Saturday, March 30, 2024

Why the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Normans and Everybody had Easter Eggs.

Thomas Kirchmeyer, who wrote under the pen-name Naogeorgus, provides us with some of the better detail, in his poem “The Popish Kingdom,” that has survived as to how the Catholic church celebrated it rituals at about 1553. While Kirchmeyer is describing his experience in the German Catholic church, the practices were essentially identical in the English church. About Good Friday he tells us that (in Barnaby Googe's English translation of his poem):


Two Priestes, the next day following [Maundy Thursday], upon their shoulders beare

The Image of the Crucifix, about the Altar neare.

Being clad in coape of crimosen die, and dolefully they sing:

At length before the steps, his coate pluckt of, they straight him bring,

And upon Turkey carpettes lay him down full tenderly,

With cushions underneath his heade, and pillows heaped hie ;

Then flat upon the grounde they fall, and kisse both hand and feete.

And worship so this woodden God, with honour farre unmeete;

Then all the shaven sort falles downe, and foloweth them herein,

As workemen chiefe of wickednesse, they first of all begin :

And after them the simple soules, the common people come.

And worship him with divers giftes, as golde, and silver some.

And others corn or egges againe,


The author's disapproval is palpable. He does so as a Protestant apologist determined to show that Catholicism was actually paganism slightly disguised.

He was right to a considerable degree, of course, and the puritan version of Protestantism, such as were then taking over the English worship, was founded specifically upon erasing all pagan influences from the church. Most Anglicans were aghast to think of losing their favorite traditions of the various holidays. But they could not deny the point. The puritans had them in an impossible position.

For all he and others knew about the pagan rites upon which the Catholic were based, he likely did not know that the prevalence of the egg in the Easter traditions went back millennia into the depths of time. That it was everywhere because the first Sun-worship figure from which Christ would evolve — Phanes — would be born from the great Cosmic Egg and the world (universe) along with him. He only knew that the traditions were pagan.

He certainly also did not know that the Celts who brought their version of the Greek Phanes (Bel or Ba'el, a.k.a. Ba'al), their young warrior Sun God, from a common source. He was born in the Anatolia plateau region of modern Turkey nearly 7,000 years before. In his travels west, to western Europe he came to be called Bel. In his travels south he became Apollo, Phanes, etc. He traveled east with the Indo-European Canaanites, as Ba'el, and their new neighbors the Ibharu (Hebrew) nomads, first worshiped him, as Ba'al, and then rejected him. Later, certain of the Hebrews, resident in Greek Asia Minor, took a more evolved version of him back as the Christ. The ancient Indo-European folk memory of the Cosmic Egg was waiting in Celtic western Europe for him when he arrived there.

Kirchmeyer paints for us the picture of Easter midnight:


At midnight strait, not tarying till the daylight doe appeere.

Some gettes in flesh and glutton lyke, they feede upon their cheere.

They rost their flesh, and custardes great, and egges and radish store,

And trifles, clouted creame...


The worshipers cannot wait a minute more to gorge upon sweets and eggs that they'd hard-boiled during Lent in order to keep them edible at the big moment.

As those millennia passed, and the Indo-Europeans migrated through Persia to Northern India, from the Balkans to Greece, through Central Europe to south Italy and north to Russia, and Western Europe to Scotland and Ireland, their languages changed — each region diverging from the others. So did the names of their gods and goddesses, and the stories told about them, the specifics of their traditions concerning eggs and much more. But they did not change so much that their relationship is unrecognizable.

And they added their own new stories and traditions along the way. The Celts and their cousins the Gauls worshiped the hare for its astonishing fertility. Easter being the beginning of their year, they were particularly attentive to the hare so that they would receive the blessing of having many children and the Cosmic Egg would return and reopen to revive the world and provide a good crop.

Thus we can quote from Brand's Popular Antiquities (1900):


GEBELIN, in his Religious History of the Calendar, informs us that this custom of giving eggs at Easter is to be traced up to the theology and philosophy of the Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, Greeks, Romans, &c., among all of whom an egg was an emblem of the universe, the work of the supreme Divinity.

Hutchinson, in his History of Northumberland, speaking of Pasche eggs, says: “ Eggs were held by the Egyptians as a sacred emblem of the renovation of mankind after the Deluge. The Jews adopted it to suit the circumstances of their history, as a type of their departure from the land of Egypt; and it was used in the feast of the Passover as part of the furniture of the table, with the Paschal Lamb. The Christians have certainly used it on this day, as retaining the elements of future life, for an emblem of the Resurrection. It seems as if the egg was thus decorated for a religious trophy after the days of mortification and abstinence were over, and festivity had taken place; and as an emblem of the resurrection of life, certified to us by the Resurrection, from the regions of death and the grave.”

*

Le Brun, in his Voyages, tells us that the Persians, on the 20th of March 1704, kept the Festival of the Solar New Year, which he says lasted several days, when they mutually presented each other, among other things, with coloured eggs.

*

The subsequent extract from Hakluyt’s Voyages (1589) is of an older date, and shows how little the custom has varied — “ They (the Russians) have an order at Easter, which they alwaies observe, and that is this: every yeere, against Easter, to die or colour red, with Brazzel (Brazil wood), a great number of Egges, of which every man and woman giveth one unto the priest of the parish upon Easter Day in the morning. And, moreover, the common people use to Carrie in their hands one of these red Egges, not only upon Easter Day, but also three or foure days after, and gentlemen and gentlewomen have Egges gilded, which they carry in like maner. They use it, as they say, for a great love, and in token of the Resurrection, whereof they rejoice. For when two friends meete during the Easter Holydayes, they come and take one another by the hand; the one of them saith, ‘The Lord, or Christ, is risen’ the other answereth, ‘It is so, of a trueth;’ and then they kiss, and exchange their Egges, both men and women, continuing in kissing four dayes together.”


The conflict created by the Puritans resolved itself after nearly a century. The customs were kept, among the English, not as religious rituals but as long-cherished folk traditions. Those puritans that still objected lived a hard life or emigrated to America where they could completely cleanse their religion.



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