Easter Stories And Origins Of Easter

When you read the Easter stories about the Last Supper, the crucifixion of Jesus, and the triumphant resurrection on the third day, you may not think you're reading anything about an ancient fertility cult.

Yet the early church saw enough parallels between these stories and those of a dying and resurrecting god who revived the vegetation of the world that it deliberately made a connection between them. The origin of Easter, for the most part, lies in those ancient tales, far more than it does in the stories of Jesus.

This sort of death and resurrection, precursors to the Easter stories familiar to the church, was played out graphically in the Greek myth of Persephone. She was required to spend half the year in Hades, the Greek land of death, before returning to the living world for the rest of the year.

Her mother Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, had no heart to make crops flourish while her daughter was in the underworld. The crops only grew again when Persephone returned to life in the upper world. The correspondence between such stories of spring and the meaning of Easter in the church is pretty hard to miss.

Even the Jewish Passover, with which the Easter stories are intimately connected, occurs in the spring. There are so many spring festivals connected to a dying and resurrecting god that it was actually logical for the church to connect their own dying and resurrecting divinity to them.

The meaning of Easter, in the church's view, simply expanded and perhaps explained what those myths imperfectly signified. The church may not have managed to eliminate all the pagan fertility symbolism, but it likely succeeded beyond its wildest dreams as it appropriated those older cults.

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