Red Eggs and Rabbits: Is Easter Actually Kinda Pagan?
A special-edition Easter post with fun facts re: 5-ft rabbits, Cadbury eggs, a Fabergé potato, and the origin of the term "Easter egg"
The Cauldron features artful nudes from SF-based photographer and mysterious gentleman Jose de los Reyes. See more of his work on Instagram.
The Cauldron is a monthly publication, but it turns out Easter is on March 31 this year, so you get to enjoy April’s post a little early. Ya welcome, witches. Cheers!
A Moveable Feast
Like Christmas, Easter is a symbolic mishmash. So, how’d we get here?
The Spring Equinox
Easter occurs around the spring equinox, when light and dark claim equal portions of the day. This was a time of celebration and revelry among the old-old religions. Today, many neopagans honor Ostara, a festival of fertility and rebirth (it started on the eve of March 19 this year btw). Supposedly “Ostara” derives from a Germanic fertility goddess called Eostre. But the primary source on Eostre is St. Bede the Venerable, a 6th century historian who took a lot of liberties. Fortunately, contemporary scholars are reexamining the evidence, so stay tuned.
Resurrection
In my post on the gods who die, I outline millenia of mythology where deities are killed and come back, or travel to the underworld and rise again. Unsurprisingly, many ritual god-deaths occur in spring, when seemingly dead flora come back to life. Grief and loss are frequent themes: in one version of a myth from Mesopotamia, the goddess Inanna sends her consort to the underworld. The consort’s devoted sister begs to take his place.
When Persephone is kidnapped, her divine mother’s grief threatens all humanity with starvation. Thus Persephone the maiden grows into Persephone the harvest goddess, who is also, paradoxically, the queen of the underworld.
Odin, the Norse All-Father, hangs upside down from the world tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days and nine nights. With a spear piercing his side, he is near-death. At the end of it, Odin arises with knowledge of the runes, a mystical power he achieves through, as Neil Gaiman puts it, “sacrificing himself to himself.”
Christ’s springtime resurrection also coincidences with Pesach, or Passover, the celebration of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt. (Jewish holidays accord with a lunar calendar, currently set at the year 5784, btw.) Scholars interpret the Last Supper as a Pesach feast.
Portraits of the Virgin Mary alongside a pure white rabbit or hare symbolize her virtue in avoiding sex.
Hare Stories
Lagomorphs are associated with birth and renewal. From the Neolithic to the Iron age in Europe, hares were sometimes ritually buried alongside humans as a symbol of rebirth.
The triple hare is also a widespread symbol. The oldest example comes from a 6th century Buddhist holy site in China. 9th century triple hares have been discovered across Europe—in churches and synagogues—and on artifacts from Syria, Egypt, and Pakistan.
Mythological tales and folktales of trickster rabbits can be found across cultures, including among the Aztecs. According to Aztec Thought and Culture by Miguel León-Portilla, on the Aztec map of the universe, the South is represented by a rabbit “[…] whose next leap, according to the Nahuas, no one can anticipate.”
Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) theorized hares reproduce so fast because they’re hermaphroditic. In reality, these leporids are capable of gestating multiple pregnancies at once.
Many interpret the Easter Bunny as a descendant of Eostre’s companion, or as a new avatar of the Germanic goddess herself, assuming she existed. In any case, the earliest reference to an Easter Bunny-like figure is from Germany in 1572. There are reports of egg hunts from the 1600's, laid out by the “Easter Hare” (“Osterhase” or “Oschter Haws”).
Europeans feasted on hares at Easter in order to scare off soul-sucking witches, who liked to turn themselves into lapins. Bonfires were employed for the same effect.
Egg-cellent Treats (sorry, couldn’t help myself)
The Osterhase came to the US with German immigrants in the 1700s. German-Americans also shared the practice of assembling nests to collect the magical rabbit’s eggs.
The first Easter Bunny confections (made from sugared pastry) appeared in Germany in the 19th century. Chocolate bunnies soon followed, but it was an American in Pennsylvania who stole the show when he crafted a 5-foot tall chocolate rabbit for his drugstore window display. Go big or go home.
