Happy New Year To All The “Fools”
Richard Lala April 2026
What’s the best April Fools joke you can recall? I remember one year my Mum, always eager to play a trick, recorded the National Lottery programme…and the next week, having purchased a ticket with last week’s winning numbers, sat back and watched my Dad jumping about with such ecstatic excitement he actually wet himself! You can imagine his face when the truth was dream-crushingly revealed. Hysterical as these hi-jinx are, the most intriguing question is, where did this curious tradition come from?
As April 1st [2026] fast approaches, I am drawn towards the hidden truths of our history. April was long considered the start of the year. I am given confidence that Nature herself confirms that the year truly begins with April. The fresh life of the new Spring Lamb heralded by the Zodiac of Aries, that constellation of new life and pioneering beginnings. April is indeed the natural start of the year, this is obvious in Nature, and obvious in the Heavens, so why on Earth did it all change…and who changed it?
Uncovering the fragments of our altered past and piecing them cohesively together is no obvious task, but if we listen to our intuition and hear the ancestral memory still coursing through the DNA of our blood, we can hear the echoing truth of our distant past speaking deeply within us.
Of course, we’re not just going to rely on instinct, we are going to siphon through the historical accounts to find record of the change. To do this we look back to the Ancient Romans, but first let’s glance at the fifteen hundreds, 1582 to be precise, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar.
Due to its association with Rome, the Church considered, January 1st, a “Pagan” date. So, in 567 AD the Church moved New Year’s Day to Christmas Day. In France, the Council of Tours (medieval Roman Catholic bishops and abbots, responsible for clerical reform and theological doctrine) deemed the Roman dating system, outdated, stating that the Julian Calendar, upon which the Liturgical Church tables were based, had a discrepancy of 11 mins and 14 seconds each year. This led to Pope Gregory the Thirteenth introducing his new, Gregorian Calendar.
Now, this is where it gets technical, so bear with me. It was concluded that the calendar would be revised by eliminating ten days. Keeping the leap day every four years. This adjustment meant that there would be no leap year in years divisible by 100 unless they were also divisible by 400. The new calendar, however, saw the New Year’s Day returned to Emperor Julius Caesar’s original, January 1st date.
So with all their tampering and adjusting, they ended up back where they started! Meanwhile, the oldest practiced religion to date, Hinduism, following the lunisolar calendar, recognises its New Year in April, and gives honour to the season’s natural energy of renewal and agricultural prosperity.
Celebrating the natural path of the Spring Equinox seems wholly logical, just ask any Witch and they’ll tell you, the key focus of this ancient, midway festival between Winter and Summer, decay and flourish, is Rebirth and New Beginnings…all, I think you’ll agree, are better associated with the new year!
Fresh Lamb or not, France, recoiling at Mother Nature’s balanced logic, arrogantly transferred the Christian world over to the Gregorian Calendar, binding New Year’s Day evermore to January 1st. Meaning, of course, that our New Year always starts in the dismal darkness of bleak midwinter. Talk about setting off on the back foot every year! What kind of traumatic start is this? Born in the month of Death, December is no place for the year’s rebirth, but fearing the Church’s torturous wrath, many were reluctant to raise their voice in question or defiance.
This is where the story gets socially interesting because those who refused to acknowledge the date change, and continued to celebrate April 1st as New Year’s Day, were ridiculed, becoming the butt of jokes and hoaxes, and were all tarred with the new derogatory term, ‘April Fools’. Pranks such as having paper fish stuck to their backs, and called “Poisson d’avrill” (April Fish) in reference to gullible people being akin to the young, naive, easily caught fish.
If you ask AI you will hear that, originally there was a thirteen month calendar, aligning with the thirteen moon phases. Thirteen cycles of 28 days making 364 days with one day out of time. It was the Roman Emperor, Julius Caesar, in 46 BCE, who replaced that Lunar Calendar with the Solar ‘Julian Calendar’ and then in 1582, as aforementioned, the Gregorian Calendar replaced that. These changes moved people out of alignment with the sacred harmony of nature and into an altered sequence of mechanical, unnatural time. Shifting our experience from one flowing in harmony with the Divine Lunar phases, to an industrial (tick-tock) capturing of time, hiding the balanced spiral of moon phase cycles behind an illusion of manufactured time.
The question is why did they remove us from synchronicity with the phases of the divine feminine moon? What was the purpose of weakening us with unnatural rhythms? The word ‘month’ actually derives from the word ‘moon’. Google states: “The word "month" originates from the Old English mōnaþ, which comes from Proto-Germanic mēnōþs, both ultimately sharing a root with the word "moon" (mēnô). This reflects the ancient use of lunar cycles to measure time.” So, instead of being fully reliant on the dictates of the calendar, perhaps we should, instead, listen to our body’s intuition and try to get back into the instinctual rhythm of the natural moon cycles?
I feel confident accepting the moon as our natural guide to time, but our sacred ‘night light’ is not the only guide. Our ancestors observed the natural rhythms of the cyclical seasons, those four changes that tell us the most about time’s procession. From the Spring baby, to the Summer King, walking on sticks in the Autumn, and dying in the Winter. These ancestral ways of looking at time illustrate much, but our ancient brethren also looked to the fish and animals for knowledge of time’s flow; everything from the migrating birds to the hibernating bees. Countless creatures have helped mankind observe and keep track of time, but arguably none more assuredly than the “natural timekeepers” themselves…the Turtles, said to be the living embodiment of time itself.
The fossil records suggest Turtles to be millions of years old. It seems they have inspired Man from the beginning. Ancient peoples envisioned the earth to be a disc balanced on the back of a great Turtle swimming through the waves of the cosmos.
What a curious and clever choice of metaphor, simulating the passage of time in such a way as to make perfect sense to those with mind to see it. To understand this you must know that the Turtle shell is comprised of thirteen large plates (scutes), one for each full-moon phase, and twenty-eight smaller sections, like a frill around the trim of the shell’s circumference. These represent the days of the Lunar cycle, the phase of wax and wane between each full-lumination. A complete lunar calendar patterned onto every shell. Perhaps the Turtle’s head represents that one extra day…sticking out, contrary…like April’s clever Fool’s Day?
