The modern myth of the Easter bunny

[Steve Hayes]

The modern myth of the Easter bunny

There is no definitive historical evidence that a goddess named Eostre and her
hare companion was part of pagan folklore

Did you know that Easter was originally a pagan festival dedicated to Eostre,
the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, whose consort was a hare, the forerunner of
our Easter bunny? Of course you did. Every year the fecund muck of the
internet bursts forth afresh with cheery did-you-know explanations like this,
setting modern practices in a context of ancient and tragically interrupted
pagan belief.

The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare
companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying
rabbit, aren't historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged
together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.

Only one piece of documentary evidence for Eostre exists: a passing mention in
Bede's The Reckoning of Time. Bede explains that the lunar month of
Eosturmonath "was once called after a goddess... named Eostre, in whose honour
feasts were celebrated."

However, even this may only have been supposition on Bede's part. In the same
section he says the winter festival of Modranecht was so named "because (we
suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night," hardly the statement
of a historian with first-hand information.

Eosturmonath may simply mean "the month of opening", appropriate for a time of
opening buds and arguably a better fit for the rest of the Anglo-Saxon months.
They tended to be named after agricultural or meteorological events, hence
"mud-month" and "blood-month". Only one other month is, according to Bede,
named after a goddess – Hrethmonath – and like Eostre, there is no other
evidence of Hretha anywhere.

Known Anglo-Saxon deities like Woden and Thor are paralleled in Norse and
Germanic pre-Christian religion, but there are no such equivalents to Bede's
Eostre and Hretha, which strengthens the case for them being inventions. Grimm
explored the possibility of a German "Ostara" in Deutsche Mythologie, but in
the absence of any primary evidence, all he could produce was conjecture.
We're also left wondering why, if Eosturmonath really was named after a pagan
goddess, the staunch Christian Charlemagne chose it to replace the old Roman
name of April.

There are no images of Eostre, no carvings, no legends, and no association
with hares, rabbits or eggs. Yet a swift Google search turns up heaps of
repeated Eostre lore. Even the usually formidable Snopes.com allocates Eostre
her customary sacred hare, without any historical justification. So where do
the tales come from?

The answer is found in the recent history of modern self-identified paganism.
Back in the days when Catweazle was on telly, the movement was inchoate,
disparate and in urgent need of roots. It was in the difficult position of
claiming moral heirship from ancient pre-Christian religion, but having very
few credentials to back that up.

Usefully, though, there was already a tendency (stemming from Victorian
anthropology) to imagine repressed pagan roots dangling from anything
sufficiently working class and folksy; and though academia had moved away from
this, pagan revivalism had not. By asserting Christian appropriation of pagan
customs as fact, modern paganism could claim both precedence and wrongful
treatment, citing Pope Gregory's letter as if that settled it.

Pagan origins were thus claimed for everything from Father Christmas to Morris
dancing and the Easter bunny was retroactively recast as Eostre's sacred hare,
grafting a faked pagan provenance on to a creature first mentioned as late as
1682. A Ukranian folk tale about the origins of pysanky, painted eggs, was
rewritten to star Eostre and her bunny. Some still claim Eostre's name is the
root of the word oestrogen, ignoring that human eggs are microscopic and that
the real etymology of oestrogen in fact relates to the gadfly.

Today's self-identified pagans are often happy to correct such
misrepresentations, yet the grudge-laden narrative of jolly fertility
festivals hijacked by Christians persists despite their efforts. One wonders
what this country's pagan Celts would have made of it: occupied and massacred
by the pagan Romans, then displaced by invading pagan Angles and pagan Saxons
who were in turn invaded by the pagan Vikings. Those bloody invasions still
have cultural relevance today, much more so than a manufactured grievance over
stolen bunnies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/23/easter-pagan-roots

http://t.co/PaWSihdL
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk