🌕 The Thirteenth Moon ..The Calendar They Took from the Goddess

A reflection from my altar on time, control, and the forgotten rhythm of the divine feminine.

I have a "13" tattoo on my left arm and I often get asked the relevance of it. Rather than a short explanation I wanted to go into more depth and I thought this blog might be a good place to explain, so grab a cuppa and remember a time with me, a time before clocks and kingdoms, when time belonged to the moon.

She marked the turning of the month. There were thirteen moons in a year each with 28 days. Each rose and fell in harmony with the tides, the crops, the womb, the wild heart of every creature. The year was a circle, not a cage or unnaturally Linear. Our ancestors lived by her rhythm and they named each moon ,(Wolf, Strawberry, Blood, Harvest etc), and each carried its own rituals and teachings.

Women’s bodies followed the same pattern, and in those cycles, people saw the divine reflected in flesh. The sacred feminine was time itself, life, death and renewal.

🌗 The Seizure of the Sky

Then came the age of empire, and with it, the hunger for order and control over the Goddesses and their Teachings. Kings and priests built calendars to measure grain, tax the farmer, and plan their wars. The wild, shifting moon represented tearing that they couldn't control , so they turned their gaze to the sun constant, bright, obedient to geometry.

Under Julius Caesar’s rule, the old lunar calendars were replaced with a solar one and became  twelve uneven months that served harvests and armies instead of seasons of spirit. A thousand years later, Pope Gregory XIII polished it into the version we still use into the Gregorian calendar.

The moon quietly was uninvited.
Thirteen became twelve.
The circle became a line.

🌒 The Demonisation of Thirteen

For countless generations, thirteen had been sacred, the number of moons, the number of times a woman bleeds within a year. It was the rhythm of the Goddess herself.  The moon has 13 cycles a year, and pre-Christian Europe celebrated 13 festivals of the Goddess.

When the new patriarchal order took hold, anything tied to her cycles was branded dangerous. Thirteen became unlucky, lunar gatherings became witchcraft, and time itself was rewritten to forget the body of the Mother, Maiden and Crone. Feminine systems were labelled pagan or disorderly.

Even our word month comes from moon, yet most have forgotten the connection.

The number 13 which was once sacred became stigmatised: 13 at a table during the Last Supper turned 13 in an omen of death. 13 witches in a coven not only demonised gatherings of women but brought in the superstition of unlucky 13. Friday the 13th suddenly became a cursed day but this was the day linked to the arrest of the Templars, which was another challenge to Church authority. The fear of 13 was never cosmic,  it was cultural conditioning to erase lunar, cyclical, feminine power.

🌔 The Cost of Linear Time

In trading the moon for the sun, humanity gained efficiency, but lost alignment.
We began to move faster, harvest more, conquer farther. Time became something to spend, not something to dwell within. And in that shift, we lost the gentleness of ebb and flow, the truth that everything is cyclical: birth, decay, rebirth. The feminine principle of rest and renewal was erased, leaving only constant productivity, endless daylight, and exhaustion (especially when Daylight Savings Time factors in).

But if we still followed the lunar calendar would give 13 months of 28 days (364 days) which would be  a perfect circle of 4 weeks per month, each new moon would begin a new month; time would flow rhythmically, not mathematically.

Festivals like Imbolc, Beltane, and Samhain would align exactly with seasonal energy.and our bodies (especially menstrual cycles), would sync more naturally with the months.

🌒 Reclaiming the Thirteenth Moon

But the moon never left, she simply waited.
She still pulls the tides and the blood, still whispers through the skin of the sea and the spine of the forest. Each month, she begins again, calling us to remember what the calendars erased: that time is sacred, and our bodies are its altar.

To live by her rhythm is an act of quiet rebellion. To honour the 13 moons is to return to balance, to the old knowing that life is not a race around the sun but a dance between shadow and light. Thirteen was never cursed. Thirteen was the heartbeat of the Goddess hidden in plain sight.

Simply remembering the connections that most of the world forgot for a while between the moon, the earth, compassion, and power. If you've found your way here you’re doing what wise ones have always done: listening, questioning, and weaving meaning back into a world that’s forgotten how to listen.

✨That’s real magick and you’re living it.

🕯 From my altar to yours may you find your rhythm in her phases, and remember that you, too, are part of the turning.