Today the church considers Easter symbols to be Christian. But in the old days, both sausages and colored eggs and Easter were forbidden by her, as they were considered obscene attributes of the pagan faith. How and when did this change take place?
Long before Christ was born, pagans worshiped their own resurrected God. They celebrated his wonderful resurrection every spring: they arranged erotic rituals in which they fertilized women with painted eggs, baked Easter, which they sacrificed to the deity …. What had to happen in order for the church to accept these attributes of paganism?
We celebrate Easter today in memory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, on Maundy Thursday we clean the house, kiss the Shroud on Good Friday. We go to church to consecrate Easter baskets from Saturday to Sunday, and greet with the words "Christ is Risen!" our friends and relatives, and then we have breakfast with solemnly consecrated food. But we do not realize that four centuries ago our great-great-grandfathers, instead of everything described above, honored the death of Christ, eating unleavened bread and drinking it with grape juice.
All Jews, and Jesus himself, celebrated a completely different Easter - it was the day of Jewish independence. The history of this holiday is as follows: at a time when the Jews were in slavery to the Egyptian pharaoh, Moses repeatedly asked to free the people, but in vain. And then ten punishments were sent by God Yahweh to Egypt. The inhabitants survived the invasion of flies, toads and locusts, survived the ulcers, hail and darkness. And Pharaoh finally released the Jews, but only refused to give up their livestock. Then God sent the tenth punishment on the Egyptians, the last - the death of the firstborn. To prevent this punishment from touching the chosen people, Moses ordered the sacrificial lambs to be killed and the doors to be marked with this blood. And it so happened that thousands of children died in all the houses where there was no blood sign, even the son of Pharaoh died. The next day, the frightened Pharaoh released all the Jews with their cattle. Moses commanded to celebrate Easter every year in memory of the day of liberation from slavery.
And that is how Jesus Christ last celebrated Easter in 33 AD. The table was modest: wine as a symbol of the blood of the sacrificial lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs as a token of memory of the bitterness of former slavery. This was the last supper of Jesus and the apostles. However, the Bible says that on the eve of his arrest, Jesus changed the meaning of the festive dishes. The Bible says: “Then he took the bread, gave thanks to God, broke it and gave it to them, saying,“This means my body, which will be given for you. Do it in remembrance of me. " Likewise, he took the cup after supper, saying: "This cup means a new agreement based on my blood that will be shed for you." (Luke 22: 19,20).
Thus, Jesus foretold his death, but somehow He did not tell His disciples to celebrate Easter in honor of His resurrection. There is not a single mention of this in the Bible.
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The apostles and early Christians celebrated the anniversary of the remembrance of the death of Jesus, every year on Nisan 14 in the Hebrew calendar. It was a memorable supper at which they ate unleavened bread and drank wine.
But 200 years pass, and the world begins to celebrate this day cheerfully - in memory not of death, but of the resurrection with kisses, songs and a feast.
The fact is that long before the advent of Christianity, the Romans worshiped their own God, Atis, the patron saint of plants. An interesting coincidence can be traced here: the Romans believed that Atis was born as a result of an immaculate conception, died young because of the wrath of Jupiter, but rose again a few days after death. And in honor of this amazing resurrection, people arranged a ritual every spring: they chopped down a tree, tied a statue of a young man to it and carried it to the city square with weeping. Then they began to dance to the music, and soon fell into a trance: they took out knives, cut their body, and sprinkled the tree with the statue with this blood. Thus, the Romans said goodbye to Atis. It is important to note that they were fasting until the Feast of the Resurrection.
When the day of the vernal equinox came, the Roman priest announced solemnly: "A miracle happened - God is risen!" And people arranged festivities and carnivals in honor of this, it was a day of joy. Incredibly, the feast of the resurrection of Atis was celebrated right up to the 4th century simultaneously with the Jewish Easter and with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And everyone - Christians, Jews and pagans considered their holiday to be the main one.
This religious dispute was settled by Emperor Constantine. In the 4th century, he made Christianity the state religion. In 325, the Christian Passover was separated from the Jewish Passover. But then on the tables there were no colored eggs, no beads, or sausages - where did these symbols come from?
The Orthodox Church has an official version: when Jesus was resurrected, Mary Magdalene carried this message all over the world, and reached the Emperor Tiberius. It was a tradition that every visitor should bring a gift to his Caesar. Since Mary was a poor woman, she only brought an ordinary egg. Tiberius, hearing the news, said: “Christ could not rise again, just as this egg cannot turn red …” And suddenly a miracle happened - the egg turned red in the hands of the emperor. And after this incident, a tradition arose to paint eggs for Easter. Only the Bible does not mention this.
This version arose when it was necessary to hide another, not at all Christian origin of the Easter symbols.
In 988, Vladimir the Great baptizes Russia, and begins to fight pagan holidays on the advice of the Byzantine monks. But then for the Russians, Christianity was an alien and incomprehensible religion, and if the authorities began to openly fight paganism, the people would rebel. Therefore, a slightly different tactic was chosen: not by force, but by cunning.
Each pagan holiday was gradually given a new, Christian meaning, and the signs of pagan gods familiar to the Russians were also attributed to the Christian saints. Thus, Kolyada, the ancient feast of the winter solstice, became the birth of Christ. "Kupailo", the summer solstice was renamed into the feast of John the Baptist, which is still popularly called Ivan Kupala. As for the Christian Easter, it coincided with a very special Russian holiday called Great Day. This holiday was a pagan New Year, and it was celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox, when all nature came to life.
