All my life I've heard comments like “old as Methuselah” and accepted them as common belief, if not fact. Methuselah, I learned in Sunday School, lived about 900 years and other old timers had pretty impressive lifespans, too. Such things don't matter much to an adventurous 6 year old who cannot see beyond age 30, which also is a significant age one learns on the first day of the week, the Sun's Day when light was created and everyone goes to church so that light can be reflected upon them.

This latter age, 30, teachers made seem more significant because it was when things really started happening for Jesus. But I imagined 30 was an age I would never see because another myth was popular then, during a world-wide war, that only the good die young. I intended to be good, so was bound to accept that mine would be a short, perhaps volatile life. Possibly, as Greeks intended, I would be a hero and die in a fiery pyre.

But that did not happen and so around my fortieth year I began to examine this notion that biblical patriarchs had lived such long lives. I discovered that people the world over had used many calendars over the millenniums but that two formed the basis of them all.

First, probably, was a Lunar calendar. Women would have become aware that their fertility cycle paralleled the 28 days of the moon's phases. Such a reckoning makes thirteen 28 day months, with an extra day for a holiday, 364 + 1 equals 365 days. Akkadian and other astronomers found 13 constellations in the Zodiac to help the average man and woman keep track of the calendar so that planting, harvesting and other fertility activities could be coordinated throughout an ever more complex riverine/agricultural society. The Moon and women and civilization became ever more synonymous.

The second way we made a calendar involves the Sun. It had 'birth' pains and probably involved a good deal of violence because it has been subject to many adjustments, explanations and justifications over the past two or three thousand years. One example shows how and why. A Roman emperor, said to be Julius Caesar, wanted to make a lasting mark on his realm and decreed, rather willy-nilly, that henceforth a year would be ten months long. This in honor of the many sun-gods. Ten 36.5 day months is plainly silly, hence it didn't catch on. So Janus, a god who can't remember whether he's coming or going was added, and February, which is destined to be perpetually deprived, a sort of 'poor which will always be with us' afterthought.

But our current calendar is just as convoluted with twelve months having 4 different number of days, 28, 29, 30 and 31. It seems like memory 'make-work' or pop-quiz time to me.

Why would someone go to so much trouble to change such a simple, easy to remember system? To make it hard? Maybe so. Children spending time memorizing nonsence have fewer hours to get into mischief, and fewer hours day dreaming … and fewer being observant, introspective, questioning or thinking. So, is it all about learning? About education?

Why are we taught to organize our thoughts into month, day, year when larger to smaller, or smaller to larger is more logical? Our forms, computers, calendars all insist on a particular way of not thinking about a thing. We are taught dates of creation, invention or conquest, but not much about the event itself. Spitting out a date is considered 'knowing' on the pop quiz or SAT.

Memorizing scripture seems to fall into the same category. Shouting chapter and verse is somehow taken as wisdom or 'gospel' but understanding what the chapter and verse mean, or what its context might be, is deemed unimportant.

So let's suppose for a moment that when nomadic invaders from the Great Beyond overwhelmed these permanent riverine (serpentine) cultures they wished to impose their authority, a practice common to conquerors and colonizers.

Forcing a change so monumental is a multi-century struggle. Patriarchs see this structure as elemental, important as their lock on government, wealth and the right to use force. In fact education is one of the four sides of a pyramid's base, essential to its lofty heights and enduring (if crumbling) composition.

So the Sun was declared masculine and superior to the moon, part of the man-on-top conquest begun 4000 years ago. Matri-linear succession was quashed. Wealth and property had to be passed to male offspring, young girls who showed 'take charge' attitudes were (still are) labeled 'bossy' and the number 13 became 'unlucky', occult, even evil. And so on.

As for Methuselah, he lived 900 cycles of 'something' … of the moon, apparently. Nine hundred divided by 13 months is about 70 solar years. Scripture confirms this by declaring that human lifespan will henceforth be three score and ten, and in order to blur the notion that women were once so important, patriarchs claim that the 'reduction' in our time on Earth is because we were sinful, evil, and undeserving or some such put-down.

So seventy is now 'normal' and I've already lived longer than that. Move over Methuselah. As a feminist, I'm already nearly 1000 (or so) and counting!