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Have you been putting off having purgation (purging), purification, or an exorcism? Have ,a need to extinguish or rekindle some fire, or maybe hold a masked procession honoring the dead, or another similar activity? Or do you, silly goose, just want to. party, party, party? Well, we have just the day for you and it is coming your way soon. From primitive man to today’s most cosmopolitan dude, the day marking the beginning of the year has been one on which rites are performed to abolish the past and rejuvenate for the future.
The start of a new year is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, of human celebrations. Perhaps the most logical time to observe the beginning of a year would be the spring equinox in late March. This seems to have been the ancient practice and indeed March 25 marked the New Year in Christian Europe through the late 1500s. But as with most things in life, there were issues.
The Romans had pegged January 1 as the start of their year in 153 BC, largely because it was the day after their elections. How did they get away with this? Control of much of the known world probably had something to do with it. The choice of date may also have been related to Janus, the Roman god of all beginnings for whom January is named. Janus was always depicted with two faces: one looking into the past and one looking into the future. Julius Caesar tweaked the calendar about a hundred years later; the Julian calendar that resulted lasted one and a half millennia and retained January 1 as New Year’s Day.
For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church rejected the celebration of New Year’s as a pagan ritual. But as with
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