Circles of Time I
Solar Time – dividing the year
In October last year I took up a Visiting Research Fellowship in Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, with the aim to create an artist book based on research I'd be conducting using the University's resources. Circles of Time is the result: a boxed set of three entirely handmade volumes taking us through the systems for marking circular time which humanity devised by observing both celestial and earthly cycles.
The books are now part of the College's special collections, where they will join the very astrolabes that were used, 700 years ago, to create some of the very almanacs I studied for this… This is not the end of the project, though: writing up all this research is a must, particularly as I’m working on a limited run of reproductions of the original book, and they will require a companion booklet to fully unpack the contents. This post, and the next three, are the first version of this write-up, using my book to take you on a journey through pre-modern timekeeping, and at the same time sharing the manuscripts and objects that I references in my choice of visuals.
General Notes
First, a question I posed when I embraked on this journey: To what extent are our apparently arbitrary ways of dividing time, actually reflections of a cosmic order?
It turns out very little about them was arbitrary, but we have removed ourselves from the natural orders that originally guided us. Time reckoning is completely rooted in deep and sustained observation of both earth and heavens, and requires an intimacy both with the cyclically changing land and the steadily revolving cosmic bodies. In all our devices to keep track of these circles of time, there’s a tension between our links to a patch of soil and our place in the stars, that has defeated all attempts to reduce it to a "universal" arithmetic—poetically so, as it reflects the paradox of our own human nature, both physical animal and spiritual being.
This double nature expresses itself in this book, where we travel constantly from the earthy and figurative to the abstract and conceptual. Some of this earthiness come through the natural materials it's made of: paper, silk, mineral pigments, botanical inks and dyes, which I describe in more detail in the final section below. The abstraction manifests among other things in the use of (mostly unfamiliar) numbers and (mostly Kufi) script. My artist books are usually devoid of text because reading gets in the way of the experience; I want people to really look at the work, deploy their senses and imagination to tease out a story, rather than switch to reading mode. However, the presence of text signifies the presence of meaning, and this adds an extra dimension I find desirable. So I use text that most people cannot read, introducing meaning that is just out of reach—in other words, mystery.
Unboxing
The book is divided into three volumes, that nest in a silk-lined box. Three volumes ratehr than one, because there is no single correct order to read them: Solar, Lunar and Planetary time can be picked up in any sequence.
The first thing you see when you open the box is an ammonite. This fossilised spiral features here as a symbol of Time: the spiral marries together cyclical time, which is the subject of these books, and linear time, personified in Greek cosmology as Aion and Chronos respectively.
But this is a real ammonite. It’s anything between 66 million and 400 million years old. This is deep time, unimaginable, and yet present here in a physical form you can touch before embarking on the journey.
The following film which leafs through all three volumes is optional, but shows the numerous volvelles in motion. It includes light music and the sound of the pages turning.
Solar Time
To divide the solar year is to divide a circle; this is intuitive, but also aligned with the physical reality of the matter, although the Earth's journey around the Sun is in reality an ellipse rather than a perfect circle. However, conceptualisation requires a "rounding up" of reality into the nearest clean diagram. In this I didn't only follow my own inclination as an artist, but took my cue from medieval scholars who developed beautifully conceived diagrams based on their detailed observations.
One Year
Independently of its other associations, the snake eating its tail is used in the Middle Ages to represent the solar year with its cyclical nature. My representation was directly inspired by the medieval original below. It opens this book because it’s also one, a single unit, the beginning of a progression in which the year is divided into smaller and smaller units.
Four Seasons
This page introduces the four points of the year, perhaps the one universal constant in all our timekeeping: the solstices and equinoxes. The Summer Solstice occurs when the noontime sun is the highest it's been all year, making it the longest day, while the Winter Solstice sees the noontime sun at its lowest, and the day is the shortest. The Autumn and Spring equinoxes are the two midpoints where day and night are of equal length. The icons I use to represent them recur through the book, usually in their simplest "pie chart" form. Here, for their first appearance, they include a visual cue to suggest the strength of the sun at these different points in the year. Note also the colour key, so obvious it can go unnoticed, of primary yellow for day and indigo blue for night, as it will return in less obvious places.
As for the seasons themselves, it's only in some parts of the world that they lend themselves to a four-fold division, and even then there are various ways of defining them. Meteorologically, for instance, Winter starts on December 1st, Spring on March 1st, Summer on June 1st and Autumn on September 1st. Astronomically, the solstices and equinoxes each mark the beginning of their titular season. But solar timing, which is the one I used, is based on insolation (the amount of sunlight) and sees the four points of the year as being the mid-points of the seasons; e.g. the Summer Solstice is Midsummer.
While the four points of the year are marked by conceptual icons located outside the circle, inside the circle itself I'm using intuitive visuals1 to describe the season: pink blossoms, green grass, red leaves and pale blue snowflakes. They constitute another colour key that will reappear later.
