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| The Easter Bunny as imagined by Johann Conrad Gilbert in the late 18th century. |
OK, I admit it. I have never liked the Easter Bunny.
Of course, as a kid I did enjoy getting a basket full of malted milk chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday. But the idea that those delicious chocolate eggs with the rich creamery filling made by Cadbury were actually laid by a fat, white, clucking lagomorph—that was a bridge too far.
Then, there was also the iconic lazy Easter Rabbit of Looney Tunes fame (Easter Yeggs, 1946), who tricked Bugs Bunny into delivering the eggs for him. Part of me rooted for Elmer Fudd when he said, "I'm waiting for the Easter Wabbit. When he comes in looking so fwuffy and cute with his wittle basket of Easter eggs... BANG! Easter Wabbit stew."
My own kids were absolutely terrified of the grown men dressed up in giant bunny outfits hopping around in malls and other places during Easter-time. Honestly, who could blame them?
Lastly, before I knew better, I just took it for granted that those folks were correct who claimed that the Easter Bunny was yet another echo of pre-Christian paganism that had been absorbed into the Paschal feast by Catholics, thereby introducing an inappropriate element of the absurd into the celebration of Christ's resurrection.
But then I dug up some interesting facts that have made me have a slightly different view of the Easter Bunny and his "technicolor hen-fruit" as Bugs called it.
At the top of this post is a drawing of the Easter Bunny made by Johann Conrad Gilbert (1734-1812), a first-generation American whose parents emigrated from Baden-Württemberg, Germany in the 1730s. The Gilbert family were authentic Pennsylvania Dutch, and the town of Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania was named for them. Johann was a Lutheran schoolmaster who would be posted to various schools around Berks and Schuylkill Counties in PA throughout the late 18th century. According to Find-a-Grave, he was married to Anna Elizabeth nee Stoltz and was the father of eight children (though his will lists ten). During the Revolutionary War, he served on a pair of armed vessels of war, Eagle and Vulture.
So the earliest reference to the Easter Bunny in America comes from good old southeastern PA. And if the Bunny has pagan roots, it's not the fault of Catholics. Mr. Gilbert was very much a Protestant.
But of course, the Bunny doesn't really have pagan roots. That theory follows a very tenuous thread that begins with Venerable Bede, runs through the Brothers Grimm, is frayed by the German philologist Adolph Holtzmann, and then subsequently metastasized into a myriad of fanciful legends depicting the Bunny as the magical familiar of a Teutonic goddess.
The story begins with a single short passage in St. Bede's work entitled De Ratione Temporum, which runs as follows:
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance. [Taken from "Bede on 'Eostre'" on Tertullian.org]
Readers of this blog will realize that this is not a shocking revelation given that Pope Saint Gregory the Great encouraged his missionaries in England to retain those festal or cultural practices of the people which are neutral or universal. That the Anglo-Saxon Christians in England retained the name of a pagan goddess in their common word for the month of April, and thereby transferred it to the Paschal Feast is no more shocking than a modern Christian celebrating Holy Thursday or Good Friday. I suspect not many modern Christians attend the Liturgy of the Lord's supper with the Norse god of thunder (Thor) secretly in mind. Nor do they imagine the Norse goddess, Frigg, among the women of Jerusalem during Christ's passion.
St. Bede's fleeting mention of Eostre was forgotten for over a millennium. Eostre is not mentioned anywhere else at any time.
By contrast, rabbits and hares had been mentioned occasionally in early Christian literature, and normally not in a laudatory way. They were most commonly presented as a symbol of either sexual profligacy due to the rabbit's awesome procreative powers, or as an metaphor for prey, cowardice and timidity. Writing in the late 2nd century AD, Tertullian compares his contemporary Christian community to hares due to persecution, saying, "We ourselves, having been appointed for pursuit, are like hares being hemmed in from a distance." [Tertullian, Scorpiace, Chapter 1]
Writing some two centuries later, Saint Augustine admits his timidity, but acknowledges his one hope of safety:
For I will confess mine infirmity, to the end that I may be timid like a hare, because I am full of thorns like a hedgehog. And as in another Psalm [104:18] is said, "The rock is a refuge for the hedgehogs and the hares:" but the Rock was Christ. [Augustine of Hippo, Exposition on Psalm 71]
During the Middle Ages, literary rabbits developed into more fearsome creatures, occasionally inhabiting the margins of illuminated manuscripts bearing weapons or inflicting damage on someone deserving it. These images were meant to convey a certain sense of good-natured irony, and given how popular they are in our own times (see this article from the British Library), I would have to say that the monks who drew them have successfully conveyed their whimsical sense of humor across the centuries.
