mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== _________________________________________________________________ [INLINE] [INLINE] Groundhog Day and Chinese Astronomy _________________________________________________________________ Every February 2nd in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a groundhog named "Phil" is supposed to indicate whether Spring has arrived or if there will be six more weeks of Winter. In 2004, Phil reportedly has seen his shadow, which means there will not be an early Spring. January was already an exceedingly cold month in the East. In Southern California, however, it has been warm and dry and a bone, though on February 2nd a storm is approaching. Phil needs to send a bit of winter this way! Groundhog Day is commemorated elsewhere, and there are other groundhogs besides Phil, each promoted by an interested locality; but Punxsutawney seems to get the most media attention and is now immortalized in the excellent and imaginative movie Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell -- though the movie was actually shot in Illinois and not in the real Punxsutawney in Pennsylvania. The real Punxsutawney does have a town square with an old hotel standing on it, the "historic" Pantal Hotel; but Gobbler's Nob, where the Groundhog Day ceremonies are held, is really on a hill outside of town, not in the town square as shown in the movie. Phil normally lives in a "habitat" constructed by the Pittsburgh Zoo in the Punxsutawney Public Library, which does happen to be on one side of the town square. Hollywood poetic license or not, Groundhog Day itself remains unexplained -- the local theory that it was carried by the Romans, by way of a Christian couplet ("If Candlemas Day is bright and clear -- There'll be two winters in the year"), to northern Europe, is no explanation at all. Here my concern is not in the folklore or history of Groundhog Day, but in the question why February 2nd might be thought to mark a possible beginning of Spring. This leads off into other curiosities. [INLINE] The accompanying chart shows the astronomical events that mark the seasons as they are familiar in modern astronomy. The Equinoxes are days where day and night are the same length. The Solstices mark the days with the longest period of day or the longest period of night. Which is which depends on the hemisphere. In the Northern Hemisphere, the December Solstice marks the longest night; but in the Southern Hemisphere, it has the longest day. Similarly, the June Solstice is the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere but the longest night in the Southern. The seasons are likewise reversed: The December Solstice marks the beginning of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but the beginning of Summer in the Southern. The chart is written for the Northern Hemisphere because historically that was where calendars developed and where astronomical traditions began. Two dates are given for each Equinox and Solstice because they drift backwards until, every four years, a leap day is introduced to correct them. Thus, the Vernal Equinox usually falls on 20 March but drifts back to 21 March in the year before a Leap Year. It is then abruptly reset to 20 March after a leap day occurs on 29 February. The second date is the "ideal" one usually cited as "the" date, as with 21 March (used in Groundhog Day itself) for the Vernal Equinox. One might ask, however, just why Spring was thought to begin right with the Vernal Equinox, Summer right with the Summer Solstice, etc. There are other ways to do it. The seasons of the ancient Egyptians had nothing to do with the Equinoxes and Solstices. The Egyptians had three seasons: the Flood (3kht), Winter (prt), and Summer (shmw). The Flood meant the flood of the Nile, which came to be correlated with the "heliacal rising" of the star Sirius, or the time in July when Sirius first becomes visible in the morning before sunrise. So if we use the Equinoxes and Solstices to mark the seasons, where did that begin? Whose seasons were they originally? As it happens, they were the seasons of the Sumerians and Babylonians, later adopted by the Greeks, and then later adopted by the Romans [INLINE] , to be spread to everyone following in Roman cultural footsteps. A similar process occurred with the names of the planets: The bright planet Inanna of the Sumerians, named after the goddess of love and beauty, was simply translated as Ishtar into Babylonian, then as Aphroditê into Greek, and finally as Venus into Latin. The Babylonian New Year was associated with the beginning of Spring. Since the Babylonian calendar used lunar months, which always began on the evening when the young Crescent moon could first be observed, the rule for the New Year was that it started with the first month after the Vernal Equinox, or the first New Moon to be thus observed. Both Judaism and Christianity contain elements of this rule: The Jewish month of Nîsân (which is clearly the name of the Babylonian month Nisannu, a name also used in Arabic for "April" in the Levant and Iraq), when Passover occurs, is supposed to contain the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. Since the Jewish calendar has accumulated some error over the centuries, this is not always true, but that was the original idea. Similarly, in Christianity, Easter is supposed to fall on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon on or after the Vernal Equinox. There are many exceptions to this rule in Eastern Orthodox Churches that still use the Julian calendar; but the secular accumulation of error was corrected in the Gregorian calendar and its lunar tables, which most Christian Churches now use, so Easter in general is celebrated with some astronomical precision. When the Babylonian seasons have become our seasons in the modern world, it is a little jarring to come across something like