Timewar

In Rome, Thursday the fourth of October 1582 was followed by Friday the fifteenth. Ten days were removed from the calendar by papal bull, Inter gravissimas, so that the spring equinox would return to the twenty-first of March, where the Council of Nicaea had fixed it twelve centuries earlier, and Easter could again be reckoned correctly. Spain, Portugal, Poland and most of Italy made the jump that week. France waited until December. The Protestant states refused for more than a century, and for a hundred and seventy years a traveler crossing from Catholic to Protestant Germany walked ten days into the past. England held out until 1752, when Wednesday the second of September was followed by Thursday the fourteenth, and Hogarth painted a placard in a Whig election crowd that read Give us our Eleven Days. Russia kept the old calendar until 1918, Greece until 1923, and the Orthodox churches keep it still, so that Christmas arrives on the seventh of January by the civil count and on the twenty-fifth of December by the Church’s own.

The astronomy was never in dispute. Everyone agreed on the length of the year. What was contested was whose count would organize the obligations, the feasts, the debts, the harvests and the memory of a people, and the answer took three and a half centuries to settle because the question was never about the sky. Whoever holds the clock holds the world that keeps it.

The contest

Timewar is the struggle over which clock becomes the world. The word is used here for a conflict older than any calendar and continuous with the reform of 1582: the contest over what a population can perceive, remember and bring into being, conducted through the rhythms that synchronize its attention. A clock can coordinate free participants or bind them to a sequence they cannot question. The same faculty that finds meaningful relation in the world can be occupied by imposed urgency, and the same shared present that makes common action possible can be narrowed until the fence is mistaken for the horizon.

What follows is the whole argument, once, so that its parts can be recognized when they arrive in their own places.

Consciousness first

Consciousness comes first. Matter is its durable and consequential expression, the form it takes when it enters limitation to learn what limitation can teach. This is the position of the Hermetic texts, of the Upaniṣads, and of a modern philosophical idealism that has returned to it from the failure of the alternative; and every other claim follows from it. A body is what consciousness looks like from outside. Consciousness Primacy states the ground.

Through the body, consciousness receives a world and acts on it. The human instrument is a transceiver: a nervous system, an electric field, a boundary that admits some signals and refuses others, and a plurality of centers inside that boundary contending for the right to speak as I. Whoever governs the boundary governs what the person can become. The Instrument follows the mechanism.

The world that arrives through the instrument is rendered. It comes already translated, arranged by the capacities of the receiver and the training of a lifetime, with a center and an edge; and it is nonetheless shared, because other centers are rendering the same field and the field answers every act with a consequence. The Rendered World develops the relation between the map and the fire.

The word and the clock

Rendered worlds become one world through names. A name makes a distinction portable between minds; a shared name makes a shared thing; and a thing that many minds keep in common acquires a life its makers never intended. Law, architecture, money and the calendar are names that have hardened into infrastructure. The reform of 1582 was the renaming of every day, and its resistance was the resistance of people who knew that their world was being rewritten from the count upward. The Word follows a name into a thing, and many worlds into one clock.

The enclosure and the altar

A shared world can be narrowed. Embodiment already limits what a person can perceive; a child needs scaffolding; a culture needs categories. The Lock is that limitation captured: held in place past its developmental purpose by an arrangement whose continuation depends on keeping those inside it dependent. Its sign is that the ceiling is felt as the sky. The Lock describes the enclosure from inside.

The enclosure is defended by an active operation against attention, perception and memory, conducted with the documented instruments of the twentieth century and the older instruments of ritual and theater. The War is the account of that operation.

And the enclosure has a purpose that the economic account of exploitation reaches but never explains. What the enclosed produce is offered up. The oldest image of Saturn, god of time and of the harvest, is a mouth; the Carthaginians built him a walled precinct and burned their children in it for six hundred years; and the deepest tier of every modern structure a court has opened arrives at the same place. The control structure is sacrificial. Its profit is the tithe, and its operators are a priesthood bound by the act that cannot be confessed. The Harvest states the deepest reading and its evidence.

The work and the field

The altar cannot take what was never produced: the capacity a person has made and keeps. Forming that capacity inside the enclosure is the Work. An opening, a crisis, an initiation or a grace supplies intensity; the Work converts intensity into durable change in being, through the alchemical sequence of dissolution, separation, conjunction and fixation, under the ethical direction of love and the courage to confront what is false. Its measure is retained capacity, and its sign is that the person can increasingly decide, relate and act without permission from the system that injured them. The Work describes the forge.

The field in which the Work is done is inhabited. Other centers of agency, human, discarnate, imaginal, egregoric, technological and parasitic, render the same world and act in it, and some of them feed. Contact with them is real, its appearances change with the culture that receives them, and the faculty that governs the encounter is discernment. The Inhabited Field describes what lives there and what guidance can be trusted.

What survives and what returns

A person is a pattern that can persist across a change of body. Memory, affinity, injury and capacity cross the boundary of death in forms that the case record can distinguish, and lineages, schools and families carry what an individual cannot. The Work is therefore cumulative across lives and generations, and so is its opposite. What Survives separates what persists from what is merely repeated.

Time itself is the territory. The present is organized by remembered causes and by approaching possibilities, and a completed future acts on the present as an attractor, recruiting the history able to embody it. Ages recur; each recurrence inherits what the last one retained; the enclosure is one phase of a cycle it cannot own. The end of the Work is an inhabited earth, a shared world grown responsive to the consciousness that renders it, and a city with the same measure as the enclosure and no temple in it. The Return follows the future back into the present.

The stakes

Earth is a battlefield on which capacities must survive contact with consequence, and a forge in which they are made. Bodily resilience, practical competence, discernment and virtue each carry part of the contest. Love gives them their purpose, a world in which power sustains free relation; and courage gives love the strength to confront what is false without becoming it. Liberation requires the refusal of capture and the formation of something worth inhabiting, and neither alone suffices.

The calendar reform of 1582 was resisted by people who could not have said what they were defending. They knew only that someone else now held the count, and that the count reached into every promise they had made. That knowledge is where the contest begins for anyone. The god of time and the god of the harvest were one god, and he carried one sickle.

References

Gregory XIII. Inter gravissimas. 24 February 1582.

Duncan, David Ewing. Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year. Avon, 1998.

Poole, Robert. Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England. UCL Press, 1998. On the 1752 change and the “eleven days” legend.

Hogarth, William. An Election Entertainment. 1754–55. Sir John Soane’s Museum.