ALT Text: Scene is WAITROSE. Behind it is a staff member, whose name we will soon learn is BECKY. She is dealing with a customer, for now out of shot, while talking to her manager on the phone.

BECKY [on phone]: Yeah, hiya…

2 BECKY: Yes I have a customer here who wants to complain about the Easter eggs.

3 BECKY [putting hand over receiver while addressing the customer stood at the desk in front of her]: Sorry what was your name again?

4 [Pull back to show the customer is a very tall, green-skinned, PAGAN GODDESS, festooned with flowers. Stood next to her is her son, a normal human teenager in a hoodie, who looks mortified by his mum.]

PAGAN GODDESS: Eostre the Pagan Goddess of Fertility

5 BECKY Sorry - Your name is Easter…?

PAGAN GODDESS: Eostre.

6

[Vicky pauses, trying to take this in].

VICKY: Your name is Easter and you want to complain about the Easter eggs.

7 PAGAN GODDESS: Sorry love, what’s your name?

BECKY: Becky

PAGAN GODDESS: Well, Vicky -

8 PAGAN GODDESS: If it was you who’d shagged the solar god of the Equinox to give birth to an actual living god - my son Darren here -

TEENAGE BOY: Muuum…

9 PAGAN GODDESS: ….only to have all your efforts totally forgotten by history, you’d have a complaint too!

10 PAGAN GODDESS: Aisle four is full of products, with no hint of the true meaning of the festival!

11 BECKY: You mean… Jesus…?

PAGAN GODDESS: I mean shagging, Vicky.

12 PAGAN GODDESS: Is it too much to see just a little bit of pre-Christian sex in Aisle 4?

  • Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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    6 个月前

    What better way to symbolize shagging in a kid-friendly way than an egg hunt? Look at all those little sperms go, trying to find the egg as quickly as possible after all being released at the same time?

      • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
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        6 个月前

        It’s a nice idea, but eggs were associated with the Christian Easter (Pascha in Latin, which is roughly the name for Easter in most countries that celebrate it), probably as a custom from Persia going through to what’s now Eastern Orthodoxy and from there to Catholics/Protestants as a way to celebrate the end of Lent (eggs being prohibited during that time). It’s still possible it was also Pagan and forgotten, decorating eggs is at least 60k years old, but its association with Easter was only (re-?) initiated through Christianity.

        • 1dalm@lemmy.today
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          6 个月前

          They don’t care. They need their anti-intellectualism as badly as fundamentalist Christians.

        • Semjeza@fedinsfw.app
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          6 个月前

          The thousands of years old tradition from non-Abrahamic Persia, (in fact a proto-IE region with shared religious rites with Slavic, Celtic and Germanic Europe), predating not only the splits of Christianity into Eastern Orthodox and Other, but of Christianity actually existing, doesn’t show it was a Pagan tradition?

          What else do you call non-Abrahamic religious rites?

          (And apparently new evidence has since backed up Bede’s account of Pagan Oestra in the British Isles, too.)

  • Mulligrubs@lemmy.world
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    6 个月前

    Think of all of the millions that Christians butchered over this… then, they destroyed every single trace of any other religion, erasing centuries of cultural history.

    Today, Catholics alone own over 170 million acres of land, much of it stolen from those same people, and they enjoy tax-free status all over the world. Horrifying.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
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    6 个月前

    That’s not even a checkout line, so the man behind Spring is just there to watch the drama.

    • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
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      6 个月前

      There’s some evidence Eostre (or Ostara, Austra, definitely Aušrinė in Lithuania) was worshipped, but the evidence is scant and mostly based on linguistic reconstruction by Grimm in the 19th century. There is evidence of votive offerings to the “Austriahenae” (a collection of matron goddesses) discovered in 1958, but little else.

      • Semjeza@fedinsfw.app
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        6 个月前

        There have been more discoveries since Grimm boys, and despite earlier scepticism scholars are now mostly accepting that there was an Eostre diety worshipped in Europe around the Spring Equinox.

    • Semjeza@fedinsfw.app
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      6 个月前

      New findings and archeo-lingustics have supported Grimms and Bede, so the existence (culturally) and worship of Oestra (or however your 1000BC Celto-Germanic language spelt it) is now generally accepted by scholars (and anyone who isn’t pushing an anti-intellectual, and often antisemitic, “war on Christianity” agenda).

  • Geobloke@aussie.zone
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    6 个月前

    Without checking, I think it’s only called Easter in the UK, everywhere else in Europe uses a derivation of passover

  • root@lemmy.wtf
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    5 个月前

    One sentence written by a monk with no proof nor backing is the most we have of “eostre” btw