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The Easter RatThe Easter RatPeter Cottontail has a secret. You probably already know that the Easter celebration of today borrows the symbols and name of Oester, a spring festival of the early European pagans. After the long, rough winter came March and April, with flowers and songbirds’ eggs and the mating season for hares. These lanky relatives of rabbits would emerge in large numbers, cavorting in the greening fields, fighting, copulating, and generally behaving as mad as March hares. This is how the hare became a symbol of Oester, but there was already more to the spring festivities than that. Even in early times, a magic animal was supposed to visit houses and leave sweets and little gifts for deserving people. At this point, it might do to ask yourself why the Europeans of centuries ago, who were keenly aware of the behavior of the natural world and its animal inhabitants, would ever imagine a hare (or even a rabbit) coming indoors. Hares and rabbits back then were just as shy of people as they are today…have you ever heard of wild rabbits sneaking into anyone’s house? That’s because they don’t. Not only that, rabbits and hares do not generally carry baskets, trinkets, or much of anything else from place to place. So why would the magic “Easter Bunny” behave so un-rabbitlike? Because he isn’t, and never was, a rabbit! The Oester tradition of a gift-bearing animal was most popular in what is now Germany, and depending on where you went in the countryside, the animal was often (ready for this?) the Easter Rat! Unlike rabbits and hares, rats were frequent houseguests in early Europe, and their almost supernatural ability to come and go as they pleased probably fueled the idea that an Easter Rat could slip into the house to bring gifts. And rats do move stuff around, creating caches of interesting shiny bits of metal, cloth scraps, and other collectibles. The idea of a rat carrying a basket—or hiding goodies in the house—makes some sense. (In my house the rats have large collections of paper and small toys under the sofa. There’s nothing as silly-looking as a tiny rat dragging a huge sheet of newspaper over and trying to stuff it all underneath without attracting the attention of anyone who might want the paper for some other purpose, like, say, reading.) When the Christians came to convert the native peoples of Europe, they found that it was usually easier to assimilate a holiday than to eliminate it. Since the spring celebrations were already strongly-rooted in local traditions, the Christians just took the symbolism associated with Oester and applied it to their own spring (Passover-season) holy days commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Easter—Oester—eggs and small gifts could be used to teach Christian doctrine, and even the hare symbolism was preserved, though in the less wild and completely asexual persona of the Easter Bunny. Somewhere along the line, the Oester Rat was forgotten altogether. It may have been because the rat’s association with magic made it unpopular with Christians, or maybe the anti-rat sentiments of the Plague years led people to abandon their semi-supernatural gift-bringing rodent and replace him with the cuddlier image of the Easter Bunny. But you can be sure that beneath those floppy ears and powder-puff tail lurks the Oester Rat, still hiding gifts and welcoming the spring. SOURCE |