Re: The Julian Calendar Jenny jenny@panix.com Fri Feb 22 13:08:20 2002 Hi Taliesin,*p*The Julian Calendar was the calendar created by Julius Caesar. Westerners used it up until modern times (16th-18th centuries), when we switched over to the Gregorian Calendar we use today.*p*Originally Rome had a mainly lunar calendar. There were twelve months, corresponding to the twelve lunar periods in a year. Each month began on the "kalends", the day of the new moon (as a side note, kalends gives us our word "calendar"). The mid-point of the month was the "ides", or full moon.*p*There was one catch, though: the Romans wanted the months of the year to correspond to the seasons. Eg., they wanted Solsticia (the festival of the summer solstice) to always fall in summer. Under a pure lunar calendar, this doesn't happen. Solar events like the solstices wander the year, because the solar and lunar "years" don't match.*p*To get around this problem, the Romans invented a thirteenth "month", called Intercalaris ("between the kalends"). The length of this 13th month varied each year, and its length was calculated by certain officials. Now the seasons corresponded with the months... but the year didn't have an exact length. And the "kalends" and "ides" no longer matched the lunar periods either.*p*Enter Julius Caesar and the Julian calendar.*p*Caesar decided to make the year 365 days in length. He kept the old twelve "lunar" months (the months we still use). However he made each of them a bit longer, so that you didn't need to add Intercalaris to make 365 days. Most of the months were simply numbered: October (8th month), November (9th month), December (10th month), etc. The solstices now always fell on the 24th or 25th of the month. (Ie, Yule/Christmas = December 25th, Solsticia/St. John's Day = June 24th*p*The Julian calendar looks almost exactly like ours... except for two things. First, the Julian year began in March and ended in February ("the month of purification"). Second, the Julian calendar only had 365 days... and the solar year is closer to 365 and a quarter days. So as time passed, the solstices no longer corresponded with the solar events they marked.*p*By the Middle Ages, this error had become a major problem, and the solstices were seriously out of sync with their "real" dates. This caused problems for the Catholic Church. The Church year began on the spring equinox (March 25th -- Lady Day, or The Annunciation of the Virgin Mary). And you have to know when the equinox is to calculate the right date for Easter/Pascha, the Church's greatest holy season during the Middle Ages.*p*To fix this, in the 16th century Pope Gregory XIII created the Gregorian Calendar we use now: 365 days, with a leap day every four years. Protestant countries (like the British Isles and later the American colonies) didn't start using this "Catholic" calendar until the 18th century. Gregory also moved the solstices back to the days they "belonged" on (more on this in a second).*p*The shift to the Gregorian (modern) calendar had two big effects on traditional holidays. First, "holidays" and "dates" no longer matched. Because Gregory moved the solstices, eleven days "vanished" when you switched to his calendar. People used to celebrating Midsummer on July 4th now were supposed to celebrate on June 24th. For a time, you saw two celebration dates: Old and New. New Samhain, for instance, is October 31st; Old Samhain ("Hollantide") was November 11th/12th. Eventually people forgot the eleven lost days, and we now just use the new dates.*p*Second, as I mentioned, Gregory moved the solstices. Under the Julian calendar the solstices drifted a quarter day each year, so obviously they had to be moved "back" to their "right" dates. But what date was the "right" date? The 25th was the traditional one -- but that was a Pagan custom, one Gregory saw no reason to resurrect. John Dee, the famous English magus and mathematician, argued that the "right" date was whatever day the solstice fell on in the year 1, when Christ was born. However Gregory and his scholars eventually chose the 21st: the day the spring solstice fell on in 325. 325 was the year of the Council of Nicea, the Church council that (you could argue) created the Catholic Church.*p*And that's why modern solstices fall on December 21st, even though Christmas (the old solstice celebration) is the 25th.*p*So to summarize, the Julian calendar is the solar calendar that replaced the old Roman calendar. It looks almost exactly like our calendar -- it's just less accurate, because it's only 365 days long. The dates of some of our holidays reflect the Julian calendar (eg., it's why we celebrate Christmas on the 25th). The Julian calendar got replaced by the Gregorian calendar. And during the change to the Gregorian (modern) calendar, the solstices got moved.*p*Jenny*br* The Julian Calendar Taliesin2 805 Wed - Jan 30 - 3:23pm 12.255.128.25