History of Easter

EASTER, the Christian spring festival commemorating the Resurrection. The term in Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon languages is derived from Ostara, the divinity of spring of the ancient Norsemen, who was welcomed in a festival of celebration on her annual return, reclothing the earth with greenery and flowers, after each winter and night of death had stripped the world of its faded robes and hidden them away, the sun even in the northernmost inhabited regions disappearing during the coldest winter months.

To the Norsemen the festival of the divinity of spring which they called Ostara or Eastre (whence Easter) was especially the season of new birth. From this festival arose the symbols of the Easter egg and of the Easter rabbit, as prolific reproducers of species; the decoration of springs and wells with flowers in token of the returning flow of water as a life-giving necessity; and the custom of baptismal cleanliness, purification and regeneration. Every rite has a physical basis. The coloring of the Easter eggs, red, blue, yellow, etc., was borrowed from the rays of the Aurora borealis — the northern lights — and the dawning hues of the Easter sun. At Easter the hearth fire was lighted afresh. Easter bonfires were kindled on the hills, dispersing the germs of evil so far as an Easter fire shed its light

The foundation of drama is found in these early myths and attendant songs, for example, the desire to express the two great emotions attributed to Nature, her sorrow when the sun is withdrawn and her joy when the fruitful season of growth begins again, is poetically developed with repetition in the Greek dramatic myth of Demeter and Persephone— Latinized as Ceres and Proserpine. While gathering flowers on the plains of Enna in Sicily, Persephone was abducted by "gloomy Dio*— Pluto, the god of the dead — and reigned in Hades as his wife, the majestic queen of the underworld. Her mother, Demeter or Ceres, seeking her, hurries over the earth with a torch in her hand and at last gains the concession from the gods of Persephone's return for a third part of every year. In later years, with the development of agriculture, the festival came to be overshadowed by the rejoicing of the harvest season and by the autumn celebration of the cereal mysteries of the earth-goddess. In the beginning she was not separated from the divinity of spring, who, having wandered for nine months, at last returns, bringing new life and warmth and sunshine to the waiting earth. Therefore at "Eleusis," a general term for a "place of coming or assembly," and not originally a name attached to a special locality, the Greeks celebrated their festivals with the mysterious processions of veiled figures with torches moving from side to side in mimic search for the lost Persephone. The modern Maypole dances have their origin in these same Eleusinian spring celebrations, for the rhythmic interlacing circles of figures holding the brightly colored ribbons recall inevitably the measured torch-light dance of Eleusis, the search from side to side for lost Persephone.

The Encyclopedia Americana: a library of universal knowledge, Volume 9
1918 pgs. 504-508 @ Google Books