As you read this, you’re no doubt enjoying the Easter holiday. Along with Christmas, it is one of the great religious holidays of the Western world, even if, in this era so hostile to Christianity, its religiosity is often swamped by commercialism and just the chance for a few days off. But, where Christmas was long a relatively minor event on the Christian calendar, Easter has long been one of the holiest and venerated days in Christendom.
It commemorates, after all, the foundational event of Christianity, to the believers, and perhaps the most significant events in human history. The crucifixion of the Son of God, ‘the author of life’ in St Peter’s words, in atonement for the sins of all humanity, followed by His resurrection from the dead. On that day, Christians believe, death itself was defeated: “All who believe in me”, Jesus promised, “will live, even though they die.”
This was an even so significant that the Jewish early Christians changed their own holy day. Instead of the Jewish Sabbath on Saturday, Christians adopted Sunday, traditionally the day of the Resurrection, as the new Sabbath.
The earliest recorded observation of Easter was in the 2nd century, although celebration of the Resurrection would almost certainly have been a big deal in early Christianity before that. Fixing a date for Easter Sunday, though, took some time. Even today, the Orthodox church of Eastern Christianity, which still uses the Julian calendar, celebrates it on a different day to Western Christians.
Like the Jewish Passover festival to which it is linked, Easter is a lunar festival: by the fourth century, it was agreed that Easter would be the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Where does the name Easter come from? Contrary to a million internet memes, it probably didn’t originate with a supposed pagan goddess called ‘Eostre’. The sole source for that claim, after all, is an eighth-century English chronicler, the monk Venerable Bede.
This view presumes – as does the view associating the origin of Christmas on December 25 with pagan celebrations of the winter solstice – that Christians appropriated pagan names and holidays for their highest festivals. Given the determination with which Christians combated all forms of paganism (the belief in multiple deities), this appears a rather dubious presumption. There is now widespread consensus that the word derives from the Christian designation of Easter week as in albis, a Latin phrase that was understood as the plural of alba (“dawn”) and became eostarum in Old High German, the precursor of the modern German and English term. The Latin and Greek Pascha (“Passover”) provides the root for Pâques, the French word for Easter.
As the promise of eternal life, Easter Sunday is naturally, for Christians, a joyful day. But what about Good Friday? This was, after all, the day on which Jesus was condemned, humiliated, tortured and put to death with slow cruelty. Even Jesus was moved to cry in pain, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) What was ‘good’ about that?
In Old English, ‘god’ meant ‘good’. This lent itself to what may almost be described as religious puns: gospel: literally ‘good news’, but also taken to mean ‘god’s story’.
The earliest-known use of “goude friday” comes from c1300, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It is not a day of celebration, like Easter Sunday, but a solemn time of reflection. In Germany, the day is known as Karfreitag (Sorrowful Friday).
In Christianity, however, the meaning of ‘good’ has been reinterpreted so that Good Friday can indeed be held as a good day. It was when Christ made his ultimate sacrifice for all people, dying for their sins so that they can achieve forgiveness and find eternal peace in Heaven.
The sorrow of Good Friday is also short-lived, with Christ’s victory over death on Easter Sunday. The day of the crucifixion can therefore signal the deliverance of good over evil.
So, where does all the stuff about bunnies and eggs come from?
The use of painted and decorated Easter eggs was first recorded in the 13th century. The church prohibited the eating of eggs during Holy Week, but chickens continued to lay eggs during that week, and the notion of specially identifying those as “Holy Week” eggs brought about their decoration. The egg itself became a symbol of the Resurrection. Just as Jesus rose from the tomb, the egg symbolizes new life emerging from the eggshell. In the Orthodox tradition eggs are painted red to symbolize the blood Jesus shed on the cross.
The custom of associating a rabbit or bunny with Easter arose in Protestant areas in Europe in the 17th century but did not become common until the 19th century.
In Europe, in fact, the Easter Bunny is the Easter Hare. Hares have long had religious symbolism in Europe, going back to the Neolithic, where they were given ritual burials alongside humans. Archaeologists believe that the famously procreative creatures were associated with rebirth. In Classical Greece, hares were sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Her son Eros, the spirit of sexual desire, was often depicted carrying a hare.
But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.
Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare, particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter.
When millions of German immigrants flooded into the United States in the 19th century, they brought the tradition of the Osterhase, the Easter Hare, with them. And thus the beloved Easter Bunny, bringer of chocolate, was eventually born.
