Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/31/the-easter-bunny-hates-you.html
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Peace during a three hour long church services demands the threat of withholding. Right now hundreds of thousands of children are hearing “If you two don’t pipe down…!”
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IKR? After getting nailed and stabbed in the side, then having to move a giant rock, aspirin would be a whole lot better.
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ohboy a series of “i’ve got a theory!” … well always assuming that i don’t know nuth’n, i’ll foolishly jump in and say it’s probably a blend of pagan/pre-Christian Germanic traditions involving an egg-laying witch in the form of a hare. whee…
Thompson connects the hare to Easter through the folk traditions of Germany and England. He reported accounts from 1600s Germany in which children searched for eggs hidden by an Easter Hare, as well as written accounts from England, detailing egg hunts and the consumption of hare meat at Easter. He also described Northern European beliefs about witches taking the form of hares, so eating the hare was part of a tradition of scaring witches away.
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Ostara herself is a shadowy figure in Germanic folklore. Her story begins with Eostre, an early medieval English goddess who is not documented from pagan sources at all, and turns up in only one early Christian source, the writings of the English churchman Bede. Bede may have been right that there was such a goddess, or he may have been spreading the received wisdom of his era, and scholars have debated this point for years. Jacob Grimm [part of the Brothers Grimm literary duo], the brilliant linguist and folklorist, is one of many scholars who took Bede at his word, and in his 1835 book “Deutsche Mythologie”, he proposed that Eostre must have been a local version of a more widespread Germanic goddess, whom he named Ostara. It’s impossible to tell if Ostara as a goddess ever existed outside Grimm’s proposal. As for Eostre, there’s no evidence of her worship except in Bede’s book, and possibly in place names (which could, however, just mean “east”). There are certainly no ancient stories in which she transforms a bird into a hare.
…or not.
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This was one aspect of pagan religion that the early church couldn’t figure out how to co-opt, so we have a spring fertility celebration and the story of the resurrection running in parallel and trying to ignore each other.
ETA: Oops, @theophrastus got there first.
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Hmmmm… I still think he’s more of a vampire or a lich…
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I feel that “Easter is that it is the first Sunday after the full Moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox.” definitely points to a Pagan antecedence.
I dunno; the faithful have to eat his flesh and drink his blood; Jesus doesn’t seem to have any special dietary requirements? 
It is certainly weird as all fuck.
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Still closer than a zombie, though, which is just a mindless shell of a body (mostly, I guess there are some instances where they’ve got intelligence?), while vampires and liches have some agency?
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Happy… uh… Easter…?
Yeah, traditionally you’ve got the Hollywood (particularly the post-George Romero) notion of a mindless husk, adopting the Afro-Caribbean term that involved magical enslavement (either of a spirit, or of a sort of half-alive person - Euro-Christian notions of “the soul” map onto two different things in Haitian religion), neither of which are appropriate*. Maybe modern fiction is using the term with abandon, but words have meanings!
*Although trying to force it into one of those usages puts an… interesting spin on things.
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Did someone say Zombie Jesus?
Boy, if God doesn’t have a sense of humor I’m not gonna have a pleasant eternity.
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But why would the early Christians care about stuff outside the Empire? They were competing for devotees in the cities, and the Cybeleens had some pretty wild spring festivals to compete with. (Wild enough to make Dionysians complain about lax morals. 
) They even had a resurrection story.
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Foolish legionnaire. The stake has to go through the heart.
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Oh Man. Fred Wertham was so right…
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