Day 4 and the pond stops counting to celebrate Easterdæg ...

The pond was immensely pleased to see that a school principal and the Terrorists had attempted to whip up a war on Eostre ...

What with the war on Xmas, we can never have enough wars ...

There was more, and the reptiles of Oz also made note of the controversy ...

The pond is also indignant and appalled.

Why is it that proud secular and pagan traditions always come under attack at this time of year?

Once a match is applied to the tinder, this sort of heresy spreads far and wide in the land.

The Australian Women's Weekly also dared to ask Is it time to ditch the Easter Hat parade?

Of course the scribbler involved got it totally wrong, along with the standard provision of a cute photo of some pretty little yellow chooklets:

I am not a religious person; my children do ethics instead of scripture and have never set foot in a church. So is it weird that they’re participating in what is essentially a religious tradition?

The trouble is, it's not much of a religious tradition. More a borrowing from pagan times, with a bit of Broadway, Irving Berlin and milliners who can spot a mug from a mile away ... well the big horse race only comes once a year ...

It's the same with the chooks. Not to put too fine a point on it, the chooks and the bunnies are all about fucking and fertility rites and the thrusting and the orgasmic coming and oh it feels so good ...

All the fun things about Easter are pagan. Bunnies are a leftover from the pagan festival of Eostre, a great northern goddess whose symbol was a rabbit or hare. Exchange of eggs is an ancient custom, celebrated by many cultures. Hot cross buns are very ancient too. In the Old Testament we see the Israelites baking sweet buns for an idol, and religious leaders trying to put a stop to it. The early church clergy also tried to put a stop to sacred cakes being baked at Easter. In the end, in the face of defiant cake-baking pagan women, they gave up and blessed the cake instead. (Graudian it here).

Oops, better settle down. Those defiant cake-baking pagan women might cop a blessing ...

The Eternal Headonist (now that's a name) - from whence that snap of the chooks at the top of the page did spring - gets it right here ...

Well the tradition appears to have origins in the Christian custom of Easter being the time for new clothes after the fasting of Lent, and the Church-going notion of wearing your "Sunday Best", meaning that at Easter your best had to be "better than best" to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. But there are roots in the more secular and pagan notion of Spring being the time of fertility, new life and rebirth. A time when wreaths of flowers and leaves were worn in the hair to celebrate the cycle of life and the seasons. 
The custom of wearing hats at Easter is also inextricably tied to the American tradition of The Easter Parade, which emerged in the 1870s after the end of the Civil War. People were stepping out with positivity in their lives, and would stream out of the churches following the Easter service dressed up to the nines in their best hats. The first Easter Parade was the Fifth Avenue Parade in New York in 1870, which doesn't appear to have been an organised affair but organically came into being when the beautiful people came out of St Patricks Cathedral and surrounding churches and walked down 5th Avenue. Each successive year it gained in popularity reaching a peak in the 1940s where it's estimated a million people attended, but as it grew, lost some of its religious significance and became more about a show of prosperity and frivolity. 
These days the New York parade is a much smaller affair with about 30,000 showing up each year to flaunt their hats, but flaunt their hats they definitely do!

Pagan fertility rites run rampant at  Eostre and where's the harm in that? The pond loved this one from the Eternal Headonist too ...

Is there a Freudian in the house or on the hair?

There's also a wiki about the Easter bonnet which amplifies the superstitions surrounding the custom.

Now the pond can understand why some parents might find this pagan celebration tedious - like all school dress-ups, it's a challenge for parents and fraught with emotional disaster for the children (oh yes, the pond can recall the shame of turning up in a poverty-stricken dress up, or worse, sending the hapless child off to school without benefit of frocks or art department assistance).

But a dress-up is a dress-up and you'll never stop some getting involved with ribbons ... no matter how the intolerance is expressed as a kind of tolerance ...

