After serious efforts to align the religious festivities that I celebrate into a unified calendar, I have decided to…
Actually, I haven’t decided on anything yet. I’ve been working on this for months, and yet, here I am, still confused.
I need your help, people. For the longest time, I’ve been using the old Attic calendar out of convenience, but I’ll be really honest with you: most of the month names don’t resound with me; not with the collective cultus of my household and not with our locale. [Insert very long argument about pagan religions being about the “here” and the “now”.]
image via iStockphoto
I’ve been wanting to do something similar to what Sannion and Helio have done, so I decided to collect all the festivals that have meant something to me. They’re all neatly placed in a spreadsheet, but I honestly don’t know what to do with them.
Should I retain a lunar calendar (for tradition’s sake) and just reinvent the names? Should I go full Gregorian for practicality? Or a dual one? What about the Egyptian feast-days?
Of course, ultimately, our household will have to decide on it, but hey, maybe you have better ideas.
Under Two Trees 
You could use the Macedonian calendar, which largely replaced local calendars during the Hellenistic era, and then after that the Roman calendar started replacing the Macedonian calendar.
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You can go for a mixed solution: lunar dates for lunar deities and determine egyptian feasts based on the average date of Sirius heliacal rising in your area. For instance, if it happens anywhere between X10 and X30, X being the month and the number the day, you can mark the egyptian new year on X20 and count the months from there. And everything else goes Gregorian.
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As an alternative, you can try mixing the Gregorian calendar with a Greek one and follow the coptic calendar for the Egyptian festivals. It’s the same as the Alexandrian calendar and it has a fixed nature, with New Year starting always on September 11th or 12th.
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Thank you so much for your ideas, friends! I am taking them all into special consideration.
What I’ve been following for the last couple of years or so is a lunisolar calendar drawing from three sources (Athenian, Makedonian, and old Roman) whilst also maintaining a separate Alexandrian-based Egyptian calendar for Egyptian feast-days (which doesn’t follow the modern Coptic calendar, rather the rising of Sirius in Alexandria, Egypt).
Whilst it has worked for me quite well, I’ve been thinking of making a few things standard, such as the date of the New Year and using new month names instead of three (e.g. Hekatombaiôn/Lôios/Quintilis). The first one is rather easy (first new moon after the winter solstice), but the second one is driving me crazy.
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You can just use Kemetic Orthodoxy’s calendar for Egyptian festivals and ignore the Wep Ronpet there instead using July 25(Sirius’s rising in Ancient Egypt) as Peret Sopdut or a festival for Sirius. And you’ll just use the Gregorian calendar and mix all New Year celebrations on January 1 and celebrate the Greek Festivals on fixed dates.
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That’s not a very bad idea, at all! I’ve thought about a grand merging of New Years, too, but I never considered having a separate festival for the rising of Sirius.
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