As I'm sure you know, many older festivals were absorbed into Christianity once it became the dominant UK faith. It meant that Yule became Christmas and New Year, for example, and Samhain became All Hallows Eve (Halloween). Meanwhile, Ostara - a festival that celebrates the emergence of Spring, fertility and new life (let's face it, could there be any totems of fertility more obvious than eggs and bunnies?) - became Easter.
But while Christmas and various saints' days have fixed dates, Easter is still determined as the Sunday following the first full moon that happens on or after the Vernal (Spring) Equinox. Isn't that a curious remnant? And Ash Wednesday is always 46 days before Easter so it too moves around. Last year it was March 2nd and next year (2024) it will be February 14th - same day as St Valentine's Day.
A festival of love clashing with a festival of fertility? Oh my.
Ash Wednesday is, of course, the start of Lent which is a period of fasting and penitence for 40 days and nights (excluding Sundays) for Christians. I wonder how many Brits take part any more?
It was interesting to see the recently published results of the 2021 national census which showed that (I think for the first time since records began) more than half of adult Brits - 53% - declared that they have no religion. People who define themselves as Christian now make up just 46.2% of the population (down 13.1% on previous census). Judaism (0.5%) remained static while Islam (6.5%) and Hinduism (1.7%) showed small increases (up 1.6% and 0.2% respectively) which is doubtless due to people migrating to the UK.
What was also interesting to see was an increase of 0.2% of people declaring themselves to be Pagan. It means that Wiccans, Druids and other practitioners now account for 0.6% of the population while, by comparison Jewish people make up just 0.5%. So should Paganism now be taken as seriously as other faiths?
And. if so, will that affect access to sacred sites - such as Stonehenge - which, to Pagans, are as important as a Synagogue is to Jewish people or a Mosque to followers of Islam?
.
Watch this space.
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Percentages can make interpreting data a little confusing, so here are a few notes to clarify numbers:
On Census Day, 21st March 2021, the size of the usual resident population in England and Wales was 59,597,300 (56,489,800 in England and 3,107,500 in Wales); this was the largest population ever recorded through a census in England and Wales.
The population of England and Wales grew by more than 3.5 million (6.3%) since the last census in 2011, when it was 56,075,912.
Of that total 3,868,133 identified as Muslim so the 1.6% increase in the population equates to around 953,500 people.
The number of people identifying as Hindu (1,020,533) went up by around 119,200.
And the number of people identifying as Pagan (357,583) went up by around the same amount as Hindus - 119,200.
Meanwhile the number of people stating that they have no religion stands at 31,586 569 people.
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