Tradition

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

Liturgical gathers three calendars whose purpose is not to track the seasons for their own sake but to order a community's acts of worship across the year, and the three come from three unrelated religious settings.

The Christian Liturgical Year is built on two anchors, the fixed feast of Christmas and the movable feast of Easter, around which the year divides into seasons, Advent, Christmastide, Lent, the Paschal Triduum, Eastertide and Ordinary Time, each carrying its own character, readings and colours; it was assembled over the first six centuries and is kept, with differences of reckoning, across the Western and Eastern churches. The Roman Fasti were Rome's public religious calendar, inscribed on stone or painted for civic display, marking each day fastus or nefastus and recording the state cult's fixed festival days and the dates of the great public games; the pontifices controlled it, deciding when to insert an intercalary month, a power repeatedly used to lengthen or shorten a magistrate's term by manipulating the calendar itself.

The Wheel of the Year is the eightfold festival cycle of Wicca and much of modern Paganism, the two solstices and two equinoxes with the four cross quarter festivals, Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, set between them; the individual festivals draw on older Celtic and Germanic material, but the eightfold wheel as a single scheme was assembled only in the mid twentieth century.