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The History of Calendars
The History of Calendars
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7. Their "old new
year" is a week later, on January 14. It is all Julius Caesar's
fault ...
The Romans sometimes neglected to introduce an extra month every two
years to amortize the difference between their lunar calendar and
the natural solar year. Julius Caesar decreed that the year 46 BC
should have 445 days (some historians implausibly say: 443 days) in
order to bridge the yawning discrepancy that accumulated over the
preceding seven centuries. It was aptly titled the "Year of
Confusion".
To "reset" the calendar, Julius Caesar affixed the New Year on
January 1 (the day the Senate traditionally convened) and added a
day or two to a few months.
He thus gave rise to the Julian Calendar, a latter day rendition of
the Aristarchus calendar from 239 BC. After his assassination, the
month of Quintilis was renamed Julius (July) in his honor.
The Julian calendar estimated the length of the natural solar year
(the time it takes for the earth to make one orbit of the sun) to be
365 days and 6 hours. Every fourth year the extra six hours were
collected and added as an extra day to the year, creating a leap
year of 366 days.
But the calendar's underlying estimate was off by 11 minutes and 14
seconds. It was longer than the natural solar year. The extra
minutes accumulated to one whole day. By 325 AD, the Spring Equinox
was arriving on March 21st on the Julian Calendar - instead of March
25.
The First Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325 and determined that
the date to celebrate Pascha was on the first Sunday, after the
first full moon, after the Spring Equinox on March 21st. In other
words, it enshrined the Julian calendar's aberration.
Thus, by 1582, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 11. Half-
hearted measures by Popes Paul III and Pius V failed to restore the
essential correspondence between the calendar and the seasons.
Pope Gregory XIII decided - in his tenth year in office - to drop 3
leap years every 400 years by specifying that any year whose number
ended with 00 must also be evenly divisible by 400 in order to have
a 29-day February.
This would have the effect of bringing the Julian calendar closer to
the natural length of the solar year - though an error of 26 seconds
per year would still remain.
To calibrate the Julian calendar with the Gregorian one and to move
the Spring Equinox back to March 21, 10 days were dropped from the
civil calendar in October 1582. Thursday, October 4 was followed by
Friday, October 15. People rioted in the streets throughout Europe,
convinced that they have been robbed of 10 days.
But this was merely a convenient fiction. The Spring Equinox in the
Gregorian calendar was, indeed, celebrated on March 21 in
perpetuity. But, according to the Julian calendar, in the 17th
century it arrived on March 11th, in the 18th century on March 10th,
in the 19th century on March 9th, and in the 20th century on March
8th - 13 days earlier that even the erroneous date adopted by the
Nicea Council.
The Gregorian calendar was controversial in Protestant countries.
Britain and its colonies adopted it only in 1752. They had to drop
11 days from the civil calendar and move the official new year from
March 25 to January 1. For centuries, dates followed by OS ("Old
Style") were according to the Julian calendar and dates followed by
NS ("New Style") according to the Gregorian one. Sweden adopted the
Gregorian Calendar in 1753, Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, Eastern
Europe between 1912 to 1919 and Turkey in 1927. In Russia it was
decreed by the (bourgeois) revolutionaries that thirteen days would
be omitted from the calendar, the day following January 31, 1918
becoming February 14, 1918.
It was Pope Pius X who, in 1910, changed the beginning of the
ecclesiastical year from Christmas Day to January 1, effective from
1911 onwards.
All that time, the Christian Orthodox continued to observe the
Julian calendar. In 1923, a Conference of Orthodox Churches in
Constantinople reduced the number of leap years every 900 years and
attained a discrepancy between the calendar and the natural solar
year of merely 2.2 seconds per year.
According to this calendar, the Spring Equinox will regress by one
day every 40,000 years.
They, too, had to drop 13 days to bring the Spring Equinox back to
March 21st. Hence the gap between December 25 (Gregorian calendar)
and January 7 (revised Julian-Orthodox calendar).
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Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at
http://samvak.tripod.com
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