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Why January 1st?
Happy New Year, everyone. Did you know how January 1st came to be the first day of the year? I did not know it myself until just now. I’m surprised I never wondered about this before, since January 1st, coming 11 days after the winter solstice, has no special astronomical or astrological significance and there is no obvious reason for it to be considered the first day of the year. How then did this happen? In 153 B.C., the Roman republic changed the beginning of the consuls’ one-year term of office to January 1. Since the Romans identified years primarily by the names of the two consuls of each year (and, surprisingly, did not number years based on the traditional year of the founding of Rome, 753 B.C.), January 1st became the first day of the year, a status it maintained under the Julian calendar which was inaugurated by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. What is striking is how Western (or rather proto-Western) this is. For the Romans, at least in this instance, the institutions of their political society had a higher significance than a cosmic phenomenon such as the spring equinox. The choice of January 1st thus anticipates the desacralization of the cosmos that is a keynote of Christian and Western society.
(Personally, I think the Christian world went too far in its automatic denigration of all symbolizations of the cosmic as mere “paganism,” but that is a question for another time. In this connection, however, here is a comment on the transition from the cosmological to the transcendent, in the midst of a long discussion we had about Tolkien around New Year’s Day 2004; and here are further thoughts on the same subject.) Email entry |