Easter: From goddesses to rabbits, eggs and festivals

April 19, 2014 / Posted in  Christian Terrorists, Church history, crucifixon, Jesus Christ, Pat Robertson, Ukraine

 

Contents

I. Introduction: Why I wrote this article

II. A psychopathic sadomasochistic god

III. The Original Easter

IV. Marriage as a part of Easter

V. Easter eggs

VI. Dating Easter to make it Christian

VII. Sex and fertility as a part of Easter

VIII. The Crescent: Symbol of Woman, her Vagina, Fertility, and Sex

IX. Uselessness of man unless he rode on the foal of an ass

X. Eggs: the spiritual sign of fertility and food of generations

XI. End Notes

Ruminations on Easter 2014

 

I. Introduction: Why I wrote this article

I have written on the pagan origins of Easter  over the last thirty years. I was mesmerized with the Moabites and Sumerians use of the crescent not only for a reflection on the changing of seasons, the erection of spring and its fertility festivals in celebration of fecundity and family, but also its understanding of the nature of life and the elevation of love above all other emotions and pursuits.¹ As I will show in future essays it is the Easter-tide message that one can find the foundation for most Mesopotamian religions especially those of Abrahamic origin: from the raising of Moses’ staff with a serpent coiled at the top to the cross of Jesus raised up with the essence of man affixed to its phallic symbolism, to the ejaculation of a war cry demanding that mortals show their allegiance to a desert tribal god from Mecca.

Each writing was  in response to being awakened from a comfortable sleep as a small child in hand-me-down pajamas (that always ended twisted around my ankles) to be being stripped naked and unceremoniously immersed in a tin basin. Each ablution was tantamount to a religious right pregnant with symbolism from the breaking out of the uterus amniotic fluid that protected me, to the baptismal font in the church, or as Sarah Palin chortled, in the water-boarding of the Bush government she would continue to baptize terrorists to see the light of Jesus and holiness of the USA if she were president.

After rising from the water with my brother and sister, one on each side of me, we were scrubbed until no scent of a female or of a man lingered. Very little skin that was not a flush pink was allowed to defile a child of god.

After being sufficiently tortured, in my mind but not that of mother or grandmother, and smelling of nothing but homemade soap, I was considered sufficiently properly cleaned. After the Sunday ritual, I was anointed with Brill Cream that was dolloped and then pushed through my hair that had been soft and light until it was dark and hard. Only when my hair was as hard as a rooster’s cock was my hair considered acceptable. Afterwards, I was dressed roughly by my father, then carried with little fanfare  but much remonstration to a religious service filled with smelly, unwashed people. I always thought that they were numbered among the unsaved as my parents taught their children that “cleanliness was next to godliness” so these poor farmers and shopkeepers were obviously among the damned.

It never made sense why I had to be forcibly bathed at five in the morning on Sundays when I took my Saturday night bath just seven hours previous.  My mother would comment that god would see us with greater charity if we were “re-baptized” with water too better hear the Word preached to save us from sin. Religion was not so much for us about the love of god. Religion for us was about the fear of god and what we needed to do “to be saved”. Being saved included enduring a regular bath–as I was reminded that Jesus bathed in the Jordan–not of cold well water but water heated in an old aluminum kettle and soap out of a sauce pan.

In the 1940-1950s bathing for the lower middle-class was a once a week on Saturday to prepare us to meet “the Lord”.   The only other time those of us in lower economic strata (my sister would have a heart-attack at those words as she always boasted we were upper middle class even though our diet was of potatoes and fish sticks because both were cheap) bathed beside on Saturday night was if we died and were to be carried to the undertaker to be boxed and planted in a fresh dug grave no one would visit after the spiritual exercise of prayers no dead god would hear.

I lived in terror of bathing after hearing of the cruelty of the insane sadomasochistic god who drowned newborns, babies and little children for not following the rules he set but told no one. These small children, like parents and relatives were washed with the anger of god who drowned them in what I once believed was a worldwide flood–a flood that was without scientific foundation but captivated the mind of the gullible who believed in faith over reason.

I trembled that there was any god who would destroy what he created. Even worse was this god who realized he had made a mistake in creating man and so felt it necessary to destroy what he did not have foresight to see. What a vile god! Disgusted with the god of Jacob, Abram, and the other monsters of the Old Testament,  I turned to the delightful deities of the past who rejoiced in food and drink and pleasure. While many did slaughter in turn, none visited holocausts on others for what they themselves had wrought. These gods knew they were inventions of time and misery by men who needed an excuse for their own mortality and failings.

