Very New Year

Happy new year!  Or is it?  It depends on which calendar you're using.

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Music: Kevin MacLeod, David Fesliyan.  

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On Monday this December 30th past, I clocked in at my retail jobs, put on my headset, and played the morning messages.  There was one from my manager telling us what to expect in terms of sales volume that day and one from corporate welcoming us to the first day of 2020.  The didn’t get their dates mixed up.  December 30th 2019 was the first day of 2020 in a way that once crashed Twitter for hours.  My name…

When we think of the calendar, we think of it as singular and exclusive.  “The” calendar.  Sure, there were other calendars, but those were for old-timey people in old-timey times.  If you’ve ever listened to the show before, you’ll know I’m about to disabuse you of that notion; it’s kinda my schtick.  The calendar we think of as the end all and be all of organizing time into little squares is the Gregorian calendar, but it’s just one of many that have been used and still are used today.

For example, at the time of this recording, it’s currently the 27th day of the month of Tevet in the year 5782 for those who follow the Hebrew calendar.  The Hebrew calendar, also known as the Jewish calendar, was originally created before the year 10 CE.  It first used lunar months, which will surprise no one who has had to google when Passover or Easter are each year.  A standard Jewish year has twelve months; six twenty-nine-day months, and six thirty-day months, for a total of 354 days.  This is because the months follow the lunar orbit, which is on average 29.5 days.  Due to variations in the Jewish calendar, the year could also be 353 or 355 days.  It also used standard calendar years, but these two methods don’t line up perfectly, and this posed a problem.  As time went on, the shorter lunar calendar would result in holy days shifting forward in time from year to year.  That simply wouldn’t do as certain holidays have to be celebrated in a certain season, like Passover in the spring, Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish 'New Year for Trees,' which  needs to fall around the time that trees in the Middle East come out of their winter dormancy, or Sukkot, the festival that calls adherents to build and live in huts in their yard to commemorate Isrealites taking shelter in the wilderness, which is meant to fall in autumn.  So a thirteenth month had to be added every 3 to 4 years in order to make up for the difference.  Such a year is called a shanah meuberet ("pregnant year") in Hebrew; in English we call it a leap year, and it makes up all the lunar calendar's lost days.  The month is added to Adar, the last of the twelve months. On leap years we observe two Adars — Adar I and Adar II.  Today, the Hebrew calendar is used primarily to determine the dates for Jewish religious holidays and to select appropriate religious readings for the day.

Similar in usage is the Hijri calendar, or Islamic calendar.  It’s based on lunar phases, using a system of 12 months and either 354 or 355 days every year.  The first Islamic year was 622 CE when the prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina, meaning today is the Jumada I 28, 1443 .  The Hijri calendar is used to identify Islamic holidays and festivals.  The Islamic New Year marks the journey of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.  However, the occasion and the sacred month of Muharram are observed differently by the two largest branches of Islam, Shiite and Sunni.  Shiite pilgrims journey to their holiest sites to commemorate a seventh-century battle, while Sunnis fast to celebrate the victory of Moses over an Egyptian pharaoh.  Also known as the Persian calendar, it’s the official calendar used in Iran and Afghanistan, and it’s the most accurate calendar system going, but more on that later.

