THE DANCE OF TIME

A delectable miscellany of history and myth, religion and astronomy, festivals and feast days!

THE DANCE OF TIME will tell you that the ancient Romans left sixty days of winter out of their calendar because these two months were considered a dead time of lurking terror and therefore better left unnamed and unmarked. That they also had a superstitious fear of even numbers, hence the tendency for months with an odd number of days. That robed and bearded druids from the Celts prefigure our New Year’s figure of Father Time?. That if Thursday is Thor’s day, then Friday belongs to his faithful wife, Freya, queen of the Norse gods. That the name Easter may derive from the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, Eostre, whose consort was a hare — Easter Bunny, anyone? Three streams of history created the Western calendar—first from the Sumerians, then from the Celtic and Germanic peoples in the North, and finally from Palestine with the rise of Christianity. Michael Judge teases out the contributions of each stream to the shape of the calendar, to the days and holidays, and to associated lore. In them, he finds glimpses of a way of seeing before the mechanical time of clocks, when the rhythms of man and woman matched those of earth and sky. Michael Judge has been an actor, playwright, screenwriter, folklorist, and congressional historian and guide, as well as editor of the Senate newsletter, the Inkwell. THE DANCE OF TIME reflects his passion, his erudition, and his meticulous research.