Every time I see the hideous pastels of American Easter piled on retail shelves, a little piece of my sanity shrivels up and dies.

It’s getting close to Eastertide, and Americans all across the country are stocking up on marshmallow peeps, chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs. Mormons and Christian fundamentalists aside, most people have no idea that they’re buying corporate perversions of ancient pagan symbols.

Christians in our part of the world say that Easter is about the resurrection of their god/prophet/superman after his dramatic public execution, but the roots of this holiday are much deeper.

The word “Easter” is rife with etymological depth and subtext. The Indo-European root aus- (to shine) has many derivatives that include east, Easter and aurora. The word for dawn in Proto-Germanic is austron, and in Greek, eos. There is another Indo-European word, bhel-, that means “to shine, flash or burn,” and its derivatives include bleach, blind, blaze, German blitzkrieg, and Beltane, the Celtic celebration of spring. All of these words point to the general concept of awakening, the dawn of the year, brightness and life.

The current holidays of Easter and Christmas are products of political and theological manipulation. The dying Roman Empire made Christianity legal in 311 A.D. and the Emperor Constantine, with the Edict of Milan two years later, officially declared its neutrality towards the new religion. Constantine convened the Ecumenical Councils, where bishops argued over whether or not Jesus was a divine being. The divinity of Jesus was decided in a vote. Who ever said democracy and religion don’t mix?
Holidays were also voted upon during these councils. The Catholic Church, being centered in Rome, wanted to use the Roman solar calendar. The supposed time of Christ’s resurrection was during the Jewish feast of Passover, which changes according to the Hebrew lunisolar calendar.

This presented a problem, as the solar calendar is 11 days longer than the lunisolar. At the time, these bishops were also doing their best to convert the “barbarous” Celts and Gauls of the fractured Roman Empire to Christianity.

As a method of controlling the population, it was very convenient to have the Christian holidays of Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection around the same time as the festivals of pagan Europe. They changed Yule and Ostara to Christmas and Paschal. They didn’t have a celebration that could assimilate the harvest festival (Halloween or Samhain), so it remained a pagan holiday and was eventually labeled as “satanic” along with many other symbols of pagan faith.

Pope Gregory I told Saint Mellitus in a letter that converting the pagans to Christianity would be easier if they were allowed to initially maintain their “heathen” practices, with the idea that those would eventually disappear. Old habits die hard. Santa Claus? Probably a variation of Odin. Christmas trees? Pagan, and the bible says so (Jeremiah 10:1-8). Bunnies and eggs?  Symbols of new life, fertility and sex. Tell that to the children as they’re gobbling jellybeans.

Today, the celebration of Easter occurs on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon on or after the vernal equinox, which is April 8 of this year. The reason for this convoluted method of calculating the holiday involves computus and Quartodecimanism, and seems to be completely devoid of logic. The church didn’t even decide on the exact method of calculation until 1582.  The original way to celebrate springtime was to calculate and determine the day that had about 12 hours of sunlight.  That was the day to throw a party.

In the new Corporate American Church of Money, the religious symbols are whatever floats the publics’ boats. The symbol of a carpenter who preached love and peace doesn’t make money, but Santa and the Easter Bunny do. The sacred images of pagan ancestors have been transformed, clothed in gaudy irrelevance and wildly waved in our faces.

I refuse to buy any products that have anything to do with Paschal or the corporate translation of Easter. Start the party on the vernal equinox, and give me that old time religion.