[UA] The Easterbunny

[Luke Pendo]

Some random thoughts:

>From the long ancient times of mythic childhood, I remembered a sense that
Easter was about freakish thing.


Unlike most holidays, Easter had this strange tenuous connection to religion
for me. Christmas had spawned it's own lumbering and extensive and mostly
secular mythology, but Easter seemed to have this sense of "Refer to Holy
Text/Instruction Manual" sense about it.


And at some point in my preteens, the Easter bunny and the Rampage Bunny
from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Freakish bunnies laying freakish eggs
made of chocolate, and freakish bunnies biting off appendages - the leap
didn't seem to be that far from each other.


I also remember the Cadbury bunny playing a part in the my internal
mythology. Bock bock bock, and what not.


Another aspect is the anthropomorphization of the bunny - in most cases I
remember, the bunny was regarded as a sentient holiday force - joining the
ranks of the Lucky Charms Leprechaun and the Tooth Fairy as representatives
of holidays. (Yeah, the Lucky Charms leprechaun basically became The
Leprechaun, was tasked to serve on St. Patrick's Day. Real holiday's need
representatives.


So, Easter came to be about a freakish bunny that dabbled in strange and
esoteric mysteries such as religion and biogenetic manipulation.


And finally it devolved to a form of anthrophagy, where the materials of the
bunny, a chocolate body and candy eggs, were consumed by the eager
supplicants, and the sentient bunny - not quite human, not quite animal,
offered itself up to sustain the desires and delights of children, if only
for a single weekend.


Oh, and school was canceled for Easter, so it was a big deal. Not as big as
Christmas with it's winter break, but still, for most of my peers, a holdiay
that got a break was a big deal. Or just weird, like President's Day.

-Luke

On 5/3/07, graver <graver_13x at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Russell, thanks for the youtube link, that was hilarious!  And is it bad
> that I think my players (or one of them at least) would be able to relate to
> the various victims in that flick XD
>
> As symbology goes, nice thinking on the bunny... but what about the eggs,
> the hiding of them, the plastic vs colored eggs, and the candy?  Ya, I'm
> just fishing for more ;)
>
> VariableX, you are dead right in your statement that the bunny was
> barrowed from fertility rites and celebrations of more "pagan" people that
> were converted over to Christianity.  As you pointed out, most all Christian
> holidays are barrowed in this manner, but to be fair to Christianity, this
> is true of all religions, and to be fair to all religions, this is also true
> of most all cultures.  It's just simple cultural exchange and has happened
> for as long as there have been people of differing ideas and mind sets.
>
> When two such peoples meet up, no matter the outcome, whether bloody or
> harmonious, ideas and concepts will be exchanged and those gaining the new
> ideas will warp them a bit to own them and make them a part of their
> paradigm.  No religion or culture grew out of nor exists in a vacuum.  They
> were birthed and shaped by what had come before and continue to be shaped by
> what is.
>
> How ever, I was wanting to know what the easterbunny means to
> industrialized nations today, 2007, not what it used to mean.  We are a far
> different people now then the ones that first imagined him.  He has mutated
> and changed over time, from a fertility symbol to an odd seemingly tacked on
> after thought of a take on the rebirth archetype in the mythology of a
> predominant chunk of western religions.  As time goes by, more and more
> people in the industrialized nations put less stock in the myth cycles of
> their religion... at least in comparisons to 50 years ago.  That being said,
> I was wondering what he is today and what he is to most people today.
>
> ------------------------------
> Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
> Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=48245/*http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html;_ylc=X3oDMTE1YW1jcXJ2BF9TAzk3MTA3MDc2BHNlYwNtYWlsdGFncwRzbGsDbmV3LWNhcnM->
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> UA mailing list
> UA at lists.unknown-armies.com
> http://lists.unknown-armies.com/mailman/listinfo/ua
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.unknown-armies.com/pipermail/ua-unknown-armies.com/attachments/20070503/e508d022/attachment-0002.htm>