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On Sun, 16 Apr 2017 20:07:34 GMT,
alt.fan.jai-maharaj@googlegroups.com
(Dr. Jai Maharaj) wrote:
Dr. Jai Maharaj posted:
The pagan roots of Easter
The Guardian
Saturday, April 3, 2010
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/03/easter-pagan-symbolism
The Pagan Origin Of Easter
That article is 7 years old, and has been superseded by this one:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/23/easter-pagan-roots
The modern myth of the Easter bunny
Adrian Bott
There is no definitive historical evidence that a goddess named Eostre
and her hare companion was part of pagan folklore
Easter Bunny statue
People walk past an Easter bunny statue at the entrance of Berlin's
Britz area on Good Friday during the cherry blossom festival.
Photograph: Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Saturday 23 April 2011 15.00 BST
Did you know that Easter was originally a pagan festival dedicated to
Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, whose consort was a hare,
the forerunner of our Easter bunny? Of course you did. Every year the
fecund muck of the internet bursts forth afresh with cheery
did-you-know explanations like this, setting modern practices in a
context of ancient and tragically interrupted pagan belief.
The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and
her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren't historically pagan. They are modern
fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.
Only one piece of documentary evidence for Eostre exists: a passing
mention in Bede's The Reckoning of Time. Bede explains that the lunar
month of Eosturmonath "was once called after a goddess... named
Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated."
However, even this may only have been supposition on Bede's part. In
the same section he says the winter festival of Modranecht was so
named "because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that
night," hardly the statement of a historian with first-hand
information.
Eosturmonath may simply mean "the month of opening", appropriate for a
time of opening buds and arguably a better fit for the rest of the
Anglo-Saxon months. They tended to be named after agricultural or meteorological events, hence "mud-month" and "blood-month". Only one
other month is, according to Bede, named after a goddess – Hrethmonath
– and like Eostre, there is no other evidence of Hretha anywhere.
Known Anglo-Saxon deities like Woden and Thor are paralleled in Norse
and Germanic pre-Christian religion, but there are no such equivalents
to Bede's Eostre and Hretha, which strengthens the case for them being inventions. Grimm explored the possibility of a German "Ostara" in
Deutsche Mythologie, but in the absence of any primary evidence, all
he could produce was conjecture. We're also left wondering why, if
Eosturmonath really was named after a pagan goddess, the staunch
Christian Charlemagne chose it to replace the old Roman name of April.
There are no images of Eostre, no carvings, no legends, and no
association with hares, rabbits or eggs. Yet a swift Google search
turns up heaps of repeated Eostre lore. Even the usually formidable
Snopes.com allocates Eostre her customary sacred hare, without any
historical justification. So where do the tales come from?
The answer is found in the recent history of modern self-identified
paganism. Back in the days when Catweazle was on telly, the movement
was inchoate, disparate and in urgent need of roots. It was in the
difficult position of claiming moral heirship from ancient
pre-Christian religion, but having very few credentials to back that
up.
Usefully, though, there was already a tendency (stemming from
Victorian anthropology) to imagine repressed pagan roots dangling from
anything sufficiently working class and folksy; and though academia
had moved away from this, pagan revivalism had not. By asserting
Christian appropriation of pagan customs as fact, modern paganism
could claim both precedence and wrongful treatment, citing Pope
Gregory's letter as if that settled it.
Pagan origins were thus claimed for everything from Father Christmas
to Morris dancing and the Easter bunny was retroactively recast as
Eostre's sacred hare, grafting a faked pagan provenance on to a
creature first mentioned as late as 1682. A Ukranian folk tale about
the origins of pysanky, painted eggs, was rewritten to star Eostre and
her bunny. Some still claim Eostre's name is the root of the word
oestrogen, ignoring that human eggs are microscopic and that the real
etymology of oestrogen in fact relates to the gadfly.
Today's self-identified pagans are often happy to correct such misrepresentations, yet the grudge-laden narrative of jolly fertility
festivals hijacked by Christians persists despite their efforts. One
wonders what this country's pagan Celts would have made of it:
occupied and massacred by the pagan Romans, then displaced by invading
pagan Angles and pagan Saxons who were in turn invaded by the pagan
Vikings. Those bloody invasions still have cultural relevance today,
much more so than a manufactured grievance over stolen bunnies.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/23/easter-pagan-roots
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