I left Christianity and proudly rejected its Christ as my personal savior at a young age. I only returned to the hated structures that seemed a waste of time, material, and money when so many went homeless, to hear the same old messages repeated by old men who lived as if they existed before the days of the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther. I gave lip service to the recitation of the Nicene and Apostles Creeds that made no sense to me, as they were so filled with hate, so I could graduate  and get a job. I had no choice as my small community was filled with confessing Christians. What few friends I had (before they backed away from any recognized socialization after they learned I stopped believing in god) confessed when they came out of their coffins of Christianity and admitted they were atheists, too, could not understand my preaching the faith, citing the bible, and urging others to repent. They saw me, rightfully, as a hypocrite.

My friends were in public, like I was in private: turned off to the fire and brimstone sermons of Billy (and later Franklin) Graham who made the Jesus of the New Testament a liar by judging in contradiction of Matthew 7:1. They resented the antisemitism of street corner evangelists, who, like Pat Robertson, decried entire groups of people especially Jewish bankers, in contradiction of Acts 10:24.

When I saw them relegated to the basement bin of poor jobs, ostracism by family and friends, I quaked. My family had little interest in me, and what little remained I tried to build up like blowing harder on charcoals that would not ignite. My breath was not strong enough with most of the darkened pieces of petrification: the charcoal and my family.

I hated the Christian concept of god ever since. Why would anyone celebrate with the vocal ejaculation “He is risen!” why he condemned mountains and buildings to fall on little ones?

I always thought that there was something weird about this Lord for whom I was being prepared. I was repeatedly told this hate filled god who demanded the death of first-born children (Abram’s to the children of Egypt) lived in the sky near the sun but never sweated, never ran and never had fun. But! he, being a man, certainly must have had testicles and a penis but never, supposedly, masturbated, as he condemned Onan. After I turned Roman Catholic I was told that the fate of Onan would fall upon me, too, if I “touched myself in an impure manner.” Even after I told the priest in the other half of the confessional that I had washed myself and my hands twice so I would not be impure, I was condemned and given extra prayers to recite to the “Ever Virgin Mother of Our Lord.”  I was ordered out of the confessional when I asked if Mary and her son did not masturbate, at least in their teen years.

For what reason a penis and testicles that must normally contain semen was affixed to a god never made sense to me. Why were attached to this god of Christians, Jews, and Muslims? I was did not understand this until my young uncle (who was studying for the pastorate) intoned that man was created in the image of god: “Therefore” he pontificated, “god had a penis and testicles.”

My uncle’s reasoning was not clear. All I understood was that this god did not create woman as she did not have a penis nor testicles. If god had created woman, then “he Lord” also had a vagina and breasts. That made sense. God was a Hermaphrodite like the son of Apollo and Aphrodite. But never used them but once to create his “only begotten son”—and demanded the slaughter of little children and their parents who transgressed against commandments no one had heard of or knew personally or at a distance–what a tyrannical terrorist is this theological nightmare masquerading as a god! This was the god of Easter for Christians, and for me a myth I had yet to unravel.

Unraveling the Easter fiction took more than fifty years. It was interwoven in the American culture and became as much a part of Christianity as the Nativity. Yet the records on both were scant, and the only source seemed to be the Bible with its numerous errors. It was within the Bible I had to find the answer, as Easter was not celebrated by the early Pauline church.

The earliest Easter record does not appear until the tenth century. Even then it reflected back on pagan gods and goddess known more for the sexuality, virility and fecundity than any spirituality. Most etymological dictionaries recognize that Easter finds its initial dating only with the advent of the Middle English ester, coming from the Old English ēastre. It does have a cognate with the German Ostern that modernist use as an attribute or name for the direction East but its origin harkens to the name of a goddess (Eostre, a word from Northumbria) and her festival: the Rite of Spring and its Equinox. It was cannibalized and transmogrified by Christianity to define the psychopathic sadomasochistic god who is alleged to be the phantom father of a man (or men, as I discuss in my next essay) the redactors of the New Testament call Jesus.

