Fucking Eostre
EVERYTHING is closed on Easter. Shit. I guess we're not quite a godless nation yet. I'll have to get to work on that.
Eostre (or Eostra) herself may be a fabrication of the Venerable Bede, but umpteen cultures had spring festivals of rejuvenation (hello, May Day! let's dance around the spring pole and then fuck ourselves silly!) because that's what you do at the end of a long winter so bad that you're obliged to have a midwinter festival in the middle of it where everybody lights candles and celebrates the promise and hope of a spring to come lest everybody just kill themselves. These things are all part of a cycle. So naturally Christians had to get in on that springtime festival action because the major signposts of European religious experience are predictably similar across cultures and if you didn't provide a Christian method of celebrating those natural cycles you'd have people dancing around the maypole and fucking themselves silly in the spring and sacrificing bulls to Mithras in the winter and whatever it is they were wont to do depending on where they were from and what stories their grandmammies told them.
Funnily enough, though I'm not cogent enough to try and resurrect the amateur religious studies scholar of my early adolescence, I recall that actually it's believed that the early traditions of Jesus' birth place it in the spring, which suggests that if it hadn't been moved to midwinter in the first place Easter - well, the resurrection celebration in the springtime - wouldn't have been necessary for papering-over-purposes (unless the same early tradition also puts the crucifixion in the spring, which would make sense what with the rebirthing and all). I'd like to re-look into all of this someday.
Eostre (or Eostra) herself may be a fabrication of the Venerable Bede, but umpteen cultures had spring festivals of rejuvenation (hello, May Day! let's dance around the spring pole and then fuck ourselves silly!) because that's what you do at the end of a long winter so bad that you're obliged to have a midwinter festival in the middle of it where everybody lights candles and celebrates the promise and hope of a spring to come lest everybody just kill themselves. These things are all part of a cycle. So naturally Christians had to get in on that springtime festival action because the major signposts of European religious experience are predictably similar across cultures and if you didn't provide a Christian method of celebrating those natural cycles you'd have people dancing around the maypole and fucking themselves silly in the spring and sacrificing bulls to Mithras in the winter and whatever it is they were wont to do depending on where they were from and what stories their grandmammies told them.
Funnily enough, though I'm not cogent enough to try and resurrect the amateur religious studies scholar of my early adolescence, I recall that actually it's believed that the early traditions of Jesus' birth place it in the spring, which suggests that if it hadn't been moved to midwinter in the first place Easter - well, the resurrection celebration in the springtime - wouldn't have been necessary for papering-over-purposes (unless the same early tradition also puts the crucifixion in the spring, which would make sense what with the rebirthing and all). I'd like to re-look into all of this someday.
Labels: Culture
posted by medrawt at
20:08
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