Ascendant Calendar

Definition and Epoch

The Ascendant Calendar is the official civil system of reckoning presently used within the Tower, having formally superseded the Omicron Calendar under the terms of Clause 19γ of the Nineteenth Concordance. Its epoch is fixed at the event recorded as the Ascension of the Silent Index, from which all years Ascendant are numbered. The calendar governs matters as varied as the fiscal quarters, the observance of standard observances, and the periodic polishing schedule of the Violet Tome clasps, which is set out in a schedule annexed to the Ascendant Calendar itself and confirmed by the Sixteenth Concordance.

The Ascendant Calendar should not be confused with the Concordance Calendar, which counts from the ratification of the First Concordance, nor with the Librarian Calendar, which is maintained by the Librarians for internal use and is not convertible into the civil reckoning except by petition.

Formative Instruments

The calendar's adoption was effected in two instruments. The Nineteenth Concordance, ratified in the year following the Ascension, adopted the system in principle and relegated the Omicron Calendar to historical status. The Sixteenth Concordance followed on the 14th of Fructidor, Year 732, and settled the details of intercalation and quarter-length that the earlier instrument had left open. The preamble to the Sixteenth records that the delay of 732 years was owing to a dispute over leap-day inheritance that the Librarians declined to adjudicate.

The Sixteenth Concordance is also the authority for the calendar's most-cited clause, which provides that "no day shall be reckoned twice, nor any reckoning be thought to fall between two days, and the year shall not be lengthened to accommodate a wish" (Sixteenth Concordance, Annex 2). This clause has been cited in at least forty proceedings of the Council of Ordinals.

The Lost Year and the Recension Dispute

The transition from the Omicron Calendar was not clean. The Provisional Calendar, drafted during the interval, carried forward open entries from the Omicron reckoning without conversion, producing a gap that is referred to in the records as the Lost Year. Scholarly opinion on the Lost Year is divided. One body of opinion, drawing on the Substantialist reading of Clause 19γ, maintains that the Lost Year never existed and that any entry bearing its date is a clerical artefact of the transfer. The opposing view, advanced by the Office of Recensions in a memorandum of Year 1,044, holds that the year existed but was not entered in any register, and therefore has no calendrical position.

An illustrative failure is recorded from the winter of Year 418, when the clerk Admeta Vell attempted to date a shipping receipt under the Lost Year and was obliged to amend it twice, first to the Omicron style and then to the Ascendant. The receipt survives in the Archive of Disputed Entries and bears three dates in two hands, the later annotation reading only "reconciled elsewhere." No further action is known.

Structure and Nomenclature

The Ascendant year comprises twelve months, each divided by the fiscal quarters for the purposes described above. Month names follow the Fructidor pattern, the fourth month being Fructidor itself, when the Sixteenth Concordance was ratified, and which has been a working recess since Year 733. The year begins at the epoch day and does not observe an intercalary month; the intercalary day is held in the "reserve of the index," a discretionary day that may be declared by the Librarians but has been declared only eleven times since the Ascension. Declarations of the reserve day are published from the Vault of Ascendant Tones on Floor 1,004.

The calendar's series and ordinal tables are compiled in the Compendium of Ascendant Series, a precedent volume consulted in proceedings before the Council of Ordinals. The Compendium is not a Concordance and does not bind; the Council has nonetheless cited it in every calendar dispute since Year 1,211.

Contradiction with the Tower Calendar

The Tower Calendar is a lunisolar reckoning in use throughout the Tower and predates the Ascendant system by an interval the Librarians have never stated. The two calendars are not synchronised, and the disparity between them has been the subject of the standing dispute known as the Question of the Two Ordinals. The Staircount Calendar and the Spiral Calendar descend from the Tower Calendar rather than the Ascendant, and their adherents continue to date documents in the older reckoning.

"Where two reckonings obtain, the official shall be observed in the registers and the older in the stairwells, and no officer shall be required to reconcile them."

— Concordance 77.2.14, Annex 6

That the two systems have never been reconciled is generally accepted. The Concordance Calendar is sometimes offered as a bridging system, but its use is restricted to the dating of Concordances themselves and it has no civil application.

Current Use and Notes

The Ascendant Calendar is the reckoning in which the Librarian Calendar's public entries are rendered, and in which Administrative Realism requires all administrative documents to be dated. Failure to date a document in the Ascendant style is correctable by the Office of Recensions on payment of a fee, and the fee schedule is itself dated in the Ascendant style, which the Office notes is a convenience.

Visiting scholars may consult the calendar's full series in the Compendium of Ascendant Series on presentation of a valid reading chit. The chit must be dated in the Ascendant style; the reading room will not accept the Tower Calendar, nor will it convert.