What have bunnies got to do with Easter?

I have always found Easter a tad confusing, a gallimaufry of seemingly contradictory symbols and traditions, not least fluffy bunnies bearing chocolate eggs for us to feast on. Even the name of the festival belies an undercurrent of competing traditions and customs. In Latinate countries the name is derived from the Greek word Pascha, which itself owed its origin from the Aramaic word Pashka. So, in Spain the festival is known as Pascua de Resurrección, in Italy Pasqua and in France Pâques. In Dutch, though, it is ooster, in German Ostern and here, of course, Easter, words derived from a different linguistic root.

The Venerable Bede in his The Reckoning of Time, gave a plausible explanation for the origin of the northern European name. He claimed that the Paschal month “was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre in whose honour feasts were celebrated”. Whilst this explanation is not universally accepted, one of the symbols of the goddess, who also went by the name of Ostara, was a hare. Writing in his 1835 Deutsche Mythologie the German folklorist, Jacob Grimm, one half of the celebrated brothers, could not make sense of the association of a hare with Easter but concluded that it “was the sacred animal of Ostara”.

The early Christians were past masters at adopting aspects of pagan ceremonial life and customs into their religious observances, a mix-and-match approach that made the religion more appealing to converts, and this may well be a case in point. Hares, together with rabbits, can produce a second litter whilst still pregnant with the first, a characteristic which meant that not only could they be associated with fertility but also with a seemingly immaculate conception.

For those who studied the text of the Bible assiduously, though, hares presented them with a problem. A passage in the Book of Leviticus (11:6) declared it an unclean creature, hardly something with which you would want to associate the Virgin Mary: “The hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you”.

Such concerns may well have opened the hutch door to allow its cousin, the rabbit, to usurp its position as the principal symbol of fertility and virginity. Increasingly, from the mediaeval period onwards, rabbits rather than hares were associated with the Virgin Mary in religious imagery. A classic example is Titian’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, I can never quite dismiss the ‘Allo ‘Allo connotations of its title from my mind, painted around 1530 and which now hangs in the Louvre. With her left-hand Mary holds a rather appealing, fluffy white rabbit, symbolising fertility, purity and her virginity.

Having first caught our hare, a phrase attributed to Hannah Glasse, whose cookery book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, was an 18 thcentury best-seller, although nowhere did she use it, let’s turn our attention to eggs. Symbolic of the emergence of new life they could be seen, by extension as representative of Christ’s resurrection. The early Christians of Mesopotamia are said to have stained eggs red in memory of the blood that Christ shed at his crucifixion. The custom spread, the tradition of staining them by boiling them in coloured water or painting them was widespread by the 13 thcentury. Edward I’s household accounts for 1307 show the expenditure of “18 pence for 450 eggs to be boiled and dyed or covered with gold leaf and distributed to the Royal household”.

On a practical level, observers of Lent would have had rather a lot of eggs on their hands. Hens did not stop laying just because their owners had decided to observe forty days of fasting. Unsurprisingly, once Lent was over, eggs were back on the menu, as this benediction of Pope Paul V from around 1610 shows: “Bless…this thy creature of eggs, that it may become a wholesome sustenance to thy faithful servants, eating it in thankfulness to thee on account of the resurrection of the Lord”.With rabbits and eggs firmly rooted in the developing Easter traditions, there was a sort of logic in combining the two. Rabbits were imagined as delivering eggs to children, rather like a springtime version of Father Christmas. The earliest reference to such a benevolent rabbit appeared in a German text dating from 1572: “do not worry if the Easter Bunny escapes you; should we miss his eggs, we will cook the nest”. Over a century later, the practice was still going strong, the German physician, Georg Franck von Franckenau, referring to it as “an ancient custom”.

Protestant German immigrants are credited with bringing the concept over to the east coast of the United States during the 18 thcentury. Children were regaled with stories of the Osterhase who would bring them eggs, but only if they were good. Bribery has a long tradition.

From there it caught on, eventually crossing back over the Atlantic to form part of our Easter celebrations. Confusingly, hase is German for a hare, although it is used ambivalently in contexts where the distinction between a hare and a rabbit is irrelevant, and that may just be the point. Provided the creature is fluffy with long ears and a bobtail, the precise taxonomy matters not a jot.

By the 18 thcentury eggs had moved on from being hen-produced to artificial, often made of pasteboard or papier-maché containing small gifts inside. A little later, eggs made from cardboard and decorated with silk, lace or velvet and fastened with a bow became a fashionable way to mark Easter. Chocolate eggs began to appear in France and Germany in the early 19 thcentury, but, as there was no way of moulding the eating chocolate into a shape, each egg had to be lined painstakingly with paste chocolate.

Two breakthroughs in chocolate technology made the mass production of moulded chocolate eggs a reality, van Houten’s press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean in 1826 and the introduction, in 1866, by the Cadbury brothers of a pure cocoa facilitating the production of large quantities of cocoa butter. The first Cadbury eggs were made from a bitter, dark chocolate with a plain smooth surface. If that was not a treat enough, the hollow inside was stuffed with bite-sized sweets with hard coated shells called dragées, rather akin to sugared almonds. The eggs themselves were later decorated, initially with chocolate piping and flowers made from marzipan.

The game changer, though, was making them with a new, sweeter chocolate, Dairy Milk Chocolate, which Cadbury’s introduced in 1905. These delicious eggs soon became the best-sellers that they are to this day.

And the largest chocolate Easter egg ever produced? That honour, if that is what it is, goes to an egg created by Tosca in Italy. When it was measured at Le Acciairre Shopping Centre in Cortenuova on April 16, 2011, it tipped the scales at 7,200 kilograms and, at its widest, measured 19.6 metres.

I wonder how many bunnies it took to deliver that!

Originally published at http://martinfone.wordpress.com on April 12, 2020.