In medieval cosmology, all things are made up of the four elements, themselves based (according to Aristotle) on pairs of the sensible qualities: dry, wet, hot, cold. Each of the four seasons corresponds to an element based on similar qualities. Also aligned with these are the four humours that were believed to determine the health or ill-health of the human body. This gives us the following set of correspondences:
Hot + dry: Fire, summer, yellow bile;
Hot + wet: Air, spring, (red) blood;
Cold + dry: Earth, autumn, black bile;
Cold + wet: Water, winter, (blue) phlegm.
Without straying too much into that territory, I wanted to offer a glimpse of this order that is meant to underlie everything. "Glimpse" and "underlying" are literal as you have to lift a flap to catch just a little peep of this diagram hidden beneath.
Another colour key is introduced here, which I based on the humours listed above, as there doesn't seem to have ever existed an official colour scheme for the elements. Note the difference with the seasons: the elements' palette is made up of primary hues, while the seasons' palette is all secondary hues and admixtures, each appropriate to the level of reality they operate on.
Elements and humours may feel like we're straying from the subject of time, but in the medieval worldview all these things are closely connected in a whole system I find quite beautiful. For reasons not covered here, medecine depended on a solid understanding of the calendar, and every pocket calendar I examined included medical diagrams, though we would not accept them as such today.
Twelve Months
Though the month as a unit of time really arose from the lunar cycle, the year's division into 12 months aligns them neatly with the 12 equal sections into which the ecliptic, the apparent pathway of the Sun around the Earth, is divided. I say "neatly", but our calendar has been nipped and tucked a great deal since its Babylonian ancestor, so dividing the months equally and aligning them with the zodiac is an artistic license, imagining an "ideal" model long gone awry.
The correspondence between month and zodiac sign was already picked up by medieval artists. They were frequently commissioned to create calendars, in a tradition that emerged in late Antiquity, flourished in medieval Europe, and was still going strong when that era was drawing to a close in the sixteenth century. In this tradition of the "Labours of the Months", each month is symbolised by a typical agrarian occupation alongside its dominant zodiac sign. These occupations can vary a little, or occur earlier or later from calendar to calendar, but overall are comfortingly predictable, which is what an agricultural year should be.
For this section I directly used this imagery because successful agriculture, the basis of human survival, was the oldest and most urgent reason to understand the solar year and make calendars in the first place. The processes depicted may feel far away from us today, but the truth is they are the same processes we depend on today for food, even if they have been mechanised and take place largely out of sight. To the human figures busy at their work, I added animal friends and other natural elements, a reminder we are part of a greater society all dependent on the Earth.
The twelve months are spread over twelve pages to make the most of the sequential nature of books, which here creates an animation-like effect as you turn these pages. The animation is particularly visible in the disc of the Sun that is visible over each medallion, which moves around the circle of the year as we leaf through it. Just below the disc is a small zodiac symbol, identifying its position on the ecliptic for that given month.
Finally, the sun is inscribed in the name of the month, written in Kufi. The months are known by different names around the Arab world, for the simple reason they are alien to Muslim culture (which originally ran by a strictly lunar calendar) and have no native Arabic names. Much of the Arab world uses arabicised Latin names for them now. But in my native Lebanon, as in the rest of the Levant and in Iraq, we still know the months by names older than Islam or Rome, names going back to the Babylonian calendar. These are the names used here, going back to the roots.
January / Kānūn كانون ٢ / Capricorn: Feasting and keeping warm. Outside, squirrels are active among the snow drops.
February / Shbāṭ شباط / Aquarius: Digging ditches while a hopeful robin perches by singing to himself.
March / Ādhār آذار / Pisces: Hedging or pruning, using a bill-hook. A singing wren announces spring.
April / Naysān نيسان / Aries: Reveling in the year's first blooms, enjoyed by rabbits too.
May / Ayyār أيّار / Taurus: Gathering flowering branches from the mayblossom (hawthorn). A badger out to forage.
June / Ḥuzayrān حزيران / Gemini: Shearing sheep. A blackbird extracts a worm from the ground.
July / Tammūz تمّوز / Cancer: Hay-making with a scythe, whiel a kingfisher is on the hunt.
August / Āb آب / Leo: Harvesting wheat with a sickle, a hopeful wood pigeon nearby.
September / Aylūl أيلول / Virgo: Wine making, picking grapes and crushing them. A fox is curled up for a nap.
October / Teshrīn تشرين ١ / Libra: Sowing seeds, followed by an expectant jackdaw (based directly on the 13th-century Easby Church murals).
November / Teshrīn تشرين ٢ / Scorpio: Pig feeding, by knocking acorns off oaks. A jay, lover of acorns, partakes in the feast.
December / Kānūn كانون١ / Sagittarius: Baking bread, a cat enjoying the warmth of the oven.
