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Happy New Sidereal Year

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What New Year’s really means.

While most people know that the Western (Gregorian) calendar is “solar” (and measures the earth’s full rotation around the sun – an orbit which takes about one year) few people know that the earth’s rotation around the sun is seldom the same, year in and year out. In fact, our orbit is quite irregular, and is called a sidereal year.

By the way, a sidereal year is 6 hours and 9.1626 minutes longer than the standard calendar (solar) year of 365 days. Which is one of the reasons why we have a leap year every four years.

Of course, not every culture bases its calendar on a solar cycle, and in fact more people on our planet use a lunar cycle – which is about 29.5 days per month. Lunar calendars pre-date our solar calendar (since the earth’s rotation around the sun is a relatively recent discovery) and are still in use by many of the major cultures and peoples. The oldest known lunar calendar, by the way, was discovered in Scotland and dates back to around 8000 BC – 10,000 years ago.

Our calendar is only 433 years old.

It’s entirely forgivable for people who use the Western/Gregorian calendar to assume that our calendar, as of January 1, is 2,015 years old, but that just ain’t so. It is in fact only 433 years old, having been brought into existence in 1582 to mark the precise celebration of Easter.

Why is our calendar called the Gregorian calendar? Because it was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, via a papal bull – a decree – signed on February 24, 1582. It was several centuries before it was adopted throughout the western world.

Pope Gregory XIII’s motivation for his reform was that the Roman Julian calendar (which had preceded it) placed the time between vernal equinoxes (a “solar year,” or a full rotation around the sun) at 365.25 days, when in fact it is roughly 11 minutes shorter per year. (Extremely cool math for 1582, eh?)

With the aid of Jesuit priest/astronomer Christopher Clavius (who built on the work of Aloysius Lilius / Luigi Lilio) it was determined that the 11-minute error added up to about three days every four centuries. That resulted (back in Pope Gregory XIII’s day) in the equinox “occurring” on March 11, and moving earlier and earlier in the Julian calendar.

How we almost had a 13-month calendar

Our calendar is all about Easter.

You know why that 11-minute inaccuracy irked Pope Gregory? The date for celebrating Easter wasn’t at all reliable. And Easter is the single most important date for the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, they may have wanted to peg the new calendar to the date of birth for Jesus, but that’s quite an iffy thing.

You see, no one was really certain of the year and most scholars agree that Jesus’ (or Yeshua’s) likely birth month was actually March. Why, then, do we celebrate it on December 25th? Because early Christians hid their celebration on December 25th (or thereabouts) when Roman pagan festivities (Saturnalia) were already going strong for the winter solstice.

Pope Gregory XIII, et al, calculated Easter, by the way, the only way they could: using the Hebrew calendar to accurately fix the date of “the last supper,” which was in fact a Passover meal that Jesus was attending with his fellow Jewish disciples. Since Pope Gregory XIII wanted to be sure that Easter was being celebrated on the correct date, year in and year out, the date of that Passover meal, “the last supper,” was the starting point for the development of his new calendar.

The fact that Easter is based on the Hebrew lunisolar calendar, by the way, is why it’s a movable feast, unlike Christmas which is always on December 25th.

Today, of course, the majority of the people using the Western calendar think of it as a business tool rather than a way to keep track of religious events. And commerce was, indeed, the main reason the Gregorian calendar was ultimately adopted. But it’s worth remembering that its origins were entirely based on setting the correct dates for religious celebrations.

Is it New Year’s for everyone?

2015 will no doubt see further globalization taking hold. Our clothing, computers, cars and customer service (alas …) can come from anywhere in the world. Our economy is clearly affected by global events and our export markets can be countries that not long ago did not even appear on our economic maps.

Brazil took a significant lead on the global economic stage when it moved ahead of Great Britain in 2011. So, too, have Russia, India and China all moved up. (Investors call them the BRIC nations and place “emerging markets” investments there.) Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain continue to worry the rest of the world when their economies teeter … and teeter they do. Because the global economy affects us all now.

So, bearing all that in mind, does January 1 have the same significance to all inhabitants of planet earth? How about to the Chinese or Indians? Or those who continue to follow the Hebraic and Islamic calendars, both of which are based on lunar rather than solar cycles?

For the Chinese, their new year 4713 will begin on February 19, 2015. For those following the Hebrew calendar, the year 5776 will occur September 14-15, 2015. And for those using the Islamic calendar, the year 1436 will occur October 13-14, 2015. India has as many calendars as it has religions, though in 1957 they settled on the Indian national calendar (Saka) to align themselves with the Gregorian calendar.

