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 sky offers anchors but no command. A year is the time the sun takes to return to a fixed point against the stars, and that length can be measured; but nothing in the measurement says where the count should begin. A circle has no first point. A year could be opened at either solstice, at either equinox, at the heliacal rising of a bright star, at the first new moon of spring, at the flooding of a river, at the bringing-in of a harvest — and somewhere, at some time, each of these has served. The choice is never read off the heavens. It is fixed by authority, written into a calendar, and from then on observed as though the turn were a fact of nature rather than an act of bookkeeping. This is the single thread that runs through every New Year’s Day from the third millennium BCE to the present: a community agrees to treat a chosen day as the seam in time, and then keeps the seam.

A second difficulty compounds the first. The sun and the moon do not keep the same time. The moon’s cycle of phases falls short of a solar year by some eleven days, so a year counted in whole months drifts against the seasons unless it is corrected, and a year counted in seasons leaves the months adrift. Every calendar is a treaty between the two, and where the treaty places the join is one more matter of decision rather than observation. The ancient Near East tended to open the year near an equinox; much of the later West settled near a solstice; lunar and luni-solar reckonings have placed it at a new moon of a named month that itself slides slowly through the seasons. The festival of the year’s beginning is, in this light, the human face of an administrative act — the public marking of a line that the keepers of the calendar have agreed to hold.

The Babylonian new year and the renewal of the world

The earliest sustained celebration that scholarship can name is the Babylonian akītu, kept in Mesopotamia in the spring, in the month of Nisannu, around the first new moon after the equinox. It ran for the opening days of the year, and at its center stood the great cult statue of Marduk, city-god of Babylon and head of the pantheon. The image was processed along the city’s processional way from the Esagil temple to a special precinct outside the walls, the bīt akīti or festival house, and back again — the god going out and returning, the year going out and returning with him. The king did not stand above this; he was pulled through it. In the most discussed of the rites the ruler was brought before the god, stripped of his royal insignia, made to kneel, struck on the cheek by the high priest, and required to declare that he had not sinned against the city; only then were his insignia restored and his kingship renewed for another year. The legitimate sovereign was the one who had “taken the hand” of the god — the gesture by which the king joined the procession and by which his rule was re-authorized.

Through these days the Enūma eliš was recited: the seven-tablet poem of how Marduk, armed by the assembled gods, killed the chaos-sea Tiamat and built the ordered world from her divided body — fixing the stations of the great gods as constellations, establishing the year and the months and the phases of the moon, and founding Babylon and the Esagil at the center of the finished cosmos. The recitation was not commemoration. The festival did not merely mark the year; it was held to renew it, re-enacting the making of the world so that the world might begin again intact. The poem that ordered chaos into cosmos was spoken over the threshold to carry the cosmos across it. Kingship, creation, and the calendar were bound into a single annual act, and the binding is the point: in this rite the turn of the year and the re-founding of the universe were the same event. Comparable spring or autumn new-year rites are attested across the ancient Near East, each tied to its own city, its own god, its own myth of order overcoming disorder.

January, March, and the two faces of the threshold

The first of January is a Roman inheritance, and a contested one. The older Roman year had begun in March — Martius, the month of Mars and of the season when campaigning resumed and the armies took the field again. The opening of the civil year was moved to January, the month of Janus, in the Republic: the date by which the consuls entered office shifted to the first of January in the mid-second century BCE, and the reform of the calendar carried through under Julius Caesar in 46 BCE — the year stretched to nearly four hundred and forty-five days to bring the months back into step with the sun, after which the Julian year ran from January. 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. The month of beginnings was named for the god of the opened door, and the year was made to start by passing through him. There is a quiet logic in the move from one month to the other. The year had opened in the month of the war-god, when the season turned toward action and the legions marched; it now opened in the month of the door-god, who is patron of no single deed but of the passage into deeds — the hinge rather than the journey. To begin the year in March was to begin in the field; to begin in January was to begin at the threshold, looking both ways.

The Roman first of January was already a day of its own observances. It fell on the kalends, the first of the month, when in the developed Republic the new consuls took up office; it was attended by careful attention to omens, for the opening day was read as a token of the whole year to follow, so that a quarrel or an ill-omened word on the kalends was avoided, and good wishes, sweet things, and small gifts of honey, dates, and coin were exchanged to set the year’s character at its start. The shape of the later European new year — the well-wishing, the gift, the watch kept on the first day’s mood — is visible already at this Roman threshold, attached to the month of the god who faces both ways.