Easter was first celebrated in 325 CE under Imperial command at the First Council of Nicaea. It was to be a reissuance of the Imperial celebration of the goddess Ishtar and rejuvenation, resurrection of dreams centered around the erection of a family found in homes. It occurred during the Spring Equinox. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote in the mid-4th century: “… the emperor … convened a council of 318 bishops … in the city of Nicea … They passed certain ecclesiastical canons at the council besides, and at the same time decreed in regard to the Passover that there must be one unanimous concord on the celebration of God’s holy and supremely excellent day. For it was variously observed by people .. (Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses, Heresy 69, 11,1.)

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II. A psychopathic sadomasochistic god

This Lord of Easter was the same Lord who damned an entire planet to be drowned, in Genesis 7. It was a strange tale of one man who was given more to wine and drunkenness than to any semblance of holiness was selected to be saved than the rest of the world. This quarrelsome phantom and his family who bickered among themselves, complaining over rights of primacy quickly forgot the concept of family community after the voyage had ended. Two brothers turned against one brother to win favor with their drunken father who got naked, became drunk and experienced an unrecorded sexual activity still found favor with the demigod and cursed his grandson who had done nothing, and then walked in backwards to cover their father’s nakedness.

The tale itself is strange, for while the writers of the tale were eager to portray the superiority of mortals, the tale shows these same mortals no better than the animals who were allowed on board. It began before the wretched vagabond victimized his own family and condemned his grandson to a life of bondage when the youth had nothing wrong but be approximate to the old before the voyage began, for while the tart tale trembles with segregation as the animals walked on-board the ark in groups of two, the rascal and his wife strode into the ship followed by his sons and their wives: the prototype of any species welcomed to the floating world the ark would become. While the jealous and wrathful god condemned mortals, this same satyr would save only two of each species of land-locked mammals, while fish were not trucked on board so that they too, by reasoning, would drown with the forsaken mortals, insects and birds–and “all other living things”.

In like manner it was this god who demanded that his butchers Joshua and Gideon kill entire nations.² This “man of god”, like any of Hitler’s SS goose-stepping goon-squads, did as the deity demanded, and it is recorded

In Judges 8:7: “And Gideon said, Therefore when the Lord hath delivered Zebah and Zalmunna into mine hand, then I will tear your flesh with the thorns of the wilderness and with briers”  Three verses later the carnage is more articulately detailed: “Now Zebah and Zalmunna were Karkor, and their hosts with them, about fifteen thousand men, all that were left of all the hosts of the children of the east: for there fell an [sic: a] hundred and twenty thousand men that drew sword.”  The question is simple, do people worship this monster or say nothing in fear of being the next mortal attacked by this insane drudge? His twenty-first century foster son, William “Jerry” Boyton, proclaimed as a lieutenant at the American Family (Christian) Association will return to the earth after being asleep for more than two-thousand years and kill all who oppose him or his father, retreading the steps of the viperous godhead that Judaism and Christianity bow before.

The merciful savior who carried a lost lamb³ was soon displaced by a bloodstained warrior Jesus whose disciples were told to carry weapons⁴ while according to the NAR (New Apostolic Reformation) and chaplains at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO, and General William “Jerry” Boykin who heads the Family Research Council: Jesus would carry an automatic repeating rifle.⁵  While the Lord may be an excellent marksman separating children from parents,⁶ this same Lord just could not get it right and create the truly good and non-thinking clods that came from the earth to regenerate.⁷

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III. The Original Easter

The original Easter, goes back thousands of years, and by some records tens of thousands of years before any Hebrew (originally known as an Apiru who had settled in the Iraqi Delta known as the Ur of the Chaldees) invaded Canaan and stole land from the Palestinians, Phoenicians, and other local land owners and had enlisted in the mercenary armies of the Hittites serving Egypt, and  before any alleged sacrificed Jesus walked on the planet or was crucified as a common criminal in the manner of Zulius, Sakia, Thammuz⁸ Wittoba,⁹ Iao of Nepal¹⁰  and Krhsna, Easter existed and was a ribald revelry of rich sexual and sensual escapades of wanton seduction by teams of consensual adults and their servants: much like the original marriage feasts between any number of women and a man to ensure stability of a family holding or other tangible

The purpose of marriage, like the purpose of Easter, was to drink as much good wine as possible and save the worse wine for last as most guests would be drunk. It was a common belief throughout Mesopotamia that bad wine would be made good if a woman, dressed in the image of the goddess Eostre, could convince an unmarried  man to carry in (the term was “to change”) “new wine” and if the host proclaimed it to be new wine, the magician would be granted a choice as to his sexual partner that night. The wine changer would be hailed as the god Dionysus and after the bacchanal would become one of many crucified saviors.

