Imagine you're living in a time where there is no standardized calendar, and much of the populace is illiterate anyway. How would you know when was a good time to plant your seeds and breed your livestock? If they just went by when it started to feel warm enough, they risked losing crops because they planted too early and got hit by frost. They didn't have "dates" to know when their average last frost date was, but what they did have was a way to track the sun and moon.
Observation over many, many generations taught them that they had to wait until some time after the equinox, but that planting too early after the equinox would kill their tender seedlings. So how to count how much time they had to let pass after the equinox as an illiterate people with no calendar? By the moon. They basically said, let's wait until after the first full moon after the equinox to plant even our earliest crops. Let's have a big feast to let everybody that can't tell time like this know that it's okay to start planting now, and just to be extra safe, let's have a day of worship where we'll ask the goddess to bless our seeds and our animals and pray for fertility.
When the Catholic church decided to adopt the feast day, they moved the day of Easter to the Sunday after the lunar feast day.
What does the moon have to do with it?
Imagine you're living in a time where there is no standardized calendar, and much of the populace is illiterate anyway. How would you know when was a good time to plant your seeds and breed your livestock? If they just went by when it started to feel warm enough, they risked losing crops because they planted too early and got hit by frost. They didn't have "dates" to know when their average last frost date was, but what they did have was a way to track the sun and moon.
Observation over many, many generations taught them that they had to wait until some time after the equinox, but that planting too early after the equinox would kill their tender seedlings. So how to count how much time they had to let pass after the equinox as an illiterate people with no calendar? By the moon. They basically said, let's wait until after the first full moon after the equinox to plant even our earliest crops. Let's have a big feast to let everybody that can't tell time like this know that it's okay to start planting now, and just to be extra safe, let's have a day of worship where we'll ask the goddess to bless our seeds and our animals and pray for fertility.
When the Catholic church decided to adopt the feast day, they moved the day of Easter to the Sunday after the lunar feast day.