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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)
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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.
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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 Shiva 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 disappear 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 Indian 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.