The first chocolate eggs popped up around the same time. Initially, these eggs were solid and largely inedible. Then, in 1828, a Dutch chemist named Coenraad van Houten figured out how to separate cocoa butter from cacao. (Dank u wel, Coenraad!) The result was a recipe for creamy, moldable chocolate, which Cadbury perfected in 1866.
The most expensive chocolate egg ever made was the Golden Speckled Egg, crafted by chocolatier William Curley in 2012. It weighed 110 pounds and was sold at a charity auction for $11,107.
The first hollow chocolate Easter eggs were released by a British company in 1873, seventeen years before that giant chocolate bunny appeared in a store front in Pennsylvania. Two years later, Cadbury produced their own version: a dark chocolate egg filled with sugared almonds. Milk chocolate eggs came along in 1905.
In 1923, Cadbury launched the first fondant-filled chocolate egg: the original Cadbury Creme Egg.
In the 19th century, Carl Fabergé designed jeweled eggs for the Russian Czar and Czarina. But did you know Fabergé also crafted a potato?
Egg Magic
Various schools of witchcraft employ eggs for purposes of divination and ritual cleansing. Using eggs to interpret the future is called oomancy, a term coined by ancient Greek soothsayers. Druids also practiced oomancy.
Why the ovo? Well, eggs are potent and mysterious symbols of fertility and eternity: until one hatches, you can never be totally sure what’s inside. An egg might even contain the whole of the universe. The ancient Egyptians believed the world was born from an egg. In fact, the Cosmic World Egg appears in many creation myths, from Finland to Nepal. In the Upanishads, there’s a reference to the act of creation as cracking an egg. There’s also a Chinese myth where the first being emerges from a cosmic egg.
Decorated eggs have a long history—about 60,000 years, in fact. In 2010, some 55,000-65,000 year-old decorated ostrich eggs were found in South Africa. Ostrich eggs were intricately carved by the Romans too. Both the Greeks and the Romans strung up colorful eggs to celebrate the spring equinox. (Egg-quinox?)
A noteworthy shift occurred when early Mesopotamian Christians started dyeing eggs red to symbolize the blood of Christ—hence the red Orthodox egg of today. If you travel to Greece to celebrate Easter, you’ll see lots of red eggs being handed out.
In Europe, the practice of consuming differently colored eggs for Easter began around the 13th century. After fasting for Lent, fatty, protein-rich eggies made a good treat.
You might find red eggs in Persia, too: the Iranian or Persian new year—Nowruz—is celebrated as a 13-day festival beginning on—you guessed it!—the spring equinox. Dating back thousands of years, Nowruz started as a Zoroastrian holiday. Today, some folks celebrate with colored eggs on their altars. Red is still a popular choice.
The modern seder plate also typically includes an (undyed) egg, known as the beitzah, which symbolizes “the cycle of life, the continuous flow between life to death to rebirth, and the springtime renewal of Passover.”
Easter Eggs Inside Easter Eggs Inside Easter Eggs…
There’s no question Easter is a sacred Christian holiday. Acknowledging that practically every element—from resurrection to springtime symbology—has roots in much older traditions, from Nature-based Germanic cults to early Judaism, in no way diminishes the legitimacy or importance of Easter.
Yet our culture often views Christian practices as set apart from other faiths, particularly polytheistic religions, both old school and new. For example, in my research for this post, I came across a few Christian blogs that labelled claims to Easter’s pagan ancestry as “anti-Catholic.” The blog I linked to above offers the following advice: “Whenever you are confronted with claims that some element of Catholic customs or practice were ‘borrowed’ from ancient pagan religions, you can rest easy knowing that most of these are based on speculation, or on dated or shoddy scholarship.”
To argue Easter’s eggs and rabbits exist in a cosmic vacuum is kind of absurd. All holidays have history (most of it amalgamated), and none need to prove their legitimacy; they’re legit because they’re meaningful to us. Instead, from the POV of this witch-nerd, our understanding of our religious rituals is enhanced by further historical, theological, and anthropological study, even when it’s theoretical.