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What a Month Entry Covers

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What a Month Entry Covers

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Sources
The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning
Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford University Press, 1999View the Source
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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.