Happy Easter, everybody!
It's time for bunnies, egg hunts, and everyone's best buddy, big J.
Not the most obviously themed subject matter, but it's a fun way to spend a Sunday,
and it puts interestingly-shaped chocolate back on the shelves after the Valentine' supply runs out,
so I've got no complaints.
Now, Easter is a complicated holiday.
At its heart, the modern celebration is about one thing and one thing only:
~Jesus~ *angelic choir*
Specifically, how he rose from the grave three days after getting crucified like, "Whoa."
The first bit of confusion comes to us straight from Greece, where Easter is called Pascha,
which is cognate with Pesach: Jewish Passover of all things.
For those unfamiliar, Passover is the celebration of the Jewish exodus from Egypt,
which you may note, has very little to do with Jesus and the resurrection thereof.
So while you might think this is a classic case of holiday hijacking
(like how Christmas may be bumped off Saturnalia to take its place as the go-to winter celebration of the year),
there's actually a legit reason for why Passover and Easter are connected
and it all starts with the Last Supper.
See. the synoptic Gospels explicitly state that the Last Supper is a Passover meal.
Now, this isn't a universally held belief.
The Gospel of John puts the Passover dinner as happening a few hours after Big J kicks it,
but in a lot of the source material, the big important Last Supper is itself a Passover celebration
(albeit given additional significance by Jesus equating body to the matzah and his blood to the wine).
This means that Jesus rising from the grave canonically has to happen mere days after Passover.
So while the events being celebrated are completely distinct,
they're also inextricably connected just by virtue of the timeline of events.
The celebration of Easter also has very little in common with the traditional passover, Seder
which is another major clue that they're not actually sourced from the same thing.
But this does pose the question: "Where does all the iconic Easter stuff come from?"
The eggs, the rabbits, the pastels?
Well, Easter eggs *as* Easter eggs seem to have originated in Mesopotamia,
where early Christians dyed eggs red to symbolize the blood of Christ.
But the practice of decorating eggs in spring celebrations is at least 60,000 years old.
Engraved ostrich eggs dating back about that far have been found in Africa.
At some point, Easter eggs were specifically assigned the symbolism of representing the empty tomb,
and Easter egg hunts were apparently invented by Martin Luther,
but eggs had been associated with spring celebrations for a lot longer than that.
One contributing factor for the egg thing might be that eggs have been symbolically linked with life and rebirth for a long time.
All themes relevant to spring celebrations of all stripes.
And on a similar note, hares were also generalized fertility symbols with themes of rebirth,
and were sometimes thought to be capable of asexual reproduction (aka virgin birth).
And a holiday celebrating a resurrection would most likely have a pretty easy time synchronizing with
pre-established symbols of life, rebirth, and even fertility as a whole.
This could explain why eggs and hares are iconic symbols of a holiday that
practically speaking, has almost nothing to do with either of them.
The figure of the Easter Bunny specifically originates with German Lutherans,
assigning it a Santa-like role of judging the niceness of kids to determine who gets candy and colored eggs for the holiday.
Doesn't seem like anyone knows why it exists, but these things happen, I guess.
Of course, beyond simple symbolic practicality or random cultural happenstance,
there's another possible source for all these weird, un-Jesus-y symbols all up in our good Christian holiday,
and that's good old-fashioned Paganism.
So let's talk about Ēostre, also known as Ostara.
So in the 8th century, this monk named Bede wrote a treatise where he said that pagan Anglo-saxons
used to celebrate the goddess Ēostre by holding festivals in April,
but by the time of his writing, these celebrations had been superceded by more familiar Easter celebrations
specifically about the resurrection.
He says the pagan origin of the celebration is why the holiday is called Easter in the first place.
Ēostre is not referenced by that name anywhere else, which led some people to wonder if Bede made the whole thing up.
Although as of 1958, a large number of 2nd century vocative inscriptions have been discovered in Germany,
all directed to the Matronae Austriahenae,
which has been etymologically linked with Ēostre, presenting evidence of an Ēostre-like goddess or set of goddesses having been worshipped
in about the right time place to corroborate Bede's original claim.
Bede didn't say anything about hares or eggs being symbols of Ēostre, which is frustrating,
because he's the only real source we have on pre-Jesus Easter celebrations.
There's a supposed folk tale of Ēostre transforming a bird into an egg-laying hare,
but this folktale is first cited in the 1990s and doesn't seem to have any credible basis before that.
There is, however, an actually possible connection between Ēostre and the symbolism of hares,
which - hear me out - only sounds sort of like a conspiracy theory.
*inhale*
To start with, Ēostre was most likely a version of the proto-indo-european dawn goddess Hausos,
a figure reconstructed by comparative mythology scholars drawing connections between similar
indo-european deities with etymologically similar names to try and reproduce the original religion that spawned them all.
This reconstructed proto-indo-european religion is basically supposed to be the OG religion that strongly affected the ones that came after it.
So, Hausos is generally considered to have been the starting point for a large number of goddesses affiliated with
the dawn, the spring, fertility, and other stuff in that general vein,
including Eos, Ushas, Aurore and Austrine.
Due to the propensity of the more fertility-oriented of these goddesses to wind up getting kidnapped,
with their rescue being symbolic for the coming of spring in the return of life to the world,
the theory is that Hausos probably had a myth with that general structure.
Now.
One of the goddesses thought to be an offshoot of Hausos is Aphrodite,
whose name might even etymologically imply a possible origin as a dawn goddess.
One translation is "She who shines through the foam".
Anyway, Aphrodite had a sacred animal and that animal was a hare (connected again due to their fertility).
So, that's a possible connection.
Ēostre, or maybe even the original Hausos, might have had an affiliation with hares that carried over to Aphrodite.
...Maybe.
Look, we really don't have a lot to go on with this holiday.
There's got to be something connecting it, but information gets lost all the time.
We don't really know for certain what all might be connected to the traditional celebrations or why people drew the connections they did.
One thing we know Easter *isn't* connected to is Ishtar.
This claim, you've probably seen circulated on Facebook every year since 2013, originated in the 1800s
when this Scottish theologian Alexander Hislop wrote a religious pamphlet that amounted to a conspiracy theory
claiming that the Catholic Church was a thinly veiled continuation of ancient Babylonian pagan worship.
He claimed that Easter and Ishtar were connected on the basis that they sounded kind of the same
which is the kind of reasoning that makes modern etymologists weep as they envision a terrible future where puns are regarded as ironclad gospel.
And while it's true that Ishtar did have a celebration on the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox celebrating her return from the underworld,
there's no evidence that this celebration influenced Easter directly or indirectly.
Spring festivals with a theme of rebirth are kind of a worldwide phenomenon, for fairly self-explanatory reasons.
One of Hislop's accompanying claims was that eggs were sacred to Ishtar, which just straight-up isn't true.
Ishtar's symbols included lions and doves, but no bunnies or eggs.
In short,
Nope.
Not even a little bit.
It's still a mysteryyy
So the next time you wonder why you celebrate the Resurrection by
microwaving marshmallow peeps and spilling chocolate all over your Sunday best, keep wondering.
The past is another country with extremely poor documetation and sometimes the answer isn't just a Google away.
Besides, life's more fun if not everything makes sense.
*Guitar* I've heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
bringing something we must learn, and we are led
To those who help us most to grow, if we let them
And we help them in return.
Well, I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today because I knew you.
Like a comet pulled from orbit as it passes a Sun,
Like a stream that meets a boulder halfway through the wood.
Who can say if I've been changed for the better,
but
Because I knew you, I have been changed
for good.