Are Easter Memes really about Easter?
Easter’s almost here, which means that we’ll soon be up to our necks in Easter bunnies, Easter eggs, and COVID-safe Easter egg hunts. Most of us will even see a number of Easter memes, harmless jokes about rabbits or chocolate good for a short laugh. (Or maybe a wry snort.) But some recent research has picked up on a strange undercurrent in some Easter memes which aren’t out to make you smile: they want to convince you of some surprising claims about the (alleged) pagan origins of Easter. That said, I’m not so sure it’s really Easter these memes are about. I think they’re just as much about the internet itself, and how people use it to find information and identify their communities.
Let’s take a step back. Humans seem to have celebrated spring festivals of one sort of another around the world and throughout history. European traditions of decorated eggs go back to at least the 900s in Poland, and the English King Edward I gave gifts of eggs at Easter in 1290 — probably due to egg eating being forbidden by the Catholic church during Lent. More recently, edible chocolate eggs were produced in Britain by the 1870s.
Easter Memes
These days though, it’s not just chocolate we send each other at Easter: the sending of traditional greeting cards might be in steep decline — at least partially due to environmental concerns — but e-card services continue to grow, up nearly 10% in recent years. Of course, you don’t need a special service to send someone an electronic image. There aren’t many of us who haven’t seen some sort of Easter meme on social media! These range from twee stock photos of cute rabbits and painted eggs to cheeky jokes.
Yet for all the classic Easter represented in these memes being held up as part of ‘traditional British culture’, it’s worth noting that pretty much every part of it has been imported from abroad. The Romans introduced Christianity, rabbits, and chickens to Great Britain over 1500 years ago, although neither Christianity nor rabbits were great successes at first — they had to be reintroduced again in later centuries, and it took still more centuries for them to become ‘normal’ and ‘British’. Research by academics on the Exploring the Easter E.g. project have shown a similar nostalgic bias in the way we talk about Christmas and other aspects of ‘British’ culture: new arrivals are initially rejected, then accepted, then become the new standard against which later arrivals are measured.
Meme Warfare
Speaking of British things, there was a burst of memes around the UK school holidays at Easter last year as the extent of the COVID lockdown restrictions became clear. Most were light-hearted, but they helped express a current of frustration, even anger, people were feeling about the situation.
We’ve all witnessed in recent years how memes aren’t just for laughs. They’ve played a large role in major political developments in the UK and USA, to the point that researchers have started discussing how memes have been ‘weaponized’. And it’s not just professional trolls and politicians either: some religious groups have also moved from silly memes designed to engage people online…
…to edgier memes aimed at stoking up their followers and making provocative statements. In the English-speaking parts of the internet, this type of meme is usually Christian.
The Origins of Easter
That said, it’s not only Christians who are making argumentative memes, even when it comes to Easter. Pagans — people who follow religious traditions from before the arrival of Christianity in different parts of the world — often rely on the internet to find like-minded believers. (Some related religions even take place entirely online.) So it’s not surprising that they’re also keen to spread the word of their beliefs online too, and some have responded to the growth of Christian Easter memes with their own contributions, which focus on the pagan roots of modern Easter:
Most of these memes claim that the Christian festival of Easter was originally a pre-Christian spring festival dedicated to a fertility goddess, allegedly called Ēostre in Anglo-Saxon England and Ostara in pagan Germany. The general idea that Christians deliberately adapted pagan festivals in areas they were trying to convert is true, but the details surrounding Easter are much less secure. In fact, research has shown that while it’s possible that Ēostre was worshipped in early Medieval Kent, it seems very unlikely that she was known or worshipped more widely. Similarly, it’s not clear whether a German equivalent to Ēostre even existed.
That said, these pagan memes aren’t just about Ēostre. Many treat ‘Easter’ as a goddess who has gone by different names in different parts of the world. They particularly link her to Ishtar, a Mesopotamian goddess. And while there does seem to have been a common origin for the names of some European dawn goddesses, neither Ēostre nor Ishtar belong to that group. Fascinatingly, Easter-Ishtar memes seem to be controversial in pagan circles, with meme-makers responding to each other and correcting what they see as incorrect information:
The Memeing of Easter
So what are all these pagan Easter memes about? At the Exploring the Easter E.g. research project, we think they’re very similar to the twee photos of bunnies and cheesy jokes about Easter I talked about earlier: they work on multiple levels, communicating different messages at the same time. Just like the straightforward Easter memes are superficially about modern Easter, pagan Easter memes are superficially about historical Easter. And just like straightforward Easter memes also communicate messages about what is traditionally and acceptably ‘Easter’, pagan Easter memes have other messages too. In fact, in a recent study a colleague and I argued that in addition to using some of the same symbols as a series of ancient British deities, there are a number of less obvious things these pagan Easter memes do that help them gain traction every year.
First and foremost, these memes also make us question some pretty key assumptions about who we are: Britain, for example, is commonly described as Christian country, so being confronted with an argument that a key part of that Christian culture wasn’t always straightforwardly Christian can be uncomfortable, even if you disagree with it. This is intensified by the general loss of interest in and knowledge about Christianity. So-called ‘irreligion’ — the growing rejection or indifference to religion — is becoming widespread the world over, but particularly in Western nations like Britain.
In which case these memes about ancient goddesses and old-fashioned traditions are doing something very modern indeed: they’re part of a conversation about how we construct our identities as Christian or non-Christian, British or foreign, in the modern age. The corrected and re-corrected Ishtar memes in particular also reflect people’s frustrations about the spread of information on the internet. How and why people choose to trust different sources of information online is a huge and confusing topic, one that feeds into our anxieties about our identities. After all, without reliable information about where our traditions come from and what they mean, how can we decide who we are?
In conclusion, then, are Easter memes really about Easter? Sort of. That depends on what you mean by ‘Easter’.
