A message for all my loyal readers:
Pinch Punch First of the Month!
(No returns.)
It's really no big deal in the scheme of things, a symptom rather than a cause - and I still (sometimes) wish people a Happy New Year* after the numbers click-over (and our 1:1 definition of New Year is plain numerological thinking, a discipline so beloved of the totalitarian Establishment)...
But it has become traditional for me to write a curmudgeonly post about the fake/ incoherent/ demonic practice of calling January 1 New Year.
Here 'Tis, yet again, and with some new added malice...
In our heads, for our-selves, we ought to have some other date for the new year.
If we accept that a year is essentially astronomical, then the new year arrives after the winter solstice (whatever date we happen to assign to that, usually 21 December, having artificially made periodic adjustments with extra Leap Years)...
But, bearing in mind that through most of history the solstice could not be known more accurately than to a span of several days - we ought not to make a fetish of the precise astronomical instant.
Solstice is (for the natural Man) more of a "season" than a day.
If you are a Catholic Christian, you probably should consider celebrating Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation - currently March 25th in the UK - as your inner New Year...
As was done in England until 1752 (which was, by no coincidence, the time and place when modernity began to ascend to dominance).
In essence, today really-is the New Year - only because They regard it as a New Year for the purposes of their demonic strategies.
In this bureaucratic world, where the elimination of human belief-in and contact-with the spirit and the divine is primary - the wholly artificial, simultaneously anti-scientific and atheistic date of Jan 1 does the desired job very well.
Just bear that in mind.
*In particular, from having lived for many years in Scotland among Scots; I have to make allowances for that more-deeply mind-controlled race than we English, and their post-religious pseudo-patriotic infatuation with Hogmanay!
22 comments:
i was not aware of your hatred for new year's day. but i always appreciate your caustic peeves. personally, my start of the year is when the summer turns to autumn, sometimes september sometimes october. but january is not as arbitrary as you say, as Janus was the god of entrances, and transitions.
I've always had an aversion to NYE celebrations, particularly the ridiculous cheering at midnight as though it meant anything. But perhaps that's just me being a grump. More to the point, the fact that this comes so soon after Christmas seems like an attempt to override the miracle of the Nativity with a wholly secular (not even honestly pagan) substitute.
March has to be the first month. Otherwise, the names of September, October, November, and December don't make any sense.
@Wm - Strange, but I had never noticed that .
Yes, and this explains why NY always feels so flat, sad and pointless. Lady Day far better
How do you feel about the moon, Dr Charlton? The ancients, like modern China, marked their new years with a lunar phase. Are we missing out? Are we, perhaps, better of without it? Did Steiner shine any light on this topic (so to speak) ?
@Crosbie - I feel very positive about the moon! But the year is a solar unit, so it seems rather contrived to use a lunar measure of it - especially when the two cannot be made to fit together except very approximately.
Phases of the moon are simply much easier to observe than solstices and equinoxes, so it stands to reason that all the oldest calendars are lunar. I think it is for a similar reason that the Chinese zodiac is based on the apparent motion of Jupiter rather than of the sun. Since the stars are not visible when the sun is up, measuring its position relative to the constellations is inherently more difficult.
Another reason March should be the first month is that it makes sense to add Leap Day at the end of the year, not at the end of the second month.
Then there is September 1 [14], the Indiction, start of the Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic, new year, going back to Roman times. I agree, however, that Lady Day is the preferable one.
I got a long anonymous comment GMT 03:47 - I don't publish anonymous comments, but will publish this if the author identifies himself by name or a pseudonym.
@Wm - Very interesting ideas. The implication is that if it is too complex to measure the solar year, so that the moon was used as an approximation; this moon era was probably preceded by an even more approximate measure based on seasons - the recurrence of seasons (and the implications of particular seasons) are presumably the reason why people measure years in the first place.
Peter Hitchens also disapproves of New Year's Eve, but I think he disapproves of almost everything at this point.
I don't agree with you! I love traditions, and the more of them the merrier (unless they are celebrating something intrinsically evil). This year I wrote a New Year's article for a general interest magazine I write for, looking at New Year's Eve diary entries made over the centuries. Going back to Pepys, Lewis Carroll, and many others. It's been a celebration for a long time. I'd also be happy to celebrate solstice season!
@M - Well, to my mind the very essence of these times is that "traditions" (even such shallow ones as Jan 1 new year) have mostly been infiltrated, subverted and inverted.
But surely Pepys would have been celebrating Lady Day as his new year?
I also believe that some traditions have been harmfully distorted from very early in their history; such as Easter:
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/search?q=easter+date
"Ed" has left a comment':
(Note, I have just changed the settings for commenting - see if that makes a difference. So long as I don't get flooded with spam...)
I agree that New Year's Eve is over blown, and there was a segment on the local news this morning saying as much.
There was also a Reddit thread with discussion similar to this post and the comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1q1aexn/january_isnt_the_first_month_of_the_year_its/
As pointed out here, the earliest calendars were lunar, because the phases of the moon are more easily observable than the solar equinoxes and solstices. But the Redditors made good arguments that they simply can't work, if you need more precise times. The main problem is that the lunar cycle is almost exactly 29 and a half days, meaning there would have to be constant readjustments, as opposed to the adjustment to the solar calendar turning out to be one leap day every four years or so. The lunar cycle doesn't really sync with the solar cycle, and the solar cycle, with its effects on seasons and plants, is more important.
