How do they decide when Easter is anyway?

But first, a plea from the author.

There’s actual content below, don’t worry, but first something a bit more personal.

Free posts from the archive generally go out on a Sunday, and that was the plan this week, too. But something incredibly petty and annoying has happened that’s made me decide to go early.

This morning, Twitter seems to have done its best to ban links to Substack: as things stand, links to this platform can be tweeted, but not retweeted, quote-tweeted or replied to, which means they are doomed to sink without trace. This is, for those of us hoping to use both platforms to make a living, intensely annoying. 

No one at Twitter has explained the reasoning behind this decision, but Substack’s announcement a few days ago of a Twitter-like “notes” feature seems likely to be a factor, as does Elon Musk’s ever charming personality. Whether it’ll stand remains to be seen: it’s anti-competitive, and could also piss off assorted Substack writers who are normally comparatively Musk appreciative. If you want to read more about all this, I’d recommend James Ball’s new tech-focused newsletter Techtris. 

But it does mean I am, frankly, worried. So I’m going to shamelessly ask two things. Firstly, if you’ve been thinking of becoming a paying subscriber but have thus far been on the fence, this would be a good time to make the leap, and I would be extraordinarily grateful. Sign up for a year and I’ll even throw in a copy of my and Tom Phillips’ book Conspiracy: A History of Boll*cks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them when it’s published in paperback at the end of the month:

The other favour I’m asking is that, whether you’re up for paying or not, you consider sharing anything I write that you particularly enjoy, on whatever channel you feel is appropriate. I fear I’m going to need the help. Thank you.

Oh, and as ever: I offer complimentary subscriptions to those who can’t currently afford to pay. Just hit reply and ask for one and it’s yours, no questions asked. The world’s messed up, we’ve gotta help each other right now.

Anyway, that’s enough of the serious face. Time for some actual content. 

Moveable feasts

I’ve never quite got the hang of Easter. When you’re a kid, and it determines the date of both chocolate and school holidays, it’s pretty great. But as an adult with a job, who can buy chocolate any time, its significance fades a little, and as a freelancer even the “Woohoo, four day weekend!” bit loses its power. Christmas has always felt to me like it has a social significance entirely separate from its religious connotations: a primal need for a midwinter celebration, a moment when the night is darkest, at which everything just stops. Easter, by contrast, is a bank holiday weekend on which it may or may not rain.

There’s another reason I suspect Easter hasn’t impinged on my, and thus, by virtue of my egomania, the nation’s, consciousness: they don’t seem to be able to decide when it is. There’s a joke in an episode of The Young Ones, in which Dawn French appears as the Easter Bunny and starts handing out eggs, only to be greeted by a baffled, “But it’s June the 12th!” That joke never worked for me because I could never entirely shake the idea that June 12th might be a theoretically entirely plausible date for Easter.

So – how do they decide when to hold this thing?

Some German easter eggs. Image: Toelstede/Wikimedia Commons.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ – the Biblical event this whole Easter shebang is meant to commemorate – was believed, by the earliest Christians, to have happened on the third day following the Jewish festival of passover (a link still visible in the name of the Christian festival in the many languages where it’s some variation on “pascha”). Passover in turn takes place on the 14th day of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar: that doesn’t map neatly onto the calendar we’re all used to because it only has about 354 days in the standard year and, I think, 384 in a leap one; but it puts Easter sometime in spring.

In the earliest years of the church, Easter moved around quite a bit and was observed at different times by different communities, but this was, I’m guessing, a relatively minor problem compared to all the persecutions. In 312, though, Constantine became the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity, and in 325 the bishops gathered at Nicaea for the first Ecumenical Council to debate various theological matters and agree The Line. Regarding the date of Easter, they decided two things: that everyone should celebrate it at the same time, and that they should ditch the link to the Jewish calendar. 

If Passover was no longer the starting point, what was? In 725, the Northumbrian monk Bede explained the computus, or calculation: Easter Sunday was “the Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox”. That sounds straightforward enough. It isn’t. For one thing, the spring equinox – the point at which both night and day last exactly 12 hours – isn’t a fixed date: it’s generally 20th March, but it can be a day either side. The exact date of the next full moon moves about a bit, too, and not in a manner entirely predictable to your average early medieval monk.

So the early Church got around both problems by, essentially, making up its own calendar: it worked out in advance when it expected astronomical events to take place, and calculated the date of Easter from that. By ecclesiastical convention, the spring equinox is assumed to take place on 21st March, and the full moon takes place on the 14th day of each lunar month. So: Easter Sunday is the Sunday following the theoretical full moon which the church assumes to take place on or after the theoretical equinox. 

All of which means that, yes, 12th June is an unfeasible date for Easter, something that should have been obvious to me, now I come to think about it, because of the existence of something called the “Easter holidays”. As things stand (the dates will drift a little, centuries hence), Easter Sunday has to fall somewhere between 22nd March and 25th April. That has a knock on effect which means Good Friday has to be between 20th March and 23rd April; Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, has to fall between 4th February and 10th March; and so on for Shrove Tuesday, Ascension Day, etc. 

A couple of things worth noting before we move on. One is that, since my paganism is very much Church of England paganism, I’ve been talking about the western churches here. The eastern Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian one as we do in the west (the Orthodox Church wasn’t a big fan of Pope Gregory XIII, for some reason). This affects the calculation of the date of Easter and means that they’re only occasionally celebrating Easter at the same time as Christians in the west.

The other is that, for this and other reasons, there have often been proposals to reform the system by replacing the computus with direct astronomical observation – that is, to use the actual equinox and full moon, rather than the imaginary ones the system currently uses. The most recent such proposal came from the World Council of Churches in 1997, but it wasn’t the first.

In fact, an earlier attempt meant that the UK government actually got as far as legislating for Easter reform nearly a century ago. In 1926, the League of Nations recommended that the world pick a more specific date for Easter. Two years later, the government of Stanley Baldwin passed the Easter Act 1928 which decreed that, henceforth, the Easter weekend would be that of the second Saturday in April. The need for Easter Sunday to be, well, a Sunday meant that, unlike Christmas, its date wouldn’t be entirely fixed; but it would in practice be limited to a range between 9th April and 15th April. 

This has never been brought into force. The reason seems to be that one government, however self-regarding, doesn’t get to decide this one: the Church hasn’t moved to pin down the date of Easter, so the British government can’t either, even if it formally gave itself the power to do so. And so the moveable feast will keep moving about, come rain or shine.

One last thing. Passover is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, as detailed in the book of Exodus. This year, the ritual Seder night dinner which begins the holiday takes place on the eve of the 15th day of the month of Nisan, which this year was last Wednesday; it will end next Thursday. 

Ramadan is the ninth and most sacred month of the Islamic calendar, in which the Quran was revealed to the prophet Muhammed, and in which Muslims are expected to fast. Because the calendar is a lunar one, consisting of 354 or 355 day years, the date of Ramadan moves, getting roughly 10 days earlier each year according to the Gregorian calendar: this year it began on 23rd March and will run until 20th April.

That means that, this year, western Easter, Passover and Ramadan are all taking place at the same time, something that only happens three times a century. That strikes me as rather lovely. Enjoy the long weekend, everyone.

Self-promotion corner

This is an expanded extract from the archive of The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a newsletter (obviously) sent every Wednesday around 4pm. In this week’s edition I considered the true meaning, and lack thereof, of “failing organisation”; asked whether changing the dates we attach to the Roman Empire or the age of revolutions could help us to better understand history; and wrote about one of the most baffling maps of Britain I have ever seen.

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