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Pencil in Some Calendar Trivia
The Calendar >
The New Year is upon us. But why now? Why not February 27 or September 12? What gives the first of January the right to be called the first day of our new year?
I thought you'd never ask.
Calendars are nothing new. People for thousands and thousands of years have seen the repeating patterns in the sky by studying the movements of the sun and moon and stars. They used these heavenly rhythms long ago mostly as agricultural and religious timekeepers, reminders to tell them when to worship, plant, harvest, take out the trash.
They noticed amongst all this that the sun and seasons kept very good time with each other. When the sun was low in the sky, as it is now, the season we call winter was no doubt bearing down.
The moon wasn't so in step with the sun's movements, but did, like a teenager, go through an entire array of its own phases every 30 days.
Organizing the yearly cycles of the sun and seasons with the "moonly" or monthly cycles was no easy trick since they were always out of sync. That's why finding an agreeable and easy calendar was always a colossal pain in the year.
But however a mess the calendar could be, people groups for millennia have insisted on including a celebration of the new year in that calendar. The Greeks marked it at winter solstice. The Egyptians chose the fall equinox to kick things off. But the Romans, way back before they were The Empire, started off the year near the spring equinox.
About eight centuries before Christ, it is said that Romulus, namesake and first king of Rome and slayer of brother Remus, made up a calendar in which the first day of March was the first day of the year. His year followed with nine more moon cycles, ten total months, followed by a dead space of wintertime with no months at all until March was back.
The names of some of those months are used even today. For example, September, our ninth month, was the seventh month back then, its name based on the Latin for seven, "septem." October was the eighth month, November the ninth. And we can all see the well-known "dec-" or "decem," meaning ten, in December.
The second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius, allegedly squeezed a couple months into the long winter gap, after the Big Ten. After December now came January, named for Janus, the god of gates, now of course the god of football. And February was named after an old Sabine word, februum, which meant purification, since the Romans held their festival of purification then.
So now the months are accounted for. How then did the New Year's Day get the big switch to January?
There was this guy, an Etruscan, the fifth king of Rome, named Tarquinius Priscus. He wanted to move the first day of the year to January, since it honored Janus. The month of the god of the gates would be symbolic of passing through into a new year.
That idea got a quick boot when the Etruscans themselves were booted from Rome in 510 B.C. March stayed put as the first month.
In the years after kings were eliminated, the Roman Republic was lead by two consuls, who took office in March, and served for just a single year. (Those were the days!)
In 153 B.C. someone got the bright idea of having the consuls start their term in January. So the beginning of the year was now shoved back again to the month honoring Janus.
But old habits die hard, and many still defiantly celebrated the New Year in March.
By the time Julius Caesar hit the scene in the 40's B.C., the calendar was so unbelievably messed up, with centuries of accumulated mismatched lunar and solar cycles, all now hopelessly interwoven with politics, that reform was urgent.
Julius gave us the Julian calendar that, among a number of other reforms, fixed the New Year Day as January 1. No questions asked. All Rome obeyed.
But not all in the Empire did.
Early medieval Christians who saw the celebration of the New Year as not exactly what one might call "chaste" ignored it and celebrated their own New Year on March 1, or the spring equinox, or Christmas, or Easter!
Then in 1582, Pope Gregory, in an attempt to fix the already outdated Julian calendar, gave us the new and improved Gregorian calendar that – again – fixed January 1 as the first day of the year. All the Church obeyed.
But not all Christians did!
Protestants, who didn't give a tinker's cuss for papal decrees, continued to celebrate New Year's whenever they wanted. In fact, it wasn't until 1752 that England finally switched over to January. Eventually all the Protestant countries quit protesting and capitulated.
So here we are, now days away from the first day of 2005 by our reckoning. Still not all have adopted – or even care to adopt - the western calendar. Still some cultures don't even use the sun to measure a year.
But whenever one celebrates the New Year, isn't there just something refreshing about leaving the past behind and starting anew? That's the great blessing that a New Year's Day can bring to many, regardless of the date.
Here's to an enriching and renewing 2005.
Mark Ritter teaches astronomy at Temecula Valley High School and can be reached at mritter@firstlightastro.com.
Posted by Administrator at 2004.12.25 11:50 AM | Comments (1)
Comments
Mark,
You might check out Vedic astrology/astronomy (India). It is many thousands of years older than the western and very complete. There are Vedic observatories still in existence many thousands of years old that use very accurate and complex systems.
Best Wishes,
amm
Posted by: amm at 2005.01.10 09:30 AM