January 1st is a weak candidate to start the New Year. If we keep the Gregorian months, which don't start on the solstices and equinoxes, than either March 1st, April 1st, September 1st, or October 1st (the month start dates either before or after the equinoxes) are better candidates.
March 1st would have the virtue of aligning the names of the months with their positions on the calendar again; September would again be the seventh month, October the eighth month, and so on.
April 1st has unfortunately been ruined by April Fool's Day (which was deliberately started to discredit it as a potential New Year's Day), but is the first start of the month after Lady Day.
October 1st has the advantage, in the United States, for being the start of the fiscal New Year. It also, along with September 1st, falls outside of Lent, and in a part of the Calendar without many holidays (September 1st falls on or close to American Labor Day, but that is a pretty crappy holiday that should fall on May 1st anyway).
Another problem with January 1st is that you get two holidays one week apart, which is exhausting, and it messes up what should be the twelve days of Christmas.
If I were in charge of reforming the calendar, my two goals would be to have each number date align with the same day of the week each year, and to start the months on the solstices and equinoxes as much as possible. I would do the first by not assigning New Year's Day and Leap Day to any month or day of the week, allowing for the 364 other days to be divisible by 7. The second part would be four months of five weeks each, starting as close as possible to each Solstice and Equinox, and a remaining eight months of four weeks each.
My understanding is that when the Gregorian calendar was introduced, people just celebrated Christmas twelve days earlier, so it still fell on December 25th, while Orthodox countries continued to use what is January 6th in Western countries? Then if my version was introduced, Christmas would probably be moved earlier, so it still fell on December 25th, and four days before the New Year and Solstice. Of course just having it on January 4th (and after the New Year's celebrations!) would be better, but I think people would still opt for the first option.
I don't know if Pepys celebrated Lady Day. I haven't read the diaries. But I looked up all his New Year's entries, and he certainly observed it, albeit in a rather casual way (for instance, wishing his wife a happy New Year and kissing her). He always tallied up his wealth that day, too.
Surprise, surprise-- I can't agree with you about Easter. Yes, it's the most important of Christian festivals, but I don't see how that makes the precise date it's celebrated so important in itself. The important thing was the authority of the Roman See, which is precisely what saves us from confusion, as per your very sensible statement: "The necessary essence Must Be simple, in order that we can comprehend it in order that we may have faith - so simple that it must be directly knowable by a single act of comprehension." I know you won't agree!
I shall save my reflections on Easter for that celebration - if we are spared.
But the problem of Easter goes back far beyond the Synod of Whitby, if that it what you are referencing*. From very early, the purpose and method for the dating of Easter was like a sliver through the heart of the church - and the remarkable thing is that it did not do a lot more harm than it did (which was very considerable).
But in those days, more people had (I believe) a more powerful unconscious and direct link with the Holy Ghost - which had this benefit of keeping people of many opinions broadly on the right lines.
(*Although I do have a higher regard for Celtic Christianity - which is in its essence Eastern Catholicism - than for the Roman Western church. I regret the outcome at Whitby, which outcome was due to the worldly faults and dishonesties of Bishop Wilfred, rather than to his Christian virtues. Something distinctive and very precious was eroded and then all-but lost, by the trends set in play from Whitby.)
@Ed - Thanks for your suggestions.
An interesting discussion. Since I was a child, I instinctively always loved Christmas and disliked New Year festivities. But I never knew why, exactly. Now I understand.
"New Year" is a completely pointless celebration that has no real meaning. Solstices, equinoxes have meaning. Seasons have meanings. Religious festivities have meaning. But a numerical change of the year on an almost arbitrary date? And the media shows us celebrations "in Australia, in Japan, in America", etc, all happening at different times, which gives away the whole absurdity of it, but no one even notices it. Why is the 1st of January even a holiday?
Perhaps you are right and it was meant to disrupt what was essentially a sequence of religious festivities (Christmas to Epiphany), and giving secular and atheistic people something to celebrate, but which has no more real meaning than "Festivus" or "Kwanza".
I think March 25 (Lady Day) is indeed a better start of the year, as it also basically corresponds to the end of Winter and beginning of Spring.
You have a point, Bruce. But January 1st is also the feastday of the Motherhood of Mary, mother of Jesus, mother of God, and mother of the Church, for Catholics; and it's the feast of the Circumcision for all Christians, to remind them that Jesus was and is a Jew. Some people celebrate, or used to, the feastday of the holy name of Jesus, Yeshua, or Yehoshua, "God saves". The new year - though it's only the new year according to modern secular calendars - the octave of Christmas, is or can be a very great day for any Christian, I think.
Oh, and I'm sorry, I missed out mentioning the Orthodox and many other churches with apostolic roots for whom the seventh / eighth day after the feast of the Nativity is or could or should be of importance. Παρακαλώ συγχωρήστε με.
I charge Bruce with false purism. King Arthur celebrated both Christmas and New Year, as we read in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Chrystmasse / With many loflych lord... For ther the fest watz ilyche [like] ful fiften dayes
Whan Nw Yer watz so was so yep [fresh] that hit watz nwe cummen / That day doubble on the dece [dais] watz the douth [company] serued
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