I ran across and interesting theory on social media a few weeks ago. A Jehovah’s Witness was defending the idea of not celebrating holidays because of their pagan origins. Inevitably the Easter Bunny came up as a point of contention. The normal Easter Bunny being associated with Ishtar, blood sacrifice, and other “Two Babylons” nonsense came up. In the comments though, someone pointed out that the whole thing with Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny association came from the Pennsylvania Dutch people and wasn’t an ancient Germanic tradition at all. The implication there is that it’s actually an American tradition and therefore can’t be particularly old. This rang a bell from my childhood so I decided another of these articles was in order.
I was surprised at how straightforward this was to dig through. We’ve got dates for when the Easter Bunny appeared in folklore, and roughly when he started carrying eggs.
Note: I know rabbits and hares are two separate kinds of animal. I’m using both words to refer to rabbits for variety sake. I also use the word “hermaphrodite” a few times. I am aware this term is not used for people anymore (intersex is the correct term), but it is still used for animals with reproductively functional male and female genitals and that’s the context I’m using it in.
The Origins of the Easter Bunny
According to Wikipedia, and its sources, the Easter Bunny is originally a Lutheran tradition. The first reference to the Easter Bunny as an egg giver is from “About Easter Eggs” by Georg Franck von Franckenau in 1682. Since there no Lutherans before 1517, it stands to reason the idea of the Easter Bunny is five hundred years old at most, and a bit over three hundred at minimum.
Originally the Easter Bunny was another figure that judged whether children were good or bad during the Eastertide season (Easter Sunday to Pentecost). So, it’s pretty firmly a Protestant Christian tradition, not a pagan one. It was brought to North America in the 18th century by people from what’s now southern Germany. A large percentage of these immigrants ended up in Pennsylvania, hence “Pennsylvania Dutch”.
These immigrants didn’t belong to any single sect or denomination either, but many were Lutheran, or Lutheran adjacent. To say it’s a Pennsylvania Dutch tradition isn’t really accurate either. It seems more correct to say it’s a German Protestant tradition.
Why A Rabbit?
Why a bunch of Lutherans decided to tell their kids about a Santa Claus like hare is a bit of a mystery, but it’s certainly not pagan. There are symbolic associations with the rabbit and Christianity that were quite ancient even in the 1500’s, and associating a spring hare with Easter/Passover isn’t that much of a leap. Pun intended.
These ideas stem from early Christian traditions, which ultimately come from Greek and Roman philosophy and naturalism. So in some ways it is a pagan idea, but only because the ideas that inspired them originally came from pagan philosophers and scientists. The ideas that brought us the Easter Bunny are also hilarious.
The ancient Greeks had some magnificently absurd ideas about how the world works, and actually wrote them down. Aristotle says that rabbits copulate in a rearward position, indicating the man had never seen a rabbit in his life. One time some city boy saw two rabbits sitting butt to butt in a field for whatever reason. This person then decided the rabbits were having sex, immediately told Aristotle about it, who then wrote it down. This was taken as scientific fact for generations among the elites of society.
Later, in the first century a bunch of Roman philosophers and naturalists decided that rabbits were hermaphrodites. Since they were philosophers, they never examined a rabbit, nor did much in the way of observation of rabbits. They just thought about it real hard, based on third-hand descriptions of rabbits from their peers who had poor countryfolk cousins, and Aristotle. Continuing in this tradition, future naturalists took it at face value that these ancient philosophers were correct and expounded upon it.
Not one single rabbit was ever looked at, cut open, or captured in pursuit of this “scientific research”.
The rabbit-as-hermaphrodite theory does indicate that at least one Roman naturalist had some scant contact with actual rabbits. Female rabbits do have a sort of ‘double uterus’ with two separate openings and chambers. Normally only one side of the uterus can get pregnant at a time, as hormonal changes prevent further pregnancy. Rarely both uteruses do become pregnant, even more rarely with conception happening at separate times. This can possibly happen with with two different males, under even less likely circumstances.
This observation was likely made with rabbits in captivity. The female was only purposefully bred once, but had two different litters several days apart. What was really happening was the male in the cage next over bred her at night a few days later and by luck, impregnated the other uterus.
My family used to raise rabbits when I was a kid, and I saw them mate through double-walled, wire mesh cages. I imagine an ancient wooden cage wouldn’t stop stealth copulation from happening any better. My parents eventually just started keeping the male rabbits in a totally separate set of cages to prevent unexpected litters.
