future and the past. Pompilius was the one who decided that the new year should begin with January, just as we know it today.
February comes from Februa, the Roman festival of purification and cleansing that took place annually during that time. February gets an “additional” day almost every four years to keep our modern-day Gregorian calendar (introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII) aligned with earth’s revolutions around the sun. The earth takes approximately 365 and a quarter days to revolve around the sun, so it’s like the calendar is playing “catch up” to stay accurate.