Prof Carole Cusack: Who put the bunny into Easter?

As Easter is celebrated this long weekend, have you ever wondered how the resurrection of Jesus Christ came to be celebrated alongside the Easter bunny?

University of Sydney religious studies professor Carole Cusack talked with Susie Ferguson about how a pagan festival became a Christian festival and the emergence of the Easter traditions we recognise now.

For Christians, Christmas and Easter are the two equally most significant festivals, but when they fall in the year is not based on when the events they mark happened, Cusack says.

"No-one has any idea when the events of Jesus' life happened. The dates that the Christian church assigned to his birth, his death, his resurrection, were not accurate dates. ... So we should not assume that these dates map out an actual historical life."

In the Northern Hemisphere, Easter is about the time of the equinox that marks the start of spring, as the resurrection story is about a kind of rebirth, or new life.

"In the Northern Hemisphere this is hugely important," Cusack says, "because people are emerging from extremely cold and inhospitable winter. It's okay now, we have heaters and air conditioning, but in prehistoric times and really right up to industrial modernity harsh winters were particularly bleak and difficult times for people, limited food supplies etc. and so the arrival of spring is a tremendous point of hope."

When Easter was placed on the calendar by the Christian Council of Nicaea, at 325CE, the dates were chosen in relation to the natural cycles of the sun and the moon, which in that era would have mapped out the lives of human beings, she says.

Easter Sunday would take place on "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This is one of the reasons why it moves... it doesn't stay still, unlike Christmas."

In many European counties, the word for Easter derives from the Hebrew name for the earlier Passover holiday: Pesach. But in Anglo Saxon and German areas, the word for Easter is believed to have a connection to ancient pagan religion.

"Even though we don't have a lot of evidence from European pagan religion about goddesses or gods, or particular things that happened at the spring equinox, we do have - at least from Anglo-Saxon England and to a lesser extent Continental Germany - references to a goddess who is called Eostre, who gives our festival Easter its name in English," Cusack says.

"We have a text from the 8th century, written by a monk called the Venerable Bede, which talks about how the month is called the Eosturmonath, the month of the goddess Eostre, and it is a month of feasting and celebration, because of the coming of spring and new life.

"So of course, Jesus is resurrected at Easter. It's a much less naturalistic idea about new life than just the birth of lambs and chickens and so on, but it shares the same kind of significance."

New life as a popular concept in the ancient world

Many cultures have dying and rising god stories, Cusack says.

"They're nearly always young men, and the resurrection of these dying and rising gods is usually associated with ideas about crops ... The idea that some of these young men, they're a bit like a seed, and when they're buried in the ground the idea of them rising again is that they sprout or bring new life.

"The other thing I think I could say about that is that humans are defined not just by nature, the frame that we live in, but they're defined by mortality - we die. And everybody has been interested - I think since the first sapient person ever crawled out of the cave - we have been trying to work out what it means, if it's possible to somehow survive dying. And there are lots of different theories, ideas, about how we come up with ideas about coming back to life. But pretty much every culture expresses the idea - some have a stronger affirmation that it can happen - some are more pessimistic."

So did the Christian church keep the existing religious ideas and dress them up in a new way?

"The ancient world into which Christianity emerged was a place of varied cultural exchanges, and Christianity has nearly 400 years of getting established and working itself out before it is officially the religion of the Roman Empire - something that happens when Emperor Theodosius the First makes Christianity compulsory around the 380s, the 390s, so it's the end of the Fourth Century.

"And during that time Christian theologians and church historians have been exploring Greek philosophy and merging it with more biblically or Jewish kinds of ideas. There are elements of Roman architecture and administrative structures that get absorbed by the church - it's a real melting pot.

"I think it's not as simple as 'dressing up' [existing religious holidays and ideas] - I think it was more organic, and less intentional," Cusack says.

And Christianity's own easter traditions and practices have continued to develop into the modern world, as Catholic and Orthodox church traditions, and then Protestant reactions against them, then increasing commercialisation and secularisation, she says.

"For a lot of people now, Easter is now a holiday, not a holy day."

Eggs, rabbits and chocolate

Eggs were a typical ancient symbol of new life, and appear early in Christian iconography, Cusack says.

"The rabbit thing is a bit more weird because people often think that it must be ancient, but actually, the first association of a rabbit - which actually was a hare - with the ecclesiastical season of Easter, was a mention of what was called the Easter hare, in Germany in 1722.

"A guy called Georg Franck von Franckenau, who was a professor of medicine at the university of Heidelberg published a book in which he talked about this figure, the Easter hare.

"And people often say: 'Well, what's going on here? Why is there a connection?' Well the first connection is very simple - rabbits and hares are believed to breed rapidly, which is very life affirming.

"But interestingly, something a bit stranger is that in European - especially central European - folklore, hares were often said to lay eggs, which is certainly something that doesn't happen in nature, but people have superstitions often which are not actually scientifically true. And in the 18th century they came to be associated with hiding the coloured eggs that children hunted for in Easter egg hunts.

"And nowadays we think of an Easter egg hunt as being a hunt for chocolate eggs. But of course it was a folkloric tradition to paint eggs with beautiful designs for Easter. And it was these coloured eggs that the children typically hunted in their Easter Egg hunts."

And painting beautiful patterns and colours onto eggs is still a typical tradition in many parts of Europe today, Cusack says.

Then, with 19th Century industrialisation, mass produced chocolate Easter treats arrived.

"There were all of the firms that were mostly run by Quaker families from England - Cadbury, Fry's, etc - and there's always 'a reason for the season', you find the promotion of treats and enjoyable things for the family at different times, and the chocolate egg and the chocolate rabbit emerge - along with the Christmas Card ... but Easter cards are a thing too, particularly for Orthodox Christians."

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.