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| 14th century manuscript showing two rough coneys abusing a hunter. (source) |
It wasn't until sometime in the late 17th century, however, that the legend of the Easter Bunny emerged onto the world scene. In a work entitled, Satyrae medicae, continuatio XVIII. Disputatione ordinaria disquirens de ovis paschalibus von Oster-Eyern (or Medical Satires, Continuation XVIII. Investigating in a formal disputation concerning Easter eggs), German physician and botanist, Georg Franck von Franckenau, wrote the following:
In Upper Germany, our own Palatinate, Alsace and neighboring locations, as well as in Westphalia, these are called "Easter-Hare-Eggs" (die Haseneier) because of a story with which they deceive the simpler folk and children: that a Hare (The Easter Hare) hatches eggs of this sort and hides them in gardens in the grass, bushes, etc., so that they may be sought out more eagerly by the children, to the laughter and delight of their elders. [Satyrae Medica de von Franckenau, p. 6 - When searching the Latin, look for the phrase: "In Germania Superiore, Palatinatu nostrate, Alsatia & vicinis locis..."]
Based on this, it seems that the Easter Bunny was an established tradition in certain areas of Germany by this time. It should be remembered, however, that Germany was not a single country in the late 17th century, but a patchwork of petty kingdoms and dutchies held together very loosely by a common tongue. What was traditional in Westphalia may not have even been known in Prussia or Bavaria.
It is safe to assume that the artist who created or Easter Bunny image at the top of this post, Johann Gilbert, was born into this tradition and his family carried it with them to Britain's American colonies when they arrived in the early 18th century.
About a century after Gilbert's birth, Jacob Grimm, one half of the Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame, rediscovered the passage from Venerable Bede and mentioned "Eostre" (whom he called "Ostara") in his work, Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology in English). Grimm added his own speculative embellishments saying:
Ostara, Edstre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted to the resurrection-day of the Christian's God. [Grimm: Teutonic Mythology, p. 291]
It should be stressed, however, that Grimm discovered no new mentions of Eostre in the historical literature. His assumptions are completely theoretical.
But theoretical though they may be, Grimm's elaborations of Eostre/Ostara were latched onto by another German, Adolph Holtzmann, in the later 19th century. It is Holtzmann who, in his 1874 work which was also entitled Deutsche Mythologie, proposed a speculative relationship between the Easter Hare and Eostre/Ostara. Holtzmann wrote:
The Easter Hare (Osterhase) is inexplicable to me; probably the hare is the animal of Ostara....However, in German mythology thus far, a hare appears nowhere...Moreover, the hare must have been a bird, since it lays eggs; perhaps Easter eggs do not even date back to paganism at all; for with Easter, the fasts end, and it is an old custom to consecrate eggs and meat in the church on Easter Eve, and children then receive such consecrated eggs. But the fact that one makes a nest for the children the evening before so that the hare can lay the eggs in it—that does seem to be a pagan idea. [Holtzmann: Deutsche Mythologie, p. 141]
All other connections between the Easter Bunny and neo-paganism emerge from this point onwards with no solid tie to antiquity.
So to sum up, the Easter Bunny is a fun, humorous tradition that emerged in Germany and spread to other places around the world. There is no concrete evidence that he originated as a pagan spirit animal, only very tentative modern speculation and subsequent embellishment. And even if the mythical egg-laying hare had been part of a pagan German myth at some point in murky antiquity, the legend was religiously neutral enough to be adopted into Christian German cultural traditions with nary a trace of its origins remaining at all.
Furthermore, it's worth emphasizing that however the legend developed, the Easter Bunny was not a Catholic tradition, but one that originated from German Protestants.
But let there be no mistake -- the purpose of this article was not to give our lop-eared egg courier a bad name, so if like Bugs you've already got some bad names for the Easter Rabbit, maybe just reconsider calling him a sinister crypto-pagan or a demonic witch-pet. Given the connection cited by Holtzmann above, he was probably a good Christian fur-bearing critter, delivering eggs to those celebrating the end of their Lenten fasts and the making of all things new by our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Also, if the Bunny tradition in the US originated from southeastern PA, that makes him a home-boy, and we always root for the home team around here.
