Easter: A Panreligious Swirlie

Easter, in its current incarnation as a popular holiday often perceived as Christian in inclination, consists of a superficially incomprehensible whirling of mismatched symbolic entities: A bunny carrying a basket of eggs, a children's searching game, daffodils, the resurrection of Christ. This archetypal maelstrom can be best appreciated by understanding that it consists of a number of divergent cultural strains that all share a celebration of springtime marked by a solar event – the vernal equinox.

The Vernal Equinox is one of eight significant solar events of the year: The winter and summer solstices, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the four cross-quarters that lie between them (Brigit, Imbolc, Beltane, and Samhuin). At each of these times the Earth passes through a point in its orbit that can be measured with archaeoastronomical instruments such as stone circles or sundials. For human cultures that have depended on natural cycles for sustenance throughout millennia, these occurrences are of great traditional importance, and so feast days tend to cluster about them: Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Idh, even groundhog day (which falls near Brigit), among many others, are commemorations of these events. Since they are so important to so many cultures, symbols from disparate cultural histories tend to converge around these significant calendrical moments.

A currently popular internet meme derives the modern English word “Easter” from the Sumerian fertility goddess Ishtar. I am not aware of any scholarly support for this derivation, however. Philologists tend to derive the modern term “Easter” from a Celtic or Germanic pre-Christian goddess of the same name (see, for example, The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology). Even this derivation is disputed, and some simply derive the name from “East,” the direction from which the Sun rises. Since the Vernal Equinox celebrates the return of the sun from its winter seclusion, and since the V.E. is the first of only two dates of the year on which the sun rises precisely due East, this seems plausible. The internet meem may not be entirely wrong, however, as Ishtar may be linguistically cognate and symbolically syncretistic with the pagan fertility goddess variously renedered “Ostara,” “Eostar,” etc.

The rabbit and egg, both symbols of fertility, are probably correctly associated with the pagan goddess, although one is always dealing with uncertainty when reconstructing pagan thought and symbolism, since the pre-Christian religions were so thoroughly obliterated by the domination of the Roman Catholic Church, whose mission was supported by the full weight of the Roman Empire, which was acutely interested in replacing the matriarchal, naturalist pagan thought system with a patriarchal, militant, and imperial one. But there is more behind the symbolism of the egg than its obvious connotation of new life. The egg is also a potent symbol of druidic knowledge, and Mary Chadwick, in her seminal work on druidism, describes the ritualistic pursuit of the druidic egg as a feature of druidic lore. The quest for the egg, believed to represent secret knowledge (because the hard eggshell hides the mystery of life), may shed some light on the modern popular ritual of the Easter egg hunt. Yet there is another understanding of the symbol of the Easter egg that relates to Jewish tradition.

The Jewish culture celebrates the V.E. with the festival of passover, whose Hebrew name, “Pesach,” gives the Romance language its cognates for Easter (e.g., Spanish “Pascua”). Passover is an exceedingly rich and complex confluence of symbols in itself. But of interest here is that one of the elements of the seder (the traditional passover meal) is a hard-boiled egg. Since this is the only tradition in which an egg that plays a prominent role in the V.E. is boiled to hardness, it is likely that the passover feast is the origin of the modern Easter egg. To understand how a symbol can become degraded from a prominent ingredient of a high holy feast (the hard egg is a traditional food of mourning, and represents the mourning of the loss of the first and second temples), it is necessary to understand that Judaism was as fiercely repressed under the early Catholic Church as was paganism. Both religious cultures were targets of the notorious Inquisition (which was not merely Spanish, but pervasive throughout Europe and the American colonies). Symbols of the religion were repressed by a brutal regime, and became cryptographic. The origins of such symbols were hidden and forgotten, but at the same time cherished and remembered. Such is the contradictory lot of a repressed symbol. The result is a transformation and codification of the symbol that makes it difficult to recognize.

If we accept that Jewish symbols are hidden within the modern Easter celebration, then another aspect of the Easter egg hunt becomes understandable. It is de rigeur in this ritual that the eggs are hidden by adults and searched for by children. This is an unmistakeable parallel with the Jewish tradition of the hiding of the matzah. At passover, parents in Jewish families traditionally hide a piece of matzah somewhere in the house. The children are tasked with finding the hidden matzah. In the Easter egg hunt, we find a distorted image of the Jewish search for the passover matzah, played out by Christian families. This should serve as a reminder of the close historical kinship that exists beween these two cultures, though hidden by centuries of repression.

The Christian religion seems to have no overt symbol in popular Easter ritual, but since its historical documentation records the crucifixion of Jesus as occurring at passover, and the resurrection shortly after, it follows that the resurrection should be celebrated at the time of the V.E. It is possible that the celebration of the resurrection only became a significant part of Christian ritual observance as a deliberate effort to displace the celebration of the Jewish Pesach and the pagan Eostar from popular medieval European consciousness. Such arguments have been made with regard to the Christian celebration of Christmas at a time when biblical historians generally agree that Jesus was unlikely to have been born, but was a significant feast day for pagan religions. But there is another interpretation that may be used to understand the celebration of the resurrection at the V.E. In “King Jesus,” Sir Robert Graves claims parallels between Christian symbolism and ancient worship of a solar deity. The sun “dies” in winter and “returns from death” in spring, so the resurrection that is celebrated may be that of the Solar God.

Thus, at Easter, we see a confluence of perhaps five religious currents: the Sumerian Ishtar, the pagan Eostar/Ostara, the Jewish passover, the Christian resurrection and the resurrection of the Solar God. All of these constellate around a time that is of special significance to all living things: the transition from dormant to vivacious state that is engendered by changes in the solar angle as the earth passes through its timeless orbit. The cycles of nature are embodied in the celebrations of all religions. Thus we have the name from the pagan and perhaps the Sumerian fertility goddess, the rabbit her symbol, the egg that is at the same time a fertility symbol, the druidic egg, and the passover egg, the search for that egg that comes by way of the passover celebration, and the resurrection from Christianity and perhaps a solar Christian precursor. All are viewed through a distorting lens of history, and the images capture both the tragedy of oppression and the victory of remembrance. We may see them as living testaments to the manner in which cultural survival transcends oppression, and coexistence, in some form, is not only possible, but inevitable.

Ostara

Frost on fen
Forest and field
Yield to Eostar's
Sweet breathing
Buds extending
Into the tilting Sun
Of Great Ostara's coming!