No Cheat Code: What A Brilliant Calendar Didn’t Escape
This episode goes looking for a calendar that watches the sky instead of doing math, and finds one still running in Iran today. But it turns out an observational calendar doesn’t give us an escape hatch from state violence: the episode traces Iran's Solar and Lunar Hijri calendars from Zoroastrian kingship through the Arab conquest, a mathematician-poet's 1079 calendar reform, and a 1925 nationalist restoration that came bundled with ethnic violence. The throughline: even the most accurate calendar in the world still gets used to decide who counts, and the episode closes by turning that question on gender, capitalism, and what it means to resource oneself under capitalism.
The astrology section covers the interim week between eclipses, moving into Virgo season, including Persephone's harvest myth and Astraea's departure from earth. This episode also announces a season break that will begin in September.
Content warning: discussion of state violence and ethnic persecution, including 20th-century campaigns against Kurdish and other minority communities in Iran, and references to ongoing discrimination.
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Music by Charmie Chandler - https://www.instagram.com/charmie_chandler/
Our favorite audio editor ever Chantal Defelice - https://chantaldefelice.com/ + ig @chantaldefelice
References:
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Calendars" — free access, academic
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Nowruz ii. In the Islamic Period" — free access, academic
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Fiscal System ii. Sasanian" — free access, academic
- avesta.org, "Zoroastrian Religious Calendar: Month Names" — free access
- avesta.org, "Angels: Zoroastrian" — free access
- Exploring Khayyam, "Quatrain 31" — free access, philological detail on the calendar-reform quatrain's composite sourcing
- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, FitzGerald 5th edition, full text — free access
- Iran International, "Why Khamenei's clerics look for the crescent moon" — free access, journalism
- Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, "The Monastery and the Clock" excerpt (PDF) — free access
- Wikipedia, "Kharaj" — free access, general overview, not primary scholarship
- On Barak, "Outdating: The Time of 'Culture' in Colonial Egypt," free PDF on Academia.edu
- Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Goodreads page
- IranWire, "'They have dehumanized us': Minority rights violations during the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement in Islamic Republic Iran"
Keywords: Iran, Solar Hijri calendar, Lunar Hijri calendar, Nowruz, Zoroastrianism, Sassanian Empire, Omar Khayyam, Rumi, calendar reform, Reza Shah Pahlavi, ethnic discrimination, Kurdish rights, moon sighting, Islamic calendar, timekeeping, colonialism, capitalism, gender, Tyson Yunkaporta, Lewis Mumford
2. CHAPTER MARKERS
00:00 — No Cheat Code
01:50 — Welcome + Grounding Ritual
08:06 — The Season Break Reveal
12:03 — Ongoing Portal of Eclipse Season
12:28 — Monday: Yes-Man Energy meets Ancient Poison
15:00 — Tuesday: Cornered and Rambunctious
15:49 — Wednesday: Not During Eclipse Season, Bitch
16:42 — Thursday: Dreaming Big
17:18 — Friday: Grow Up and Follow Through
18:54 — Saturday: Virgo Season Begins
21:34 — Virgo as Astraea
26:19 — Sunday: Creaky Old Knees
29:20 — Descent Begins: Remember Caesar's Math?
31:07 — The Calendar Council
34:53 — The Fingerprint of a Reality Observed
38:04 — The Man Who Fancied He Saw the Moon
43:10 — Four Hands, Thirteen Hundred Years
44:11 — The Glow That Could Run Away
48:29 — A Calendar Designed by a Poet
50:53 — Old Names, New Violence
52:09 — The People With the Most Accurate Calendars
54:47 — No One Can Tell My Body
58:19 — Why Am I Doing This?
01:02:13 — Reflection Questions
