Much of the world today is celebrating the Christian observance of Easter, coming just after the Jewish Passover. Religious ideologies aside, it’s a fascinating holiday. The death and resurrection of the son of the Divine is re-told in its Christian incarnation. A look at history, however, reveals its roots in eons of previous traditions. I bring this up not to diminish it, but to recognize its place in an even larger schema that seems built into Nature, the seasons, and our own needs for renewal.
Most commemorations of events are placed on a calendar date, but Easter is not. Instead, it comes on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Vernal Equinox. Thus, the timing of this celebration is related to cycles in the relationship among Sun, Moon and Earth. We are taught that its seasonal timing is based on the Jewish Passover, which is clear in the Jesus story.
Less well known is that Sunday was the day of worship during the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine for worship of a Sun God. Often erroneously described as the first Christian Emperor, he actually supported not only Christianity but other religious cults as well, including that of Sol Invictus – the Unconquerable Sun. Thus, he was able to honor both existing traditions as well as the new religion of Christianity. A more cynical view might be that he was playing all sides and did whatever would solidify his rule – including crafting various creeds that became part of the new faith, but that is a longer story than we need here.
Passover, we are taught, commemorates a major event in the Jewish tradition during their sojourn in Egypt. This, however, still does not tell us why its timing is movable and seasonal except to say they used a lunar calendar. A strictly lunar calendar, however, would not have need for integration into a solar calendar (as occurs with Islam’s Ramadan that slides back through the year and is thereby eventually observed in all seasons). This takes us back to the primacy of the Vernal Equinox in the timing of both Jewish and Christian celebrations.
In research for my current manuscript on unrecognized elements in the history of some of our dominant religions, I came across the suggestion that this timing arose during the Jews’ contact with Canaanites who placed their spring celebrations at this time – as did many places in the world.
And there’s one more element in these parallels. In various ancient cultures where a Mother Goddess predominated, she sometimes had a son or a consort that died or was sacrificed and resurrected. Those stories were used to explain nature’s death in winter and rebirth in the spring. The death and resurrection of the Son of the Divine was seen as a sacrifice on behalf of the people for various reasons. (There are female versions of this, too, in which a Goddess’ daughter goes or is taken to the underworld and her mother’s grief allows nature to go barren until some agreement is made to allow her time with the mother and time with her underworld captor – thus, explaining the seasons).
Thus, we have a neatly stacked succession of celebrations with similar themes of rebirth, renewal, liberation, and divine sacrifice timed to occur in the Northern Hemisphere’s season of rebirth and renewal when the life of Nature herself arises once more. In a blending of traditions, the name “Easter” appears to have derived from a Germanic Goddess of spring and dawn, based on the Venerable Bede’s history of the Anglo-Saxon people written in the 8th century. The words “Ostara” and “Eostre” may be derived from the same root as “East” – the place of the rising sun.
Both seasonal associations and existing cults with themes of a dying and resurrected Son of the Divine served to give the new Christian faith a harmonious context in which to grow its new incarnation of this ancient motif.
I write this not at all to disparage, dismiss or belittle any of the religious traditions that now serve us, but to acknowledge how beautifully they fit into the nature of our world and, I hope, begin to reintegrate natural realities into those traditions that have become divorced from the world around us because of questionable ideologies or cultural biases.
Have blessed holiday, whatever you might be celebrating.