Easter: A Movable Feast
John Mitchinson on the complicated mysteries behind calculating the date of Easter, why eggs are so important and what's really behind the Easter bunny
Why does Easter move around so much?
You might think it’s because the precise historical date is hard to determine. After all, 25 December seems to have been chosen for Christmas more for its marketing value than any attempt to mark a real anniversary. It just happened to be the same date as the Roman celebration of the cult of the Unconquered Sun, which had been started by the Emperor Aurelian in 274 AD as an attempt to provide his Empire with a single religion. In less than a century, Christianity and Christmas had taken over.
But with Easter you can actually work out a historical date. The biblical account is relatively clear – the timing of the Passover feast and the Crucifixion happening on a Friday cut down the options. Passover celebrates the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt and lasts for seven days from the middle of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which equates to late March or early April. Sir Isaac Newton was one of the first to use the Hebrew lunar calendar to come up with firm dates for Good Friday: Friday April 7th, 30 AD or Friday 3rd April 33 AD, with Easter Day falling two days later. Modern biblical scholars continue to think these the most likely.
Unfortunately, Newton’s calculation came at the end of 1,700 years of ecclesiastical squabbling. Most people will tell you Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, which is broadly true, but the precise calculations are unbelievably complicated and involve something called an ‘ecclesiastical full moon’, which is not quite the same thing as the real one. It is based on fixed mathematical tables rather than direct observation of the actual moon in the sky.
An Easter Ready-Reckoner
It wasn’t until the council of Nicaea in AD 325 that any real progress was made. The council definitely tried to simplify things but unfortunately, we don’t have a copy of its original press release. What seems to have been agreed was an attempt to both standardise the date across Christendom and to distance Christianity from Jewish practice. The serious maths behind the calculated ‘ecclesiastical moon’ system wasn’t laid down until 525 AD when a Romanian monk called Dionysius Exiguus – whose name roughly translates as Dennis the Small – produced his 95-year cyclic Easter tables. As well as inventing the Easter ready-reckoner, Dennis came up with the Anno Domini (AD) dating system and was the fist Latin writer to use the zero symbol. Unfortunately, he couldn’t persuade the Eastern church to adopt his dating scheme – as a result, Easter in the Western and Eastern churches only coincides every three or four years.
As a result, we are left with 35 possible dates for Easter in the West. The earliest, March 22, last fell in 1818 and won’t happen again until 2285. The latest is April 25, which last happened in 1943 and is next due in 2038. The whole sequence repeats itself once every 5.7 million years. The most popular date is April 19th, which will happen 220,400 times over this cycle.
If this seems impossibly complicated, it’s because it is. You might think agreeing a fixed date would simpler. The UK confectionery industry certainly agrees – as long ago as 1928 it lobbied for one: the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. The Easter Act was passed into law but has remained dormant since 1928, because, once again, the chances of gaining support for a move across all three branches of the Christian church seems remote. No one wants to risk further schism in order to make it easier to sell chocolate eggs.
Pagan Goddesses, Eggs and Bunnies
On top of all this, there is the persistent taint of paganism. Most of this derives from the name. In almost every European language, the festival’s name is derived from Pesach, the Hebrew word for the Passover. The Germanic word ‘Easter’, on the other hand, is usually explained as coming from Eostre, a Saxon fertility goddess.
That’s fine, except there are no records of any such goddess ever being worshipped. She is mentioned only once, by the Venerable Bede, who describes the Saxons worshipping her in Ēosturmōnaþ. It seems more likely he was confusing her with the classical dawn goddesses like Eos and Aurora whose names all mean ‘shining in the East’. So, rather than being a full-blown Wicker Man-style cult, Easter might simply have meant ‘beginning month’, a good time for planting, or starting things up after a long winter.
Eggs are a good example of this. On one hand, they are an ancient symbol of birth in almost every European culture, on the other, hens start laying regularly again in the Spring, and as they were forbidden to be eaten during Lent, it’s quite easy to see how eating and decorating them became a very practical way to celebrate Easter.
Then, of course, there is the Easter bunny, which is despite its cute modern incarnations and appropriation by the confectionary industry, is a properly pagan symbol.
These ‘bunnies’ aren’t rabbits at all but hares, the ancient fertility-rebirth-moon symbol, throbbing with speed and sex. In an anonymous 13th Century poem, the hare is given 77 different names including wood-cat, stubble-stag, skulker, lurker, skiver, skipper, dew-flirt, home-late, ring-the-hill, sudden start, shake-the-heart, belly-white and my favourite, ‘the creature no one dares to name.’
Somehow, that feels like an appropriately subversive and mysterious symbol for us all to contemplate this Easter.
Much needed relief from the endless doom & disaster.
Thanks!
A great post- thank you!