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IV. Marriage as a part of Easter

It was the belief that such a subterfuge would be so great that no one would tell that old wine was brought in, even though it was expected to be even less tasty than that was poured down belching throats prior to the wine delivers’ arrival.  This was a marriage of fantasy with reality where fantasy was paramount regardless of cost.

The dating of marriages always included records of when great quantities of wine were ordered, brought to the wedding chamber and paid for–a dating practice that was quite similar to the dating of festival of Easter long before there were Hebrews commanding riotous living and heaving drinking. The dating was was never exact but used as a reference to scholarly debate and disputation.

Bede of England was among the many who attempted to debate the date (and reality) of Easter. For Bede, a man giving to writing–an art nearly lost in ancient England–who aimed to be an historian but incorporated numerous myths and lies into the tapestry of England, saw Easter as a means to convert Saxons and other pagans to the novel religion of Christianity that the emperor Constantine I invented in 325 CE at his Council of Nicaea. The monk used computes (the science of calculating the date of Easter) in an effort to bring an end to the dispute between the British and Anglo-Saxon church,¹¹ in conforming with the Emperor’s rogue council that abandoned the Jewish calendar and its dating for Passover as a not-so-covert attack on the Jewish Christians that were losing favor with the Imperial Order. Antisemitism had had a long and inglorious history even before the wretched motley crew of chrestianos came to the foreground demanding their assumed rights to dictate to those who they libeled as non-believers (being those who did not believe in or worship their particular quaint and pastoral god, while pulling down statues, invading “foreign” houses of worship and killing priests who did not genuflect before the name of their various Lords.

Easter, before the new antisemitism of the emerging Pauline church that adopted the Hindu name of Christos / Christianity broke out with a vengeance and only got worse with the invention of the unHoly Inquisition, was set when Church Fathers and their flock asked Jewish neighbors for the date when the Jews “put away the leaven” from their bread indicating Passover (it was the 14^th day of the lunar month of Nissan).¹²

Few chrestianos in the third and later centuries remembered or had the courage to admit their Jewish heritage and background, seeing themselves in the distorted thinking of Saul of Tarsus as being a new people of a new covenant. Jesus’ injunction against judging others (Matthew 7:1), of loving others as they loved themselves (Mark 12:30-31) and attending to the injunction in the  Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12) were put away as too limiting in conquering the world for their Christ, and not adhering to the injunction to “go forth, baptizing and preaching” the message of love that Jesus demand and Saul of Tarsus rejected in quest of a world war for his brand of righteousness(1 Corinthians 11:23-26, with the initial words God with us being the same words to be found on the buckles of NAZIs: Gott Mit Uns and other soldiers of Christ as with the Crusaders who proclaimed Deus Vult. The break of Christianity from its roots to and within Judaism gave rise to yet another calendar that pushed Easter onto the Sunday following the full moon that appears after the Northern Spring Equinox (it was originally known as the Paschal Full Moon) and brought into Christianity (a religion that was void of any reference to a pastoral egalitarian Jesus) the goddess Eostre/Ostara or god Estre (sometimes combined as Easter), the Easter Bunny, and eggs representing fecundity and celebration. The art of dying Easter eggs was neither late in Christian history nor was it within the initial domain of Christianity.

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V. Easter eggs

Dying Easter eggs has a long and colorful past. We can find the original tradition of Easter egg coloring in old Persian records that show it to have started in ancient Persia around the year 3000 BCE. Various eggs from various birds were gathered up and dyed with natural materials to celebrate the first day of spring and the revery of the gods and goddess, beginning with Nowruz and reaching its zenith under the Good Shepherd Mithras who was adopted as the official god of the Roman army and enjoyed a great sexual holiday among the solider campaigning during spring. Anahita was the female correspondent goddess to Nowruz, and played a significant role in celebrating sexual intercourse and conception if it occurred, but was a sentry of intelligence that knew that sex was not about procreation but celebration.

Anahita was often portrayed as a virgin (not belonging by any man), wearing a golden cloak and a diamond tiara. She was styled by all as “the Immaculate One” and the fruit from her loins considered to be a child of divinity and not the product of sexual intercourse with a man–a concept that the Christian apologists plagiarized and put into their own mariology. Anahita was known as “Queen of the Heavens” and acclaimed as a Mother of God; her faithful carried her message as far north as Czechoslovakia and her recognition of love for all people heralded far and wide. She continued to play and important role in Persian/Iranian history and is still worshiped by some Iranians today who celebrate her feasts in private and in hiding given the tight Islamic rule of Iran’s ayatollahs and mullahs.

