Leap!

We have a rather childish calendar.  It’s pockmarked with the kinds of additions and subtractions that are reminiscent of a small child who raises and lowers fingers in a desperate attempt to solve a math problem that’s just a little bit beyond their grasp.

The Western calendar that now reigns over the world is also known as the Gregorian calendar, for Pope Gregory the XIII who initiated it in 1582.  It’s a revision of the Catholic calendar, which itself is descended from the Roman Julian calendar.

The original Roman calendar had most likely been lunar and based on a Greek model, but Julius Caesar introduced a new solar model in 46 BCE.  Much of this version is still with us of course, including its Latin nomenclature (guess who July is named for), the twelve months, and their quizzical staggering of days, which toss around 30s and 31s willy nilly, along with a random 28 for bad measure.

Aside from being rather sloppy and asymmetrical in a decidedly unpoetic fashion, the new Julian calendar also contained a critical error.  It was based upon the notion that a solar cycle consists of 365.25 days, which could be compensated for with a simple Leap Day once every fourth year. Hello, February 29th.

But there was a problem.  Greek astronomers had already figured out that a solar revolution actually takes about eleven minutes more than that.  However, for whatever reason, the Julian calendar did not bother to make any adjustments.  The cumulative result was to gain a day about once every 134 years.  Which brings us back to Pope Gregory.  By his time, the calendar was ten days out of whack.

On one level of course, this doesn’t really matter.  The names of months and the numbers we assign different days are arbitrary.  The world keeps spinning regardless of how we label or keep track of it.  But on another level, it’s kind of embarrassing.  You start to look like that little kid struggling with a math puzzle that an adult can solve without blinking.  But for Gregory, the real embarrassment, and even a source of divine angst, was that by his time the Julian calendar was out of sync with proclamations issued at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325.

Oh crap, here we go.  All that early European history which bored the living shit out of me when I was a college freshman.  As a seventeen year old half-Jew, I often glazed over while sitting through the first-half European history survey, which mostly seemed to be about the church.  Sigh.  Yet here I am, more than a quarter of a century later, talking about the goddamn Council of Nicaea.

So what was the Council of Nicaea actually about?  I have no idea, and apparently there was more than one of them.  You should probably find another blog to figure it all out.  But what’s relevant here is that the first Council had tied Easter to the vernal equinox.  For whatever reason.  And by the sixteenth century, because of the inept Julian calendar that the church had clung to for more than a millennium, the equinox was now falling around March 11 instead of the 21st.  Perish the thought.

So Gregory revised the Catholic calendar, taking the extra eleven minutes into account by excluding leap years that end with -00 (1700, 1800, 1900, etc.), but adding back those leap years that are evenly divisible by 400.  Which is why we had a leap year in 2000, but didn’t have one in 1900 and won’t have one in 2100, assuming we’re still using this simian counting system.

To make it all kosher, Gregory had to pull a disappearing act on the ten “extra” days that had accumulated since Nicaea.  In 1582, the year he rolled out the new model, October was truncated as the 4th was followed by the 15th.  October 5-14, 1582?  Yeah, those days just don’t exist.

Predictably, Protestants were non-plussed by this papal decree.  Scandinavia didn’t start coming around until 1700.  Great Britain and its American colonies got on board in 1752, at which point they had to axe eleven days in September.  Czarist Russia held out until its dying day, the Gregorian calendar appearing there only after the 1917 Revolution.  And those bad asses in Greece didn’t give up the ghost until 1923, when they had to throw away Thirteen days in March, which I think might’ve been a bad Oliver Stone movie or something.

Of course, the whole thing could be done much more elegantly and with minimal disruption by adding a thirteenth month.  Simply make each of the current months twenty-eight days long, which happens to dovetail nicely with lunar cycles.  The new thirteenth month would have twenty-nine days, which gets you to 365, with the lone 29th day of the last month festively marking the New Year.  And a quadrennial thirtieth day on our current leap years would make New Years an extra raucous two-day holiday.

Or maybe we could just adopt the Indigenous calendars of Central America (the Mayan is the most well known), which  are centered on a beautifully layered system of tracking time.  In fact, Indigenous Americans had developed highly sophisticated astronomy well before the Common Era, whereas Gregory’s 16th modifications had only been made possible by the recent findings of Copernicus, who managed to convince most Europeans that, no, the Sun did not revolve around the Earth after all.  Imagine that.

So in the end, what does this inauspicious day of February 29th actually stand for?  In part, it’s a reminder of the ugly Roman Calendar and its herky-jerky revisions.  In part, it’s a reminder that in many ways old religious concerns still holds sway over our modern civil society.  In part, it’s a reminder of Europe’s imperial legacy, which in addition to all the unconscionable horrors it has wrought, still casts an inane shadow over the rest of the world.  But I suppose that most of all, when your calendar is a bastion of the arbitrary, is named for a dead language, and features a whack-a-mole numbering system, February 29th is a chance for that rare breed of people to celebrate their true birthdays.

Happy Birthday, all you February 29ers.  Live it up!