New Year Festivals
NEW YEAR FESTIVALS. The concept of year, which is found in all higher cultures (as solar year or lunar year or some combination of the two), is not known in all archaic cultures. Some cultures reckon only in periods of approximately six months; this is especially the case in tropical lands where seedtime and harvest come twice in the course of a single year. Even when the year is regarded as a basic division of time, the calculation is often based not (or not exclusively) on the sun and the moon but on the visibility of certain constellations; in tropical and subtropical areas, it is based with special frequency on the heliacal early rising of the Pleiades. The beginning of the year, or the "New Year," is often not a precise and fixed date that is astronomically determined (e.g., by equinoxes or solstices). Rather, it is a period that is determined by the annual vegetation cycle or, more generally, by climatic processes (passage from the dark period of the year to the bright, from the cold to the warm, from the stormy to the calm, from the dry to the rainy). Such periods are often accompanied by festivities, and when the interval between such festivities is approximately as long as a solar year, one is justified in speaking of New Year festivals.
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