The first known egg dyeing in the U.S. was by the Pennsylvania Dutch (German) settlers in the early 1700’s. Most were Protestant and were a part of the more educated who came from the Low Countries and Germany. They used natural materials such as onion skin and bark to color the shells. Flowers were boiled for their dye material and other natural elements used that would affix, and bring delight to the recipient of the egg.

The name for the deity or deities is old, predating Constantine’s Christianity. It is attested solely by Bede in religious literature and is found in his 8th-century work De temporum ratione (it translates as The Reckoning of Time).¹³ Written in Latin, De temprum ratione includes an introduction to the traditional ancient and medieval view of the cosmos that the Church pushed as the only explanation for the universe that was narrow in scope and focus and included an explanation of how the spherical earth influenced the changing length of daylight, of how the seasonal motion of the Sun and Moon influenced the changing appearance of the New moon at evening twilight, and a quantitative relation between the changes of the tides at a given place and the daily motion of the moon.

Reading Bede is not only a revelation of one man’s triumph on reading more than the Bible, but also an outline of what religion said that people believed or ignored. The book’s lasting value is that it describes a variety of ancient calendars, including the Anglo-Saxon calendar and the Julian calendar that continued their hold over the community of faithful at large as well as the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church that was among the last . The focus of De temporum ratione was calculation of the date of Easter that was considered critical to the faithful so that each person who attended services celebrating the resurrection of Jesus’ corporal body from the tomb of Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin  (who, it is claimed, wrote a Gospel of his own: The Gospel of Nicodemus, but was originally known as the Acts of Pilot), for which Bede described the method developed by Dionysius Exiguus.

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VI. Dating Easter to make it Christian

De temporum ratione also gives instructions for calculating the date of the Easter full moon that was especially sacred to Venus who remains current in coin throughout European development, for calculating the motion of the Sun and Moon through the zodiac (a pagan sign for gods and apostles), and for many other calculations related to the calendar.

In De temporum ratione Bede makes several calculations. Bede based his reasoning for the dates on the Hebrew Bible, complete with errors not yet corrected and states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent to the month of April) feasts were held in Eostre’s honor among the pagan Anglo-Saxons but had not been practiced at the time of his birth, writing: Eosturmonath (the word first appeared in889 CE) has a name which is now translated “Paschal month” (Chapters 44-65), and which was once called after a Germanic goddess of named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.¹⁴ While Bede was in the forefront of those who were determining the distinctions and differentiations of time, it must also be noted, as it is printed in his work on Time, that he was also a believer in End Time theology and subordinated his research and findings to be in agreement with what the Church taught.  In Chapter 66, Bede accepted the six ages of time, where the Sixth Age would span a space of years from the advent of Christ until the end of days. Chapters 67-71 were devoted to the repetition of church consensus that Christ (not Jesus) would come a second time, and like the celestial Persian war, would battle the Antichrist, leading to Judgement Day, and the Seventh and Eighth age of the world to come. Dating Easter became more critical so that the Communion of Saints would be best prepared to receive the warrior Christ, and thus it was necessary to study the pagan sources as well as those confirmed as acceptable by Rome.

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VII. Sex and fertility as a part of Easter

Many have argued that Ostrara/Eostre was Freyja (or Freya), a Norse goddess linked with rabbits, hares and bunnies—each a distinct part in the erotic sexuality of the spring festival—and gathered to her serpentine arms that coil as the circle of life and regeneration / resurrection. Bunnies carried eggs to females to inform them of their fertility and future of conception. To consume an egg was considered to be a supplication not just for fertility and conception but for sexual excess and penetration, and erotic movement within the vagina that was heralded as the door eternal life. At the same time, the sexual rituals that had counterparts in ancient Canaan and Rome, also promised plurality and profit for those who cultivated the lands and sold to other people: it was a business arrangement for those who could produce.¹⁵

Literally, Ostara, Eostre and Estre are not names (nouns) but actions (verbs) signifying “dawn” or rebirth, regeneration and prosperity. Easter’s celebration was one month long, and given to rejoicing over a new birth of the year. This was later merged in with the resurrection story that incorporated the erection of hopes and fecundity. Still there was a problem with the celebration of Ester as the vernal equinox was fixed to fall on the 21^st day of March while the ecclesiastical moon was fixed at 14 days after the beginning of the ecclesiastical lunar month with Easter falling on the Sunday after the ecclesiastical full moon. There is no scriptural reference to Easter. Easter was neither recognized nor celebrated in the early communities of those who proclaimed themselves to follow a crucified Jesus.¹⁶ Long before the modern age, Easter was commercial.

