Point your browser to: http://www.snopes.com/spoons/fracture/easter.htm
why is it “point”? Like if i pick up my PC and move it, i’ll change web sites?
I guess that the column being discussed is
Easter and Rabbits column.
Or maybe it’s the Date of Easter column.
Dex,
The article about Easter you ‘pointed’ to makes a blatantly wrong point. It says that Easter is in the spring because of the spring regrowth/rebirth motif.
A-duh.
Easter is in the spring because that’s when the resurrection of Jesus took place (claimed to have taken place, for all you non-Christians).
Christmas’s date was purposely chosen to occur on Dec 25 because no one knew when Jesus was born, and the Christians purposely wanted to supplant the Pagan winter ritual with their celebration. Jesus’ crucifixion, OTOH, did historically take place during the Jewish holy day of Passover, which was in the spring.
Thus, the old anti-Christian saw that Christian holy days are just evolved forms of more original (and thus, somehow, more true) Pagan holy days is full of shit.
Peace.
And while we’re on the subject of an abundance of feces, moriah, I recall from my reading that Martin Luther began conceiving his famous 95 Theses while astride the ecclesiastical commode. It strikes me as an exhilarating bit of synchronicity that the underpinnings of a major branch of Christian theology have their genesis in a bowel movement.
moriah,
I will think of you while I turn the lights on to my “Christmas” tree. (Another Christmas tradition that is a Pagan rip-off)
Think of it this way doll, long ago … before the Christians met the Pagans… Lucifer AKA Satan was not the horned devil that we all know and love … it was only when They discovered the Pagan God “Pan” who is half man, half goat (Who also plays pipes; Where we get Pan Pipes from) did the common image if Satan pop up. Go figure!
This concept is not anti-Christain, it is anti-Pagan.(Or Hell, Anti-The Other guys!) It was a common practice for various religions to convert peoples by discrediting their current Gods/Goddesses and beliefs. (Makes it much easier to switch sides when you think your God is evil, yanno?)
This is not a slam against Christianity … This is a slam against religion as a whole.
Thank you, drive through.
Kelly
PS: Leave it to a Christian to turn Easter in to a religious thing!!!
I am The Queen of England, I like to sing & dance & if ya don’t believe me, I’ll punch ya in the pants.
There is some question as to whether the passover is the correct date. Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was probably during the Feast of the Tabernacles, not Passover. (the palm leaves strewn in front of Jesus as he entered Jerusalem would not have been in bloom during Passover) The Sanhedrin would not have met during the eight-day festival for any reason.
So, possibly the whole passover aspect was added later, or else the palm branch scene was. In any case, the whole pagan aspect of death and resurrection is a fairly convenient coincidence.
I have read that the Church fathers chose December 25th as Jesus’ birthday because, as another poster noted, they didn’t know when the real date was, and they thought it would be a nice bit of mystical metaphor to have His conception on March 25th – Spring solstice, light and life return to the world, and all that.
Of course, this explanation could just be a clever ruse to cover up the true, nefarious purposes.
What about that comment from the URL in the first post about week old eggs are easier to peel than “fresh” ones. It seems to me that when you buy them in the store would have little to do with the time from hen’s hind end to home.
Or is she talking about time in the refrigerator before boiling? I’m not following the logic (if there is any).
Computers are useless, they can only give you answers. - Picasso
Not adding substantive to this debate, but just pointing out that I am NOT Dex1138, despite the same first name.
I am the one and only TRUE Dex.
from moriah:
Um, first you just showed that christian holidays are revamped (repackaged, evolved, whatever) pagan holidays in your admission about christmas. In fact, most of the lore surrounding christmas is repackaged pagan practices, from feasts to gift giving to trees and lights to even the story of birth in a manger (see Mithra).
Second, why is it called Easter, named after a pagan fertility goddess? Why are the symbols a rabbit and an egg, symbols of reproduction? Why was Easter linked to the first full moon after equinox? (Oops, that’s first Sunday after the first full moon after equinox.)
A) The name “Easter” is unique to the English language; the feast of Easter was well established before any English speaker was a Christian. In most languages, it’s called some version of “Passover”.
