CHAPTER FIVE

THE BRANCH

The Javanese branch of the octaval calendar is particularly interesting because it has several features that diverge from the older Malay octaval model, and indeed from octaval calendars used anywhere else in the . These differences have arisen from the Procrustean bedding of the octaval calendar in its Javanese milieu. Some of these distinctive features are straightforward extensions of older practice; others arise from the interaction of the octaval calendar with Javanese visions of time and methods of divination. The Javanese court of Mataram adopted the Muslim calendar in 1043 A.H. Up to this point the court had been using a Javanese modification of the Indic calendar, based on the Saka era beginning in 78 A.D., and counting in solar years.I Through a painstaking exam­ ination of contemporary evidence, Ricklefs has shown that the Saka year 1555 began in March 1633, as an Indic solar year, and between November and the following June transmuted into a Muslim lunar year, ending on 26 June 1634.2 This was an alif year, the first of the octave, and reckoned from Friday (3: 1). The years continued to be counted in the Saka series, but from this point onwards they were no longer the solar years of the Indic calendar, but the lunar years of the Muslim calendar.3 This produced a distinctive Javanese era. In another adaptation of earlier practice, the octave assumed the Javanese windu. This term previously signified a decade, that is the period during which the units of the year-count cycle from one

The detailed working of the Javanese Indic calendar is not fully understood: Eade & Gislen, Early Javanese Inscriptions. In another place I hope to demonstrate that the Indic calendar of Singhasari and Majapahit was similar in some respects to the calendar poorly preserved among the Tengger people. 2 Ricklefs, Modern Javanese Historical Tradition 232-33; Seen and Unseen Worlds, 37-39. 3 It is a happy coincidence that both the Hijri and Javanese-Saka year numbers are equally divisible by eight, and therefore preserve the nexus between the year number and the position of the year in the octave - both 1043 and 1555 when divided by eight leave a remainder of three. 56 CHAPTER FIVE zero to another.4 In the Majapahit period it was popular practice to refer to years only in terms of their place in the decade.s The pedigree lines of the octaval calendar in throw up another feature of the Javanese octaval tradition. Although it seems to derive from a descent line of remodulated calendars (2: 1, 3: 1), the Javanese branch of the octaval calendar has always been adjusted by recalibration, stepping from a Friday reckoning to a Thursday and so forth (3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 3:4). The reason for this consistency is the salience of the pasaran five-day cycle in Javanese thinking about time. As we saw above, the five-fold cycle has been important in both the Malay and the Javanese perspectives on time, but only in was it embodied in an autonomous cycle, the five pasaran days. The five days in Malay thinking were simply counted off from the beginning of the month, each month therefore notionally comprising six five-day cycles. In a short month, comprising 29 days, one day would be clipped from the last of the six five-day cycles so that the cycles could to begin anew with the beginning of the following month.6 In this way the Malay five-day cycle was subordinated to the structure of months. By contrast, the Javanese pasaran cycle operates autonomously, alongside the equally autonomous cycles of seven days and six days. The intersections of the five-day and seven-day cycles came to lie at the heart of Javanese divination,? This pair of cycles fully revolves

4 Brandes, "Nog eenige Javaansch piagem's", 32.559 n.1. Damais, "Etudes d'epigraphie indonesienne V", 49 & n.1. 5 See Pigeaud, Java in the Fourteenth Century, re charters ofRenek, WalaIJ