A nephew in Mexico e-mailed me a question concerning Easter. His wife is a school teacher, and her pupils wanted to know why in the U.S. bunnies and colored eggs are associated with Easter.

Most of the Mexican pupils were raised as Catholics and they only know of the alleged crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ in connection with Easter symbolism (Las Pascuas). No bunnies, no Easter Eggs. How did that occur?

My nephew sent the query to me as he knew I was an anthropologist, interested in "weird" traditions of many societies, and had access to many resources. "And", he said, "You have a curious turn of mind."

The query sent me to my library of Mythology and Religion and to www.search.com. By typing in the word "EASTER" I found 234,000,000 references to that festival. What I found was so interesting that I would like to pass it on to my friends.

Easter was not of Christian origin, nor was it originally a Biblical festival, but the Holy Roman Catholic Church had taken ancient customs dealing with the Vernal Equinox and invested them with new symbolism for church liturgy commemorating events of their Christian sacred literature. This is part of syncretism, or the merging of customs and traditions.

I will deal only with the pre-Christian aspects of Easter as there is a vast and complex literature dealing with the Christian aspects, far beyond my competence to document here.

Easter is a small part of the natural processes and events dealing with the rotation of the earth, marked by solstices and equinoxes, and seasons such as winter and spring.

In ancient times people observed that the sun appeared to wane and die in winter, and they held rituals to attempt to bring life back to the sun. In many parts of the world winter is a time for harsh cold, or drought, vegetation does not grow and it is a time of scarcity.

Central to each society was observance of an annual vegetation cycle in which life was renewed each spring and died each fall. People found deep symbolic significance in the natural processes of growth, death, decay, new life and renewal

About 8,000 B.C. in the ancient East people turned to cultivation of the earth. It was vital for agrarian people to sow and harvest crops and be able to store food for the cold or dry season. Thus observation of the seasons became tremendously important, with rituals marking solstices and equinoxes being established in many parts of the world.

There are two equinoxes, which are times when the sun is directly above the equator and the daylight hours are approximately as long as the night-time hours. These are natural events and are of great importance for horticultural or agricultural societies.

The vernal equinox marks the beginning of spring, with the return of light and warmth, budding of trees, growth of vegetation, nesting of birds, and the birth of litters to animals. In many societies this involved not only the sowing of crops but the observance of joyous festivities with food and drink.

In many societies the natural process of growth and decay was linked to supernatural entities that were considered to embody important virtues and aspects. It was common, for instance, to consider the earth as a female deity, and the sun as male, and to propitiate them to insure continued fertility and warmth. . In the Near and Middle East there were several mother or earth deities connected to spring. What we call Easter may come from ancient Babylon and Phoenicia. It may have begun as Beltis, a day honoring the Queen of Heaven, and was later called Ishtar, Astarte, or Easter. Astarte, or Ashtart, was a great goddess of the ancient Near East, chief deity of Tyre, Sidon, and Elath, important Mediterranean seaports.

Astarte's Mesopotamian and Acadian counterpart was Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of love, fertility, nature, sex and war. In Sumerian and Assyria she was called Mylitta and Inanna. Later she became assimilated with the Egyptian deities Isis and Hathor. She was associated with stored food and personified as the goddess of dates, wool, meat, and grain. She was also the goddess of rain and thunderstorms.

Inanna was also a fertility figure, characterized as young, beautiful, and impulsive. She was very popular in the Middle East.

In northern countries spring was referred to as the earth mother, goddess of fertility and rebirth, named Eostre or Ostara (approximately March 21.) Part of her spring rituals were celebrated by the hare or rabbit which gave birth to litters, as symbolic of the renewal of life and fertility.

Birds nesting in the trees give rise to the use of eggs as the symbol of new life. In some societies the eggs are colored, and in the commercial U.S. both rabbits and eggs are made of chocolate.

The Easter egg emanates from the oldest civilizations, where the egg symbol was part of myths of the creation of the world. According to this, heaven and earth were formed from the two halves of a mysterious World-Egg. The Easter egg is associated with this World-Egg, the original germ from which people believed all life proceeds, and whose shell is the firmament. So there is a link between the egg and the ideas or feelings of birth, new life, and creation.

Persians first began using colored eggs to celebrate spring in 3,000 B.C.

Easter eggs have a very long ancestry. In their modern chocolate or cardboard form they date only from the later years of the last century, but giving real eggs, colored or gilded at Easter and also at the pre-Christian spring celebrations are infinitely older.

Easter egg decorating is an Old World tradition that was brought to U.S. shores by Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in the early 1700's.

By the late nineteenth century, a New Jersey druggist, William Townley, had begun selling small packets of Easter egg dye to mothers in his neighborhood. In 1880, Townley founded Townley's Easter Egg Dye to produce and sell the packets for 5 cents each. Townley, whose early customers had been Pennsylvania Dutch, soon changed the company's name to PAAS Dye Company. The word PAAS was derived from the Pennsylvania Dutch word "Passen," meaning Easter.

Eggs were regarded as symbols of continuing life and resurrection. Persians and Greeks exchanged them at spring festivals .as part of seeding ceremonies which held promise of new life

The customs surrounding the celebration of the spring equinox may have been imported from Mediterranean lands, but we know that that the first inhabitants of the British Isles observed it, as evidence from megalithic sites shows.

The Celtic Spring Goddess was Eostra which marked the Spring Equinox. She was pictured wearing green clothing, holding an egg in her hand, with rabbits at her feet, while birds flew above her, and her head crowned with Spring flowers. Hares were sacrificed to her. Some tribes called the Goddess of Spring Esther.

"Easter" is derived from Eastre, Ostrae, or Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon lunar Goddess of spring and dawn and fertility. (From whom we get the name of the female hormone, estrogen).

There is some historical connection existing between the words "Easter" and "East," where the sun rises. The festival was celebrated on the day of the Vernal Equinox, when Anglo-Saxons offered eggs to Eostre.

Eostre, the goddess of spring, was worshipped in northern and central parts of Europe. Her name may come from the word to describe the direction of the sunrise - "east."

Some think the word Easter came from the same source. Every spring people in these regions held festivals to honor and thank Eostre. They offered her cakes that were similar to hot cross buns.

Thus we have Astarte, Ishtar, Ostara, Oestre, Eostre, Eostra, Esther from whom the name "Easter" derives.

By Peter Fredson
www.bellaciao.org