The Discordian Calendar

Reference

How the calendar works

The Erisian calendar comes from the Principia Discordia. It does not replace the Gregorian year, it reorganises it: the same 365 days, counted better. Every date on this site follows the rules below and nothing else.

The year

Years are counted in the Year of Our Lady Discord, abbreviated YOLD. The offset never changes: YOLD = Gregorian year + 1166. The Gregorian year 2026 is 3192 YOLD. No epoch, no drift, no lookup table. It is addition.

The five seasons

Five seasons, 73 days each. The leap day is dealt with separately (see below), so every season begins on the same Gregorian date in every year.

SeasonBeginsEnds
ChaosJanuary 1March 14
DiscordMarch 15May 26
ConfusionMay 27August 7
BureaucracyAugust 8October 19
The AftermathOctober 20December 31

The five-day week

The week has five days: Sweetmorn, Boomtime, Pungenday, Prickle-Prickle and Setting Orange.

Five seasons of 73 days is 365 days, and 365 is 73 × 5. The week divides the year without remainder. Every year begins on Sweetmorn. No week is ever cut short by a year boundary. The weekday is a pure function of the day of the year:

weekdayIndex = (dayOfYear − 1) mod 5

Nothing accumulates and there is nothing to anchor against. Give it the day of the year and the weekday follows. That property is the whole appeal of the thing. Any implementation that looks a weekday up in a table, or counts forward from some reference date, has misunderstood the calendar.

The ten holydays

Each season has two holydays. Day 5 is an Apostle holyday, day 50 is a Season holyday. St. Tib's Day is inserted rather than counted, so all ten fall on a fixed Gregorian date in every year, leap or common.

HolydayDiscordianGregorian
MungdayChaos 5January 5
ChaofluxChaos 50February 19
MojodayDiscord 5March 19
DiscofluxDiscord 50May 3
SyadayConfusion 5May 31
ConfufluxConfusion 50July 15
ZaradayBureaucracy 5August 12
BurefluxBureaucracy 50September 26
MaladayThe Aftermath 5October 24
AffluxThe Aftermath 50December 8

St. Tib's Day, and why it does not advance the week

In a Gregorian leap year, February 29 is St. Tib's Day. It goes between Chaos 59 and Chaos 60 without being counted as one of the year's 365 days. That distinction is the whole of it, and it is the part everyone gets wrong.

St. Tib's Day has no weekday, no season and no day of the season. It does not advance the weekday cycle. Chaos 60 falls on Setting Orange in every year, whether or not St. Tib's Day came first. The day-of-year count runs 1 to 365 in a leap year exactly as it does in a common one. Nothing after February 29 moves.

This is why the ten holydays keep fixed Gregorian dates. A leap day that counted would shove every later holyday back by one. An inserted one does not, and the calendar stays still.

A well-built implementation makes it impossible to read a weekday off St. Tib's Day at all. The module behind this site hands back a different shape for it: an object carrying its kind, its year and its name. There is no weekday, season or day-of-year property to read, because there is nothing to put in one.

Leap years follow the proleptic Gregorian rule throughout: divisible by 4, except centuries, which must be divisible by 400. Nothing here switches to the Julian calendar at any historical date.

The calendar feed

/discordian.ics is a plain iCalendar file. Following that link downloads it, or hands a one-off import to whatever application has claimed .ics files. That is not subscribing. To subscribe, and so keep the feed current, copy the address https://erisianfields.com/discordian.ics and paste it into your calendar's subscribe-by-URL field:

The ten holydays recur yearly with no end date, so they are right for whatever year your calendar cares to draw. St. Tib's Day cannot recur at all. It is not on a four-year cycle, because 2100 is not a leap year, so the feed lists it one event at a time for every leap year from 2024 to 2096. Every event is a full day and marked free. None of them will show you as busy.

Sources