Primitive Time-reckoning

Synopsis

Although in the present study I devote only a few pages to the Greek time-reckoning, and am engaged for the most part in very different fields, yet the work has arisen from a desire to prepare the way for a clearer view of the initial stages of the Greek time-reckoning. In the course of my investigations into Greek festivals I had from the beginning been brought up against chronological problems, and as I widened the circle so as to include the survivals of the ancient festivals in the Middle Ages, more particularly in connexion with the origin of the Christmas festival, I was again met by difficulties of chronology, this time in regard to the earlier Germanic time-reckoning. In the year 1911 I published in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft an article on the presumptive origin of the Greek calendar circulated from Delphi.

These preliminary studies led to my taking over myself, in the projected Lexicon of the Greek and Roman Religions, the article on the calendar in its sacral connexions. This article was worked out in the spring of 1914. In it the emphasis was laid not on the historical chronological systems, which have little to do with religion, but on the question of origins, in which religion plays a decisive part.

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