Celebrating festivals alone is perhaps part of the struggle.
I try to check and see each day if there is one, and then try to make additional offerings to the different deities as appropriate. Its not something I have any great level of discipline with yet…
Definitely!!! We have the luxury of being able to pick and choose what festivals to celebrate and when, but remembering them/remembering to pick them can be an issue when you’re busy day to day.
Changed my mind again! I’ll go with the Cairo date 07th August as that works better logistically this year. I have used it before and actually, Sirius rising over Egypt was the date I usually ended up doing in the end. I forgot that I go through this indecisiveness every year lol.
And I’ve also decided to do do my version of the opening of the mouth ceremony. Following that for the Wag and Thoth festival 19 days later, I’ll do my version of Richard Reidy’s ‘General Rite Honouring Djehuty’ from the book ‘Eternal Egypt’.
Thank you for sharing the date. I will consecrate my temple…after rearranging my rooms and furniture …at Wep Ronpet. Using the Cairo rising time seems absolutely fitting
It seems a shame that our calendar is in such a bad state that we have many alternatives and no obvious criteria for selecting between them.
The passage of time, and the endless astronomical cycles are a great gift to us…
I wonder if there would be any value in building a tool that can display the calendar based on the date of the heliacal rising at any location (south of about 70 degrees latitude)?
Well if you’ve got the time and the skills I’d say go for it!
I know I’ve mentioned these sites before, but thought it might be worth mentioning again.
I use a combination of the below links. The first one for the Heliacal rising date and the second for festival dates. But it is a pain to manually work out festival dates following the different Heliacal rising dates each year. Probably partly why I don’t celebrate many festivals.
Probably i will start with something that keys the festival dates off of the Gregorian calendar date of choice for Wep Ronpet.
After that, working out the heliacal rising accurately across time can be progressively refined. I already have code that works out the elevation above the horizon at a given time of day, longitude and latitude, which I can use to work out the date of the heliacal rising.
I’ll start on this during lunch. I should be able to make an all-in-one webpage anyone can save locally, and find some kind of free permanent hosting for it. Hopefully the first step will be done later today.
EDIT: here is the WIP - it might update more slowly than I work in it however. so far its just a visual representation of a calendar that I can use to work out how to do the best job of this.
I’m wondering if I should start a thread so that everyone can have their input on this? Even if its slow to get feedback, I’d rather spend 15 years building something more useful and to an exceptionally high standard, than a month making something horrible that exacerbates, rather than eases, the practical problem here.
Obvious immediate questions are how to display names and numbers, which options people would like (e.g. Egyptological spelling vs. transliteration vs. hieroglyphs etc.)… and there is also the colour scheme and layout, which is decided purely by css so that it is easily replaced. I’ve taken my cues from a w3schools tutorial on making a calendar style layout using css in the hopes that will make it as accessible as possible.
Then there is how to display the current date, and perhaps festival information in some kind of sidebar etc?
EDIT 2: i will start a new thread about this…its now usable.