B) Easter is the first Sunday after Passover. (However, modern Christians and Jews use different calendars, and consequently do not always agree on when Passover is or should be.) One early dispute within Christianity, in fact, was between those who wanted to have Easter on Passover and those who wanted to have it always on a Sunday.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Well, let me see here. Harrumph. The Christian “Christmas” and the Jewish “Festival of Lights” are both borrowed from, and predated by, the Roman Saturnalia.
They say Martin Luther stuck the candles on the Xmas tree. He also put new words to an old Roman Drinking song. Was it “Adeste Fideles”? I know it wasn’t "here comes Santa Claus.
But hey, not to worry. Pagans were always borrowing each others’ ceremonies when they looked nifty.
One reason they did is that they tended to recognize that they were worshipping the same gods – unlike Christians (poke, poke) who changed a word here and there and suddenly had to start slaughtering each other for believing in the wrong gods.
Sure. They all knew Jupiter and Zeus and Marduk and Ammon were one and the same. And so were Saturn and Kronos and Osiris and… I forget his name in Babylonian. But that’s because those gods had handy IDs – they also happened to be the planets.
So when an ancient Egyptian happened to go to ancient Rome, and saw that the Romans observed a seven-day thing called “Saturnalia” where they kept candles and lamps going day and night for 7 days, he felt right at home. Because back home in Egypt, they worshipped a thing about Osiris where they kept the candles and lamps going for 7 days and nights too. It had to do with some great and huge event with the god Osiris or Saturn or Kronos. Where he ate his children and blew up, or something.
Then, every spring, there was this Egyptian thing where the followers of Seth chased followers of Osiris carrying the mock-sarcophagus containing the dead Osiris around, trying to prevent Osiris from reaching the underworld.
And the Assyrians at the same time of year, spring, had this thing where all the women mock-wept for the death of Tammuz, the fertility god.
And all around the Mediterreanean thousands of years before Jerry Falwell or Fulton Sheen or Billy Graham, most of the pagans regularly celebrated the holidays at the same time of year that we do in the guise of either Halloween, Christmas, or Easter. George Washington rising from the dead on July 4 is a recent addition, I think. But it seems to me the Romans celebrated Memorial day for the same reasons we do, which is to drink a lot and make old men wear funny hats and march in a parade.
Amen. Incidentally, the very word “Amen,” said to denote the “Alpha and Omega” or beginning and ending of all things, springs from the Egyptian name for Jupiter, which, I repeat, was Ammon.
P.S., Moriah, “not knowing when Jesus was born” is baloney. The census his parents had to show up for took place in the 1st month of the Roman year, which is nowadays called March. (Back then, I believe it was called “March,” after the Roman god Mars.) It just didn’t look right to have Jesus born and killed within a couple weeks. Saturnalia was handy enough since it was already devoted to the Head Honcho of the Pagan Gods anyhow.
We do not know when the Christmas census was. If we did, we’d know for sure what year it was, and we don’t. In any case, the Roman New Year was had been on January 1 by law for well over a century, and de facto for centuries more.
Hannukah is most certainly not based on the Saturnalia. It would be nearer the truth to say that Hannukah as we know it in the suburban USA is based on Christmas.
And the connection between Christmas and Saturnalia is, in part, a modern myth. Some ancient Saturnalia customs did indeed become attached to Christmas, but not before they had already become detached from Saturnalia and transferred to the New Year. And all mid-latitude cultures have some sort of observation of the Solstice; it’s only natural.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Chanukah commemorates a historical event (Jewish military victory over Greek-speaking Syrians circa 160 bce.) It used to be a very minor holiday - less important than Saturday (Shabbath). David ben Gurion tried to revive Chanukah in Israel as a military holiday. In the last few decades, U.S. Jews (especially reformed) made Chanukah into a major holiday (seemingly more important than Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) to compete with Christmas, decorating a coniferous Chanukah tree, and exchanging Chanukah gifts. Since Christmas itself is based on Saturnalia, I agree that Chanukah as celebrated in the U.S. is indirectly based on Saturnalia as well.
Merry Xmas.
