SCIENCE-AMERICAS: World Group Proposes 13-Month Calendar

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Néfer Muñoz

SAN JOSE, Jul 8 1999 (IPS) - An international organisation plans to request Vatican and United Nations support in promoting international use of the Mayan calendar, replacing the 12-month Gregorian calendar.

The World 13 Moon Calendar Change Peace Movement believes the world should adopt the Mayan “tzolkin,” a calendar with 13 months, 28 days per month.

The U.S.-based group organised an international conference last month at the Costa Rican University for Peace, attended by 200 international supporters.

Participants in the calendar change movement include, among others, quantum physicist Mark Comings, Alfredo Sfeir-Younis of the World Bank, Russian physicist Vladislav Lugovenko, and Valmir Gentil, president of the World Non-Violence Movement.

The promoters hope that the new millenium will begin with a calendar that is not based upon error and respects the cycles of nature, putting the world in greater harmony with time.

The goal of the movement, headed by U.S. physicist Jose Arguelles, is for the world to abandon use of the calendar established by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582.

“The problem with the calendar the world uses now is that it has a poor distribution of days,” explained Alonso Urrea, the movement’s Latin American spokesman. “Every year, the moon rotates around the earth 13 times,” he said.

The current time measurements are therefore irregular and incorrect, because “one month is cut” every year, causing perpetual confusion, Urrea maintained.

The group also pointed out that biological cycles, such as women’s menstruation, occur 13 times per year, coinciding with the Mayan 13-moon calendar, which proponents say is one of the most precise calendars ever created.

“If the months of the Gregorian calendar were reduced to 28 days, a thirteenth month could be created with the remaining days for a total of 364, and we would need just one day to complete the year,” stated the spokesman in Costa Rica.

The leftover day would be “outside of time,” and coincides with July 25 of this year in the current Gregorian calendar.

That is why the group plans to give its proposal to Pope John Paul II and UN secretary general Kofi Annan on that date, “as a symbolic act prior to the commencement of the tzolkin new year,” said Urrea.

The Mayan calendar would maintain the seven-day week and the current names of the days.

But the names of the months would change and would all have the suffix “moon.” For example, the first month of the year would be called “Magnetic Moon,” the second would be “Lunar Moon,” the third “Electric Moon,” and so on. All names chosen by the group have an element of planetary mysticism.

Though many countries were reticent to adopt the Gregorian calendar when it was established in 1582, little by little its influence grew around the world.

There have been other efforts to replace the 12-month Gregorian calendar throughout the world. In 1793, after the French Revolution, the republican calendar was established in France, but was followed for just 10 years.

In the nineteenth century, philosopher August Compte was one of the best known promoters of time measurement reforms. He unsuccessfully advocated what was known as the positivist calendar, which also had 13 months, 28 days each, but was based on a calendar used in Tahiti.

The twentieth century has also seen calendar change initiatives. In 1931, 111 delegates from 42 countries in the League of Nations voted in favour of adopting a 13 month calendar. But the project met with the opposition of the Vatican and the press media.

The current representatives of this movement for change say that the world would greatly benefit from adopting the Peace Calendar, as the group calls the Mayan tzolkin.

The project’s defenders argue that being more in line with the cycles of nature would promote better spiritual harmony.

Urrea declared that the members of the World Peace Movement are optimistic and confidently await the responses of the Vatican and the United Nations.