p.2579 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
EASTER, the most important of all Christian feasts, celebrates
the passion, the death, and especially the resurrection
of Jesus Christ. The English name Easter, like the German
Ostern, probably derives from Eostur, the Norse word for the
spring season, and not from Eostre, the name of an Anglo-
Saxon goddess. In Romance languages the name for Easter
is taken from the Greek Pascha, which in turn is derived from
the Hebrew Pesah: (Passover). Thus Easter is the Christian
equivalent of the Jewish Passover, a spring feast of both harvest
and deliverance from bondage. The Eastern Slavs call
Easter “the great day” and greet one another, as do the
Greeks, with the words “Christ is risen,” receiving the response
“He is risen indeed.”
Easter is the earliest of all annual Christian feasts. It may
originally have been observed in conjunction with the Jewish
Passover on the fourteenth day of the month Nisan. Gradually,
however, it was observed everywhere on Sunday, the day
of Christ’s resurrection. The Council of Nicaea (325)
prescribed that Easter should always be celebrated on the
first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring
equinox.
Easter was fundamentally a nocturnal feast preceded by
a fast of at least one day. The celebration took place from
Saturday evening until the early morning hours of Sunday.
In the fifth century Augustine of Hippo called this “the
mother of all vigils.” From at least the time of Tertullian
(third century) the Easter Vigil (also called the Paschal Vigil)
p.2579 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
was the favored time for baptism, since the candidates for initiation
mirrored the new life won by Christ from the darkness
of death.
The symbolism of light became an important feature of
this nocturnal festival. It was customary on the Saturday evening
of the Easter Vigil to illuminate not only churches but
entire towns and villages with lamps and torches; thus the
night was called “the night of illumination.” From at least
the end of the fourth century in Jerusalem the lighting of
lamps at vespers took on a special character at this feast. In
Northern European countries the use of special lights at Easter
coincided with the custom of lighting bonfires on hilltops
to celebrate the coming of spring; this is the origin of the Easter
fire later kindled in Western Christian Easter Vigils.
Large Easter candles also became the rule, and poems were
composed in honor of them and thus of Christ the light,
whom they symbolized. Such poems stem from as early as
the fourth century; the most famous, still employed in various
versions, is the Exultet, which originated in the seventh
or eighth century. In the East, among the Orthodox, Holy
Saturday night is celebrated with a candlelight procession
outside the church building. After a solemn entrance into the
church, bells peal and the Great Matins or Morning Prayer
of Easter begins. It is followed by a solemn celebration of the
Eucharist according to the liturgy of Saint Basil.
The Easter Vigil also contains a number of biblical readings.
In the East the baptisms took place during the long
readings of the vigil, whereas in the West a procession to the
baptistery took place after the readings had been completed.
In both cases the celebration of the Eucharist followed the
baptisms. With the decline in adult conversions and, hence,
in Easter baptisms during the Middle Ages, the time for the
vigil service (and thus the end to fasting) was moved up to
Saturday morning; however, the Roman Catholic church restored
the nocturnal character of the service in 1952 and
other rites relating to Holy Week in 1956. In the current
Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Episcopalian rites the Paschal
Vigil is the high point of a triduum, or three days of services,
celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ.
From at least the end of the fourth century, Easter was
provided in Jerusalem with an octave, eight days of celebration.
With the medieval decline in the octave celebration,
Monday and Tuesday of Easter week nevertheless retained
the character of holidays. In a larger context the whole of the
fifty days from Easter Sunday to Pentecost was properly
called Easter, and so constituted a feast in its own right; the
eight-day octave, however, was a time of special recognition
of the newly baptized. The Sunday after Easter was called the
“Sunday in white” because the newly baptized wore their
baptismal garments for the last time on that day, and among
the Orthodox the octave of Easter is still called “the week of
new garments.”
Devotions tied to the liturgy of Easter are the origins of
liturgical drama. In the Middle Ages it was customary to
bury the consecrated host and a cross, or simply a cross, in
an Easter sepulcher on Holy Thursday or Good Friday. The
host or cross was retrieved on Easter Sunday morning and
brought to the altar in procession. From this practice developed
a brief Easter play called the Visitatio sepulchri (Visit to
the Tomb), which enacted the visit of the two women to
Christ’s empty tomb. The same dramatic dialogue can be
seen in the eleventh-century poetic sequence Victimae paschali
laudes (Praise to the Paschal Victim), which became
part of the Western liturgy.
A number of popular customs mark Easter Sunday and
the rest of Easter week. One such custom, allied to the coming
of spring with its earlier sunrise, is an outdoor sunrise service
celebrating the resurrection. Such celebrations are especially
popular among American Protestants. Since Easter was
a time in which the newly baptized wore shining white garments,
it became customary to wear new clothes on Easter
Sunday and to show them off by walking around town and
countryside; thus originated the Easter promenade or Easter
parade, popular in many places.
Among the most familiar Easter symbols are the egg and
rabbit. The egg symbolizes new life breaking through the apparent
death (hardness) of the eggshell. Probably a pre-
Christian symbol, it was adapted by Christians to denote
Christ’s coming forth from the tomb. In many countries the
exchange of colored or decorated eggs at Easter has become
customary. The Easter Bunny or Rabbit is also most likely
of pre-Christian origin. The rabbit was known as an extraordinarily
fertile creature, and hence it symbolized the coming
of spring. Although adopted in a number of Christian cultures
cultures,
the Easter Bunny has never received any specific Christian
interpretation.
