How & when are you celebrating Wep Ronpet 2023?

Hi all,

When, where and how are you celebrating Kemetic New Year?

I usually celebrate in August on the day that Sirius rises in my area: How are you celebrating Wep Ronpet 2022?

However, this year it looks like Sirius is rising at the end of August and I’m not sure whether I want to celebrate it that late.

Different groups tend to have different approaches. Kemetic Reform celebrate in July Kemetic Reform Calendar for Year 18 (2022-23)

UCL has a date for the start of August. Perhaps that’s a possibility for me: Festivals in the ancient Egyptian calendar

1 Like

My personal inclination so far has been to follow the Coptic calendar, as the inheritor of the legacy of the earlier calendars.

This is also places Wep Ronpet late in August.

I have no particular plans on how to celebrate it yet… it will be my first effort in this area.

After some thought, I think I will stick to my usual method, which means that I’ll celebrate 30th August when Sirius rises in my local area.

I haven’t celebrated other festivals for a long time, so that’s worth a thought as well.

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.

Another date option for Wep Ronpet: Sirius rises over Cairo 07th August…

2 Likes

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’.

2 Likes

Thank you for sharing the date. I will consecrate my temple…after rearranging my rooms and furniture :sunglasses:…at Wep Ronpet. Using the Cairo rising time seems absolutely fitting :heart:

2 Likes

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.

https://in-the-sky.org/ephemeris.php?iob=1&objtype=0&objpl=Mercury&objtxt=Sirius&tz=0&startday=2&startmonth=7&startyear=2021&interval=1&rows=250

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/ideology/festivaldates.html

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. :slight_smile:

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.

https://semiessessi.github.io/kemetic-calendar/

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.

3 Likes

Approaching this problem has been insightful.

All the talk of chronologies based on computing heliacal risings is highly prone to error, and I can say this with confidence now.

I am not alone in this assessment. Although different papers on the subject contribute to the conversation without explicitly calling out the futility of the effort.

One of the interesting conclusions is about the so called arcus visionis of the famed astronomer Claudius Ptolemy. It is the altitude required for both the sun and a star on the date of heliacal rising, and he provides estimates for particular stars as observed from Alexandria, where the viewing conditions would have been markedly worse than at Memphis, Heliopolis or Thebes due to the humid atmosphere.

The latter paper explicitly mentions this by making comparisons with ancient Babylonian observations of Saturn, and considering modern models of atmospheric extinction.

That is not to say that the average of these observations in antiquity would not have resulted in a remarkably accurate and reliable calendar. However, dating efforts using software to predict positions as far back as 2000BC will suffer significant error, and even if these were removed (which seems unlikely), precision down to a specific date is practically impossible.

I have seen many publications citing software that does not include precession, changes in the obliquity of the ecliptic, polar wander, the true rotation rate of the earth, proper motion, and other significant factors in precisely pinning down the dates… yet make claims about specific dates.

Better models of Earth orientation at 1600BC and 2000BC than are typically used have 30m-1h of error, which is a wider error range than the more often mentioned ambiguity in observation site - usually between Heliopolis and Memphis.

Stellarium is pretty good, but in their FAQ and documentation they point to Cartes du Ciel as a better choice of software for such studies, citing the errors in their approach for stars like Sirius and Dubhe as only indicating the direction of motion, and change of shape of constellations - not the quantity or precise angle.

Still, it is very interesting to see how the stars appeared slightly differently in ancient skies…

Sopdet in situ today…

… vs 3000BC

(thanks to Cartes du Ciel)

2 Likes

I was going to start my epag days tomorrow, in line with Kemetic Orthodox Temple. But I am now sick with something suspiciously like Covid. I feel awful and the house is a mess. Certainly not in a celebratory mood. Not sure whether to shift dates or push through.

How horrid! I hope you feel better soon.

@Senneferet I also hope you feel better soon, and that it is just “suspiciously like” COVID rather than the real deal. Maybe these days are a good time to try and relax and recover?

I’m planning on starting the intercalary days tomorrow myself. Its poorly timed in my life as well, but I will do my best to take some time out and make suitable offerings.

Same! I’m also celebrating the epagomenal days from tomorrow. Hoping I can fit in my offerings.

1 Like

image

:grinning:

2 Likes

What is that screenshot of?

a work in progress to be found here:

https://semiessessi.github.io/kemetic-calendar/

EDIT: I made a thread about it here

1 Like

That calendar is coming along well. Looks good! I like what you’ve done with the intercalary days - sunrise and sunset.

2 Likes