Discordian calendar

The Discordian or Erisian calendar is an alternative calendar used by some adherents of Discordianism. It is specified on page 00034 of the Principia Discordia.[1]

The Discordian year 1 YOLD is 1166 BC. (Elsewhere in the Principia Discordia, it is mentioned that the Curse of Greyface occurred in 1166 BC, so this is presumably related to the start-date of the calendar.[2]) As a reference, AD 2017 is 3183 YOLD (Year of Our Lady of Discord). The abbreviation "YOLD" is not used in the Principia, though the phrase "Year of Our Lady of Discord" is mentioned once.[3]

Composition

As described in the Principia Discordia, the Discordian calendar has five 73-day seasons: Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, and The Aftermath. The Discordian year is aligned with the Gregorian calendar and begins on January 1, thus Chaos 1, 3183 YOLD is January 1, 2017 Gregorian.

The Erisian week consists of five days: Sweetmorn, Boomtime, Pungenday, Prickle-Prickle, and Setting Orange. The days of the week are named after the five basic Discordian elements: Sweet, Boom, Pungent, Prickle, and Orange. There are 73 of these weeks per year and every year begins with Sweetmorn.

Every fourth year in the Discordian calendar, starting in 2 YOLD, an extra day is inserted between Chaos 59 and Chaos 60 called St. Tib's Day. This is because 4 years + 1 day = 5, a holy number, but the Discordian leap year also coincides with the Gregorian one. The result of this is that any given day of the year in the Discordian calendar may be taken to correspond to the same day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, and vice versa, although some users of the calendar believe that it is tied to the Julian calendar and so will diverge from the Gregorian in 3266 YOLD (AD 2100). St. Tib's day is considered outside of the Discordian week.

There are Apostle Holydays on the 5th day of each season, named after the 5 Discordian apostles: Mungday, for Hung Mung; Mojoday, for Dr Van Van Mojo; Syaday, for Sri Syadasti; Zaraday, for Zarathud; and Maladay, for Malaclypse the Elder. There are also Season Holydays on the 50th of each season: Chaoflux, Discoflux, Confuflux, Bureflux, and Afflux.

Holyday Discordian calendar Gregorian calendar
Mungday Chaos 5 January 5
Chaoflux Chaos 50 February 19
St. Tib's Day St. Tib's Day February 29
Mojoday Discord 5 March 19
Discoflux Discord 50 May 3
Syaday Confusion 5 May 31
Confuflux Confusion 50 July 15
Zaraday Bureaucracy 5 August 12
Bureflux Bureaucracy 50 September 26
Maladay The Aftermath 5 October 24
Afflux The Aftermath 50 December 8

Only these eleven dates are named in the Principia Discordia; however, Discordians have felt free to invent other holidays which have become popular to varying degrees. Some of these include Discordians for Jesus/Love Your Neighbor Day (March 25/Discord 11); Jake Day (April 6/Discord 23 or occasionally May 23/Discord 70), a day to send tongue-in-cheek letters, emails or faxes to an official or bureaucracy; Saint Camping's Day (May 21/Discord 68), a day to make End of Days predictions and share them in social media; Towel Day (May 25/Discord 72); Mid Year's Day (July 2/ Confusion 37); X-Day (July 5/Confusion 40); and Multiversal Underwear Day (August 10/Bureaucracy 3).[4]

Implementations

Ddate, a program that prints the current date in the Discordian calendar, was part of the util-linux package containing basic system utilities.[5] As such, it had been included at least since 1994 in nearly all Linux distributions. In August 2011 however, one of the maintainers of util-linux made ddate optional, and by default omitted.[6] In October 2012, ddate was completely removed from util-linux.[7] The ddate program now has an upstream source.[8] There was some controversy,[9][10] but in the end, anyone wishing to reintroduce ddate to a distribution will have to create a separate package based on the new upstream. This has been done for Debian, FreeBSD, Fedora Linux,[11] and Gentoo Linux[12] for example.

There are many other programs with similar functionality, such as HodgePodge,[13] an Android widget. Discordian-calendar is an implementation using Java 8's date and time classes.[14]

References

  1. ↑ Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Page 00034
  2. ↑ Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Page 00042
  3. ↑ Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia, Page 00053
  4. ↑ "Holydays from the Ek-sen-trik-kuh Discordia". April 25, 2009.
  5. ↑ util-linux: Miscellaneous utilities for Linux, 2.12j at the Wayback Machine (archived February 13, 2010)
  6. ↑ "build-sys: add --enable-ddate". kernel.org Git commit log. Karel Zak. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  7. ↑ "ddate: remove from util-linux". kernel.org Git commit log. Karel Zak. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  8. ↑ "The ddate source ripped out of util-linux". GitHub/bo0ts/ddate. Philipp Moeller (bo0ts). Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  9. ↑ "Bug 823156 – Reintroduce ddate into Fedora". RedHat bug tracker. RedHat. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  10. ↑ "What's new in Fedora 17 (The H)". Linux Weekly News. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  11. ↑ "Fedora ddate Package page". Fedora Packages Web App. Fedora Project. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  12. ↑ "app-misc/ddate". Gentoo CVS repository. Gentoo Foundation. Retrieved 2014-05-08.
  13. ↑ "HodgePodge Discordian calendar Android App". Google Play. Google. Retrieved 2013-01-02.
  14. ↑ "discordian-calendar". Rob Fletcher. Retrieved 2014-12-13.
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