THE COLIGNY CALENDAR AS A METONIC LUNAR CALENDAR

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Helen T. McKAY

In history and folklore, the Celtic and other northern European peoples held the moon in great awe, and used its various phases as omens to regulate their own earthly activities. The one thing that has always been accepted without question by scholars about the Coligny Calendar is that its focus is on the lunar cycle, and that its internal notations show patterns consistent both between months of the lunar year, and between days of the same month across the years, and so it follows that these notations contain a significance in relationship to the actual lunar phase at which they occur. This paper will accept that each month begins on the ‘ sixth day’ of the new moon as recorded by Pliny the Elder1. This places day 1 of each month at the only point of the lunar cycle that can clearly be differentiated by eye, the quarter moon. This means that the calendar could be ‘ calculated’, that is, set down ahead of time, rather than announced upon finally sighting the new moon, as many other calendars of its day were. It also means that everyone, farmer, king, or priest, could look to the sky and know when a month was starting. It places the full moon at day 8, and the opposite middle dark moon at day 8a (23), days 8 and 8a being the central days respectively of the two 15-day fortnights of each month on the calendar. The patterns of a number of internal daily notations are focused around these key central days of significance. For example, Mac Neill2 noted that the N INIS R notation clusters around days 8 and 8a as part evidence for his assertion that the calendar was wholly lunar. It makes no sense that a lunar calendar with complex and detailed notations focused on certain points of the lunar month, as the Coligny calendar is, should be allowed to slip out of sync with the actual moon’s phases (lunations). The Coligny calendar from the start gives the appearance of being special in the very complexity of the web of daily notations which make best sense as tied to a point in the lunar phase. Given the long history of the western European peoples watching and measuring the sun and moon since Neolithic times, we should expect the calendar to keep in sync with the lunar cycle with great precision. And it is this simple idea – that we should expect to be able to place the Coligny calendar within its cultural context – that begins this paper.