In the wild, this double pregnancy would probably cause fatal complications. Since captive rabbits are better fed and taken care of than their wild counterparts, I speculate that more of these double pregnancies could come to term without killing the mother.
What do the genitals and reproductive style of rabbits have to do with the Easter Bunny you ask? A lot actually. See, early Christian writers and thinkers were huge fans of the Greek and Roman philosophers. A few of their writings, and Aristotle’s especially, were considered to be unquestionable scientific truth for a long time. That is until someone decided actually observing things rather than just thinking about them very hard was more important. Even then, it took a long time to convince the elites, which included clergy, that something contradicting Aristotle was true.
Some medieval Christians took the rabbit-as-hermaphrodite idea and associated it with the Virgin Mary. They thought hermaphrodites could impregnate themselves without losing their virginity, and so the parallel was drawn. There are apparently rabbits included in some medieval artwork depicting the Virgin Mary. I couldn’t really find any examples from the Middle Ages, but I did find a picture of Mary and Elizabeth with what might be a rabbit in a decorative square surrounding the image.
In addition there is a motif called ‘the three hares’. It appears on several old, but not ancient, churches in Europe, and in cave paintings from the 500’s AD in China. This is used as an illustration of the Trinity as each rabbit has two ears, but there are only three ears between them. The ears resemble a triquetra, and the design is much cooler, explaining how a Chinese motif now decorates French churches.
That’s how the rabbit came to be associated with the Virgin Mary, as well as being kind of a symbol of the Trinity. The only thing pagan about these ideas is they were based on ideas put forward by philosophers who themselves were pagan.
Isn’t the rabbit or hare sacred to Eostre?
There’s no evidence whatsoever that worshippers of Eostre associated rabbits with her. That’s a much later idea.
In fact, we’re not even 100% sure that Eostre was the name of a goddess. The earliest and only attestation we have to her is from Bede in the eighth century. All he says is that there was a month named after a goddess named Eostre, and that the English now celebrated Pascha in place of an older festival that fell in that month. No mention of rabbits, eggs, or even that she was a fertility goddess as is commonly accepted.
There’s not much reason to doubt Bede, but there’s also no evidence of anything Eostre related prior to Bede. It’s not like there wasn’t stuff written in the British Isles or Ireland prior to Bede either. There are written eyewitness accounts of the Saxon invasion in the fifth century, yet no mention at all for several hundred years of a Saxon goddess named Eostre. Granted, the Saxons had no written language, but that wouldn’t stop people who did from mentioning their customs.
Considering other Christian traditions, the Easter Bunny is a bizarre one that doesn’t seem to fit. While the assumption that it’s an ancient pagan tradition that got co-opted is reasonable, it’s just not the case.
Why does the Easter Bunny lay eggs?
The Easter Bunny technically doesn’t lay eggs, he brings them to good children on Easter morning. Or hides them for children to find. This probably stems from children misunderstanding what’s going on, and Cadbury Egg commercials.
The real origins of the Easter Egg are straightforward and practical. Eggs were considered a luxury food that could not be eaten during Lent. They were given to children as treats to eat on Easter (or Holy Saturday) when they’d finally get to break their forty day fast. Children would also run around and ask for eggs before Lent, because they knew they’d not get any for the next six weeks.
That’s it, that’s why we have Easter Eggs. Catholics used to go temporarily vegan during Lent, and craved stuff like eggs and meat when it was over. No esoteric or ancient reasoning behind it.
The egg also has symbolic value outside the practical. Some Christians used eggs to illustrate the Trinity. Others thought it symbolized the grave, and when cracked, Christ’s resurrection. There were groups that drew a connection between the mythical phoenix and Christ’s resurrection and the lowly chicken egg came to symbolize that.
As for dying eggs, people have been painting, dying, and decorating eggs since before the Neolithic Era. The Christian egg-dying practice didn’t originate from just one culture for one reason, several different customs independently arose from many different peoples as the religion spread. As the religion spread, those traditions often spread with it, and also back into Christendom as a whole.
So is the Easter Bunny Satanic?
Nope, not at all.
What seems to have happened is Lutherans sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries combined two pre-existing Christian ideas for their own purposes and the tradition spread back through the religion as a whole. Much later in the 1800’s some other people tried to associate them with ancient Saxon paganism based on two sentences from an 8th century book.
Further Reading
Just some fun stuff I found that wasn’t immediately relevant to the topic.
Sir Thomas Browne wrote a humorous book in 1646 talking about widely believed absurdities. You can read the chapter on rabbits being hermaphrodites here:
Sir Thomas Browne’s Vulgar Errors III.xvii: Of Hares
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