When did the Romans change the first of their year to January over March?
I would certainly like to know why in the name of Sodium Benzoate anyone considers it “natural” for ancient peoples to have celebrated “the solstice.” Just how lame-brained are we supposed to presume our ancestors were?
The notion that “early man became frightened at the shortening days” gave rise to some festival expressing relief when they started getting longer a minute per day is just stupid. After about 2 years of noticing nothing bad happened you’d figure they’d shrug it off. And why, for one instance mirroring every other ancient cultural practice, would the Romans dedicate those same days to the planet/God Saturn? Who ever dedicated the days now called Christmas to the sun?
The 7-candle Chanukah thing, incidentally, which appears to be as standard a symbol of Judaism as the Star of David, is representative of the same 7 days of lamp-burning by which the Romans celebrated their Saturnalia. No, Chanukah did not evolve out of Christianity, and its prominence is not merely a reaction to Santy Claus in America. That’s ridiculous. Chanukah has been around at least 4 centuries longer than Xmas.
The first recorded Christian use of Saturnalia to celebrate Xmas, so I read 2 days ago, was in Rome in 323 A.D. Christianity was still wheedling its way into Roman Pagan temples and borrowing their ceremonial dress and rites.
Of course, my main purpose for raiding Cecil’s chat columns is to stir up trouble using Immanuel Velikovsky. He was a devout Jew, the devoted son of a prominent Russian Zionist who helped found jewish kibbutzes in Palestine around the turn of the past century; V. in turn was an authority on his own religion. So read all this and weep. It’s here on the 'net. Copyright Shulamit Kogan, I think. It comes from an unfinished tome called IN THE BEGINNING. Herewith:
The Deluge and the seven days of brilliant light immediately preceding it were a universal experience, and they left indelible memories. Many of the religious rites and observances of all creeds go back to these events of the past in which the celestial gods Saturn and Jupiter were the main participants. Among the most ancient of all such observances were festivals of light of seven days’ duration, held in honor of Saturn. The “seven days of light” just before the Deluge overwhelmed the Earth are recreated in these feasts.(1)
Herodotus describes a nocturnal light festival held each year at Sais in commemoration of Osiris’ death and resurrection. It was called the Feast of Lamps:
There is one night on which the inhabitants all burn a multitude of lights in the open air round their houses. . . . These burn the whole night. . . . The Egyptians who are absent from the festival observe the night of the sacrifice, no less than the rest, by a general lighting of lamps; so that the illumination is not confined to the city of Sais, but extends over the whole of Egypt.(2)
In Rome the feast of light was named Saturnalia. According to tradition the Saturnalia had been established in honor of Saturn when, all of a sudden, after a lengthy and prosperous reign, “Saturn suddenly disappeared.” (3) Macrobius wrote that in celebrating the Saturnalia the Romans used to honor the altars of Saturn with lighted candles . . . sending round wax tapers during the Saturnalia.” (4) In his time the festival was celebrated for three consecutive days but, Macrobius wrote,
And yet in fact among the men of old there were some who supposed that the Saturnalia lasted for seven days . . . for Novius . . . says: ‘Long-awaited they come, the seven days of Saturnalia’ ; and Mummius too . . . says: ‘Of the many excellent institutions of our ancestors, this is the best—that they made the seven days of the Saturnalia begin when the weather is coldest.’ (5)
Hannukah and Christmas are both feasts of light and, like the Saturnalia, both can be traced to the days of the Universal Deluge. The Hebrew tradition that Hanukkah was established to commemorate the “miracle with the oil” that was found undepleted and sufficed for seven days, is a poor rationalization. A better ground for a re-establishment of a holiday, so similar to the Saturnalia, in Judea, was in the fact that in the middle of the second century before the present era Rome conquered Greece, and about the same time in the rebellion of the Hashmanaim (better known by the name of one of the sons, Judah Maccabi) against Hellenistic rule, the people of Palestine were drawing near the Roman world with its usages. It appears that the Romans fomented the revolt in the Hellenized provinces at the time of their conquest of Greece. Thus the feast of Hanukkah seems to be an adaptation of the Roman Saturnalia.(6)
The observation of this festival was later taken over by the festival of Christmas, which was originally observed for seven days, from the 25th of December until the first of the New Year.
