As you can tell from the PFM website and our Reflections emails, we like to use the Quaker tradition of referring to days of the week and months of the year by their numbers, not their commonly used names.
We hold our meetings for worship on First Day, and do not use the name Sunday. This is the Reflections email for Eighth Month, not August.
The reason for that is that the days of the week and the months of the year were named after ancient gods (well, most of them anyway), and Quakers do not think those gods should be honored that way. But how we got to where we are is an interesting story.
Somewhere around the second century, the Romans put the seven day week we currently use in place. The names of those days were mostly based on the names of the planets, which in turn were based on the names of the Roman gods of that time.
The Roman names for the days of the week referred to these gods:
– Sunday: Sōl or Helios (Sun)
– Monday: Luna or Selene (Moon)
– Tuesday: Mars or Ares (Mars)
– Wednesday: Mercurius or Hermes (Mercury)
– Thursday: Jove or Zeus (Jupiter)
– Friday: Venus or Aphrodite (Venus)
– Saturday: Saturnus or Kronos (Saturn)
Our current English names are derived in part from Germanic translations of the Roman names and in part from Germanic gods. According to The Scholarly Community Encyclopedia website, they come from:
– Sunday: the day of the sun
– Monday: the day of the Moon
– Tuesday: “Tiw’s day”. Tiw was a god in Norse mythology
– Wednesday: the day of the Germanic god Woden
– Thursday: the day of the Norse god known as Thor
– Friday: the day of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Fríge
– Saturday: the day of Saturn
The months of the year have a similar history. The Old Farmer’s Almanac website explains the origins of the names of the months:
At one time, the Roman calendar had 12 months, but only 10 of the months had names. The winter months were not named because not much happened in those months.
March (Martius) was named for Mars. May (Maius) and June (Junius) were named for the goddesses Maia and Juno. April (Aprilis) comes from Latin aperio, meaning “to open”, probably a reference to springtime.
The rest of the months were simply numbered; their original names in Latin meant the fifth (Quintilis), sixth (Sextilis), seventh (September), eighth (October), ninth (November), and tenth (December) month. (At that time, September through December were the 7th through 10th months.)
Eventually, January (named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions) and February (from Februa, an ancient festival dedicated to ritual springtime cleaning and washing) were added, giving all 12 months names.
Under Julius Caesar, the calendar was changed to the calendar we have today. January and February were moved to the front of the year, thus moving September through December to their current positions as the 9th through 12th months.
In 44 BC, the month Quintilis was renamed July in honor of Julius Caesar. In 8 BC, Sextilis was renamed August in honor of the Emperor Augustus.
So we ended up with names from gods, emperors, numbers, and… spring cleaning? The Quaker method seems a lot easier.
We hope to see you at one of our FIRST DAY meetings for worship during EIGHT MONTH and beyond.
Peachtree Friends Meeting 