It is not really a new year until you have made some new year resolutions, is it? At least, the ancient Babylonians seemed to think so. Over 4000 years ago, the Babylonians celebrated the new year with a twelve-day long festival called Akitu. Akitu corresponded with the sowing of fresh crops to herald the beginning of a new agricultural cycle and had tremendous cultural and religious importance. The festival involved the usual practices of temple visits by the ruling monarch and rituals venerating the Babylonian deities (Marduk, the supreme God, and his son Nabû). It also involved the not so usual practice of the monarch being slapped by the High Priest. To be clear, this was not some ceremonial pat that was meant to be symbolic. Oh no. The High Priest would do an assortment of upper body exercises in the days leading up to Akitu and was expected to whack the royal face with reckless abandon until the king ‘had tears in his eyes’1.
In addition to this wholesome custom of regal assault, Akitu was also a time when the Babylonian populace made promises to pay off debts, return borrowed objects and lead better, more pious lives in the new year2. These were the proto-new year resolutions of the ancient human civilizations. Since Akitu was tied to the crop cycle, it was celebrated around March/April (of the modern-day calendar) like a number of more local ‘new-year occasions’.
The move to mark January 1 as the beginning of a new year, is credited to that man who is renowned for having many faithful friends: Julius Caesar. In 46 BCE, Caesar introduced the Julian Calendar which commenced with the month of January, named after Janus, the Roman god of “doorways, arches and new beginnings.” The two-faced Janus is, unsurprisingly, the patron god of politicians, investment bankers and people who borrow books but never return them.
The calendar we follow today, the Gregorian Calendar, is a modified version of the Julian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, was introduced in 1582 to address the inaccuracies in the manner in which the Julian Calendar measured the solar year, i.e., the time taken by Earth to complete one orbit around the sun3. Importantly, the Gregorian Calendar retained January 1 as the start of the new year, which has continued into modern times.
The phrase ‘new year resolutions’ is believed to have come into existence around 200 years ago. On January 1, 1813, a Boston newspaper used the phrase ‘new year resolution’ in a column by a writer who clearly had very little patience for these shenanigans:
And yet, I believe there are multitudes of people, accustomed to receive injunctions of new year resolutions, who will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behaviour, and with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.
To be fair, his cynicism has withstood the test of time and would be valid even today. The internet is filled with surveys and studies which have documented how a large majority of new year resolutions are doomed to fail spectacularly4. A US study suggested that 80% of new year resolutions are abandoned by February. A survey of UK and Australian adults found that two-thirds of the people making new year resolutions, abandon them within a month. The popular fitness platform Strava monitored 800 million user-logged activities to predict that most people would give up on their fitness-related resolutions by mid-January. We are all familiar with the futility of resolving to be better, do better seemingly overnight; yet, every year we begin January with renewed promises we know we will not keep. What drives this bizarre and repetitive behaviour? Perhaps it is the one thing that Pandora kept locked up: hope.
The mythological story of Pandora and hope is well-known. Pandora was the first human woman created by the Greek Gods and entrusted with a sealed pithos (jar). As instructed by Zeus, Pandora resolved (on new year’s eve, perhaps?) to never open the jar. Which obviously meant that she opened the jar at the first available opportunity, and released a host of unpleasant afflictions that would henceforth plague humans: anarchy, starvation, war and so on. But when Pandora did eventually shut the jar, Elpis (typically translated as hope) was trapped within forever. The import of hope being trapped in Pandora’s pithos has been the source of much philosophical debate.
Some scholars believe that Elpis is more akin to foreboding than hope. They argue that Elpis being released would have filled mankind with dread about the worst possible outcome in any scenario and hence, it is a mercy that Elpis never escaped the jar. Other scholars construe Elpis in more positive terms and say that hope remaining in the jar was the antidote that humans needed to fight the other evils. Friedrich Nietzsche, the eternal optimist whom you could always count on to spot the silver lining in the gloomiest of situations, had a different take. He believed that Elpis was the “most evil of evils” as it was meant to prolong the torment of humans by filling them with a false sense of hopefulness, when in reality their lives were devoid of meaning or purpose. Cheery as always, Herr Friedrich.
Whatever be the source of humanity’s unshakeable belief in making new year resolutions, I think it is a commendable pursuit that we should cherish and celebrate. The doggedness with which we plan resolutions every year, blithely ignoring a lifetime of failed attempts strewn in our past, is what makes us human. So don’t let the past failures deter you from making those resolutions this time around. Mathematics dictates that most probably you will fail again, but we cannot let maths stand in the way of progress, can we?
Happy New Year!
This piece of trivia throws new light on Shakespeare’s famous quote (from his play, Henry IV): ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ Vigorous slapping is liable to make anyone’s head feel uneasy.
Historians say that these are the first known instances of people promising to return books they had borrowed, but then shamelessly claiming that they had “lost the book, sorry definitely and most certainly returned it to you, why don’t you check again / never borrowed that book from you at all, why would I lie”.
Although the Julian Calendar’s measurement of the solar year was off by only a few fractions, over centuries it had resulted in a ‘drift’ where the calendar dates did not synchronize with important events, such as the equinox and solstice.
These studies are limited, of course, to first-world countries because frankly speaking, the rest of the world has real problems we need to focus on.