According to my downloadable
desktop calender, it's Easter Weekend all weekend this weekend. It
lists all the holidays in every country of the world and I haven't
figured out how to make it stop doing that, so this is what I get to
see:
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| Good Friday. ALL DAY. |
Just so you know, that goes
all the way down the page, until it gets to Sunday, and then it says
“Easter Easter Easter Easter Sultan of Johor's Birthday.” That
one's Malaysian, in case you're wondering.
1) According to the Venerable Bede, a 7th Century Christian scholar and historian known
as the Father of English History, Easter takes its name from the old
English “Eostur-monath” or “Easter month,” named after the
Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess Eostre. Eostur-monath, which corresponds
with the modern month of April, saw various festivals celebrated in
Eostre's honor, along with the exchange of eggs and the baking of
cakes, two traditions shared by numerous pre-Christian cultures. She
was named after the Old English word for spring, “eastre,” and
her symbol was a rabbit.
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| I always wondered about that bunny thing. |
2) Most pagan religions
celebrated a spring equinox holiday featuring a resurrected deity. In
Sumer (modern Iraq) the goddess Ishtar was hung, nude, from a stake
until her death, after which she was resurrected from the underworld.
The ancient gods Horus, Mithras and Dionysus were killed and
resurrected in their respective mythologies. I know lots of people
who like to point out these cross-cultural mythological similarities
as if they're shockingly important (“Look, you guys! Horus was
JEEESUSSSS!”). These people have obviously never heard of an
archetype.
3) Many of early Christianity's
best converts came from religions or cults that had strong springtime
resurrection myths. The Roman cult of the Sol Invictus, or InvincibleSun, appeared near the end of the Roman Empire, probably as a
re-establishment of one of the older sun-worshiping cults. The cult
began in 274 AD, well after the birth of Christ, and continued into
the 5th Century, so long that early church leaders had to
start warning against its dangers. There is some evidence, as
suggested by Roman mosaics depicting the Sol Invictus, that they had him mixed up with Christ a little.
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| Hint: That's not Jesus. |
4) Religious historians believe
that the death and resurrection stories, and ancient pagan
traditions, were added to the story of Jesus's life to help
Christianity compete with other religions when it was still in its
infancy. That's what they say now.
I doubt there was a group of guys sitting around somewhere, 1800
years ago, going, “Man, Christianity just isn't gaining any ground.
What do you think we should do? I know, let's use that egg-laying
rabbit thing. That's good stuff.”
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| "Let's give 'em chocolate, everybody loves chocolate." |
5) According to this website,
the Easter bunny makes it into Christian mythology because Jesus, at
some point, befriended a rabbit. No, I don't remember that being in
the Bible, either.
Legend has it that, from
Black Friday to Easter Sunday, the little rabbit waited for Jesus in
the Garden of Gethsemane, cause I guess they had a date, or
something. Most people would wait
for about half an hour, realize they'd been stood up, and go off in a
huff, but not this little rabbit. It waited faithfully for its friend
Jesus, until, on Sunday morning, the resurrected Christ appeared to
do whatever Jesus Christ did with the pet rabbit I didn't even know
He had.
6) Now,
if you're anything like me, you're still wondering why the Easter
bunny lays eggs. After all, rabbits don't lay eggs. That doesn't even
make sense.
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| This picture is a hoax. ~ Gerbil |
Eggs,
of course, are a fertility symbol, and part of traditional Easter dishes for Catholics who are forbidden to eat eggs during Lent, the
forty days of fasting immediately prior to Easter. During Lent, eggs
that weren't hatched would have been hard-boiled and saved.
The
dyeing and eating of the eggs came to be symbolic with the
resurrection of Christ, with the eggs originally dyed red to
symbolize the blood of Christ, and the cracking of the egg symbolic
of Christ's escape from the tomb. So where does the rabbit come in?
It's
said that the idea of the egg-laying Easter Bunny originated with
German Protestants who wanted to keep the Easter egg tradition, but
ditch the Lenten-fasting tradition. That ultra-reputable website that
gives us the legend of Christ's pet rabbit also gives us a
pre-Christian origin for the Easter bunny myth. Apparently the
goddess Eostre rescued a bird from the freezing winter snows. The
bird was injured and Eostre healed it, out of either compassion or
boredom; it's not entirely clear. In the process, for some
reason, she also turned the bird into a rabbit. Out of respect for
the rabbit's true nature as a bird, Eostre gave it the ability to lay
eggs, but only on one day out of the year. Cause that was easier than just letting it stay a bird in the first place, I guess.
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| Boredom, I vote she did this out of boredom. |
