Wep Renpet: Why Egypt Began Its Year in High Summer

The Egyptian year opened in the heat of midsummer, on a day nobody decreed. A note on the star that governed the river, the calendar that wandered for three thousand years, and the five days that belonged to no year at all.

Our own year begins in the dead of winter, on a date chosen for reasons most of us could not now recover, in the darkest and least promising week of the calendar. We mark it with fireworks and resolutions, and by the second week of February most of the resolutions have quietly gone.

Egypt began its year in the heat of high summer, and it began it for a reason you could walk outside and see.

The star that governed the river

For about seventy days each year, the brightest star in the sky is simply not there. Sirius, which the Egyptians called Sopdet and the later Greeks called Sothis, and which the tradition identifies with Isis, passes behind the glare of the sun and vanishes from the heavens altogether. Then, on one particular morning in high summer, it returns: rising in the east just ahead of the dawn, visible for a few minutes in the pale sky before the daylight swallows it again. Astronomers call this the heliacal rising. The Egyptian priests watched for it with the closest attention.

They watched because of what came with it. At almost exactly that season, the Nile began to rise. The inundation, the annual flood that laid down the dark fertile silt on which every life in the country depended, arrived in the wake of the star as though the star had been sent ahead as a herald.

Consider what that does to a people's understanding of the world. The greatest event of the agricultural year was announced by the reappearance of a single point of light in the heavens. Here was "as above, so below" made not merely poetic but operational, written across sky and earth together and legible to anyone who knew when to look. To the Egyptian this was not coincidence. It was Ma'at, the order that holds the world together, showing its own working.

So the year turned when the star came back. Wep Renpet, the Opening of the Year: the first day of the first month of Akhet, the season of the flood.

Two years at once

Here the story becomes more interesting, and rather more human.

The civil calendar of Egypt was elegant. Three seasons of four months, each month of thirty days, making three hundred and sixty, with five further days added at the end to bring the count to three hundred and sixty-five. What it did not have was a leap day. The solar year is slightly longer than that, and so the calendar slipped, one day in every four years, gradually and irreversibly, against the very sky it had been built to match.

Over centuries the drift became enormous. The civil New Year wandered forward through the seasons until it had made a complete circuit of them, taking something close to fourteen hundred and sixty years to come home. Egypt was perfectly aware of this. A civilisation whose hour-priests could tell the time of night by watching thirty-six chosen star groups rise in their appointed order was not confused about arithmetic.

They simply kept both. There was the year you counted: orderly, administrative, the same length every time, the year of the scribe and the harvest tax. And there was the year you observed, the true one, which began when the star returned and the water rose, whatever the counting happened to say. The two agreed occasionally and disagreed for centuries at a stretch, and Egypt lived with the discrepancy for three thousand years without apparent distress.

That is worth sitting with. We are not good at holding two frames at once. Egypt seems to have found it unremarkable: a year for the ledger and a year for the land, and no obligation to force them into one.

The five days that belonged to no year

And then there are those five extra days.

The epagomenal days, as the Greeks named them, are among the loveliest things in the whole calendar, because Egypt refused to treat them as a rounding error. They were held to stand outside the year altogether. Days upon the year rather than in it, belonging to no month and no season, a small deliberate gap in the ordinary run of things.

Into that gap the mythology put the birth of the gods. Plutarch, writing his account of Isis and Osiris for a Greek readership long after, gives us the tale in the form that has come down to us. Nut, the sky, was forbidden to give birth on any day of the year. Thoth, the reckoner and keeper of measure, played at draughts with the moon and won from it a small fraction of its light, enough to make five new days that were not part of the year at all. On those five days the gods were born: Osiris first, then Horus the Elder, then Set, then Isis, then Nephthys. Everything the Egyptian mysteries would go on to be about, the murdered king and the mourning sisters and the necessary adversary, entered the world through a loophole in the calendar.

It is a story about time, and it makes a rather precise point. The things that matter most do not arrive inside the ordinary count. They come in the interval, in the days that belong to nothing, in the seam between one year and the next where the ledger has nothing to say.

What this asks of us

Three thousand years later, in a country with no Nile and no rising of Sopdet that anyone troubles to watch, what is any of this for?

Three things, I think, and none of them sentimental.

The first is that a beginning was, for Egypt, something observed rather than decreed. The year did not start because an authority said so. It started because life visibly returned, and the whole apparatus of the calendar existed to notice that and mark it properly. Our own new year is a decree. We begin because the date says begin, at the coldest and least hopeful point of the wheel, and then wonder why our beginnings will not hold. Egypt began when there was something to begin with.

So you might ask yourself when your own year actually turns. Not when the calendar says. When the thing that carries you actually starts moving again. It will not be the first of January, and it is worth knowing what it is.

The second is the five days. Egypt understood that a year needs a threshold, an interval belonging neither to what is ending nor to what is beginning, and it built one into the structure. Most of us pass from one year into the next without a seam of any kind, and then find ourselves carrying the old year's unfinished business a long way into the new one. Five days outside the count is a luxury few can arrange. An hour is not.

The third is the star itself, and it is the one I would most want you to take away. The priest went out before dawn and looked, and kept looking through all the mornings when there was nothing whatever to see, because the looking was the practice and the star would come when it came. That is the discipline of this whole tradition in miniature. Not intensity. Attention, held steadily, through the long season in which nothing appears to be happening.

A practice for the turning

If you would like to mark this turn, here is something small and entirely safe. It is the practice with which our own students begin.

Rise early enough to catch the sunrise, or, if that is not possible, come to a window or a doorway where the morning light can reach you at whatever hour you can manage. Stand easily, face turned towards the light, and let the breath settle. When you are quiet, greet the light by name: Hail Ra, light of the One, I greet your rising. Then do nothing but open. Let the light fall on your face and, in the imagination, let it pour gently into you, warm and bright and living. Do not strain to feel anything. Only open, and receive, and be grateful, as you would open to the warmth of a fire on a cold morning. Then give your thanks, bow your head to close the contact quietly, and carry the light with you into the day.

Do it for five days. Then, if it has anything to say to you, do it for a year.

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The rising of Sopdet, the reading of the heavens and the Egyptian understanding of time are treated at greater length inThe Living Temple of Egypt, the first of the Voices of the Nile series. The liturgical year and the great festivals form the ninth module of Keepers of the Flame, our twelve-month First Degree in the Egyptian Mysteries, whose September cohort is currently taking applications. There is no hurry about either.

Written by Andy Cooper, Founder and Director of Studies, Helios School of Esoteric Science.