October Almanac: Sensibility

Danica Boyce (0:24)

It is October. In fact, it's October 2nd as I'm recording this. We're in ADHD mode. And I think it's kind of cool because the fact that I often end up not getting my monthly podcast almanac episodes out at the beginning of the month, has meant this month and last month that they tend to align somewhat with the new moon, which was an idea that I was toying with when I started thinking about reviving the almanac so that I could be working on a traditional moon cycle, which is how in pre-Christian times, nearly everybody was measuring time. However, I must admit that this time, it's just an accident. My podcast editor was out of the country and I didn't check weeks in advance because some people are capable of that kind of thing. But yeah, so again, we're getting the podcast in line with the way that time would have been kept in pre-Christian times, and that's kind of cool. It's definitely not a hill that I would die on, and I don't intend to, but it is kind of fun. So it makes sense, especially in October, I think, because we are looking at a time of year that a season, a month that is typified by its end. Often that is the case with our months. Have you ever noticed that either the beginning or the end of the month is when a major folkloric holiday falls?

And the reason for that is again, the fact that people used to work on a lunar solar calendar. So you can kind of imagine like the year, according to the sun, is a tree. And you know, it's straight up and down. We've got a solstice at the top and a solstice at the bottom, and then we've got an equinox pointing one way and an equinox directly pointing the other way. It's like a cross, like a wheel with a cross at the center. But that's not how the seasons work, nor how we can reliably measure time, because there's vast amounts of time between the solstices. And the main things don't tend to happen at the solstices or the equinoxes. Seasonal change tends to be more obvious in between them. So in comes the moon, which happens to go around 12 to 13 times every year, which gives us the decorations, let's say, on the Christmas tree. The moon illuminates the microclimates of time around the wheel of the year that is set by the sun.

And of course, the moon doesn't go around precisely 12 or 13 times every year, which is why in pre-Christian times, there was something called an intercalary month, which many cultures would use ways of making up for the fact that time is not as precise as it tends to look. And it changes every year because that moon is pretty precise, but not precisely as precise as the sun in its turnings. And so we would get a leap month depending on the culture. It might come in at a different time, in the same way that we now have one day that we change around every once in a while to make up for the fact that the calendar is still not quote unquote perfect in the way that we'd like to imagine it would be, that it would follow our whims. So that, my friends, is why holidays that have folkloric significance or from pre-Christian times tend to fall at the beginning or end of a month, because the months are named for the moon. Monoth in Old English means the moon. And so month literally means moon. When we're talking about a month, we're talking about a moon. But of course, our calendar now has detached from the actual moons. So we're tracing them where they dip in and out of the Roman calendar months that we're looking at now. So welcome to Fair Folk Podcast, where we are looking in this episode at the folklore of October. We're looking at what the month offers to us in its traditional content, in its traditional ways, in the reverence that people showed for this season, the activities they engaged in, the spiritual tides of this time. Tide simply being another word for time. But in its material sense, just like we used to measure time by what was happening in nature. So here we are looking at what happens in October. So what is an Elmanac episode of Fair Folk Podcast? For me, it's a prompt to look into what clues in the direction of wholeness and love the ancestors have hidden for us in the calendar, in calendar custom. It's an invitation to ask what the land is saying and how the sacred text of world tradition can help us to understand that land and its beings as our kin. The end of October, the full moon or the new moon, depending on who you ask, is in the old pagan calendars of the Celtic world and of the Germanic world. That would be like Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland. The beginning of winter, because in these calendars traditionally, these ancient calendars, there were two seasons, winter and summer, and each occupied half of the year. The year turned over October 31st, as we now calculate it, the October moon.