Even this was a problem for the pagan Roman Catholic community who saw the Jewish dating as being unorthodox with the Emperor’s wishes to create an imperial religion for the empire, demanding that Easter be in the spring time.¹⁷  Some of the Jewish dating fell before the official spring season, leading to the ill-educated Dionysus, bishop of Alexandria, remonstrating seething with vitriol that “at no time other than the spring equinox is it legitimate to celebrate Easter” as was so favored by religions Roman Catholicism cannibalized and incorporated into the canon of the corrupt diocese (originally the name of a legal department within the empire): from the rituals of Persephone and other spring deities.¹⁸ It also afforded an opportunity for the unlettered Peter, bishop of Alexandria to go on the attack against communal Jews: “The men of the present day now celebrate (Passover) before the (spring) equinox…through negligence and error.”¹⁹ It was with the unrelenting resistance to the Roman and Greek Pauline churches of Constantine over the issue of Easter that the Emperor saw the need to take charge and control (“direct”) the church. That he did with a firm hand, all the time remaining a pagan until the moment of his death when he, not wanting “this barbaric act”, was baptized against his expressed wishes. The Roman Senate understood the ploy of priests and patriarchs, and to counter their grab for more power by pledging to declare Constantine a saint, the Senators declared the dead emperor a god.²⁰

The problem of dating Easter lasted for centuries. Churches and religious leaders quarreled in private and in public with open attacks on opponents credentials and credibility. When it appeared for certain that the Roman Catholic Calendar–that of Pope Gregory–would win the Roan Catholic countries in the West, and gave credence to many that Protestant would also follow them, but not as rapidly, the Orthodox community, especially in Russia an Greece, declared against it and stood with the Julian calendar and its many errors.  The common people, those who actually toiled the land, winnowed wheat, forged weapons, fortunately kept their pagan customs and these ultimately would be incorporated into the sterile, staid and ossified religion of bishops who tolerated, most mildly, the pleasurable parts of the holiday that not all sought to celebrate with scourging, weapon and self-denial. After the sixteenth century this resulted in differences between the Eastern and Western churches, with the Roman Catholic Church using the Gregorian calendar, and the Eastern Orthodox churches using the Julian calendar.

The erotic side of Easter can be seen in the philological origins of the word Easter: Ishtar or Estre/Easter. Easter was the celebration of nudity and considered to be the “original way all of mankind began”—as babies. The purification of the individual was equal to my ablution in the 1940s and 1950s—being given by an older person (usually my mother, and at rare moments by my father, but argued over by my uncles who has a strange delight in washing my little body, paying close attention, as did the ancients Sumerians, Babylonians, Canaanites, and other fertility cultures, to cleans with special patience and prolonged rubbing of select orifices that I was told later were gateways to hell).

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VIII. The Crescent: Symbol of Woman, her Vagina, Fertility, and Sex

The crescent was always associated with the feminine: woman, in honor of her vagina, and thus it was not unusual in ancient Arabia for the crescent to be raised above men as it was the goal of men to achieve unity with the goddess²¹ through her crescent: Ishtar,²² Asherah,²³ Inanna²⁴ or Venus who was worshiped universally even in the city of Mecca. One of the most penetrating lies is that the crescent is associated with Muhammad and Islam–but the crescent goes back to the ancient Moabites (14th or early 13th – 6th century BCE) and appears on their seals and is a part of Sumerian iconography. They are not joined before 58 BCE, and not in Arabia but in Mesopotamia.²⁵

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IX. Uselessness of man unless he rode on the foal of an ass

Among the ancient Canaanites from whom the Israelites are alleged to have come, the passage into Passover came with naked women riding on horses to effect stimulation of their crescents and therefore more adaptable to entertaining men. Those men who were selected for this joyous union were invited to mount the foal of an ass and ride behind the savior goddess whose crescent was ruby red in the sun and bright against the hairs of the horse on which the woman rode.

