Easter, Jesus... and Bunnies?
An idea is able to gain and retain the aura of essential truth through telling and retelling. This process endows a cherished notion with more veracity than a library of facts… [D]ocumentation plays only a small role in contrast to the act of re-confirmation by each generation of scholars. In addition, the further removed one gets from the period in question, the greater is the strength of conviction. Initial incredulousness is soon converted into belief in a probability and eventually smug assurance.
William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, as quoted in Barbara Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
No holiday reminds me of the systematic, patriarchal takeover of the religious imagination more than Easter. Of the whole liturgical calendar, no holy day is more un-Christian. It’s right there on the face of it. The moon-faced hare, that is.
People didn’t always look up and see a man in the moon. For eons, they saw a moon-faced hare, sacred to the god who lays the Golden Egg of Creation, the world egg which contains the whole universe in embryo. First, the divine feminine brought forth the World Egg (the moon) and fixed it to the Mother’s womb - the night sky. Heaven and Earth are in the two halves of the shell. In spring, world cultures celebrated their fertility god, whether they called her Eostre, Astarte, Ishtar, or a host of other names. The mythic first cause of the divine feminine is birth, the opposite of the masculine god’s, which is the word.
So, if the crucifixion happened during Passover (and that’s a pretty big if), the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan, that explains why we celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the full moon which follows the vernal equinox. Wait, what? What connection does the fertility god, Eostre, have with Passover? None. Rabbits and eggs both come from the moon, and Eostre is much older than Jesus.
Just an aside here. Sometimes I wonder about the narcissism of a god who needed to be the only god so much that he changed his name by capitalizing the word god - as if that would make him more powerful than the other, lower-case gods. Really. That’s not his original name. The other gods didn’t go anywhere because of a change in the conventions of grammar.
The mythologizing goes:
European people just refused to let Eostre go, so the upgraded Christian celebration merged with hers in a process called syncretization. But the Christian holiday is the real one. You knew that, right? If you repeat a story often enough, it becomes true. You know that, too, if you watch the news.
Easter moves around the calendar because it is an ancient festival, based on the lunar calendar, pre-Julian and pre-Gregorian. If so much about Easter feels erratic, the lunar calendar is partly why.
The older lunar calendar was based on the creator-god’s menstrual cycle, which influences the ebb and flow of the tides and controls the wise blood of women. Naturally, the phases of the moon determined the holidays. Theirs was a night-based reality, which explains why the magic of holidays happened on the eve before. Like germination, Creation takes place in the dark of the mother’s womb (and when we are sleeping). We used to have respect for all things dark. Their calendar contained thirteen 28-day months, which consisted of four seven-day weeks. That yielded 364 days, which is why we say a year and a day. Women invented calendars because they had something to keep track of. Then men usurped them, imposing the idea that the sun was in charge, and shifted us to a day-based reality. Sound familiar?
Most of my working life as a high school teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I’ve had the week before Easter off for spring break. Once in a while, a kiddo will ask me why spring break moves around, when what they mean is: Why isn’t Easter a set date? Easter and the holidays that depend upon it are the only Christian holidays that are still movable feasts. When I explain that Easter is so much older than Christianity, its date is determined astrologically by the lunar calendar, they blink - the first sign of cognitive dissonance. It blows their minds that any real holiday could be older than Christianity. Didn’t time itself start with the birth of Jesus? Then you can see the smart ones put pieces together. Wait. There’s a calendar older than the one we use? Sometimes, if the dissonance lasts long enough for them to look into my eyes, I’ll ask: “Ever wonder what eggs and bunnies have to do with the resurrection of Jesus?”
Then, their eyes go wide. They’ve never thought about it before, but now that I mention it, why do they? My whole childhood, like theirs, was spent celebrating Easter with eggs and bunnies. Yet, no one I knew ever wondered aloud: What does the resurrection of Jesus have to do with eggs and bunnies? Rabbits and their fertility, like eggs, were associated with the divine feminine - the first cause. A rabbit is called a cunny, and a warren is called a cunnery. It makes me want to say with Hamlet: Get thee to a cunnery!
The forces of monotheistic patriarchal Christianity would love you to continue glossing over the history here, as Christian scholars and translators did for centuries. They’d want you to accept that the father god is the only god. They’d brush their hands together and tell you that men are naturally in charge. (I know. There’s a corollary: the world is unsafe because men are in charge.) The patriarchal order (the Great Chain of Being) is a natural response to a dangerous world. Of course, men are in charge! It’s just… obvious they should be. I mean… men are physically stronger. Plus, God is male. In every culture on Earth, men are in charge and have been forever, right?
Except it isn’t, and they haven’t been. Many cultures were and remain matrilineal and matrilocal. It’s well documented that Europe used to be. People hung on to their mother god, because they loved her.
Instead of Easter bunnies and red eggs, this Easter, I want you to think about the process of mythologizing, the ways the church, run by men, perpetrated patriarchy upon us, as a usurpation, and the way the right is using the same method of mythologizing (repeat, repeat, repeat) to perpetrate a coup upon our government. They aren’t much different.
I chose William Arens’ quote above because it shows how ancient, modern, and personal myths inhabit our consciousness through repetition. Bear in mind that his book was published in 1979, well before the current political crisis, Human beings are so attuned to story, we should be called Homo Mythologica.
The mythologizing of Donald Trump as the archetypal strongman, on its face, would be laughable, except it’s causing so much harm. Many of his devotees believe that their god sent their prez specifically to smite liberals. Of course, their god could just smite us himself. He has a long history of smiting. Instead, they fling curses at a mirror, a reflective surface that causes the curse to bounce right back to the caster. Any witch worth their salt could tell them that. If they hadn’t hung so many witches, those good people might be willing to explain the physics behind the phenomenon.
On a personal level, if you’ve ever obsessively run the story “I’m Not Good Enough” on repeat, you know how the repetition itself causes decisions that make the story true. In this way, myths generate their own proof. But if you’ve ever seen through the myth called, Not Good Enough, you can never be a full believer again, and there’s a good chance you’ll let it go as an operating principle. The same is true of god stories.
Our religious myths aren’t factual, which is why the search for Historical Jesus (which always reminds me of Malibu Barbie) is rather sad and smacks of desperation. Myths are potent metaphors and symbols, all the more powerful because they aren’t literal. Robert Frost said it best: “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you aren’t safe to be let loose in the world.” Religious myths speak to us on a metaphoric level. That’s why a good religious myth can be a valuable operating principle, while a bad one, such as monotheistic patriarchy (especially when merged with economic systems such as capitalism), is devastating.
Repeat, repeat, repeat is also the modus operandi of political echo chambers. It explains why so many people vote against their interests, thinking they are doing the opposite. And if you add a veneer of numinous fervor (which rises from the deep unconscious like a great while whale wherever two or more are gathered - think: rally), you can convince people to flog themselves while flinging curses at the mirror. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Some will wake up, and others will continue to curse themselves. The ones who wake up, though, will be angry enough to save a world.
Happy Easter
I’d love to know what you think. Please leave a comment below.
my subconscious has really been churning on the patriarchy lately. it's a house that's eating itself
I love reading about how organized religion has fed us so much patriarchal stuff -- brainwashing. This is the first I've ever known where all the bunnies come from on this Christian holiday. It was only recently that I learned the myth of crucifixion/execution of a spiritual leader with his/her subsequent resurrection is based on myths (Egyptian, Hindu?, etc.) a lot older than the Jesus story. That said--I believe everyone has the right to believe whatever religion they want to believe, as long as separation of church and state continues (?) to be recognized.