When I was a kid, Easter meant three things: chocolate, church and getting to wear a pretty dress. Usually my mom would make biscuits and gravy for breakfast and I would eye my Easter basket, dying to unwrap the phosphorescent pink wrapping and gorge myself on jellybeans. Alas, I would always have to wait until after church. After a longwinded sermon about “what Easter is really about,” I could finally get down to business. I could tear into my basket full of coloring books and stuffed bunnies and chocolate Cadbury eggs. If Easter was really JUST about Jesus, he had plenty of opportunities to prove it, but I never saw any religious effigies in the cream filling. When I was really young, my mom would hide plastic eggs in the yard for me and my friends to hunt. We would, of course, always dye real ones. Even now, the smell of white vinegar evokes the same nostalgia as Christmas cookies. And yes, I would go see the Easter bunny when he came to the mall.
What do bunnies and colored eggs have to do with the resurrection of Christ? Absolutely nothing. It seems to me that God must hate holidays and not want Christians to have any, because every time they invent one, it seems like the damn Pagans already got to it first. That is because Easter originated in Babylon, eggs and bunnies and all.
Bab•y•lon
–noun
1. an ancient city of SW Asia, on the Euphrates River, famed for its magnificence and culture: capital of Babylonia and later of the Chaldean empire.
2. any rich and magnificent city believed to be a place of excessive luxury and wickedness.
Bab•y•lon•ian
1. describing anything unspeakably evil, ungodly and pagan, including Cadbury eggs, Christmas trees, Harry Potter and possibly even kittens and cupcakes (research pending).
Now, I know what you’re thinking. After all, I went to Christian school—for nine years! Babylonians, according to my memory, were all prostitutes and thieves (every last one of them!)– shouldn’t they have celebrated their holidays with bloody sacrifices or raping virgins? (You know, like the Israelites.) Am I to believe that they celebrated their goddess with bunnies?? It all just doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should have kept femacentric religion around. Then again, if America were a pagan country, we might be celebrating the 4th of July with cute animals and chocolate instead of explosives.
If you really care about the Pagan roots of Easter, twisted and poorly researched by some raving Evangelical nut, just go to Google. Really, there are literally thousands of people who are DYING to tell you how evil holidays are. Easter's heritage, like all holidays, is a conglomeration of different cultural practices that have been exchanged and adjusted over many generations. It is usually traced back to the Anglo Saxon goddess Eostre, a feast for whom was had in the spring (celebrated with hares and eggs). Obviously spring is a time that has represented fertility and life as long as people have been on the planet. Almost every culture in history has a tradition of some sort of fertility celebration (except Christian who prefer their births to be of virgin conception), almost exclusively occurring in the spring. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was a goddess who is believed to an evolution of Hathor and Isis. Her tradition is that every year at the end of the lunar cycle an egg would fall from the sky near the Euphrates river and she would be reborn. The person who found her egg would be bestowed with a special gift. Hence, the beginning of Easter eggs. Supposedly there’s more to do with Ishtar regarding her connection to rabbits, ham and even hot cross buns, but I don’t really care enough to waste time doing the research to find out. Ironically, the first council of Nicea of the Roman Catholic church decided to establish Easter according to the lunar calendar at the vernal equinox. They also (ironically) scandalize the Ishtar tradition for claiming to have a virgin birth. Damn it, are you as confused as I am?
So as you can see, Easter is a pagan holiday. That’s all there is to it. It’s as pagan as a maypole dance, pagan as dancing naked under the full moon and burning sage and sipping a toasty stinging nettles infusion whilst jotting incantations in your handmade Book of Shadows.
I don’t consider myself a pagan but I can certainly appreciate their contribution to the creation of the sacred and mystical Cadbury egg. And really, what is it with Christians getting so uppity about holidays with "pagan" roots. Everything pre-Christian was pagan. That means dinosaurs are pagan! Pagan dinosaurs! It boggles the mind.
The Church has an extensive history of stealing pagan holidays and then getting pissed off about them being pagan. If they want a non pagan holiday so bad, maybe they should start making chocolate Messiahs and selling them at Wal Mart. I mean, clearly chocolate is the primary reason anyone even cares about holidays anyway. Until there is a chocolate pope or cream-filled Pat Roberts that I can gnaw the head off of, I will continue to support Easter in all of it's pagan glory.
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