Easter, Eostre, Eostarum and The Art of Appropriating Ancient Traditions

This Easter weekend, around the world, children are rushing about searching for eggs, be they real painted hard-boiled eggs or chocolate treats. There may be presents, a fine lunch, time with family and religious observances. Easter is a faint simulacrum of Christmas without the tree and lights. Somehow a bunny (or hare) brings eggs, which doesn’t make much sense at all when you really think about it. 

Like many traditions, Easter isn’t a single thing created out of whole cloth. Instead, our modern incarnation is a multi-layered tradition that has incorporated significant ancient festivals, beliefs, symbols and activities. Easter is a perfect example of how newer mythologies are built from the ideas of old. 

There are multiple stories that form the backbone of Easter. The most repeated theory is that Easter comes from the word ‘Eostre’, who was an ancient Anglo-Saxon pagan goddess responsible for harvests and other spring rights. This the attribution for this origin comes from the Venerable Bede, historian of ancient Northumbria and author of “Ecclesiastical History of the English People.” In one of Eostre’s stories, she saves the life of a bird, by turning it into a hare. Partway through this transformation, the bird / hare offers her a gift; an egg. 

The egg is a powerful and far more ancient symbol than Easter provides for. The ancient Egyptians considered the egg symbolised the sun as life springs forth both from the rays of the sun and from within an egg. Ancient Persians dyed eggs and exchanged them as gifts. They were symbols of life and rebirth. 

The hot cross bun - a traditional English desert with spices, fruits and a bold icing cross - likely comes from a long tradition of making spiced and sweet buns on festival days; a tradition that stretches all the way back to the Middle East. Early Christian conversionists were probably faced with the challenge of trying to remove the tradition, versus adopting it with new meaning. Protestant England actually attempted to hot cross buns all together, along with many other Catholic symbols and representations. The famous poem or calling song might have been heard at markets in London and beyond, with bakers calling out their wares: 

Hot-cross buns! Hot-cross buns! One a penny, two a penny, Hot-cross buns! If you have no daughters, Give them to your sons; One a penny, two a penny, Hot-cross buns!

Another possible origin of the word ’Easter’ comes from the old German “Eostarum” (which means ‘dawn’), which in turn came from the Latin ”Alba.” Again, this reference to spring highlights a link to the traditional placement of Easter in Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. The Germans probably have a lot to do with the modern Easter tradition making its way across the Atlantic to the Americas, after all the first reference to the ‘Easter Bunny’ appears in a Germanic text in 1572 AD. 

The pagan observances weren’t the only mythologies to take over older stories. In Christian tradition, Easter celebrates the death and resurrection of Christ. However, links can be drawn to a far more ancient goddess, Ishtar, with a death on a stake and rebirth in the underworld that forms part of her crucial origin story. 

Hot cross buns and chocolate eggs might be popular in English countries, but in research conducted in Romania showed that parents were gradually shifting their gift giving to a more substantial array of gifts, including clothing, footwear, books and technology. There may even be a health dimension driving a shift away from sweet and savoury treats. If this is mirrored elsewhere, then it is an interesting shift in how the holiday might be associated more with generalised gift-gifting then its original religious observance. 

After all, even the stories we tell about Easter are changing. Over time, many of the movies about Easter seem to focus more on the Easter Bunny itself. Movies like “Hop” and “Legends of the Guardians” both make the bunny a central character independent of any association to spring crop or fertility rites or religious observance. The symbols might remain, like the egg, but the more ancient undertones fall away. 

There is a deep power that comes from taking a piece of an older idea and using it in a new one. It gives the new idea ‘cultural standing.’ It makes it seem both exciting but also familiar. In some ways it’s just easier to get people to act mostly in the same way under a new label. In time, with enough practice, their original beliefs fall away. 

I’d love to invent an entirely new interpretation of the Easter holiday, one that celebrates the duality of birth and death; Spring and Autumn. For half the globe - those in the Northern Hemisphere - spring is just starting and new life is springing from the Earth. For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the natural world is winding through Autumn down towards Winter. That might feel more interesting and relevant than the more commercial elements of modern Easter, which clearly has been tightly yoked to the sale of candy. 

Mythology is just like that, an endless cycle of appropriation and reinterpretation. The historian, linguist and mythologist Thomas A. Shippey calls it the ‘House of Heroes,’ a vast and infinite place where new ‘stories’ (both literal and metaphorical) are build on top of the foundations of old. New rooms are added with new things inside each room as new interpretations are folded in to accomodate the trends of the time. Shippey uses this framework to describe how heroic stories are retold, but I wonder if it has a more general purpose application to myths in general. That’s probably why I’m so sanguine about traditions that get flexed, bent and sometimes changed entirely. It keeps our society and culture dynamic. I might go lightly on the chocolate eggs, but I’m happy to have a moment to think larger thoughts about our movement through the seasons and our place in the world. 

Happy Easter. 

References

Bellis, Mary (2017) The Origins of Easter Celebrations. Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.thoughtco.com/origins-of-easter-celebrations-1991607 

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia (2020) St. Bede the Venerable. Encyclopedia Britannica, Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Bede-the-Venerable.

Hillerbrand, Hans J (2021) Easter. Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Mar. 2021, Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Easter-holiday 

Gillan, Joanna (2019) The Ancient Pagan Origins of Easter. Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/ancient-pagan-origins-easter-001571 

Lupua, Daciana. Laurengiua, Andreea Ramona. Norel, Mariana. (2012) What the Easter bunny will bring? Parents preferences when offering Easter presents Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 33 (2012) 974 – 978 

McDougall, Heather (2010) The pagan roots of Easter. Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/03/easter-pagan-symbolism 

Rose, Phil Fox (2013) The not-so-Christian roots of hot cross buns — with a recipe. Retrieved April 2021, from: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/philfoxrose/2013/03/the-not-so-christian-roots-of-hot-cross-buns-with-a-recipe/

Jumping Bunny Photo by Neonbrand on Unsplash.