The different tools used above sometimes become shorthand symbols for the months themselves. In this manuscript from England, the column for motnsh is entirely made of these symbols. You can spot the bill-hook, scythe for July and sickle for August among others2.
Twelve Signs
The animated months then resolve into the 12 signs that are their celestial equivalents (if we ignore the slight shift). Triangles of coloured thread connect them three by three, and you may remember we have encountered these exact thread colours earlier: they identify the elements associated with the signs. Each icon is accompanied by the small symbol that prefigured them in the months section, in yellow or ingido: the colour key I use for day and night. This is because each sign is considered to be "positive" or "negative" in Western terminology, but in Arabic the (less loaded) terms used for this are "of the day" and "of the night".
The iconography of the signs is from the Islamic cultures of Central Asia, where between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries there flourished a whole artistic tradition for astrological imagery that drew on traditions ranging from Greece and Harran to India. The resulting images are far more interesting, and contain more encoded information than the flat and tired standard zodiacal images of today. While this isn't the place to discuss them in detail, I wanted to include them to breathe new life into the topic: several of these clearly have unfamiliar stories to tell.3
Thirty-Six Decans
The Signs unfold into the Decans, a system with roots in ancient Egypt of dividing each sign, or month, or 30º of the circle of the year, into 3 periods of 10 days. Each decan is ruled by a planet, but again the Arabic terminology differs in that decans are called وجوه "faces". This gave me an excuse to portray the planets in a way visually linked to their full portrayals in the Planetary Time volume. At the same time, I’m also introducing the tiny planetary symbols you can see under each one, of which I'll say more later.
The planets alternate in a cycle (based on an order we'll encounter again), but you can't divide 36 decans by 7 planets. The result is Mars appears twice in a row, right at the Spring Equinox. Why at that time of the year? This is left over from the days when this date marked the beginning of the year. As early as the Accadian calendar in the second century BC, the month of Nisan (April) began the year. Even in parts of Europe including England, New Year’s day was celebrated on March 25 for centuries, as late as the sixteenth century in some places. This survives in the way the sign of Aries is still seen as the first in the Zodiac, but it also survives in... the tax year. So at the Spring Equinox, the old year ended with a Mars-ruled decan, and the new year started over from the same.
The idea of using the decans came late during my planning of the book, so that I caught this detail too late. Otherwise I should have liked to begin the 12 months with April to match! (I will get my wish in the limited edition reproduction, thanks to some digital editing.)
The Zodiac icons for each set of three decans are still visible, but in a much-reduced form that is once again based on a historical example: the minuscule, punched signs I encountered on a series of sundials made in Nuremberg in the fifteenth century, such as this gorgeous example made to fit in your hand.
Three Hundred and Sixty-Five Days
Finally, the year is fully divided into 365 days. Of course there is in reality an extra quarter day to account for, but if I wanted to be technically accurate I would have to differentiate between synodic and tropical years – and then we'd fall into a rabbit hole that gets much worse when we reach the duration of a month. For my illustrative purposes, 365 is good enough.
Around the circle, 365 fine lines grow from shortest to longest then back again, visually describing the length of the day from solstice to solstice. This is underlined by a colour gradation from cool to warm, and also expressed in the colour of the gold: I used white gold leaf for Winter, which gets gradually warmer until the warm yellow gold of Summer.
As for what we see inside the circle, it's a slight departure from my principle of sticking to tradition, but I really wanted to include a reference to a strikingly beautiful timekeeping object: the clog almanac.
These perpetual calendars, still used in Europe in the 19th century, descended from Viking runic calendars. Each face of the block of wood encompasses 3 months. Notches are carved bearing symbols that for the most part are numbers, the same I used here, to indicate the day in the month. Finally, a host of symbols that required familiarity with the principal saints of the church marked feast days.
I wanted to keep the focus on natural phenomena, but there are none, save the regular ones we have seen, that would cause specific days of the month to be highlighted. So I used environmental dates instead; there are so many of them, and it was a chance to bring attention to them. The first in this calendar is January 5: Bird Day, followed by January 31: Zebra Day, then February 2: World Wetlands Day, and so on.
We’re not quite done with Solar Time, but this is quite long enough already! The next three installments will be much more modest. Next time, we’ll be dividing the day.
Intuitive in those parts of the world where this manifestation of the seasons applies. In complete contrast with the solstices and equinoxes, which are a celestial matter, the seasons are very much a place-dependent earthly matter.
My choice of imagery varies a little from the norm, so in this table you find the much more traditional falcon for May.
This iconography is the subject of my ongoing series Heavenly Figures, where I paused after completing the planets and before starting on the Zodiac. Part 1 describes a number of objects on which these images and aesthetics are based. All of the previous installments are linked at the end of Part 7.
Yes, me too, in awe, speechless. What a delight. The care and beauty. I absolutely love the video, and all the layers! Thank you.
I am also in awe at your work, research, and knowledge. Detailed but accessible explanations. Mesmerising.