New Year's Day

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New Year’s Day is the festival that marks the turning of the reckoned year: the point at which one cycle of counted time is closed and the next begun. What makes it strange among festivals is that it answers to nothing in the sky. The solstice, the equinox, the first new moon — these are observable events; the start of the year is a decision laid over them, and different cultures have placed it in different seasons. Its history is therefore a history of where, and by whom, the line was drawn.

The earliest sustained celebration that scholarship can name is the Babylonian Akitu, kept in Mesopotamia in the spring, around the first new moon after the equinox. Over some days the great cult statue of Marduk was processed, the king was ritually humbled before the god and then restored, and the Enūma Eliš — the poem of how Marduk made the ordered world out of chaos — was recited. The festival did not merely mark the year; it was held to renew it, re-enacting creation so that the cosmos might begin again intact. Comparable spring or autumn new-year rites are attested across the ancient Near East.

The first of January is a Roman inheritance, and a contested one. The older Roman year had begun in March, the month of Mars and of campaigning weather; the shift of the civil year’s opening to January, the month of Janus, was settled in the Republic and confirmed when Julius Caesar’s calendar reform of 46 BCE fixed the Julian year. Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings, looked at once backward and forward — an apt patron, the Romans held, for a threshold in time. Yet the January date was never secure for long. Through much of the Christian Middle Ages, European reckoning moved the year’s start to Christmas, to the Annunciation in March, or to Easter, and the modern uniformity of 1 January arrived only piecemeal — in some countries only around the time of the Gregorian reform of 1582, in others well after, as the date of the year’s start was standardized region by region.

Across these reckonings a common grammar recurs, though it should not be collapsed into a single thing: the year’s edge draws to it rites of purification, of settling debts and accounts, of divination about what is to come, and of resolution. Whether such acts were thought to make the new time, as in the Akitu, or merely to greet it, varied sharply from culture to culture; the resemblance is in the shape of the gesture, not in any shared belief about what it accomplishes.

What the festival has always supplied is a sanctioned break in the count — a place where a community agrees that something is over and something else has begun. The reckoning is artificial, fixed by authority and revisable by it; the human use made of the threshold has proved remarkably constant. The line is drawn where it is decided, and people cross it as if it were real.

→ Related: Anu · Mesopotamia