Page 113 - Southern Oregon Magazine Spring 2019

ne of the more iconic symbols of spring, the Easter
egg is deeply rooted in culture and ancient traditions.
OWhile we are more familiar with the modern incar-
nation, Easter eggs have a long history with deep religious and
social meanings that are more than just stained fingers, morn-
ing egg hunts, and plastic egg-shaped shells filled with good-
ies left for children by a mysterious late night bunny. Looking
deeper into the history of Easter eggs takes you on a journey
through the foundations of Christianity, it’s interaction with
paganism, millennia old food restrictions, and physical objects
as metaphor for both natural and theological concepts.

Like many modern traditions that have their roots obscured
by history, there is no single authority on Easter eggs, and no
commonly agreed-upon evolution of the practice of decorating
eggs. We may not be able to draw a clean, direct line between
the first egg decorators and modern Easter, but there is at least
enough evidence and tradition to rough out some possibilities.
And of course, the closer we get to modern times, the more
certainty we can have about the tradition.

The first instances of decorated eggs are so old that we can’t
be sure what the intentions of the decorators were. It’s beyond
our ability to know whether a 50,000-year-old ostrich egg
from Africa, etched and decorated, had anything to do with
the celebration of life or rebirth. It’s an easy mental connec-
tion to think of an egg as a symbol of life, and certainly in the
last 2,000 years we see exactly that. We can guess that, as an
egg, it may have had that connection so long ago, but we can’t
really know.

We have to move our timetable up to the time of pre-dynastic
Egypt before we have certainty that eggs are a symbol of life,
death, rebirth, and kingship. It’s around 5,000 years ago that
we begin seeing decorated ostrich eggs in both Egyptian and
Sumerian burial sites. And only slightly more recently we
begin to see egg decorating in ancient Persia connected to the
spring equinox festival of Nowruz and Zoroastrian traditions.

Some people support the idea, championed by Bede the
Venerable (a Benedictine monk in the late 7th – early 8th cen-
tury A.D.) that the Easter egg tradition is based in European
paganism. In his history of English Christianity, Bede wrote
about the spring celebration of a fertility goddess “Eostre” that

spring 2019 | www.southernoregonmagazine.com 111