Every calendar on this site—the Restored Enoch Calendar, the Aztec Sacred Round rendered in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Venus Cycle, the Lunar Mansions, the Holy Star Wheel, Solomon's Priestly Courses—traces back, directly or indirectly, to the research of one man: Dr. John P. Pratt. This page exists to say so clearly, to explain who he was, and to tell the story of how his work very nearly disappeared—and how it didn't.
An Astronomer Who Studied Calendars No One Asked Him To
John P. Pratt earned bachelor's degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Utah, then a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 1976. For seventeen years afterward he worked at the Eyring Research Institute, at one point leading a team of nine engineers developing guidance systems for the Minuteman missile program, and along the way co-invented three software patents. He taught astronomy at the college level, built a pictorial periodic table to make chemistry easier to memorize, and for decades served as the Science and Religion editor for Meridian Magazine, writing a monthly column connecting current astronomy to questions of faith.
None of that was really the point of his life's work, though. According to those who knew him as a child, he was studying calendars before he could have explained why—one account describes him poring over a calendar with the kind of attention no other child in the room would have thought to give it. That attention never left him. His own research journal, kept for decades, records a young astronomy graduate student writing out his life's ambitions in 1976: to reconcile the Book of Abraham with modern astronomy, to test whether the constellations were revealed to ancient prophets, to solve the correlation problem of the Mayan calendar. He spent the rest of his life pursuing exactly that list.
The pursuit produced real discoveries. Working from the Ethiopic text of 1 Enoch, he reconstructed the calendar this whole site is named for—364 days, twelve 30-day months, four unnumbered solar-transition days, an intercalation keyed to the moon's nearness to the new year—from scattered verses that read, without his framework, like little more than poetry about the sky. He proposed, with fellow researcher John C. Lefgren, that the 24 priestly courses of 1 Chronicles 24 spell out 24 facets of the mission of Christ. He proposed a date for the First Vision—March 26, 1820—built from the same methods. Across every system he touched, his consistent claim was the same one this site inherits: that these calendars, read correctly, all point to Christ.
Dr. Pratt passed away on October 12, 2021, of COVID pneumonia.
A Legacy at Risk
Dr. Pratt built his own calculators to compute these calendars—but he built them in Java, in an era when that made sense, and browsers have since stopped supporting it. By the time of his death, his own calendar-conversion tools already no longer ran in a modern browser. His actual formulas—the precise mathematics behind mansion, phase, course, and glyph—lived only inside that Java code and inside decades of blog posts and articles, written iteratively, a piece revealed here and a refinement noted there, never assembled in one place into a single, complete, working specification.
A personal website, unlike a published book, only exists as long as someone keeps paying for the domain. With its creator gone, enochtime.com's predecessor—Dr. Pratt's own site—had no one left to renew it indefinitely. Nothing was wrong yet. But nothing was permanent either.
Reconstructing What Was Lost
I came across Dr. Pratt's research several years before he passed, already deep into my own study of Latter-day Saint literature. What first drew me in was his work on last-days timelines, but what kept me there was something bigger: his fluency across an astonishing range of calendar systems, and his conviction—argued fresh in each one—that all of them pointed to Christ. Before he died, I ordered a book from him directly. He signed it.
After he passed, a friend asked me a simple question: did I know of a working Enoch calendar? I said I didn't, but that I knew of someone who had done remarkable work on one—except that he had died. Looking again at his personal site afterward, I realized what that actually meant: without anyone left to maintain it, the domain would eventually lapse, and with it, access to everything he had built.
His formulas were locked behind Java code I couldn't simply read. So I set out to reconstruct the system a different way—by tracing his own calendar-working descriptions across scattered blog posts written over dozens of years, piecing together a specification he had never written down in one place because he had never needed to: it was already running, in his own head and in his own code. It was painstaking work. I checked and corrected my results against his still-functioning Java calculator and against a historical-events database, tweaking the reconstruction wherever the two disagreed.
After several months of trial and error, the breakthrough came—fittingly, over new moon intercalation, which, if I remember correctly, was also the last breakthrough of his own life's work. Once that piece fell into place, my system matched his exactly, across any proleptic Gregorian date I tested it against.
Building Forward
Having salvaged what he built, I didn't want to simply preserve it—I wanted to see whether the same approach could be extended. Along the way I noticed something Dr. Pratt's own writing hadn't identified: that each of the Aztec Sacred Round's twenty day-signs has a correlating hieroglyph in Egyptian, a connection worth making given the tradition that Enoch himself was behind the pyramids. That correlation is the version of the Sacred Round used throughout this site.
I also began exploring calendar systems of my own, and from that work came the Lunar Mansions calendar featured on this site: the first system, as far as I know, to track a day's sidereal mansion and its synodic phase simultaneously, reading both together as a single compound name.
In keeping with everything Dr. Pratt's own research had found, this calendar testified of Christ too—independently. Its most sacred alignment ties a lunar eclipse, a blood moon, and the moon's emergence from it, to the Resurrection itself.
Is this the calendar God is actually using to mark sacred time? I don't claim to know that with certainty. But if Dr. Pratt's reading of the instructions the angel gave to Enoch is correct—and its accuracy against known history, checked again and again against independent calendars and independent events, is hard to explain any other way—then perhaps what has been built here approximates it. That's not a conclusion so much as an invitation: the tools are here now, freely usable, for anyone willing to check the pattern for themselves.
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