(Mago Almanac Excerpt 2) Introducing the Magoist Calendar by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang

Mago Almanac: 13 Month 28 Day Calendar (Book A) Free PDF available at Mago Bookstore.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

For this essay, I provide a translation and commentary of the Budoji’s chapter dedicated to the explication of the Magoist Calendar. I have discussed elsewhere in detail the Budoji (Epic of the Emblem City), the primary text of Magoism.[3] For the purpose of this essay, suffice it to say that the Budoji, alleged to have been written in the late 4^th or early 5^th century of Silla Korea (57 BCE-935 CE), expounds the Magoist Calendar to warn against the establishment of the Chinese 29.5 day lunar calendar, which marked the onset of a patriarchal rule in the third millennium BCE.

How old is the Magoist Calendar, the luni-gyno-solar calendar? That question assumes the idea that the onset of the gynocentric calendar can be marked within a linearly charted chronology, the patriarchal time. What if the gynocentric calendar can’t be marked within the patriarchal time? Questioning the origin of the gynocentric calendar is no matter of how old it actually is but a matter of reorienting one’s understanding of patriarchal chronology as well as time. For, on the one hand, the gynocentric calendar marks a cyclic and rhythmic time that can’t be contained within the patriarchal time. On the other hand, that is because the very existence of the gynocentric calendar presupposes an entirely differently concept of time, the Womb Time, the Time of the Creatrix, which is ever-present (HERE/NOW) and all-inclusive (WE). The Womb Time is an embodied time that can’t be separated from its measurer who is the very scale of time. Its origin can be traced to the collective consciousness of ancient people, the oldest archive of human affairs. According to the Budoji, the Magoist Calendar originates from the establishment of the paradisiacal community of Mago Stronghold, a mythic history remembered in the collective mind of Old Magoists. In other words, the origin of the gynocentric calendar dates back to the human memory of the primordial home of the Mago Clan.[4] Human cultures began by inheriting divine intelligence possessed by primordial Magoists, the residents of Mago Stronghold. A new invention comes about as a timely reification of the female principle that runs through the Magoist Cosmogony. And all cultural apparatuses are an innovation of older ones in one way or another. Doubtless that the Magoist Calendar is likely to be an innovation of the older 13 month calendar. Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo in The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth tap into the evolutionary nature of a gynocentric invention, the moon calendar. Noting the engraved rocks dating from 300,000 BCE as time-markers, they draw that women as birthers were the primary inventors of the luni-centric calendar. According to them, the calendar system has undergone the process of refinement by the hand of women from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic and thereafter.[5]

The Magoist Calendar that this essay expounds possibly dates back to the time of Danguk (ca. 3898 BCE-ca. 2333 BCE), the second oldest confederacy of nine sub-states in the mytho-history of Old Magoism.[6] The Magoist Calendar was likely to be one of the monumental technologies of Sinsi (Divine Exporium) civilization attributed to Goma. Goma is the under-represented Goddess of pre-patriarchal East Asia/Old Magoist Korea who deserves to be known for her innovation of Old Magoism and the spread of the Nine Goddess symbolism across cultures of the pre-patriarchal ancient world. In fact, the Seven Constellations Calendar (七星曆 Chilseong-ryeok), the 7 day weekly calendar (a centripetal sub-calendar of the 28 day, 13 month calendar) that comprises the basic cyclic scheme of the Magoist Calendar, is known to have been created by Seonin Jabu (紫府仙人)[7] in circa 2,700 BCE.[8] The calendric continuity found in today’s calendars (including 12 months calendars) have been extant about 4,700 years. Derived from its matrix, the 28 Constellations, also known as the 28 Mansions of the Moon, the Seven Constellations Calendar stands as a unit of the 28-13-7 scheme of the Magoist Calendar.

Can a gynocentric consciousness co-exist with a logical mind? The Magoist Calendar demonstrates a gynocentric consciousness that is organically logical. Its mathematical mind reflects nature’s interconnectedness that supports the life force in all beings. To say that the gynocentric mathematical mind is no less scientific than the patriarchal counterpart is misleading. For it is asymmetrical with the latter, which is solipsistic, directionless, and off-balance. Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo describe the gynocentric thought process as follows:

It is not far-fetched to think women invented symbolic and abstract notation, observational science and early mathematics. Early woman’s thought process (early man’s too) were still organic, still rooted in nature and practical experience – not alienated or born of a desire to “conquer Nature.” Organic rational thought emerged from a desire to cooperate with the natural world, and from a real integral observance of the needs and rhythms of the personal self and the human community. It also emerged from a mind free of the inhabitations, blocks, and dogmas imposed by later patriarchal religions and cultures.[9]

