H’ok… bare with me here. I got a bit intoxicated, and was pondering the easter bunny one night. I came up with a little nursery rhyme, that made it all make sense. Only its for the most part lost to me.
Easter is in Spring, and it is the, BIRTH, no… resurrection of Jesus?
Basically my Rhyme, started with when a girl and a guy should ***k like rabbits, getting her pregnant, to carry her package. Fitting in time to the seasonal tasks, that are required, so as to have the baby rise up. Carry each year to this rabbit habit.
March - pregant -
july - heavy pregant -
November - birth
Winter - child, food stores are up.
march -> november -child catches first responsive time, in cultivation/harvest season.
Sorry, it is a bit crude off hand, but it was quite, definitive, when it came off my tongue.
Makes the for quite the olden planned parenthood brochure, doesn’t it?
That is certainly one possible life cycle. But humans, unlike many other animals, can get pregnant and subsequently give birth at any time of year at all, and before the invention of reliable birth control, consistently did get pregnant at all times of the year.
In those modern Pagan religions which steal heavily from the “olden days” to form our mythology, we often celebrate it like this:
[ul]
[li]Winter Solstice/Yule: (re)birth of the solar god[/li][li]Imbolc: goddess comes out of her postpartum seclusion (often with a symbolic washing at a water source). Not much mention of the baby god yet.[/li][li]Spring Equinox/Ostara: The goddess presents the baby god to the world. This is also where the bunnies come in. The Germanic goddess, Oester, or Ostara, was associated with hares and eggs, symbols of spring fertility. Note that this is most likely mythical revisionism, and She doesn’t seem to have been a very important goddess in her day, but we like Her now. It’s rather undeniable that eggs and bunnies are very visible signs of baby making in the early spring, and not surprising that multiple cultures and religions incorporated that observation into their spring celebrations. [/li][li]Beltane: god and goddess get jiggy wit’ it and she gets pregnant. (Try not to think about them being Mother and Son; incest rules don’t apply to divine beings.)[/li][li]Midsummer/Litha: solar god’s energy of young manhood is at its peak. Yay, Sun! Please make our food grow. [/li][li]Lammas/Lughnasadh: First of the (three) harvest festivals; often the harvest of the grain. The solar god grows horns, runs around the woods a lot. Goddess is still busy making stuff grow.[/li][li]Autumn Equinox/Mabon: Second harvest festival; the harvest of fruits and vegetables. The god is sacrificed to ensure a good harvest, in those traditions in which he wasn’t sacrificed at Lammas.* [/li][li]Samhain: Third harvest festive; the harvest of roots. Also the time when the goddess descends to the Underworld. If the god is mentioned, it’s usually as a Death figure.[/li][li]Winter Solstice/Yule: rebirth of the solar god.[/li][/ul]
Apparently, divine beings have a not quite 8 month gestation. Considering that women for most of human history didn’t start counting pregnancy until their second missed period, this makes sense, as most of them would have given birth roughly 7-8 months after they started counting.
None of this is universal to all modern Pagans. Every group has their own way of doing things and their own myths.
*There’s a lot of slop between Lammas and Mabon; many people have difficulty articulating the difference between the two.
When man started “civilizing to a standard” was sometime around 10,000 years ago. “Word of God” started hundreds of thousands of years ago. Christ was 2000 years ago. Reliable birth control started a few hundred years ago. Just what time are you referring to?
Nothing clear at all about what you’re referring to.
And even among those animals that do have a yearly cycle, spring is usually the time of birth, not fall, and with the time of mating being however much earlier is needed given that animal’s gestational period. So if humans did work like that (which, again, we don’t), then early summer would be the time when we should “fuck like rabbits”.
the entire post was in reference to the useage of the bunny as an easter symbol. clearly i am not talking about cave man grunt praise, or egypts pharoh crypt texts.
church laws = to ensure conservative life. to keep with the sacred of lifes inhabitance.
so easter is depicted with the symbol of a rabbit… for people to start getting at it.
how could one of gods order, ever exact characteristics equivalent to an animal.
That would be sacrilige or herecy or blasphemy.
but…-cough cough-… jesus was reborn on this day… so uh… remember what life has been brought by… -cough cough - (get like rabbits) and bring new life next year.
I don’t think we could apply this to anything because nothing you’ve said in this thread makes any sense at all. Could you take a little time to explain exactly what you’re talking about and exactly what your question is?
“According to the University of Florida’s Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, the origin of the celebration — and the origin of the Easter Bunny — can be traced back to 13th-century, pre-Christian Germany, when people worshiped several gods and goddesses. The Teutonic deity Eostra was the goddess of spring and fertility, and feasts were held in her honor on the Vernal Equinox. Her symbol was the rabbit because of the animal’s high reproduction rate.”
“The first Easter Bunny legend was documented in the 1500s. By 1680, the first story about a rabbit laying eggs and hiding them in a garden was published. These legends were brought to the United States in the 1700s, when German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania Dutch country, according to the Center for Children’s Literature and Culture.” From here: http://news.discovery.com/history/what-does-easter-bunny-come-have-to-do-easter-120406.htm
So it’s nothing about a specific life cycle of the rabbit. They didn’t have a cycle. They reproduced constantly.
Does that answer your question?
Seriously, I don’t think anyone reading this thread has a good grasp on what you are asking. A lot of the symbolism you are referring to goes way back before Christian times, so it’s merely been adopted and modified for the symbolic use.
2000 years later than what? We’re not 2000 years after the Easter Bunny. Bunnies as a fertility symbol go back far earlier than that, and association of bunnies with the festival of Jesus’ resurrection (or even association of the name “Easter” with that festival) is far later.
And it’s you who are applying the internet-age analysis. From a context more than a century or two old, planning of families through the year was simply impossible. People had sex all the time, and had babies all the time.
It’s an aside, but Lawrence Watt-Evans once made a passing comment in a novel that still makes me laugh when I think about it. It’s a far-future setting and the protagonist mentions the “Eastern Bunny” several times as a mythical example. She then muses, “Someday I meant to look up the Eastern Bunny, and find out why there’s no Western Bunny. And just what the hell a bunny was, anyway.”
