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