Yet the January date was never secure for long. Through much of the Christian Middle Ages European reckoning moved the year’s start away from January and onto the great fixed points of the liturgical calendar. In many places the year turned at Christmas; in others at the Annunciation, on the twenty-fifth of March, nine months before the Nativity and long kept in England as Lady Day; in others again at Easter, a movable feast that made the very length of a year unstable, since a year reckoned from one Easter to the next could be longer or shorter than twelve months. A document dated within such a system can be a full year displaced from a modern reading of it unless the local style of reckoning is known. The first of January survived all this as the day on which the calendar’s own numbering of months still began, even where the official year turned elsewhere, and it was that older numbering, together with the demands of cross-border commerce and record-keeping, that gradually pulled the year’s start back to January.

The variety was not chaos but a set of named conventions, the styles of reckoning, each consistent within itself and each known to the clerks who used it. The Christmas style began the year on the twenty-fifth of December; the Annunciation style on the twenty-fifth of March, in two forms that ran a full year apart depending on whether the count was taken to fall before or after the corresponding January; the Easter style began at a movable feast and gave years of unequal length. A modern reader who silently assumes a January start can misdate a medieval charter by a whole year, and the discipline of reading such documents includes knowing which style the issuing chancery kept. The first of January endured through all of this not as the official turn of the year but as the day from which the calendar’s own months were still numbered, the natural seam in the count even where the year-number changed elsewhere.

The modern uniformity arrived only piecemeal. Some realms restored the first of January around the time of the Gregorian reform of 1582; others held to older styles for generations afterward, so that for a stretch of European history the same calendar day could fall in different years on either side of a border, and the same letter could bear two year-numbers at once. England and its colonies kept the twenty-fifth of March as the legal start of the year until the eighteenth century, even as the first of January was already the popular new year, which is why documents from those generations are often written with a doubled year — a single winter day belonging at once to one numbered year and the next. The line was standardized region by region, late and unevenly, until the first of January became the near-universal civil new year it is now — a uniformity of the calendar, not of the sky.

The grammar of the year’s edge

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. The threshold invites a clean ledger. Old fires are put out and new ones lit; debts are called in or forgiven; quarrels are closed; the house is swept; offerings are made and, at many a year-turn, a libation is poured to mark the crossing. What is to come is questioned — by lot, by omen, by the look of the first day taken as a sign for all the rest — and what one intends is declared, the resolution being a vow made to the new time in the hope that the new time will hold one to it. These are the gestures of a people standing at an edge they have themselves drawn and treating it as real enough to act upon.

The danger is to read this shared shape as a shared belief. Whether such acts were thought to make the new time, as in the akītu, where the recited creation was held to renew the cosmos, or merely to greet it, as in the resolution offered to a January that no one supposes oneself to be creating, varied sharply from culture to culture. The resemblance is in the form of the gesture — the purification, the reckoning, the divination, the vow at the turn — not in any shared account of what the gesture accomplishes. A Babylonian re-enacting the world’s foundation and a clerk forgiving a debt at the year’s close are performing the same kind of act at the same kind of seam; they are not holding the same thought about it.

Texts and the study of the year’s turn

The fullest evidence for any ancient new year is Babylonian, and it comes through the Enūma eliš recited at the akītu. The poem is preserved on seven tablets, most recovered from the Nineveh library of Ashurbanipal. The first modern edition of the cuneiform text with an English translation, L. W. King’s The Seven Tablets of Creation (Luzac, 1902), is fully in the public domain and remains a usable entry point, with King’s rendering long hosted online ( sacred-texts.com/ane/stc ). The current critical edition, distilling a lifetime of work, is W. G. Lambert’s Babylonian Creation Myths (Eisenbrauns, 2013), which traces Marduk’s rise from a minor local deity to head of the pantheon and the culmination of that rise in the epic’s recitation of his fifty names. King’s later Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition (1918) is likewise in the public domain ( Project Gutenberg #9914 ). The festival itself received an early dedicated monograph in Heinrich Zimmern’s Das babylonische Neujahrsfest (Hinrichs, 1926), now in the public domain.

For the wider cosmology in which the akītu sits — the sky read as a divine script, the year and its months fixed in Tablet V of the Enūma eliš as part of the ordering of creation — the standard modern synthesis is Francesca Rochberg’s The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2004), which treats Mesopotamian celestial science as a coherent intellectual tradition in its own terms rather than a forerunner of something else. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green’s Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia (British Museum Press, 1992) gives the iconographic and ritual orientation for the procession, the cult statue, and the festival house. The astral material that runs alongside the new-year cult — and that feeds the divinatory side of the year’s edge — is gathered in Erica Reiner’s Astral Magic in Babylonia (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 85/4, 1995; JSTOR 1006642 ).

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.

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