While Christians prepare to celebrate Easter as the commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection, they are unlikely to dwell on the pagan roots of such festivals, which were overlaid by Christian rites as Christianity spread across Europe in the first millennium AD.
Easter replaced spring festivals, which focused often on the death and rebirth of a fertility deity.
A growing pagan movement, well- established in South Africa, harks back to the ancient roots and celebrates the deeper meaning of such rituals. The South African Pagan Rights Alliance (Sapra), founded in 2004, gives modern Paganism a capital ‘p†to differentiate it from ancient forms and defines it as ‘a nature-venerating spirituality that draws inspiration from ancient and modern Pagan spiritualities and religio-magical belief systemsâ€.
The Pagan Federation of South Africa (PFSA) says Pagans ‘acknowledge Nature as a manifestation of Divinity†— which chimes with concerns about the global environment.
Modern Paganism is often identified with Wicca, called the ‘Craft†or ‘the Old Religion†and descended from the ‘witchcraft†traditionally demonised by Christianity and quite different from the ‘Satanism†of Christian witch-hunters. The use by Paganism and Wicca of pre-Christian European traditions is what defines and distinguishes it from broader, highly eclectic New Age spirituality, though the rise of New Age fuelled Wicca’s growth.
Paganism is a loosely organised system incorporating many beliefs, from forms of monotheism to polytheism and atheism — and the view that the gods are symbolic. It is perhaps the most diverse, inclusive and tolerant religious practice, deliberately uncodified in any scriptures and not given to proselytising.
‘There are as many valid Pagan paths as there are practitioners,†says Sapra. Convener Damon Leff estimates that there are about 170 Pagans in covens or other groups in South Africa and perhaps more than a thousand ‘solitaries†— people who practice Paganism without belonging to an organisation.
Sapra has made a submission to Parliament on same-sex marriages or civil unions, arguing in favour of full equality for all before the law and requesting the accreditation of Pagan marriage officers. Here Pagans are in line with those seeking acknowledgement of African and other traditional religious practices.
The 15-or-so Pagan groups in South Africa include the Circle of the African Moon, the Clan of Ysgithyrwyn and the House of Ourobouros. Besides Sapra and the PFSA — not to be confused with the Philatelic Federation of South Africa — there is the Free State-based South African Pagan Movement.
According to the 8th-century, scholar-monk, Bede, the name Easter comes from Eostre, a Saxon fertility goddess honoured in spring. Jacob Grimm speculated that the name might be linked to Ishtar or Astarte, the Mesopotamian fertility goddess. (Eostre’s sacred animal was thought to be the hare, hence the folk tradition of Easter bunnies. Eggs symbolise new life.)
Easter itself, however, is a Christian development from Judaism and its date is still calculated in a way similar to Jewish calculations of the date of Passover — based on the lunar calendar used by Jews until the second century after Christ. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox (in the northern hemisphere). Easter grew from Passover, the earliest Christians being Jews and Christ being seen as the sacrificial lamb.
In Europe the dating of Easter so near to pagan spring festivals meant it gradually superseded them. This was church policy: Pope Gregory the Great advised that pagans should be led gradually from pagan to Christian rites or, as he put it: ‘Let them drink milk before they have meat.â€
Southern hemisphere pagans do not celebrate Easter because it falls in autumn. But South African Pagans, says Leff, ‘are pleased that the autumn equinox happens to coincide with Human Rights Dayâ€.
The spring equinox is important because it is the rebirth of the year after winter’s dormancy. Eostre is related, like all such goddess figures, to the prehistoric mother goddess, the most prominent deity of Europe’s most ancient religions, represented by such ancient carved figures as the 25 000-year-old Venus of Willendorf. Feminine generative power is important to Pagans, who reject the male domination inherent in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The spring festival was celebrated all over the ancient world for millennia and later, in pre-Christian civilisations, was linked to deities, such as the Mesopotamian Attis and Egypt’s Osiris. Such male fertility gods died and were reborn as symbols of the Earth’s life-death-rebirth cycle. They are clearly a template for Christ’s death and resurrection. The old rabbis, who objected to proto-Christianity as a heresy within Judaism, were clear that it was no more than paganism reborn and the tradition of Jesus’s links to Egypt — in the Bible his childhood exile there — showed this.
This may be irrelevant today. But one can argue that it makes more sense to venerate the cycles of the Earth and to celebrate our connection to all life than to believe in individual salvation provided by the blood sacrifice of a man-god and the persecution of non-believers so characteristic of the major faiths.
There is no rational explanation for the transcendent God of the major monotheisms, who is supposedly the embodiment of love, but presides over a world full of gratuitous suffering. The Pagan view is that we should venerate the universe as a self-generating, self-regulating system, of which we are a part. Instead of faith in God, they argue, let’s have faith in the cosmos.