[“Traditionally, New Year’s Day in Russia fell on September 1, which ended Russia’s tax year. In 1700, in an attempt to westernize the country, Russian ruler Peter I moved the holiday to January 1 according to the Julian calendar. Russia started using the Gregorian calendar in 1918. Between 1919 and 1937, the Bolsheviks banned public celebrations of New Year’s Day, calling it a bourgeois holiday. It became a non-labor day again in 1947. The tradition of having Russia’s leader give a televised address became a New Year’s tradition in 1976.” – timeanddate.com]

The diversity of global populations is one of the reasons that New Year’s celebrations have always struck me as a tad odd. First of all, Father Time is winning, whichever calendar you use. Every new year means that everyone is a year older. (Not sure about cheering that.) And, as you can read above, the yearly cycle is hardly celebrated (or measured) the same way by all people on earth.

What do we measure when we measure time?

Clocks, watches, calendars … do they measure actual time, or the experience of the passage of time?

In reality, we “mark time” rather than inhabit it. We tick off the time we’ve used and look forward to some future calendar event – a celebration, religious holiday or vacation – which will only arrive after we’ve marked off the appropriate amount of time.

But time, according to Albert Einstein, was an indication of our relationship to space and gravity – how fast and how far we were able to move through space. And, in a way, that’s what we’re actually measuring when we say “day, week, month and year.” A day is the spinning of the earth on its axis (creating the illusion of sun-up, sun-down). A year is the time it takes for our earth to orbit the sun completely – an elliptical journey that takes us closer to and farther from the sun, creating our seasons.

Bearing all that in mind, it’s possible to see that days and years are in reality markers of time/space travel, while other calendar-based measurements are an artificial construct that in fact simply measure the passage of time as it relates to us, personally.

In other words, what we think of as time is actually very subjective.

More proof that time is a human construct:

[“Time Undone: Right now, on the top of Mount Everest, time is passing just a little bit faster than it is in Death Valley. That’s because the speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity. Einstein himself discovered this dependence as part of his theory of relativity, and it is a very real effect.” – Geoff Brumfiel, Science Correspondent, NPR]

It’s all relative.

Einstein and Paul Langevin addressed that “relativity” with a theory of time (one of my favorites) that has come to be called the “twins paradox.” It goes like this: one twin leaves the earth traveling at the speed of light and returns seven years later; the other twin stays behind. For the traveling twin, only seven years have passed, so he has only aged by seven years. But for his brother, back on earth, several decades have passed and he is now elderly. How can this be? (For a practical demonstration, watch the Jodi Foster film “Contact,” from a story by Carl Sagan.)

The point is that time is not as fixed as we think it is … or as our Gregorian calendar would have us believe. In fact, time is entirely relative. So we do not measure time objectively, but rather subjectively, based on our experience of time, based on where we are on our planet, and the calendar we’re using.

We all subjectively say, “one year has passed,” or “our child is two years old,” or “we have a doctor’s appointment next Monday.” All of these are important to us, yet create a slightly false or inaccurate sense of time – an imposed sense of time, one that doesn’t matter to or affect the movements of the planets around our star, which is what calendars theoretically measure.

Think of it this way: if we were still using the Julian calendar, we’d experience time differently. The same goes if we were using lunar calendars – New Year’s day would come more often. Which is why I just can’t help remembering that the Gregorian calendar we’ve all agreed to use is just slightly more than 400 years old, and it even has a back-dated, highly subjective starting point.

In fact, the new year did not always begin on January 1 for everyone everywhere. It depended entirely on which calendar was being used. The date that we now, in the West, refer to as “New Year’s day” is a very recent innovation … and an entirely subjective event.

Why winter solstice is the longest night of the year.

Happy New Calendar.

New Year’s used to be celebrated on days such as the vernal or autumnal equinox – days when you can actually feel something new is coming. That’s what Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” was all about.

No one can deny that our lives are run by calendars. They determine when we go to work and when we rest. They determine when we play and when we pray. They determine when we’re paid, and even how much. Do we have a choice? Not really. But I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that if you asked a large number of people what their favorite day is, the most frequent answer would be whatever day they consider the Sabbath.

And all of that is why I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. But, hey, knock yourself out.

New Year’s is supposed to be about new beginnings. January 1 strikes me as a very poor date for that. What it really means is that we’re celebrating a calendar event rather than a cyclical, natural event. It seems to come down to celebrating Happy New Calendar.

But, I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else …

 



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