A friend admitted this week that, although she appreciated the opportunity to enjoy a four-day long weekend in early spring, she remained mystified at its timing.
“Every year, it’s different — sometimes it occurs in early April, sometimes later. This year, it’s in March. If Easter is about celebrating a holy person’s death and rebirth, wouldn’t the dates be specific, like Christmas?”
The timing of this most holy of Christian holidays is tied to the lunar cycle, just as the new year is in many Asian cultures. China, Vietnam, Korea and Tibet, for example, each celebrate their traditional new year according to the Chinese lunisolar calendar.
Such calendars track the astronomical cycles of both the moon and the sun.
The two cycles don’t match up, so, under these calendars, the length of moon-based months is artificially adjusted to keep it more or less in sync with the solar year or seasons.
The Chinese lunisolar calendar puts new year on the second new moon after winter solstice, or late January to mid- to late February. Other Asian cultures follow a different sun–moon calendar. Our Cambodian, Laotian, Sri Lankan, Bengali and Thai friends usually celebrate their new year in late March or April — about the time we celebrate chocolate eggs.
The Muslim New Year, on the other hand, tracks a purely lunar calendar, and might fall in any season.
“Tying such an important holy day to the moon seems pretty pagan for a religion that spent much of its history intent on either converting or killing pagans,” my friend remarked.
She had pinpointed one of the ironies of Easter. The other great irony is Easter’s modern-day emissary — a rabbit. The Easter bunny is a potent pagan symbol of fertility. Furthermore, this bunny performs miracles by laying eggs… that hatch into chickens. Eggs and chickens — whichever came first — are also fertility symbols lifted from pre-Christian European cultures.
The word Easter, too, underscores fertility, sharing a root with estrus — the in-heat state that causes female cats to caterwaul and female dogs to gnaw at the gate to get to freedom and the neighbourhood’s hounds. It’s profane stuff for a sacred day.
A more recent, occasional interpretation of Easter bunny eggs leans into stranger territory. A few chocolate purveyors have started selling Easter eggs shaped like cartoon representations of dinosaur eggs. Given that paleontologists determined only within recent decades that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs — and might even be dinosaurs — this riff on the Easter-bunny miracle starts to make a weird kind of pointy-headed sense.
Yes, Easter as modern westerners — and particularly marketers — celebrate it contains many metaphors open to interpretation.
As to its timing, I asked a family member who attends mass several times a week how Easter’s timing is determined each year. Her answer — “I look in the calendar” — circled me back to more metaphorical chickens and eggs.
Actually, Easter is the reason for the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we and most other western cultures use today. Before Pope Gregory XIII introduced this version in October 1582, the calendar year was mismatched from the seasons by about nine days, and the drift was growing wider by about 10 minutes every year. Because Easter Sunday is tied to the spring equinox, the Roman Catholic Church decreed the drift undesirable.
The Gregorian calendar adjusts for the mismatch by omitting three leap days every 400 years.
Under the Gregorian calendar, the mean length of the calendar year changed from 365 days and six hours to 365 days, five hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds.
Today, Easter is calculated according to the lunisolar Gregorian calendar, with a few, key ecclesiastical decisions thrown in. These long-ago decrees influence the calculations and cause the uninitiated to refer to their calendars instead of trying to work it out on their own.
Like the pre-empting of pagan rabbit, egg and chicken symbols, they also add a layer of mysterious complexity to the modern weekend named in honour of springtime fertility.
