The Origins of Easter
Coalescing Religions
It is that time of year again. There is chocolate eggs and bunnies in stores, and most people are getting ready for the long weekend. It is Easter! But to whom do we owe this break? Where does it come from? For most Namibians, the answer would be easy — Easter is a Christian holiday. However, just like Christmas, Easter has longer history than the Christian faith that most people do not know about.
“Aha,” you say, “It’s actually a Jewish holiday!” Moreover, you would be partially correct. Nevertheless, even Jewish traditions had to come from somewhere, and the Jewish people were not always of the Jewish faith. What is now known as the Passover ritual actually comes from something even older — apotropaic magic rituals and harvest/rain rituals.
Apotropaic magic (from Greek apotrepein “to ward off” from apo- “away” and trepein “to turn”) was a household ritual that was supposed to ward again evil and turn away the evil eye. In this apotropaic ritual, Hyssop was used to dab the blood of slaughtered sheep on lintels and doorposts, ensuring that demonic forces were kept outside the home.
Then, in the Canaanite religion, the barley harvest was of great significance. However, the rains that made the grains grow during the winter had to stop at just the right time, or the storms would decimate the fields and rot the grains, starving the people. Therefore, the rain god Baal had to be stopped — and every year, the Canaanite god of death Mot needs to kill the god of rain, Baal. Baal then spends the summer in the netherworld before being resurrected in the spring. Thus, Mot kills Baal by eating him, like eating the flesh of a lamb. After the rains have stopped, there was a ceremony made with unleavened bread, to be made as quickly as possible afterwards, while a lamb is eaten without the bones to symbolise Mot’s killing of Baal.
Does that sound familiar? Once the Jewish people coalesced from the various Canaanite tribes, and the Priestly Code was developed, these rituals were incorporated into Passover. It also explains why Passover is at the time of year that the rains stop in the Israel area. With the construction of the Exodus myth, great care was taken to ensure that it would fully replace the previous rituals — a specific warning was inserted into the myth about the dangers of Baal worship to guarantee its replacement.
Hence, the Jewish Passover was born, based on the myth of freedom from Egyptian enslavement. Thus, when Paul the Apostle was developing the Christian Church, he incorporated the Jewish festival of ‘freedom from the Egyptians’ into his nascent faith, as a festival of ‘freedom from sin’, and connected it to the death of Jesus. As a result, it became the foundation of the Christian faith. As Christianity spread, so did the new Passover. In most of the world, that is still what it is called — Pascha, the Greek for Passover.
When it reached Western Europe, however, it found itself replacing another spring festival in honour of the dawn goddess Eostre. Since Pascha was celebrated in the Month of Eostre, it gradually became known as the Eostre festival and from there, Easter, as it is known in English.
What then of the chocolate bunnies and eggs? They seem suspiciously absent from these accounts. Well, the Easter bunny springs from their reputation as prolific breeders, and as such were venerated as fertility symbols. It is popularly believed that the Easter Hare was thus sacred to Eostre, and that is how it came to be associated with Easter, but in fact, it was believed in ancient times to be a hermaphrodite, and as such, could reproduce without loss of virginity, resulting in the early church associating it with the Virgin Mary. With Easter occurring in spring in the northern hemisphere, its association with spring fertility rituals resulted in an easy integration with the early Easter festival.
Originally, the Easter Bunny also served as a sort of judge — similar to Santa Claus — that judged whether children were disobedient during Easter, and originally was depicted as wearing clothes. However, the Easter Bunny is not a worldwide phenomenon. In Australia, the rabbit is considered a national pest, and as such, they use an alternative — the Easter Bilby.
Easter eggs, however, remain a firm Christian invention, despite attempts to link it to Eostre as well. It originally started amongst Christians in Mesopotamia, who dyed their eggs red in memory of the blood of Christ. When the practise of Lent began, Christians were forbidden to eat eggs during Lent, and had consumed all their eggs before that time. However, chickens kept producing eggs during Lent, and to keep them from spoiling they were often boiled. When Lent ended on Easter Sunday, there was thus a surplus of eggs available.
Thus, the cracking open of eggs on Easter was linked to symbolise the empty tomb of Jesus by the church, and a new tradition was born. With the invention of refrigeration, it was no longer necessary to consume all the eggs, and it was linked to the Easter Bunny, who would only bring decorated eggs to good children. As a children’s gift, it should come as no surprise that when Fry & Sons made the first chocolate ones, they were immediately popular, and as such, are now the predominant form Easter eggs take.
Yet perhaps the most famous variant of the Easter egg is the Fabergé eggs. Commissioned originally by the Tsar Alexander III as a gift for his wife, a tradition continued by Tsar Nicolas II, these exquisitely crafted eggs were made from precious metals and decorated with the most expensive of gemstones, these have become symbols of splendour and wealth.
So while we all take some time off this weekend, we should all take some time to reflect on the wide range of cultures and traditions that had to come together to make this long weekend possible. Because the first answer is not always the most correct one, and once you start to scratch the surface of any seemingly simple matter, fascinating details can emerge.
Originally published at theoryofinterest.blogspot.com on April 13, 2017.
