THE recent outrage over the apparent dropping of the word Easter from National Trust egg hunts flummoxed me. It was illogical.

Archbishop John Sentamu called it “spitting on the grave” of the religious founder of Cadbury’s chocolate, John Cadbury, who happened to be a Quaker who didn’t celebrate Easter. The very name, Easter, is not a Christian religious name at all, but pagan. So why is Archbishop Sentamu so upset?

Next, our Prime Minister reacted to this “fake news” story. Why was she so concerned about something so inconsequential? Surely, there are far more important things to be done than make a solemn pronouncement on such a trivial matter? As the daughter of a vicar and a National Trust member, perhaps she felt the need to say something. What would have helped both Archbishop Sentamu and Prime Minister May, would have been taking a little bit of time to research the truth of the story before making any statement.

The fact is the word Easter is all over the National Trust publicity for the egg hunts and all over its website, which made this “fake news”. It was a non-story generated, just like the ones we have about Christmas being cancelled, to stir up a reaction. It’s all nonsense designed to encourage some form of faux public outrage about attacks on British or religious values. Sadly, two high-profile people fell for it and were caught out.

That said, what we actually celebrate at Easter, when and how we celebrate it, is as nonsensical as the National Trust non-story.

Is Easter a time to eat chocolate, a time to celebrate a religious miracle, or is it the time to celebrate a pagan goddess of fertility? As with many traditions it’s a mix of everything and unravelling the story shows just how nonsensical it is.

Nearly 1,700 years ago the First Council of Nicaea, a group of Christian Bishops, set the date of the holiday we now call Easter. It was determined as being “On the Sunday which follows the 14th day of the Moon which reaches this age (a full moon) on March 21 or immediately after that”. Got that? The date for Easter is not determined by any religious event, but by astronomical events. Astronomy, being scientific, is predictable, so the date should be easy to work out. Or so you’d think.

Easter always falls on a Sunday – the name comes from the Old English word Sunnandaeg, meaning “sun’s day”. But which Sunday? Well, the rule is, the one that follows the 14th day of the moon “which reaches this age on March 21”.

March 21 is obviously a significant date. But why? It’s the vernal equinox, the date when the earth is tilted neither towards nor away from the sun. This happens on or around March 20. The vernal equinox gives us equal lengths of day and night; the same thing happens at the autumnal equinox on or around September 22.

For Easter, however, we have to create another equinox: the ecclesiastical equinox, fixed as March 21. Easter is the Sunday closest to the 14th day after the full moon that is nearest to March 21. The result of all this is that the date of Easter can vary quite a lot. Anything between March 22 and April 25.

But what about those symbols of Easter, the rabbit and the egg? The name Easter comes from the goddess of spring, Eostre (or Eastre). As a companion, the goddess had a hare, the symbol of fertility. Spring is the season of fertility, from lambs to spring flowers. In essence, what we’ve done is take the name of a pagan goddess to make Easter and the symbol of fertility, the hare, and changed this to a rabbit. The egg, in pre-Christian times, symbolised the rebirth of the Earth at spring each year. To this, we added in a biblical story of the resurrection.

As early as the 17th century the tradition of Easter eggs (not chocolate ones) and rabbits appears in Christian festivals. The egg represents the tomb in which Christ was buried after his crucifixion. Traditionally, it was painted red to symbolise the blood of Christ.

Now of course many people complain that Easter is all about commercial products like chocolate eggs. The first Chocolate Easter eggs were made in the 19th century and were common in France and Germany, Cadbury made their first chocolate Easter eggs in 1872.

The most expensive non-jewelled chocolate egg sold at auction for £7,000 in 2012. It was called the “Golden speckled egg” and was decorated with edible gold leaf. The egg was estimated to weigh 50 kg (110.23 lbs) and took three days to make.

There’s a lot more to Easter than you think, from astronomy, to religion. But the best bit has to be the chocolate, surely?

  • James D Williams is a science lecturer at the University of Sussex