The Lion Calendar
The Lion Calendar or Lion Count is a lunar calendar used since ancient times on Aren. Based on the phases of the moon, it uses a 384-day year with each month having 32 days. Being 19 days longer than a standard Alliance Year, this makes the calendar somewhat problematic as it has no alignment to the seasons. It is believed that the ancient calendar served a strictly religious/ceremonial function, while a more robust solar calendar governed the planting and harvesting of crops.
The moon above Aren goes through 8 phases each of which lasts 4 days.
The first day of the solar and lunar years align once every 384 solar years. B.G.A. 3800, the accepted start of recorded history, represents one such alignment. The last lunar/solar alignment of the Mage Wars occurred in 344 B.G.A. and the first alignment after the formal adoption of the Alliance Calendar occurred in A.Y. 140
Contents
Aspects of the Calendar
Hours of the Lunar Day
In addition to numbering the days and dividing them by the phases of the moon, the Lion Calendar divided up the hours of the day accordingly:
- Matins — late at night or at midnight
- Lauds — at 3 a.m. or at dawn
- Prime — around 6 a.m.
- Tierce — around 9 a.m.
- Sext — at midday
- None — around 3 p.m.
- Vespers — around 6 p.m. or after dinner
- Compline — around 9 p.m. or before bed
Texts from the Mage Wars that provide dates according to the lunar calendar frequently also list the hours an event happened.
While the widespread invention of clocks negated the original function of these divisions, the practice survives both in ritual magic and various esoteric practices.
Days of the Lunar Month
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Months of the Lunar Year
The Lunar year is 384 days long divided into 12 months of exactly 32 days each.
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The same names for the months were used by the Atayans and several other civilizations on Aren for their solar calendars up until A.Y. 150 when Eieber unified the calendars. At that time many major powers within the Alliance used different names for their months, with very little agreement. A compromise was reached by
Cycles of Lunar Years
An oft-overlooked aspect of the Lion Calendar is the Lion Count. The Lion Count fixes dates according to a 384 year cycle beginning from an arbitrary year zero. For reasons lost to history, this scale is known as "the time it takes for a bird to become a bird again". Dates fixed with the Lion Count list the lunar day, lunar month, lunar year, and the number of complete cycles that have taken place before it.
So a complete Lion Count date might be "Tierce, Puh, Sextus, 118, 3". This corresponds to the hour of 9 AM, on the 21st day of the 6th month, in the 118th year of the current cycle, after 1270 years have elapsed. Some considerable math is required to translate this into an Alliance date(as well as knowing the arbitrary year zero) but it can be done.
Traditionally, Lion Count cycles began whenever the lunar and solar years lined up. The Atayans kept a record of which of their years(which later became Alliance Years) corresponded to known cycles of lunar years:
| Year B.G.A. |
| 344 |
| 728 |
| 1112 |
| 1496 |
| 1880 |
| 2264 |
| 2648 |
| 3032 |
| 3416 |
| 3800 |
This allows for any known date given in the Lion Count to be reasonably calculated.
Usage
The Lion Calendar was heavily used by various civilizations throughout the Mage Wars. Many traditions indicate it dated back to Antiquity, however the Ancients are not known to have had significant enough a presence on Aren to account for such widespread use. In any case it was suplanted by the Atayan Calendar at the start of the Golden Age.
During the Alliance era, the Lion Count remained in usage in various niche roles. Since so many dates in the Mage Wars were fixed according to the lunar calendar, it remained of great interest to historians. Lelroughodaism and various esoteric practices continued to use it, though no official state kept it as the calendar after A.Y. 150. The Lion Calendar remained vital to Magic as various rituals were based around it.
During the Long Night, the Lion Calendar came back into common usage. It had some advantages over the standard Alliance Calendar, most notably in situations where fleeing rebels had lost count of exactly what day it was. Calculating the day of the month by the phases of the moon was easier, especially with the ability to fix dates by the summer and winter solstices.
As the Long Night wore on, a tradition began of fixing dates according to the lunar calendar as a small act of defiance. Samuel Fate introduced his own timekeeping systems and outlawed the Alliance Calendar, but anyone familiar with lunar dates could record time that way, knowing the dates could be reconciled at a later time. However, this led to a very interesting problem, as scribes working through the era often had no clue exactly what the year was. This leads to events for which the exact hour, day, week, and month are known; but not the year.
Calculating Lunar/Solar dates
With thanks to Debsta on the Math Help Forum:
42nd day of the 150th solar year would be (150 - 1) x 365 + 42 days in = 54, 427 days in.
54427 / 384 = 141 full lunar years + 283 days, ie 283 days into the 142nd lunar year.
So, 42nd day of the 150th solar year would be the 283rd day of the 142nd lunar year.