Once the women arrived with their pets, the men on foals of asses, they dismounted to enter a courtyard so that there could be a union in the tabernacle of the holies while other women danced nude during their worship service.  No woman in the Middle East before the eighth century and the rise of puritan Islam ever wore clothes while engaged in choreographic presentations.

Ultimate forgiveness of inhospitality came when the worshipers touched the naked body of the goddess (Ishtar) and rejoiced in touching the breasts and labia of the women dancers. When men were involved, their Staff of Life was hailed as the Rod of God.

The erection of the penis became known as the resurrection of man and his right to a part in the rites of Easter. It erect penis swiftly became a talisman that ultimately evolved into the cult of Ester and the symbolism of the rabbit and its fecundity in hopping up and down.

In the world freed of the shackles of hatred that were forged by Christianity as defined by Constantine’s bishops who raised Paul above Jesus of the New Testament and his erstwhile letters above the gospels and the sayings of Jesus, the joy in living was smothered in favor of a life of penance, prayer and terror of perdition. Nothing was good. Paul condemned entire groups of people. This self-proclaimed apostle, degraded women  wholesale unlike the loving Jesus found occasionally in the Gospels. It was Saul of Tarsus, after being was “blinded by the light” in an epileptic seizure, who forged a frightening veil over the family that turned its unity into submerged slavery. It was the chains that were cast by a distant father who would have been far happier in the days of the carnage recorded by rogue prophets of perdition. It was the Old Testament prophets who damned everything from eating shrimp to rejecting the basic food stuffs that society had survived on for generations, garments that were not only to cover but to enhance, and cosmetics that gave a more flattering tone than sun-weathered and beaten lips and cheeks as some adornments were made with eggs–the foundation of life in twisted thinking. Critical considerations and independent through brought death sentences, and blind obedience carried promises of illusionary lives no one ever found while alive among peers and family.

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X. Eggs: the spiritual sign of fertility and food of generations

Eggs were considered to be a sign of fertility and were used through the age of the Renaissance, especially with Mary announcing the Conception of her child. Eggs, however, go further back in time and are found in caves, on plates, and elsewhere, but always as a symbol of sexuality and fertility and were not respective of gender or status. The eggs of a woman found in menstruation were a sign of life and a promise of future generations. Menstrual blood, however, was considered unclean among those who would become know as the Hebrews. While menstruation was lamented as a curse on women, the eggs or testicles of the man were considered so sacred that Aaron’s priest swore allegiance to their god upon them (Leviticus 21:20) as later legends had popes (beginning with Benedict III in 855), would be tested for testicles while riding in the papal chair before being installed as the supreme pontiff in Rome.

Fertility symbolism, worldwide, was centered around the innocent and innocuous egg. Holy people and gods were seen as not being born of an egg but born in an egg, and the initial study of life was focused on the egg of which there were drawings, sketches, and celebrations in honor of the rebirth of learning: Easter.

One of the most under-discussed but important aspects of hagiography, especially in Christianity is the early use of the egg to form an aureole of light to frame the body of one considered sacred today.

In the past an aureole surrounding a person set apart for worship or veneration referred or reflected upon the fecundity,usually prolific, of the individual or some divine connection in this world or another world that most people did not venture towards. This became the celebrated case with the hagiography of the mother of Jesus, a simple woman who played an small and unassuming role in the original scriptures. That changed with the mariology of the church and its dependence on turning to women as objects of worship so that the sacerdotals could control them and the men who found favor with them. This is true in depictions of the Virgin Mary who in the later days of Christianity was actually transmogrified from being a mortal woman to being a god-like figure in the order of Isis and Astarte.

Painting eggs and decorating them with colors or jewels was just a further advance of giving eggs greater value and strong erotic overtones.²⁶ From the Ukrainian art came the famous Fabergé eggs created with fine gold and enamels by(Peter) Carl Gus·ta·vo·vich, 1846–1920, Russian goldsmith and jeweler, that the despotic Romanovs purchased in celebration of their wealth and feigned religiosity. These eggs have become collectors items that people fight for on the floors of auction houses, in bars and brothels if necessary to obtain one. It is for that reason the world has forgotten their source: the most beautiful and carefully crafted eggs that are found in the Ukraine now under a reign of terror by pro-Russian NAZIs who are demanding that Jews register and pay a fine in matching the menacing scripts of the defunct Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s Ministry of Propaganda.²⁷

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XI. End Notes