Further east you’ll encounter the Buddhist calendar, which is used throughout Southeast Asia.  This uses the sidereal year, the time it takes Earth to orbit the sun, as the solar year.  Like other systems, the calendar does not try to stay in sync with this time measurement, but unlike the others, no extra days or months have been added, so the Buddhist calendar is slowly moving out of alignment at a pace of around one day every century.  Today, the traditional Buddhist lunisolar calendar is used mainly for Theravada Buddhist festivals, and no longer has the official calendar status anywhere. The Thai Buddhist Era, a renumbered Gregorian calendar, is the official calendar in Thailand.  The Buddhist calendar is based on an older Hindu calendar, of which there are actually three -- Vikram Samvat, Shaka Samvat, and Kali Yuga.  The Vikram Samvat is used in Nepal and some Indian states, and uses lunar months and the sidereal year to track time.  Sidereal means based on fixed stars and constellations, rather than celestial things on the move, like planets.  The Shaka Samvat, used officially in India and by Hindus in Java and Bali, has months based around the tropical zodiac signs rather than the sidereal year.  The Kali Yuga is a different sort of calendar altogether.  It meters out the last of the four stages (or ages or yugas) the world goes through as part of a 'cycle of yugas' (i.e. mahayuga) described in the Sanskrit scriptures. The Kali Yuga, began at midnight (00:00) on 18 February 3102 BCE,  is the final cycle within the 4-cycle Yuga era. The first cycle is the age of truth and perfection, the second cycle is the age of emperors and war, the third stage is the age of disease and discontent, and the third stage (the Kali Yuga) is the age of ignorance and darkness.  If you’re worried because you already missed 5,000 years of the Yuga, don’t fret; you have upwards of 467,000 years left.  

You’ve probably heard of Chinese New Year, so you won’t be surprised that there is a Chinese calendar.  According to this system, each month begins on the day when the moon is in the "new moon" phase. The beginning of a new year is also marked by the position of the moon and occurs when the moon is midway between the winter solstice and spring equinox.  China uses the Gregorian calendar for official things, but still uses the Chinese calendar is used to celebrate holidays.

You might be surprised to learn about the Ethiopian calendar.  The Ethiopian calendar is quite similar to the Julian calendar, the predecessor to the Gregorian calendar most countries use today.  Like the other calendars we’ve discussed, it’s intertwined with the faith of the people.  The first day of the week for instance, called Ehud, translates as ‘the first day‘ in the ancient Ge’ez language, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian church.  It is meant to show that Ehud is the first day on which God started creating the heavens and the earth.  The calendar system starts with the idea that Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for seven years before they were banished for 5,500 for their sins.  Both the Gregorian and Ethiopian use the birthdate of Jesus Christ as a starting point, what Eddie Izzard called “the big BC/AD change-over,” though the Ethiopian Orthodox Church believes Jesus was born 7 years earlier than the Gregorian calendar says.  The Ethiopian calendar has 13 months in a year, 12 of which have 30 days. The last month, called Pagume, has five days, and six days in a leap year.   Not only do the months have names, so do the years.  The first year after an Ethiopian leap year is named the John year, and is followed by the Matthew year, then Mark, then Luke.  Sept. 11 marks the day of the new year in Ethiopia.  By this time, the lengthy rainy season has come to a close, leaving behind a countryside flourishing in yellow daisies. That’s fitting because Enkutatash in Amharic, the native language of Ethiopia, translates to “gift of jewels.” To celebrate New Year’s, Ethiopians sing songs unique to the day and exchange bouquets of flowers. Of course, there is plenty of eating and drinking, too.

So what about this Gregorian calendar I keep mentioning?  The Gregorian calendar was created in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, who made some changes to the previously used Julian calendar.  Okay, so what was the Julian calendar?  It should shock no one that the Julian calendar was ordered by and named after Julius Caesar.  By the 40s BCE the Roman civic calendar was three months ahead of the solar calendar.  The Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, introduced the Egyptian solar calendar, taking the length of the solar year as 365 1/4 days.  The year was divided into 12 months, all of which had either 30 or 31 days except February, which contained 28 days in common (365 day) years and 29 in every fourth year (a leap year, of 366 days).  That 29th day wasn’t February 29th, it was February 23rd a second time.  What a mess that would make, though that conflagration of confusion probably paled in comparison to to what Caesar did to align the civic and solar calendars--he added days to the year 46 BCE, so that it contained 445 days.  Unsurprisingly when you try to make such a large change to the daily lives of so many people in the days before electronic communication, it took over fifty years to get everybody on board.

