Category Archives: Boeotian calendar

Boeotian New Year is upon me, and my dreams are getting weird….

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So, this December 17th marks the Boeotian New Year (see here for the semblance of a reconstructed / new Boeotian calendar I managed to concoct), and reading a brief summary of a friend’s dream about Apollon jogged my memory of the weird things my brain threw at me last night.

In my dream, I was discussing with Eros a potential Boeotian New Year party, but the idea was still pretty much in embryo and I’d set nothing concrete. But Eros, being who he is, took it upon Himself to send out invitations to all of my friends for a party. The two weeks pass, and I really didn’t think much more of the idea of a party, since I have friends who host a pretty sweet Gregorian calendar New Year party, and that’s only two weeks after Boeotian New Year observances, so I didn’t think chances were high that anybody I could invite would come for an extra party.

…but no, the day of the party, I’m getting out of the shower for Gay Night at the club, and people have arrived for a party — while I’m in a towel, the apartment a mess, no snacks, etc…. I apologised for the misunderstanding, and invited them to come out with me, instead, and then more people show up. And then more. Then still more. And it was getting rather ridiculous, and many of them getting angry with me — some even accusing me of “having no piety at all” and just jerking my friends around.

But Eros wasn’t angry. He said that he thought he told me, and more importantly, he thought I had spoken of concrete plans and not just an idea I had thought about doing maybe. At some point, it became very clear to Him and myself that He was the only one the who wasn’t angry, so we locked ourselves in my room and performed a simple ritual with an offering of wine and fruit and performed divinations for the coming year until everybody had left.

New Boeotian festival calendar

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link to PDF — right-click –> save as for Windows; double-click — > save as for Mac

An eighteen month calendar. I’ll probably come back to this every few months with a new one for the next eighteen months (cos I may be lazy, but I’m easily entertained by nerdology), or at least whenever I can unearth an update to festival dates, etc… I’m still considering this project a “constant work in progress”, so expect periodic tweaks for pretty much any conceivable reason.

And who knows? Maybe next year, I’ll make a fancy version for sale.

Also, if you download it, I’m not going to expect anything (but I can still see how many times this has been downloaded), but gee, it sure would be nice if you could take a look at the downloaded document, think about what this work is worth to you, and then mosey on over back here and go to the sidebar and scroll down to the Tip Jar.

In the works

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I downloaded a lunar calendar template from Sarah Kate Winter earlier today, and have been working most of the day on piecing together a mostly-Boeotian festival calendar — I’ve marked things that aren’t, but that I still celebrate, anyway, and have even included some of the more personal days, like the anniversary of my father’s death (the Nekysia), and other things of especial personal importance.

When I’m done with this, I’ll go back and take out all the personal things and save it (along with a brief sheet explaining what things are, and my justifications for adding some festival or another, and where in Boeotia some festivals originated) as a .PDF.

Now, I have a book signing next week, and so I’m still kind of busy with the last-minute preparations I have for that, but I should have it “done” by the end of August.

Of course, just so that anybody interested in using this along with me knows, I consider this calendar project essentially on-going, and may make updates to things as I learn more. Also, a lot more is known about the Attic festival calendar than the Boeotian, so some dates (and I will explain which ones in the accompanied letter) may shift wildly with the next update as I learn more due to the fact that both I felt this festival is significant enough to continue the tradition and because I had to hypothesise when in the year things may have occurred — or with at least one festival, I simply settled on the date for a near-identical Attic festival.