I thought the Druids invented April Fools’ Day, but it turns out they had first actually invented Easter, not the Christian kind, but the pagan kind that celebrated springtime fertility with rabbits and eggs to coincide with the vernal equinox, an astronomical event, when people also are accustomed to running around making jokes and pulling pranks.
Now there’s rich conflation of folklore, religion and science! Maybe it’s useful back up here in order to put these seasonal events in some kind of perspective.
We know that Easter is the Christian observance celebrating Jesus’ resurrection. But some smart early believer suggested that organizing Christian rituals around pagan celebrations might help sell the gospel to skeptical locals. So at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., early Christians adopted a calendar that appropriated the springtime celebration of the pagan goddesses of fertility, named Eostre or Ostern from Saxon and Norse mythologies, and tied these primitive festivals to the observance of Jesus’ transcendent rebirth. Good strategy, it turned out.
In the Christian calendar, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox. The vernal equinox, as an astronomical matter, occurs when the sun rises due east and sets due west and the length of day is theoretically equal to the duration of night, hence the Latin, equi(equal)nox(night), which is how astronomers got into the act.
Astronomers were important adjuncts for people like pharaohs, emperors, monarchs and popes, others whose claims rest on divine rights, because astronomers not only set the dates for various religious observances, but also for the timing of planting and harvesting the crops, upon which their patrons’ royal and immortal ultimate authority rested. To get any of these dates wrong meant your life as a sky-gazing retainer could be unmercifully cut short.
It turns out that setting the precise date for the vernal equinox was not so easy. To get it right, you had to know that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa. The great Ptolemy, an ancient Greek astronomer, had worked out an astronomical calendar based on the what our common senses suggest, which is that is the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and thus obviously the sun revolves around the earth. But as the centuries wore on, the Ptolemic calendar needed one adjustment after another, suggesting the either the gods or God himself was capriciously enjoying a joke at their expense or that something was seriously out of whack in the heavens.
Copernicus, a Polish religious philosopher and astronomer, figured out that the earth actually revolves around the sun, but he did not publish his radical cosmological ideas until on his deathbed in 1543, principally for fear of religious persecution. Apparently there were Biblical passages that clerics had interpreted as the divine word that the sun moved in the heavens while the earth stood still.
It was left to Galileo, who used telescopes he had developed, to defend Copernicus’ calculations, by which time the Vatican Inquisition had formally declared the Copernican idea to be heretical and condemned Galileo to arrest confinement for the last 10 years of his life for defending it. The Vatican ban of Copernican science was not lifted formally until 1835.
So much for using Biblical scripture for setting the exact time of the equinox, which this year I have discovered from unimpeachable sources on the Internet occurred at 7:02 eastern time on March 20. Do you believe what you read on the Internet?
But back to lighter springtime pursuits, including the celebration of April Fools’ Day, which can add a moment of levity to our northern souls. To understand its roots, we go back again to the ancients. The Romans celebrated a religious festival called Hilaria, from which we derive hilarity and hilarious, on the day after the vernal equinox, the first day that nights were shorter and winter gloom was swept away. During the Hilaria festival, Roman citizens were allowed to dress up in masquerades and make fun of nobles and magistrates.
Now we torture our kids, unless they torture us first.
My favorite family conflation of the Easter, spring and April Fools’ Day occurred when the boys’ mischievous mother planted spring flowers in little pots, which she put on the kitchen table as a centerpiece on the first of April. In one of the pots, in place of carefully sifted dirt, she concocted a “soil” that was actually a combination of dark chocolate pudding and crumbled oreo cookie crumbs mixed up to look like a rich dark disgusting compost. After dinner, she carefully picked up this pot and began eating what appeared to the disbelieving little boys to be dirt, which clung to her lips and mouth.
“Oh my God, Mom is eating dirt!” they shrieked, first in delight, but then in concern she had completely gone crazy. She told them it was quite good and gave each one of them a bite, whereupon they immediately grabbed spoons and began eating dirt, first enthusiastically, then less so. Parental hilarity ensued.
Do not try this at home.
Philip Conkling is the founder and president of the Island Institute.