Precisely, the gynocentric mind that operates in the Magoist Calendar manifests itself as numerology. Far from being an abstract notion disconnected from the material world, numerology is the very principle that shapes the physical world. Mor and Sjoo also recognize the innate nature of numerology in the universe as following:

Geometry and the human image were originally two expressions of the same divine image – the body of the universe. Number emerges from sensory matter. To the ancients, number was always founded in real and concrete human experience, and did not possess abstract universality, or “objectivity” … Pythagoras, like mathematicians after him, came to believe that mathematics is not just a language describing Nature, but in inherent in nature. “All things are numbers.” “Numbers are the first principle, indeed the very elements of the things of Nature.”[10]

A numerological explication severed from its bodily/physical manifestation is misled/misleading at best. Judy Grahn in Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World observes that time and number were kept and measured by menstruating women in indigenous cultures around the world. Noting that the manstruant is the very embodiment of time and number through whom all other beings are related and measured, Grahn writes:

The menstruant kept time with her seclusions, and women kept number on their bodies. They taught us what time it is, and how to think proportionately; they taught us how to connect events together, to add them up. They taught us the power of the essential metaphor implicit in the connective word, “and.” They also taught us where in the world we are.[11]

Representing the gynocentric consciousness, the Magoist Calendar may be called a cultural/astronomical/religious expression of Nine Numerology. Undergirded by Nine Numerology, the Magoist Calendar bedazzles with its multi-faceted qualities of precision, complexity, and sophistication. The following is a brief explication of Nine Numerology. In Nine Numerology, all numbers work like persons. And the nine numbers from 1 to 9 present them. All numbers stay within the cycle of nine numbers in the form of the digital root. The digital root of a number indicates the single digit value obtained by the repetitive process of summing single digits of a number until a single-digit number is reached. For example, the digital root of 10 is 1 (1+0=1), 11 is 2 (1+1=2), and so on.

To be shown below (Figure 1), the numbers of months, weeks, days, extra days, and time units in the Magoist Calendar are interwoven by the three groups of numbers (Natural Numbers 1, 4, 7; Lawful Numbers 2, 5, 8; and Physical Numbers 3, 6, 9), forming a double helix with the third line running through the middle.

In short, the Magoist Calendar is interwoven by the three strands of the nine numbers, all of which are discussed in detail in a later section of this essay. The first group of Natural Numbers 1, 4, 7 in the digital root concerns the unit of one year as 364 days, is made of an interlocking cyclic sub-units: The largest unit is 13 months comprised by 13 cycles of the 28 day month or 52 cycles of the 7 day week. A monthly unit of 28 days is sub-divided by 4 cycles of 7 day week. Thus is made the regular time of 364 days. Each of these numbers (28, 13, 7, 4, 52, 1, 364, all of which are the members of the 1, 4, 7 digital root group) forms a self-circuiting organic cogwheel in sync with one another. I call this group of Natural numbers 1, 4, 7 the 28-13-7-4-52-1-364 scheme.

The second group of Lawful Numbers, 2, 5, 8 in the digital root concerns the unit of one year as 365 days (364 days with one extra day for intercalation). I call this group of Lawful Numbers 2, 5, 8 the 365 scheme.

The third group of Physical Numbers, 3, 6, 9 in the digital root concerns the unit of one day, which are starkly different from today’s 24 hours and 60 minutes. One day is 9,633 Myo-Gak-Bun-Si. I call this group of Physical Numbers 3, 6, 9 the 9,633 scheme.

To be continued.

(Meet Mago Contributor, Helen Hye-Sook Hwang)

Notes

[3] For more discussion on the Budoji, see Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia (Mago Books, 2015), 64-6.

[4] The Mago Clan refers to the community of Mago’s divine and human descendants. See Hwang, Mago Way, 69-81.

[5] Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1987), 146.

[6] Hwang (2015), 76-81.

[7] Seonin is an honorary title, equivalent to Sinseon (Immortal), given to a person who perfected the Way of Heaven/Mago.

[8] Seoin Jabu is the figure during the period Danguk, teacher of Yellow Emperor of ancient China, at the time of circa 2,700 BCE. Seungguk Im, trans, Handan Gogi, Taebaek Ilsa, Samhan gwangyeong bongi, 198.

[9] Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, Great Cosmic Mother, 146.

[10] Ibid., 147.

[11] Judy Grahn, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 160.