References
[The earliest of the festivals of this type that we know of was the yearly seven-day-long celebration commemorating the inauguration of the temple of Ningirsu in Babylonia in the time of Gudea (before ca. 2000 B.C.). For this and other similar festivals, see P. Bourboulis, Ancient Festivals of “Saturnalia” Type (Salonica, 1964). Ningirsu was “he who changed darkness into light,” the same as Ninib, or Saturn (M. Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens, ch. IV, pp. 56ff). In Athens the feast in honor of Saturn was called the Kronia. See H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London, 1977), pp. 29-30. It would appear that the main idea behind the Saturnalia-type festivals, so widespread in antiquity, was a re-enactment of the conditions that existed during the Golden Age when Saturn reigned. The celebration of the Roman Saturnalia, which, according to Macrobius, pre-dates the founding of Rome by many centuries (VII. ??), was marked by a reversal of social relations, the release of the statue of Saturn that stood in the Forum from its bonds (Macrobius, Saturnalia VII. ??), the crowning of a mock-king (apparently representing Saturn) whose every command had to be strictly obeyed (Tacitus, Annales 13, 15; Epictetus, D, I. 25. 8; Lucian, Saturn. 2. 4. 9), and who was later sacrificed on the altar of Saturn. Some details of such a sacrifice are given in Acta Sancti Dasii, ed. by F. Cumont in Analecta Bollandiana XVI (1897). See also Cumont, “Le roi des saturnales,” Revue de Philologie XXI (1897), pp. 143-153. Porphyry reports the existence of a similar festival on Rhodes during which a man was sacrificed to Kronos (De Abstinentia II. 54). A similar Persian festival was the Sacaia (Dio Chrysostom, Orationes IV. 66). A possible parallel in Mexico may be the festival Atemoztli, “Coming Down of the Waters,” described in a manuscript reproduced in Kingsborough, The Antiquities of Mexico: “On the XXI of December they celebrate the festival of that god who, they say, was the one that uncovered the earth when it was annihilated by the waters of the Deluge.” ].
Herodotos II. 62, transl. by George Rawlinson. Cf. J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, second edition (London, 1907), pp. 300f.
Macrobius, Saturnalia I. 7. 24: subito non comparuisset. [It was then, according to Macrobius, that Italy came to be called Saturnia in honor of the planet. Cf. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanorum I. 6; Ovid, Fasti, VI. 1. 31.]
(Saturnalia I. 7. 31-32, transl. by P. Davies, 1969). Macrobius noted also the opinion of those who “think that the practice is derived simply from the fact that it was in the reign of Saturn that we made our way, as thou to the light, from a rude and gloomy existence to a knowledge of the liberal arts.” [Cf. above, “Tammuz and Osiris,” n. 9 on the Egyptian light festival in honor of Osiris.]
Saturnalia X.
Similarly, the way of praying with covered head appears to be a taking over of the Roman usage—the Greek custom was to pray with an uncovered head.
This shows how much you (and presumably Velikovsky) know about Judaism!
<img align=“center” src=“http://www.browardchai.org/menorah.gif”>
The menorah is used in relogious households to light Shabbath candles every Friday night. It takes a true ignoramus to associate the menorah with Chanukah rather than with Shabbath.
Hey. They changed it. 7 is what it was. So sue us.
Hey. They changed it. 7 is what it was. So sue us.
Just because you (and Velikovsky) repeat the same statement multiple times (bordering on SPAM), it doesn’t become any more credible. The “Chanukah thing” as you (and Velikovsky) put it (or the “Chanukiyah” as the more knowledgeable types call it) has 9 candles - one for each day of Chanukah, plus one to light them all. Check out http://www.stanford.edu/group/hillel/Being_Jewish/Chanukah_Candles.html The Shabbath Menorah has only 7 candles. I guess 7, 8, and 9 are “close enough” for Velikovsky and his adherents.
Please move all further Velikovskyite flames to the appropriate venue.