Months of the Year

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A month entry records one of the twelve months of the Gregorian civil calendar, its Latin origin and the deity, festival or numbering it was named for, its ordinal position and length, and the fixed and moveable religious observances that traditions across the world have attached to it, the Christian feast of the Epiphany and Ethiopian Timkat both falling in January, for instance, alongside entirely unrelated observances such as the Japanese Shogatsu new year or the Hindu solar festival of Makar Sankranti that happen to share the same civil month without sharing its Roman origin.

An entry keeps a month's own Roman naming history, several months carry a god's name directly, January for Janus, March for Mars, June possibly for Juno, while others simply carry a Latin ordinal number left over from an earlier calendar that began the year in March, distinct from the various religious observances later traditions have scheduled within it, since the name and the observance usually have entirely separate origins that happened to land on the same twelve part civil framework.

An entry also records a month's rough seasonal correspondence, noting plainly that the calendar's customary seasonal labels follow the northern hemisphere's own convention and read oppositely south of the equator.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Every named month an entry records, January through December, is a Roman month, and Ovid's Fasti is the primary surviving source for how Roman religious tradition itself explained those names and the festivals attached to each one, composed as a poetic calendar that works through the Roman year month by month, naming the god, the festival and the story Roman religious practice itself associated with each date.

Ovid's own account is not a neutral historical record: the Fasti is a literary and religious work of the early first century, written under Augustus, and it sometimes recounts a competing explanation for a name or a festival's origin without settling which one is correct, Janus's own claimed authority over every doorway and threshold among them, so an entry treats the poem as the documented Roman tradition's own account of its calendar rather than as an independently verified history of how the months actually came to be named.

An entry draws on the Fasti for this documented Roman religious understanding of its own calendar, keeping it distinct from the later, unrelated observances that other traditions have since attached to the same twelve civil months without inheriting any of Rome's own reasoning for them.