The war on paganism and the true meaning of Easter

! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

Social media is awash with outrage (outrage I tell you!) that Cadbury has banned the word “Easter” in case it offends people from other religions. Easter is a Christian celebration so why, they ask, would people who weren’t Christians want to buy an Easter egg?

The war on Christianity continues apace they would have you believe.

Eostre (to give it it’s sort of proper name) or Ostera (to give it another one of its sort of proper names) is the pagan celebration of the coming of spring celebrated in northern Europe and the pagan goddess associated with the festival. The eggs and the easter bunny (actually a hare) are pagan fertility symbols associated with the goddess Eostre and the spring equinox.

The Roman church started celebrating the resurrection about 130 years after the death of Jesus and fixed the date according to the Jewish lunar calendar. Until the Roman church decided to mark the resurrection with a festival early Christians celebrated Passover as Christianity was still a Jewish sect at that time.

The actual date of the resurrection has been calculated to be 4th April AD33 (6th April in the Gregorian calendar). So this year the western Christian church are marking the resurrection a week early and the Orthodox Christians 4 weeks late.

So bearing all that in mind I’m not inclined to get worked up at Cadbury not putting the name of an ancient germanic spring equinox festival on a pagan fertility symbol that’s used by Christians for a Roman celebration of the death of a Jewish man 1,983 years ago.

I’m even less inclined to get worked up by it because the story isn’t true.

The word easter still appears on most Cadbury easter egg packaging and in abundance in their advertising. The story originated from a rival easter egg company, the Meaningful Chocolate Company which produces the Real Easter Egg. The Meaningful Chocolate Company is a Christian business and their eggs carry Christian messages, indoctrinating children through the medium of chocolate. Cadbury told an Irish newspaper that they don’t have a policy of removing the word Easter from their products but don’t feel the need to put the word Easter prominently on packaging because “it is very obvious through the packaging that it is an Easter egg”.

As an aside, there has been some consequential outrage (they like getting outraged, these Christians) at a bakery selling hot cross buns without crosses in case they offended muslims.

You will notice that the cross on the hot cross bun is an equilateral cross rather than a crucifix. You can see where this is going, can’t you? The equilateral cross is (you guessed it) a pagan symbol signifying that all things are equal. It is a convenient coincidence that Christians revere a cross associated with the death of their Messiah – especially so at Easter where they celebrate his death by crucifixion – and pagans also used a cross, albeit a different type of cross. It’s quite likely that the vaguely compatible symbology as well as the loosely similar dates informed the Roman church’s decision to hijack Eostre for their resurrection festival.

In any case, the story about the bakery selling hot cross buns without crosses so as not to offend muslims was a spoof published on the satirical Southend News Network website which was amusingly taken at face value by the EDL who shared their outrage (there is a never-ending supply of outrage amongst these Christians) on social media.

Why Christians would want to buy a pagan fertility symbol, let alone get upset about the lack of the name of the goddess Eostre on the packaging of chocolate eggs is a mystery. The hijacking of Eostre by Christians to celebrate the death of their Jewish Messiah is just the latest battle in the war against Paganism.

One comment

  1. John Dodds (1 comments) says:

    There is not a good reason for Cadburys to omit the word Easter from their products in the above.Here is a better reason to not buy Cadburys which is when Hershey took over Cadburys They stated that they would keep production in England as part of the agreement and media put out to the British people
    however as we know they moved production abroad!

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