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Comment by suddenlybananas | Hacker News Reader

https://youtu.be/0m2ZQaxfpnY?si=t0zQAWhZEW8Uoa2z the Easter Bunny is not pagan, it's a much more recent tradition.

Thanks for the correction there! I was not aware that Easter Bunny was much more like Santa than something associated with Eostre or Pagan.

I guess the bunny still got something similar to the Coke-branding that Santa got to help product sales, but for chocolate sales instead!?

I retract the 'rabbits' part of what I said, but I still think it's ultimately a fairly weird taken-over/hybrid-mythology festival! I'm only able to talk about Easter as I know it in Aus though!.. I totally acknowledge festivals and their timing/meaning are very different in other places.

The video doesn't disprove a long standing non Christian association between what is now Easter and rabbits.

What it does state is in agreement with the wikipedia article on the connection between Ēostre and rabbits, namely:

  The earliest evidence for the Easter Hare (Osterhase) was recorded in south-west Germany in 1678 by the professor of medicine Georg Franck von Franckenau

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre

This is the earliest still extant written account of folk practices that had been occurring for some indeterminant time.

We are aware that the brewing of beer predates by many centuries, millenia even, the earliest still extant written account of the practice of brewing beer.

Of course it is possible that the tradition goes back more than a thousand years from when it was first attested, but we have no material evidence of that whatsoever. No statues of a goddess surrounded by eggs and rabbits, no amulets of protection, no recorded myths, no references to something similar from Greek or Roman sources, nothing. This is in contrast to beer where we have actually found remains of beer from long, long ago.

It certainly existed for generations prior to when it was first written about .. as much of all human activity did.

We have actual remains of rabbits from long long ago.

The point being much human activity leaves little trace, we'd be wise to not assume the only human activity was activity that left a pyramid or giant stautue in its wake.

Yes, but traditions are also invented all the time, and there's no reason to assume a random tradition among German Protestants in the 17th century goes back over a thousand years without evidence.

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