Sosigenes had overestimated the length of the year by 11 minutes 14 seconds.  11 minutes doesn’t mean much in a given year, but after, say, 1500 years, the seasons on your calendar no longer line up with the seasons of reality.  That matters when your most important holy day needs to happen at a certain time of year.  Enter Pope Gregory XIII, who wanted to stop Easter, which had been celebrated on March 21, from drifting any farther away from the spring Equinox.  Aloysus Lilius, the Italian scientist who developed the system Pope Gregory would unveil in 1582, realized that the addition of so many February 23rds made the calendar slightly too long. He devised a variation that adds leap days in years divisible by four, unless the year is also divisible by 100. If the year is also divisible by 400, a leap day is added regardless. [OS crash noise] Sorry about that.  While this formula may sound confusing, it did resolve the lag created by Caesar’s earlier scheme—almost; Lilius’ system was still off by 26 seconds.  As a result, in the years since Gregory introduced his calendar in 1582, a discrepancy of several hours has arisen.  We have some time before that really becomes an issue for the average person.  It will take until the year 4909 before the Gregorian calendar will be a full day ahead of the solar year.

Maths aside, not everyone was keen on Pope Gregory’s plan.  His proclamation was what’s known as a papal bull, an order that applies to the church by has no authority over non-Catholics.  That being said, the new calendar was quickly adopted by predominantly Catholic countries like Spain, Portugal and Italy, major world players at the time.  European Protestants, however, feared it was an attempt to silence their movement, a conspiracy to keep them down.  Maybe by making it hard to remember when meetings and protests were supposed to be, I’m not sure.  It wasn’t until 1700 that Protestant Germany switched over, and England held out until 1752.  Those transitions didn’t go smooth.  English citizens didn’t take kindly to the act of Parliament that advanced their calendars from September 2 to September 14, overnight.  There are apocryphal tales of rioters in the streets, demanding that the government “give us our 11 days.” However, most historians now believe that these protests never occurred or were greatly exaggerated.  Some countries took even longer than Britain--the USSR didn’t convert to the Gregorian calendar until 1918, even later than countries like Egypt and Japan.  On the other side of the Atlantic from the British non-protests, meanwhile, Benjamin Franklin welcomed the change, writing, “It is pleasant for an old man to be able to go to bed on September 2, and not have to get up until September 14.”

When Julius Caesar’s reformed the calendar in 46 B.C., he established January 1 as the first of the year.  During the Middle Ages, however, European countries replaced it with days that carried greater religious significance, such as December 25 and March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation).  I didn’t google that one.  After my mom listens to this episode, she’ll send me a gloriously incorrect speech-to-text message explaining it.  Different calendars mean different New Years days even now, and the ways in which people celebrate as as splendidly diverse as the people themselves.

The Coptic Egyptian Church celebrates the Coptic New Year (Anno Martyrus), or year of the martyrs on 11th of September. The Coptic calendar is the ancient Egyptian one of twelve 30-day months plus a "small" five-day month—six-day in a leap year.  The months retain their ancient Egyptian names which denote the gods and godesses of the Egyptians, and the year’s three seasons, the inundation, cultivation, and harvest, are related to the Nile and the annual agricultural cycle.  But the Copts chose the year 284AD to mark the beginning of the calendar, since this year saw the seating of Diocletian as Rome’s emperor and the consequent martyrdom of thousands upon thousands of Egypt’s Christians.  Apart from the Church’s celebration, Copts celebrate the New Year by eating red dates, which are in season, believing the red symbolises the martyrs’ blood and the white date heart the martyrs’ pure hearts.  Also, dates are delicious.

 Bonus fact: You know that guy, Pope Francis?  He’s not actually the pope.  The pope's proper title, according to the Vatican's website, is Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the State of Vatican City, Servant of the Servants of God.  'Pope' comes from the Italian 'papa.'  Francis is the Sancta Papa, the Holy Father.  The title of pope belongs to the head of the Coptic church.  So if anyone uses the rhetorical question “Is the pope Catholic?” to imply a ‘yes’ answer, you have my authorization to bring the conversation to a screeching halt by saying “No.  No, he’s not.”  Double points if you simply walk away without explaining yourself.