The Festival Year
The Festival Year
Lesson 40 left food regulated by day and by season. This lesson supplies the frame that decides which day is which — and it is worth doing properly, because the mechanics explain almost every apparent oddity.
A synodic month — new moon to new moon — is about 29.53 days. Twelve of them make about 354 days. A tropical year is about 365.24.
The lunar year runs roughly eleven days short. Left alone, a festival fixed to the moon would move backwards through the seasons and return to its starting season after about thirty-three years.
Month 1
The Festival Year
Month 2 · Lesson 41. A tithi is not a day — it is a thirtieth of a lunation — and almost everything puzzling about Hindu festival dates follows from that one fact and from two clocks that refuse to divide evenly.
4 min
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