A GREAT matter was to be decided at Whitby in Yorkshire in AD 664. King Oswy had been appointed arbiter of a great council to be held at the abbey and, as imagined by Melvyn Bragg in his epic novel Credo, the King began his speech as follows: "If we celebrate festivals at different times then we may fall into error and not be true Christians and may not enter the gates of heaven.
"So we must all do the same thing, not as we do now, some this day, some another day, so that some are fasting while others are feasting, and some have Easter on a Sunday and others any day of the week. Our task is to decide which argument holds true."
Easter takes its name from Eostre, the Teutonic goddess of the dawn whose heathen festival was held around the vernal equinox. Our Christian Easter is related to the Jewish feast of Passover, which in turn commemorates the "great deliverance" - when the destroying angel "passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, and smote the Egyptians". And its significance for Christendom, as we know, is its association with the Resurrection.
The Council of Nicaea in AD 325 decreed that Easter should be celebrated on the first Sunday after the Pascal full moon. But this prescription was by no means universally accepted and we Irish were partly to blame for the squabbles that arose concerning it.
Our monks, who were very influential throughout Scotland and the north of England, had a way of calculating Easter's date that they claimed was authorised by no less a personage than the Apostle John. But it differed from the Roman practice, as decided at Nicaea and favoured by Augustine of the See of Canterbury.
In the end, Oswy and the Council of Whitby predictably leaned toward Rome, and Easter Sunday was firmly settled on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which for these purposes was taken to be always March 21st.
Perhaps because of the connection with the goddess of the dawn, it was once a popular custom to rise very early at Easter, when it was said that the rising sun danced around the sky. When the sun is near the horizon, refraction or "bending" of the light beams by the atmosphere sometimes results in strange optical effects under certain atmospheric conditions the solar orb may take on strange shapes, resembling perhaps a loaf of bread, a mushroom, or even appear to be divided into segments. Such illusions sometimes follow each other in quick succession, so perhaps, with a little imagination, it was not difficult for our ancestors to believe that the early morning Easter sun was, indeed, dancing in the sky.