This page groups holidays by the kind of calendar that sets their date. Wikipedia notes that "religious festivals are commonly celebrated on recurring cycles in a calendar year or lunar calendar." Browsing by calendar system lets a visitor find every holiday fixed by the same kind of calendar.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingDays a tradition's calendar sets apart - feasts, fasts, festivals, high holy days and lesser observances - each reckoned in the calendar of the tradition that keeps it. Those calendars are lunar, lunisolar, sidereal-solar or tropical-solar and none is the civil Gregorian year, so a date fixed in its own reckoning moves against the civil calendar year by year. 1 Learn More
The Festivals and Holy Days
This category holds the festivals and holy days of the religious calendars: fixed and movable feasts, fasts, new years, solstice and equinox observances, and commemorations of events and figures. Each entry records the tradition, the calendar by which the date is reckoned, and what the day marks.
Holy days give a religion its year, a repeating cycle of remembrance and renewal that structures communal life. Some commemorate an event held to be historical or mythic; others mark a turn of the season or the calendar; others are set aside for fasting, penitence or joy.
Reckoning the Date
Because traditions use different calendars, the same festival can fall on different dates from year to year, and movable feasts (Easter, the Islamic festivals, the Hindu festivals set by lunar dates), shift against the civil calendar in ways the entries explain. The reckoning of dates is itself part of a festival's character, tying it to the calendars gathered elsewhere in the atlas.
The holidays group by kind (feasts, fasts, festivals, high holy days and observances), so a reader can compare, for instance, the major fasts of several traditions together.
Ancient Egyptian civil calendar (365 days, no leap day)
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Sources
1. The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning
Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford University Press, 1999Part II: Calendars and ChronologyView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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