Look up: Easter’s coming
The date of Easter moves around the calendar seemingly at random from year to year. Easter Sunday can fall as early as March 22 or as late as April 25. It makes you wonder if there's a secret scroll somewhere that decrees the future dates of this significant Christian holiday. Or does some sort of secular Easter overlord determine which Sunday we celebrate spring this time around? And does the decision have anything to do with giant, egg basket-wielding bunnies?
It may seem as mad as a March hare, but believe it or not, there is a method to Easter scheduling madness.
As you might expect of a holiday with deep ties to older traditions surrounding fertility, seasonal rebirth, and various goddesses, we can blame the moon. As the Christian story goes, the resurrection of Jesus happened after Passover. Early Christians derived their date for Easter, then, from the timing of this Jewish festival in the month of Nisan as determined by the lunar-based early Hebrew calendar.
However, it didn't take long for some Christian sects to dispute these annual calendar calculations, which often put Easter before the first day of spring. At the First Council of Nicaea, in 325 C.E., Christian bishops from all over met in what is now northern Turkey to reach consensus on a number of important church matters, including determining the true nature of the son of God, as well as setting a uniform date for celebrating Easter.
The Council decided that Easter falls on a Sunday within a lunar month of its own determination, thus separating the Christian holiday from the Jewish calendar, but retaining its relationship to the phases of the moon. This laid the groundwork for practices that evolved over succeeding centuries into how it now works in Western Christian tradition: Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon happening on or after the spring equinox.
Just to keep things confusing, the Eastern Orthodox Church uses a different calendar to fix the date of Easter each year. Sometimes the dates coincide, but more often, they don't: this year, Easter falls on May 1, over a month later, in that tradition.
The spring or vernal equinox happened this year on Sunday, March 20, just after midnight here in the EDT time zone. The next full moon rose soon thereafter, on Wednesday, March 23, at about 8 a.m. Therefore, whether you're Catholic, Protestant, or simply someone who likes chocolate, you are celebrating Easter this year on Sunday, March 27, thanks to the moon and the solar cycle of seasons.
The egg-shaped waning moon will still be fairly bright just four days later, but if the sky is clear and it's not too chilly, you can have some fun locating the constellation Lepus, the Rabbit, on Easter evening.
The collection of faint stars that make up Lepus can be found rather low in the southwestern sky at the feet of Orion the Hunter, just to the right of Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest star in the northern sky. It's no coincidence that this prey animal is found in the sky in association with the giant hunter and his hunting dogs, but astronomical progression ensures that the rabbit is never caught. The night sky is, if anything, family-friendly entertainment.
Kristen Lindquist is an amateur naturalist and published poet who lives in her hometown of Camden.
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