Ask Lemmy

I am genuinely curious so I read the article and looked into its primary sources. The scientific citations actually contradict the premise of the article.

They begin by noting the earliest written connection that we have of the Easter bunny and hiding eggs:

But it is in the folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.

Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare, particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter.

The historians I cited earlier said as much. Then the smithsonianmag article notes a scholarly hypothesis from the novelist/linguist/mythologist Jacob Grimm:

In 1835, the folklorist Jacob Grimm, one of the famous team of the fairy tale Brothers Grimm, argued that the Easter hare was connected to a goddess he imagined would have been called “Ostara” in ancient German. He derived this name from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who Bede, an early medieval monk ... mentioned in 731 C.E.

The connection between the goddess and the Easter hare was speculated by brother Grimm in the 19th century and has no ancient basis. Bede never links Eostre to hares, rabbits, or any fertility symbols. See Lauritsen et al, which smithsonainmag.org cite as support of "pagan roots", explicitly noting the lack of evidence:

Easter is similar to Yule in that Bede derives the name of the Christian festival from a name for an Anglo‑Saxon month, which in turn derives from the name of a pagan goddess (Shaw 2011). Bede notes that a festival celebrating the goddess Eostre occurred in this month (approximately April) but does not suggest that this coincided with the date of the Christian festival of Easter … Nor does it specify a link between the Anglo‑Saxon goddess Eostre and rabbits or hares.

The suggestion throughout Lauristen et al is that the name Eostre, the name of the month, was pre-Christian. Similar to how "Thursday" comes from "Thor's Day" (but that doesn't mean we worship the Norse god Thor). But there is no evidence, as far as I can tell, that a pre‑Christian festival celebrating Eostre coincided with the Christian feast of the Resurrection or involved any of the animals now associated with Easter. The claim that early Christians reappropriated pagan traditions appears unsubstantiated.