A vibrant mix with a strong acceptance of all cultures in a tolerant and inclusive way, and yet a bit of paganistic hat-wearing gets up the nose?

What about the pagans? Won't someone think of the pagans?

Whenever the puritans turn up, in whatever guise, the pond is reminded of the story arc that George Orwell assigned to Mollie in Animal Farm, in full as always here for members of the far right commentariat in search of their Orwellian references...

Now it's true that a woman has to wear this stereotypical role, when a Regency dandy or some modern new romantic male fop might have done just as well, but in the end, Orwell has more than a passing sympathy for Mollie's desire to escape ...

Let us examine the Orwellian text in a few gobbets suitable for an eostre meditation:

Well it beats reading gobbets of the bible this day, and the pond has for decades always taken an interest in Mollie, having a strong tendency towards stroking, sugar, a newly clipped coat, and scarlet ribbons - the more scarlet the better ...

Because when it comes to the crunch, secular and pagan traditions in the end undermine the patriarchal orthodoxy of the angry Sydney Anglicans and other black-garbed Calvinists, the Islamic fundamentalists, and cilice-wearing Catholics. 

You won't find the Pellists in that camp - they love a good frock and decent headgear and plenty of ribbons ... $3,600 for tailored religious robes for starters ...

What fine fripperies and narcissist foppishness. Pell's indulgences simply highlight the way that he's a Mollie in drag ...

Instead this day and all the idle talk of a resurrection and heading off to heaven to sit at the right hand, brings us to the crunch of the real problem, the notion of an after-life. 

The pond doesn't know and can't appreciate or understand the desperation or the sense of futility that would turn someone into a suicide bomber, but behind it lurks the notion that somehow through the deed a new and grand life could be reached in the shadowy afterlife... that nobody has seen or returned from to advise on its nature ...

That's how generations of soldiers have been beguiled into war, with the image of a resurrection held up to them as a path and a sign of hope ...

It's nonsense of course, pure and unadulterated nonsense, and the wiser practitioners of religion do their very best to abstain from heading off to this mysterious afterlife for as long as possible.

One good way is to become a politician and send others off to war ...

You'd think twice about getting yourself killed or killing others, if all that beckoned was a cold hard grave in the ground, or a career as ashes in a jar ...

So what's to be done? Well it's not the banning of parades of headgear, in the name of tolerance, but in reality in the name of intolerance.

Rather the pond would like to join with Meredith Doig this day and remind people of a basic, simple step that could be undertaken, and done very quickly ...

It's not possible to prevent delusions and illusions of the kind we're all heir to ... but there's no reason that people peddling delusions and illusions and creationism and pie in the sky bye and bye should get a tax break ...

Now the pond isn't a rationalist. The pond is as emotional and as dysfunctional as much of the world outside Spock, which might explain why the pond responded so enthusiastically and emotionally to Doig's Religion's tax break is a cross we shouldn't have to bear ...

There's more at the link, but that's an Easter message the pond can get behind ...

Anyone who's watched as the angry Sydney Anglicans erect a new building in Newtown - a Taj Mahal of Calvinism -  dedicated to their propaganda and the provision of 'complimentary' women, should also marvel at the way these rogues and charlatans get a tax break to do it ...

It'll never happen of course, inertia being what it is, and so the Scientologists, the Exclusive Brethren, the creationists, the Islamic fundamentalists, the school chaplains and all the rest of the Spaghetti Monster tribe will go on getting a break while mug punters wonder how they can get together enough cash to fund a decent eostre egg hunt ...(in which the pond will join if there's more than compound chocolate at the end of the hunt).

Least of all might we expect the most noble Roman of them all to do something about it ...

More Rowe here, and so forget your French movies, this weekend is dedicated to sword and sandal and toga movies, and to the eating of oysters and snails, which is just, after all, a matter of taste ...

Good old Dalton Trumbo, he mightn't have had much of a biographical flick made about him, but he did have a way with words ..