The Easter weekend is upon us; a time for deep reflection if you are a serious Christian, a time to stuff your face with chocolate if not. I suppose both together is common.
Our High-back XXL and XL bean bags look remarkably similar to Easter eggs but without the calories, so why not treat yourself to a Cozibag bean bag and enjoy Easter whilst remaining on course for your summer beach body!
Like many others, I have never understood how or why Easter seems to change each year, so I decided to have a little look into it.
Apparently, Easter was originally called Pascha after the Hebrew word for Passover, a Jewish festival that is set by the first full moon following the vernal equinox – the spring day when night and day are exactly the same length. As Pascha fell around the same time as the Jewish festival, Christians wanted to have their feast day at the same time as the Jews.
Pascha later became known as Easter, a word which is believed to be derived from Eostre, the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and springtime.
The date of Easter is determined, like its pagan festival equivalent, by the lunar calendar.
Solar and lunar calendars
The ancient Egyptians used a solar calender which was passed on through the Roman and Christian cultures to become the modern world standard. However, the Jews used phases of the moon (as Islam now does).
A problem is caused by the solar year (the length of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun) being nearly 11 days longer than the lunar year. Many formulae have been devised to try to reconcile the two as a method of marking time.
So when does Easter fall?
Generally speaking, Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon after 21 March.
It can be as early as 22 March, as it was in 1761 and 1818 (but that won’t happen until 2285) or as late as 25 April, but we haven’t had that since 1943 and won’t again until 2038. The most common date is 19 April.
So there you go, a nice little lesson in religious history! I hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for reading,
To say that the Jewish Feast of Unleavened Bread “is set by the first full moon following the vernal equinox” is a very loose description of the Jewish and Christian lunar calendars. It can even be misleading unless “full moon” and “equinox” are qualified. As you yourself note, the Gregorian lunar calendar defines the equinox as March 21, without regard for the precise hour astronomical equinox in any year.
The first day of Unleavened Bread is the 15th of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. Since the Hebrew Calendar’s lunar months begin around the time of the mean lunar conjunction or shortly after it, the 15th of every Hebrew month is close to the full moon. But it is defined by the number of days since the 1st of the month, not by precise astronomical computations or observations. Likewise the matter of the equinox: In the Hebrew calendar as it now is, the equinox does not enter explicitly into any computation. The relationship of the month of Nisan to the equinox is implicit. And since the Hebrew calendar contains a slight solar drift, its implied equinox is some days after the Gregorian lunar calendar’s March 21 formal equinox. In 3 years out of every 19, the 3rd, 11th, and 14th years of the Christian cycle, this results in the feast of Unleavened Bread being a lunar month later than Gregorian Easter.
Like the Hebrew calendar, the Gregorian lunar calendar divides 19 years into 235 lunar months of 30 and 29 days each (with occasional exceptions). Each year has a paschal lunar month, which is the first lunar month after January 1st to begin on or after March 8th. Easter is the 3rd Sunday in the paschal lunar month. That’s it. Find the lunar month and count 3 Sundays. The relationship to the moon is taken care of by the use of a lunar calendar that is kept, by adjustments every 100 years or so, synchronised with the astronomical facts on the average. This year, 2010, the paschal lunar month begin on Wednesday, March 17 (or, more precisely, at sunset on March 16) and has 29 days. Its 3rd Sunday is April 4th.
To say that the word Easter “is derived from Eostre, the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and springtime” goes a bit beyond the documented facts. The 8th century English writer Bede tells us that the word came, not from the name of a goddess directly, but from the name of a lunar month. The lunar month was in turn named after a goddess, or so Bede thought. But this goddess is nowhere else attested and nothing is known about her, if she did exist. Hence it cannot be said for certain that she was a fertility goddess. The name itself seems to suggest a dawn-goddess.
Thanks, Mockingbird, for expanding on my post with some excellent information and for highlighting the origins of the word ‘Easter’ as an area that is a little dubious and open to debate – having looked in to it a little further on the internet, it certainly seems that documented evidence is sparse, yet it is accepted as fact by some seemingly trustworthy sources.