a footnote to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream explaining that "Midsummer Night" (or "Eve") actually means 23 June, the night before "Midsummer Day," 24 June. But, one may object, 23/24 June is at the beginning of Summer, not in "mid" summer! What is going on here? Well, it looks like this represents some different way of reckoning the seasons. What way could there be? Well, one need go no further than Chinese astronomy to find just such a way that would put 23/24 June quite in "mid" summer. [INLINE] In Chinese astronomy the Equinoxes and Solstices are all reckoned to occur in the middle, not at the beginning, of their respective seasons. This has the convenient and symmetrical effect of placing all the shortest days of the year in Winter and all of the longest days of the year in Summer. Spring and Autumn only contain days of rapidly changing length near the Equinoxes. Chinese Spring thus begins when the sun is midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox. That occurs on 3 or 4 February, depending on the year (as with the dates of the Equinoxes and Solstices themselves above). Since Chinese Summer thus begins on 5/6 May, 23 or 24 June, hard by the Solstice (20/21 June), is then definitely in "mid" summer. As with the Babylonian New Year, the Chinese New Year, which occurred on 1 February in 2003, the day before Groundhog Day, is correlated to the beginning of Spring. The actual rule for the Chinese New Year, used since the Han Dynasty (specifically since the T'ai-ch'u Era of the Emperor Wu Ti in 104 BC), is that the New Year is the second New Moon after the Winter Solstice. Like the Babylonians, the Chinese used lunar months, though they came to regard the actual New Moon, rather than the first appearance of the young Crescent, as the beginning of the month. This rule seems very peculiar. "Second New Moon"? What's that supposed to be? [INLINE] Then one notices that this rule is virtually the equivalent of a rule that puts the New Year at the closest New Moon to the beginning of Spring on 3/4 February. Since a lunar (synodic) month is 29.5 days long, the second New Moon after the Winter Solstice is not going to occur before about 20 January, or later than about 19 February. That puts 3/4 February squarely in the middle of the range. So the Chinese associated the New Year with Spring just like the Babylonians, but they saw astronomical Spring differently from the Babylonians, and also went for the closest New Moon, which was calculated, instead of the first New Moon after, which could be observed. This now brings us back to Groundhog Day: If Punxsutawney Phil does not see his shadow, as he did not in 1997, and he reckons Spring to have arrived, he is simply using the Chinese seasons instead of the Babylonian. Were he to see his shadow and defer Spring six weeks (until 15/16 March), this puts it within range of the Babylonian reckoning. But what could the groundhog possibly know about Chinese astronomy? Well, we might ask the same about Shakespeare writing A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both Groundhog Day and Midsummer Day are old European traditions, brought to America mainly from England and Germany. Since the Babylonian seasons were brought to northern Europe by the Romans, it is tempting, and more, to think that both holidays reflect a pre-Roman astronomy that construed the seasons in the same way as Chinese astronomy. Since Chinese influence seems unlikely, and since we have some evidence of pre-Roman astronomy in Britain by the arrangement of stones at Stonehenge to observe events like the Solstices, it is not improbable that the requisite astronomical tradition was indigenous. There are suriving Celtic traditions (i.e. Irish and Gaelic) about the "cross-quarter" days, Samhain in November, Imbolc in February, Beltane in May, and Lughnasadh in August. Similar ideas about the seasons may even have occurred elsewhere: There is speculation that some markings at the great Anasazi ruins in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, may betray analogous interest in the mid-points between the Equinoxes and Solstices. [INLINE] The existence of Groundhog Day and Midsummer Day thus are clues to the survival, as cultural fossils even after the adoption of Roman (Greek/Babylonian) astronomy, of an older European reckoning of the seasons, perhaps even from the Celtic tradition itself. Groundhog Day itself may bespeak the sort of perplexities that probably occurred in the midst of that assimilation: Come February, people weren't quite sure whether it was Springtime or not. So they may have figured it could be either, depending on the auspices. But there is more. There are two other peculiar occasions that correspond to a Chinese-like reckoning of the seasons. These have the distinctive characteristic that a sanctified day is preceded by a night in which the forces of evil are thought to be unusually active. The most famous and commonly observed is the combination of Halloween ("All Hallow Even") and All Saints' Day (Hallowmas, Samhain), 31 October and 1 November, respectively (All Souls' Day, which has been elaborated into the "Day of the Dead" in Mexico, then follows on 2 November). This is hard by the beginning of Chinese Winter on 6/7 November. Six months later, coincident with the beginning of Chinese Summer on 5/6 May, we find May Day on 1 May (Beltane) and Walpurgisnacht on 30 April. James George Frazer in his classic, if rather dated, The Golden Bough [1890, 1900, 1906-1915], addressed the question of the origin of All Souls and All Saints Days: In order to answer this question we should observe, first, that celebrations of this sort are often held at the beginning of a New Year, and, second, that the peoples of North-Western Europe, the Celts and the Teutons, appear to have dated the beginning of their year from the beginning of winter, the Celts reckoning