New Year Resolutions
2009 arrived quietly, I liked that about it. Punctuated only by the sound of my mobile spinning on its rear end the New Year was a quiet affair and the stars in the sky overhead made a bolder statement by the stunning way they hung in the sky than all the pyrotechnics I’d experienced on that famous Sydney ‘coat-hanger’ in previous years. It was a stark contrast.
I rarely make New Year’s resolutions but the tradition of the New Year’s Resolutions goes all the way back to 153 B.C. Janus, a mythical king of early Rome was placed at the head of the calendar. With two faces, Janus could look back on past events and forward to the future. Janus became the ancient symbol for resolutions and many Romans looked for forgiveness from their enemies and also exchanged gifts before the beginning of each year.
The New Year has not always begun on January 1, and it doesn’t begin on that date everywhere today. It begins on that date only for cultures that use a 365-day solar calendar. January 1 became the beginning of the New Year in 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar developed a calendar that would more accurately reflect the seasons than previous calendars had.
The Romans named the first month of the year after Janus, the god of beginnings and the guardian of doors and entrances. He was always depicted with two faces, one on the front of his head and one on the back. Thus he could look backward and forward at the same time. At midnight on December 31, the Romans imagined Janus looking back at the old year and forward to the new. The Romans began a tradition of exchanging gifts on New Year’s Eve by giving one another branches from sacred trees for good fortune. Later, nuts or coins imprinted with the god Janus became more common New Year’s gifts.
In the Middle Ages, Christians changed New Year’s Day to December 25, the birth of Jesus. Then they changed it to March 25, a holiday called the Annunciation. In the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII revised the Julian calendar, and the celebration of the New Year was returned to January 1.
The Julian and Gregorian calendars are solar calendars. However, some cultures have lunar calendars. A year in a lunar calendar is less than 365 days because the months are based on the phases of the moon. The Chinese use a lunar calendar. Their new year begins at the time of the first full moon (over the Far East) after the sun enters Aquarius sometime between January 19 and February 21.
Depending on your religion or ethnicity, New Year can come at different times of the year and be celebrated in many ways. For example, there is the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival, the Muslim month of Muharram, and Rosh Hashanah, one of the most important religious holidays in the Jewish calendar. In Hebrew, Rosh Hashanah means the ‘head of the year’. Maori also have their own New Year, which is marked by the rise of Matariki (the group of stars also known as the Pleiades star cluster or The Seven Sisters) and the sighting of the next new moon.
Like Chinese New Year (and the Christian festival of Easter), its exact timing varies from year to year, but it usually occurs during the month of June. Traditionally, Matariki was used to determine the coming season’s crop. A warmer season, and therefore a more productive crop yield, was indicated by how bright the stars were. Among some Maori, Matariki is much more than a festival-type event that welcomes in the New Year, they believe it is a way of thinking and planning leading up to the sighting of the stars followed by the next new moon. The pre-dawn rise of Matariki can be seen in the last few days of May every year. The new moon can be seen for the first time in 2009 on 24 June.
Matariki, the star cluster that heralds the start of the Aotearoa Pacific New Year, is important to Māori and Pacific people and other cultures around the world. Matariki is visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn sky after the full moon from mid to late June each year.
There are many stories about its significance as a navigational star and also as a portent on whether the coming harvests will be plentiful. If the stars in the cluster are clear and bright, it is thought that the year will be warm and productive. If they appear hazy and shimmering, cold winter is in store for us, and all activities during the period of Matariki must take this into account.
Some say that Matariki is the mother surrounded by her six daughters, other stories suggest that Matariki is a male star. These are the Māori names that make up the other six prominent stars of the Matariki cluster, Tupu-a-Nuku, Tupu-a-Rangi, Waitī, Waitā, Waipunarangi and Ururangi. Matariki is celebrated at different times by different tribes. For some, feasts are held when it is first seen. For others, it is the full moon after it rises that is celebrated and for others, celebrations are centred on the dawn of the new moon.
Astronomers generally refer to Matariki as Pleaides. The cluster is a group of many hundreds of stars about 400 light years from Earth and has been recognised since ancient times. The brightest stars are quite easy to see with the unaided eye in Greek legend bear the names of Seven Sisters, the daughters of Atlas and Pleone, Alcyone, Merope, Asterops, Maia, Taygeta, Calaeno and Electra. For some tribes Puanga or Rigel is the star that signifies the beginning of the Māori New Year.
Matariki is a good time to consider how different cultures measure time. How and why we mark days, months and years is something we often take for granted. But they are all important aspects of cultural identity and history. Although the date for New Year’s Day is not the same in every culture, it is always a time for celebration and for customs to ensure good luck in the coming year. The celebration of the New Year is the oldest of all holidays. It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago. In the years around 2000 BC, Babylonians celebrated the beginning of a new year on what is now March 23, although they themselves had no written calendar.
Late March actually is a logical choice for the beginning of a new year. It is the time of year that spring begins and new crops are planted. January 1, on the other hand, has no astronomical nor agricultural significance. It is purely arbitrary. The Babylonian New Year celebration lasted for eleven days. Each day had its own particular mode of celebration, but it is safe to say that modern New Year’s Eve festivities pale in comparison.
The Romans continued to observe the New Year on March 25, but their calendar was continually tampered with by various emperors so that the calendar soon became out of synchronisation with the sun. In order to set the calendar right, the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the New Year. But tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what has come to be known as the Julian Calendar. It again established January 1 as the New Year. But in order to synchronise the calendar with the sun, Caesar had to let the previous year drag on for 445 days.
But from me to you right now, Happy New Year friend. Welcome to 2009.