Our ancestors, preparing for Great Day, painted eggs and baked Easter. But only the meanings of these symbols were not at all similar to the Christian ones. When the Byzantine monks first saw how people celebrate this holiday, they declared it a terrible sin, and began to fight it.
There was a game called "red testicle". The men took the painted eggs and beat each other with them. The winner is the one who breaks the most other people's eggs without breaking his own. This was done in order to attract women, since it was believed that whose krashanka wins, that man will be the strongest and best.
The women had the same ritual - they fought with colored eggs. But they did it with a different purpose: in this way they symbolically fertilized each other, since the egg has long been considered by many peoples of the world as a symbol of spring rebirth and new life.
These rituals were performed not only for their own needs, but also in order to appease the goddess of fertility Makosh. Our ancestors took these rituals seriously, because they knew that the life of the entire community depended on it: if Makosh was not properly appeased, she could get angry, deprive her of the harvest, then the cattle would not breed, and children would not be born.
Our modern housewives bake Passover on Saturday, and at the same time believe that this custom comes from the Jewish Passover bread called matzah. It is said that Jesus Himself broke the bread and treated them to the apostles at the Last Supper, but this bread was flat and unleavened. And Easter is made friable, with raisins, and sprinkled with icing on top, and then measured - whose higher grew.
Surprisingly, this tradition arose long before Christianity came to Russia. Our ancestors worshiped the sun and believed that Dazhdbog dies every winter and is born again in the spring. And in honor of the new solar birth in those days, each woman had to bake her Easter and perform the birthing ritual over her. When baking Easter, women raised their hem to simulate pregnancy. That is, when Easter was put in the oven (the oven is a symbol of the female womb), women raised the hem, imitating pregnancy. After this rite of fertilization, Easter was born and was considered a symbol of new life.
You might guess that this cylindrical pastry, covered with white glaze and sprinkled with seeds, is nothing more than an erect male phallus. The ancestors treated such associations calmly, because for them the main thing was that the land should yield crops and women give birth. Therefore, after Easter was taken out of the oven, a cross was painted on it, which was a symbol of the sun god. Dazhdbog was responsible for the fertility of women and for the fertility of the fields, and it was he who ruled the twelve signs of the zodiac.
These similarities between Dazhdbog and Jesus Christ are incredible: the resurrection and the main symbol is the cross. Therefore, it is not surprising that these two images merged after the baptism of Rus. Thus, Easter became a symbol of Christianity.
But for a long time, the church forbade sausages to appear on the festive table. Unlike Easter, our ancestors ate sausages all year round, regardless of the holidays. But once a year, meat dishes were treated not to ordinary guests, but to the dead. Monk Danila Zatochny in the XIII century with horror retold this terrible pagan ritual, which was called "Radunitsy".
People gathered in cemeteries on Thursday before Great Day. They brought food in baskets, laid it out on the graves, and then began to loudly and lingeringly call their dead, ask them to return to the world of the living, and taste delicious food. The pagans believed that it was on the Thursday before Great Day that the ancestors left the earth and stayed with living people until the next Sunday after the holiday. At this time, you cannot call them dead, because they hear everything they talk about and can take offense. People carefully prepared for a "meeting" with relatives: they appeased the brownies with small sacrifices, hung new amulets, and cleaned their homes. To date, this terrible holiday has been divided into two joyful ones: on Maundy Thursday we wash and clean the house, and on Wired Sunday we go to the graves and carry pieces of Easter to our dead relatives.
But this change did not come immediately. They fought quite hard against pagan rituals, and in the 16th century Ivan the Terrible himself joined this struggle. The king had many complaints about the church: he was angry that the priests did not take any measures to get rid of dual faith. And in order to fulfill the decree of Ivan the Terrible, the priests began to look after the religious order, sometimes even spy. But it did not help. People did not want to abandon their traditions, and, as before, they continued to perform pagan rituals in their homes, and went to church before our eyes. And the church gave up. In the 18th century, pagan symbols were declared Christian, they even invented a divine origin. So the eggs of fertility became a symbol of Christ's Resurrection, and the bread of Dazhdbog turned into a symbol of Jesus Christ.
Then the church came up with the legend of Mary Magdalene, who brought the egg to Tiberius. In Jerusalem, in the temple of Mary Magdalene, they even painted this plot.
But something incredible happened after the pagan myths went underground. New myths were invented about them. For example, the Cossacks firmly believed that when Maria mourned her son, her tears fell into the basket of eggs, and thus Easter eggs appeared. And in the Carpathians they still believe that in the mountains Satan is chained in chains, and only people who paint Easter eggs before Easter do not allow these chains to break.
People believe in different versions of the origin of Easter symbols: priests consider them Christian, and researchers consider them pagan.
Each of us should think - I want to follow pagan traditions, or do I want to fulfill the command of the Lord Jesus Christ written in the Holy Scriptures?
“I received from the Lord what I also gave you: the Lord Jesus on the night when he was to be betrayed, took the bread and, giving thanks, broke it and said:“This means my body, which is given for you. Do it in remembrance of me. " Likewise the chalice when finished supper, saying, “This chalice means a new covenant based on my blood. Do this whenever you drink from it, in remembrance of me. " And whenever you eat this bread and drink from this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes."
(1 Corinthians 11: 23-26)