it from the first of November, and the Teutons from the first of October... These considerations suggest that the festival of All Souls on the second of November originated with the Celts and spread from them to the rest of the European peoples... [The Golden Bough, A New Abridgement from the Second and Third Editions, edited by Robert Fraser, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 384] Although much of Frazer's theoretical approach is now objectionable, there still seems little objection to this conclusion. Similarly, May Day is clearly a very ancient, pre-Christian, and pre-Roman holiday. The unique and obscure ritual of dancing around the Maypole and wrapping it with streamers is an extraordinary testament to meanings that are now lost. Although, unlike 1 November, May Day was largely uncompromised by Christianity, it later achieved a form of secular sanctification when it was adopted in 1887 by the socialist parties of Europe to be the International Labor Day. Labor Day in most countries is still 1 May. In the United States, where this was rejected for its association with socialism, May Day has consequently become all but unobserved. What Frazer could not understand was why November should be taken as the beginning of Winter or May the beginning of Summer. Commenting on two great Celtic occasions (Beltane and Samhain), he says: They were two in number, and fell at an interval of six months, one being celebrated on the eve of May Day and the other on Allhallow Even or Hallowe'en, as it is now commonly called, that is, on the thirty-first of October, the day preceding All Saints' or Allhallows' Day. These dates coincide with none of the four great hinges on which the solar year revolves, to wit, the solstices and the equinoxes. Nor do they agree wtih the principal seasons of the agricultural year, the sowing in spring and the reaping in autumn. [p.731] All he can come up with is that they may relate to the practices of husbandry (p.731), to drive out or bring in the herds from pastures. For all his vast research and learning, Frazer evidently never came across the "great hinges" of the solar year as analyzed by Chinese astronomy. Nor did he question the conventional, Babylonian boundaries of the seasons, even though he uses the paradoxical terms "Midsummer Eve" and "Midsummer Day" countless times -- it never struck him that these terms were apparently applied in the "wrong" part of summer. The night before May Day came to be associated in Germany with St. Walburga (died c.779), an English nun who joined the mission (begun in 718) of St. Boniface of Crediton (c.675-754/5) to convert the remaining German pagans to Christianity. She died at Heidenheim, but her remains were supposed to have been transferred to Eichstätt on 1 May. That is sometimes said to be her feast day, but her actual feast day is 25 February. The night before the occasion of the transfer, 30 April, came to be known as Walburga's Night, or Walpurgisnacht in German. This, curiously, came to be regarded, like Halloween, as a time of evil. One is left to wonder if this association followed or preceded the connection with Walburga, or if there were ever any evil overtones to 30 April outside Germany. It is also unclear whether the overtones of evil arose from something about Walburga or her body itself or because, as on Halloween, evil is thought to decamp under the influence of the particular holiness of the following day -- or, as with many New Year celebrations, because of the idea that the world is coming apart, reverting to Chaos, until reconstituted by the New Year's rites. The transport of Walburga's body might evoke either idea since a dead body can seem a thing of horror and evil, while a Saint's body, or even a part of it as a relic, was traditionally seen as a miraculous and beatific object. The specifically German connection of Walpurgisnacht is now magnified by a particularly horrific historical association: 30 April marks the day when Adolf Hitler committed suicide. This might not have been entirely coincidental. Josef Stalin was probably planning on Russian troops taking Berlin on May Day, his own sanctified day, so Hitler may have chosen what seemed like the last convenient moment to escape capture. [As it happened, the Soviets didn't have complete control of the city until May 2nd, at the cost of 400,000 to 500,000+ Russian soldiers, in fact one of the bloodiest battles of the whole War.] But now the thought of Hitler's spirit released into the darkness, or consigned to Hell, the joy of his enemies to be rid of him, or the sorrow of his sympathizers to have lost him, are all firmly dated to Walpurgisnacht itself. [This is sometimes confused with Hitler's birthday, which was actually 20 April -- now with its own horrible association, the massacre and suicide on April 20, 1999, by two nihilistic, Hitler-loving high school students in Littleton, Colorado.] Whether we are justified in connecting the (morally) complex occasions of Halloween and May Day with the ancient astronomy that Groundhog Day and Midsummer Day seem to reveal is open to question. They are certainly off axis, as it were, for the familiar astronomical benchmarks of the Babylonian, Greek, and Roman system, neither close to a Solstice nor close to an Equinox -- in contrast, for instance, to the Jewish New Year, Rôsh Hashshânnâh, which shadows the Autumnal Equinox as Passover follows the Vernal Equinox. While I have no special knowledge of Celtic or Germanic religion and folklore, and while there seem to be a lot of popular stories about such religions that themselves appear to be New Age folklore, there does seem to be enough good information to motivate these conclusions, except perhaps for the Celtic connection. _________________________________________________________________ Philosophy of Science Home Page Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved