Where does the Easter Bunny come from?

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Does anyone here know the answer to this? And what does the Easter Bunny have to do with Easter?

 

Well, when a mommy bunny and a daddy bunny who love each other very very much get certain urges, they....

 

AFAIK the bunny is some kind of commercial symbol, kinda like the heart for valentines.

IIRC, I read something in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" that Easter was the celebration for Eostor(sp?) the mother of the dawn or something.

besides, cartoon network has already replaced the easter bunny with their own easter monkey

 

I remember reading somewhere that a certain pagan goddess was depicted in a white cloak with a creased hood. Over time, people saw this thing in white, with, thanks to the crease, looked to have ears. Thus, the easter bunny. she was probably a fertility godess (honestly, what other kind was there...?), so this helps with bunny image (ever wonder about cosmic jokes? look for a sterile rabbit). Also, as with many other Christian holidays, Easter was placed on a polular pagan holiday (i know the calculations for the death and ressurection are made, but i highly doubt such a date is the exact time, concidering the church took a good generation or two to realize the return wasnt immenent and set up a structure)
As for the chocolate eggs, well, we've all seen the comercials, look for the confused hare... i just recomend against eating anything brown and round that it dispenses.

 

Because of the bunnies who lived in a hole at the foot of the crucifix and passed out chocolate eggs to all the sad deciples to cheer them up when Jesus died.

Duh.

 

ya yutz, twas a racoon that lived in that there crucifix. I thought everyone knew that

 

It's the hostile takeover of a Pagan holiday by Christians.

So many people still honored the pagan goddess Istar because her spring feastivals were very popular. The people didn't want to give them up for passover.

So the Western Chruch (in the 400s?) decided to just say screw it and they took the name (Easter/Istar) and "Christainized" the celebrations.

 

@ Enag

Then why don't I bite the ears of my chocolate Easter Racoon every year?

On a related "christianity" note...

Peeps are the devil's work.

Just sayin'.

 

@Aces:
Easter=Istar??? Where did you hear of THAT???
First of all, all the vernal rituals took place firmly on equinox, and Easter takes place at various times, within a period of one month. The hierarchy of events that must happen before Easter (Equinox > Full moon > Sunday) is enough to say that although its symbolic is connected with springtime, it is not a celebration strictly tied to the equinox.
Of course, in 400 AD, the universal language (lingua franca) was most certainly English, which didn't even begin to form until six centuries later.
Beyond that, the English word 'Easter' is derived from German 'Oster.' Nothing related to Istar here. Besides, Babylonian pagan cults disappeared a few hundred years BC.
Easter comes from 'east' ('Oster' from 'ost'), ergo: 'dawn' (of new life).
Since LATIN was the universal language, you would have to look for the name in Latin if you would like any relevance to year 400. The name in Latin is: 'Pascha' (=name in Hebrew). I don't see any relevance or reference to Istar in that name. Could you shed some light onto it???

About the Easter bunny:
This has to do with early translations of the Bible where, in some Psalms, you have references to mountainous animals, wrongly translated as rabbits, nowadays considered more likely to have been capricorns. However, the symbol remained. Another source of the symbol (in all likelihood combined with the previous one) is the common belief that rabbits sleep with their eyes open (based on the fact that they are so alert that they wake up some time before any person notices them, so it would be hard to see a rabbit with its eyes closed) and have been the first creatures to have witnessed the Resurrection.
Hesychius is the first author to use the symbol of a hare or rabbit in relation to Easter, based on the translations and common belief. Perhaps not really the best explanation, but the symbol is, I'd say, 'cute,' and it stuck. For better or worse, seeing as what commercialism did to it.

@Aces (once again):

And I could say the same about hostile takeovers of Christian holidays by commercialism (or should I say 'Neo-Paganism?').

 

The Ishtar relation is a myth. Babylon ceased to exist as a country by 512 BC and the religion lost importance. Around 0 AD it probably had already died down. Outside of Babylon, no one called Ishtar Ishtar. Astarte maybe or Ashthoret, but under that name she's actually mentioned as a daemon in the Bible, so go figure. There was yet another myth deriving the word "Easter" from an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Easthru who had a feast in Spring, but that would only work for the English language and this holiday hardly originated amongst the Anglo-Saxons who embraced Christianity as late as in the 7th century, so there is obviously no possibility of the English language chiming in as early as in the 4th, not even in the form of Old English in its nascent status of Anglo-Saxon dialects. In other languages and cultures, the names for Easter revolve around Pascha, resurrection and night. No Ishtars here, sorry. Whoever invented that story wasn't really paying attention in elementary school.

 

Deep stuff, but still cool.

But I'll stick to Rolsuk's mommy bunny + daddy bunny theory.

 

Easter bunny comes fromthe moon, I think. There is a Japanese legend about bunnies living on the moon, I think the easter dude is one of them.

But indeed, bunnies do it like bunnies and easter is the holyday of the new beging, so a baby is a new begin of a life and bunnies make babies al the time.

The egg are there to represent newborn birds, well you know hat I ment with that...

 

While we are on the subject, has anyone seen this? http://www.savetoby.com/

 

*gasp!* Don't you guys know that the Easter Bunny is no longer politically correct?

It's now called the Spring Bunny

 

No, Splunge, I didn't know that but I for one am glad to see it. The Bunny doesn't belong with Easter. Easter is a religious holiday. Go eat your Spring jelly beans, etc.

 

I'm not looking to start a Holy War.
Religion can be worse than Politics.


Unfortunatley the web is somewhat limited as I can never find sources that I can agree with 100%.

However here is a copy/paste of part of a very long articile that I am in "general agreement" with.

 

Your are missing one thing: it wasn't the Anglo-Saxons who "invented" the holiday, so the point is mute. The first Christians were, you know, Jews and Jesus resurrected like, you know, around 30 AD, while Christianity arrived to Anglo-Saxons in the 7th century.

It's the same kind of thing as if a Frenchman talked about the roots of Christmas basing on how they conceived the word "Noel" in the French language.

If you reviewed the Catholic liturgy and choice of readings for Easter Eve - and the Roman Church is basically where it all started - you would notice it's practically a Christian passover celebration with resurrection on one special passover being the fulfilment of the theological concept.

Moreover, the author's knowledge is profound... in its lacking. Ishtar was nowhere near to chief goddess of the Babylonians or Assyrians or anyone. The most important one of goddesses is always the Earth-mother goddess and in all major polytheistic religions this is different from the goddess of love. The only portfolio they may share is fertility. In the Babylonian pantheon, the role was first performed by Tiamat and then Kishar in a violent succession akin to transition from Gaia to Rea in the Greek mythology. Actually, even Ishtar's own mother, Ningal, is a more motherly deity than she is.

Ishtar eventually became the queen of heaven on her marriage as the second spouse to her father Anu (sometimes she's presented as the daughter of Sin - the moon god, depending on the region), but she doesn't assume the position of the great mother. She remains the deity of love and war.

Of course, contrary to what the author seems to believe, it didn't all start in Babylon. Basically, every polytheistic religion has a goddess of love. Ishtar herself is the Sumerian Inanna (Sumerians occupied the land before the Semitic Babylonians), who most probably was inherited from a previous culture, probably up to a primeval cult.

The author seems to have so fragmented and confused knowledge that he is oblivious to important facts, mixes deities, confuses the relations between diverse pantheons and seems oblivious to the fact that English is not the basic language of the whole world. Even if he proved that the word "Easter" in English comes from a deity corresponding in the Anglo-Saxon pantheon with Ishtar from the Babylonian pantheon, this still doesn't mean that the generic Easter holiday in Christianity is a feast of Ishtar, anyway. What's more, he can't in any way disprove the relationship between Easter and passover (Pascha), because of Jesus's own words. The whole Triduum starts with Jesus saying "I want very much to eat pascha with you" and the Last Supper in the Bible is the passover meal. Consequently, the date is taken from passover, as well. This leaves no room for any sex goddess link as both the origin and the date of the holiday is biblical, except maybe for the name of the holiday in one language. It's actually quite funny how he assumes that the naming pattern repeats in other languages. In mine, for example, it translates into English as "great night", simple as it is.

There's no holy war here. Just history and some logic.

[ March 26, 2005, 22:37: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Please help me right here right now! Is there a conection between the Japanese bunny on the moon and the easter bunny? I need to know

 

hehe guess my easter racoon theory cant keep up with the likes of these

 

SleepleSS, I doubt that. Maybe there is a connection between the commercialised Easter bunny and the commercialised Japanese bunny, but that's about it. The bunnies and chickens for Easter are quite old, it's just that nowadays they are moved towards the centre of attention because religiously they are relatively neutral. They aren't so obviously Christian as lambs, for example, let alone resurrected Jesus with the banner.