The Lunar Calendar in The Invisible Landscape

The synodic month (a.k.a. the mean lunar month) is the mean (i.e. average) interval in days between conjunctions of the Moon and the Sun. The value of the synodic month, during the 5000-year period 500 C.E. to 4500 C.E, is 29.53059 days. Thirteen synodic months is 383.8977 days, nearly 384 days. 384 = 6 * 64, and this reminds one of the Chinese I Ching, which has 64 hexagrams each consisting of 6 lines.

Terence McKenna has suggested in The Invisible Landscape (1975 edition, Chapter 8, in particular pages 113-114) that the neolithic Chinese used a lunar calendar in which a year of 384 days consisted of 13 lunar months (alternating in length between 29 days and 30 days). In support of this idea it is pointed out that ((6 * 64) * 64) / 6 = 4096 days = 11.214 mean solar years, close to the 11.2-year period for sunspot cycles. However it is not clear why the neolithic Chinese would have wanted a calendar that kept in sync with sunspot cycles. Yet whether or not the ancient Chinese used a lunar calendar, such a calendar is of interest to contemporary people because it reflects the waxing and waning of the moon, a basic part of everyone's experience of time.

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