Among Easter foods the most significant is the Easter
lamb, which is in many places the main dish of the Easter
Sunday meal. Corresponding to the Passover lamb and to
Christ, the Lamb of God, this dish has become a central symbol
of Easter. Also popular among Europeans and Americans
on Easter is ham, because the pig was considered a symbol
of luck in pre-Christian European culture.
SEE ALSO Baptism; Christian Liturgical Year; Drama, article
on European Religious Drama; Egg; Passover; Pigs; Rabbits.
p.3586 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
Another stream in the ancient Near Eastern tradition of
goddess worship flows from the Mesopotamian civilization
located on the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In that area the
goddess Inanna was worshiped; she was the queen of heaven
and earth and the goddess of love, and she was profoundly
involved in the rise of Sumerian state-level social organization.
Although she was one of many goddesses of ancient
Sumer, Inanna outlasted and overshadowed them all. Also
known as Ishtar and later worshiped by different Semitic
peoples, Inanna had very ancient roots. She was part of an
amalgamation of Sumerian and Akkadian religious and political
beliefs, extending back to 3000 BCE or possibly further,
and she is connected to the fertility of crops, the emergence
of increasing sedentary patterns of social organization, and
the development of the first urban centers.
In the late nineteenth century the world’s oldest texts
on cuneiform clay tablets were unearthed after having been
buried for at least four thousand years. Some of these texts
tell the life story of Inanna from adolescence through womanhood
and her eventual apotheosis. The texts are extremely
rich; they reveal the sexual fears and desires of the goddess,
an elaborate history of kinship among various deities in her
family tree, her power as queen of Sumer, and her responsibilities
for the redistribution of resources and fertility of the
earth. Inanna’s cult was centered at the ancient temple city
of Uruk. Here archaeologists have provided evidence for the
earliest known urban civilization, dated 3900–3500 BCE and
characterized by monumental temple architecture and the
first writing. The oldest shrine of Uruk was dedicated to Inanna,
as were numerous later temples. She was the supreme
patroness of the city. Though related to other deities, she retained
a certain degree of independence. Inanna’s shrine was
the focus of considerable economic activity and the redistribution
of resources characteristic of urban life.
Unlike the female divinities of India and Egypt, the
goddess Inanna, who was most likely derived from Neolithic
and possibly even earlier Paleolithic roots, played the principal
role in the religious tradition of an urban society. She was
considered to have equal status with the sky god, An, head
of the Sumerian pantheon. In this urban context, Inanna became
a focal point for the full emergence of life in city-states,
and she assumed the regal responsibility for victory in war
and the redistribution of resources among urban peoples.
Often these functions have been allotted to male deities in
other traditions, as in the case of the Hindu gods S´iva and
Jaganna¯tha.
Inanna is identified with the Semitic goddess Ishtar and
the West Semitic goddess Astarte. These deities, along with
the Canaanite goddesses Asherah and Anat (a wrathful warlike
deity), were worshiped by the early Hebrew people. It
is certain that the early Israelites worshiped the Canaanite
goddess Asherah; even Solomon praised the pillars representing
this deity, and his son Rehoboam erected an image of her
in the temple at Jerusalem. Probably the female deities of the
early monarchic period did not disppear but were changed
into different forms, despite repeated efforts to reestablish a
strong monotheism in Judaism in the biblical period. Raphael
Patai (1967) has argued that various disguises are assumed
by the goddess in later Judaism: she appeared in the form of
the cherubim (depicted as man and woman in an erotic embrace);
in images of Yahveh’s wife Astarte; as the one and
only God having two aspects, male and female; and in the
form of the Shekhinah (the personified presence of God on
earth). In this latter form, the Shekhinah argues with God
in defense of man; she is sometimes manifested as Wisdom
and at other times as the Holy Spirit. The feminine element
played an important role in qabbalistic thought, especially
in the thirteenth-century Zohar, which stressed the
Shekhinah as female divine entity; she was also referred to
there as Matronit (“divine matron”). The Shekhinah was
seen as an intermediary between God and the scattered peoples
of Israel and was widely accepted in Jewish communities
in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, when Qabbalah had
widely felt influence. According to Patai, the complex concept
in Qabbalah that the Shekhinah and God are one, filtered
down to the Jewish masses, led to the simplified belief
in her as a goddess.
Although the early Israelites engaged in the worship of
female deities, at some point goddess worship was removed
from the religious tradition. Whether one places this purge
of the goddess early in Judaism or posits a disguised form of
goddess worship that was retained for centuries and then finally
removed, the really important question is why the phenomenon
was eliminated from the tradition at all. Some
feminist scholars have argued that this purge of the feminine
represents a repression of women. However, the phenomenon
can be explained also by the purely theological argument
that monotheism requires the loss of all “extraneous” deities,
no matter what gender. This raises yet another question.
Why has none of the monotheistic religions worshiped a
feminine deity as its centerpiece? Could there be some truth
to the often asserted position that monotheism represents a
final ideological phase in the evolution of complex state-level
civilizations? If this were true, how then does one explain In-
dian civilization, which is clearly a state-level form of social
organization, but is neither monotheistic nor associated with
an exclusively dominant male divinity? Perhaps the gender
of deities has little, if anything, to do with the social structure
in which they are manifested. Such questions require further
research from different theoretical perspectives.
p.3586 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION
