On her way to Saudi Arabia last week, Theresa May was asked about Easter eggs – specifically, about the National Trust dropping the word “Easter” from the annual “Egg hunts” which they co-sponsor with Cadbury. The decision was “absolutely ridiculous”, the Prime Minister said. A spokesman for the Church of England said the decision exposed “the folly in airbrushing faith from Easter”.
The row, which to many observers – Christians included – seemed wildly disproportionate, then escalated. The National Trust and Cadbury protested that much of their promotional material still used the word “Easter”. Commentators asked whether May was pursuing a vendetta against the head of the National Trust, Helen Ghosh – in other words, the Easter egg might have become a political football.
Meanwhile, the Lib Dems leader Tim Farron released a statement composed almost entirely of egg puns, while Jeremy Corbyn argued that Cadbury’s commercialisation of Easter was the real scandal. Nigel Farage declared: “We must defend our Judaeo-Christian culture and that means Easter.”
Apparently, a rapidly secularising culture just cannot help having a big, and mildly unhinged, argument about the meaning of its Christian festivals. But if nothing else, the row is a chance to examine the question of Easter’s origins. For that was the other point that came up: whether Easter egg hunts can be de-Christianised, since Easter – it is said – isn’t really a Christian festival in the first place.
In the Guardian, Peter Ormerod adopted a familiar theme: Easter was named after “a pagan goddess”, he wrote, and the festival’s combination of Christianity and folklore made it “a bit of a mess”. Likewise, Cadbury’s own website assures readers that “The worship of Eostre, the goddess of dawn, was deeply rooted in Germany and was brought to England by the Saxons.” Various pagan websites elaborate on Eostre’s story: her consort was a hare (hence the Easter bunny), or in some versions a bird-rabbit who lays eggs.
This story is grist to a certain kind of atheist’s mill. How absurd for Christians to get excited about Easter, they say, when the festival is just an update on a previous delusion.
To be fair, the story about Eostre can be traced to a Catholic saint, namely Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The English, he says, originally named one of their months after “a goddess called Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month”. Her name, he claims, passed over into the English term for the Christian solemnity.
But historians are divided on Bede’s reliability here. Maybe he knew something – but maybe he was reasoning backwards, guessing that since we called the great season Easter, the name must have been based on some previous ritual.
Eleanor Parker, a lecturer in medieval literature at Oxford, says popular claims about Anglo-Saxon customs are often far too confident. “There’s little clear evidence for an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Eostre – much less than for some other Anglo-Saxon deities,” Parker says. Nor is there any record “of any particular rituals, customs or symbols associated with her in pre-Christian England”.
And there is no basis for the oft-heard suggestion that hares and eggs are symbols of Eostre. A better explanation, Parker says, is Catholic custom. “The association between eggs and Easter probably has more to do with the fact that for the medieval Church, eggs were prohibited during the Lenten fast, and so could be eaten again when Easter came.”
The customs associated with Easter, Parker says, “have all developed within a predominantly Christian culture. Over that time the traditions of Easter have changed and evolved, and many of the customs most commonly associated with it today are actually of relatively recent origin.”
If the idea of Easter as a rebooted pagan festival endures, it is also partly because of some vague assumptions about our ancestors. The novelist Adrian Bott has led a long campaign against using “paganism” as a catch-all term for “a naive, scary but oddly appealing, fertility-obsessed, nature-worshipping, openly and frankly sexual way of seeing the world”.
This, Bott says, is a Victorian fantasy which modern pagans have clung on to even as history has cast more and more doubt on it. He has also told one interviewer: “I’d go so far as to say that the whole purpose of the modern Eostre myth is to undermine the Christian Easter.”
In the end, we don’t know much about whatever spring observances the Anglo-Saxons may or may not have held. And Parker observes that the arguments over pagan origins “greatly oversimplify the complex and creative relationship between religious observance and popular tradition, and ignore how diverse and varied Britain’s seasonal customs really are.” No culture has a homogenous identity: “The real story of how different cultures develop customs which are meaningful to them is far richer and more interesting than that.”
Many apologists have turned the atheist taunt on its head, and seen pagan forerunners as evidence that Catholicism really is universal: that it fulfils the longings imperfectly expressed by previous religious cults.
As Chesterton wrote, were we to discover, say, a Patagonian story of death and resurrection, we might respond: “If the Christian God really made this human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If the centre of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the centre have a muddled version of that fact? If we are so made that a Son of God must deliver us, is it odd that Patagonians should dream of a Son of God?”
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