PARIS – The custom of offering Easter eggs, whether chocolate or hard-boiled and colored, dates back well beyond the early years of Christianity to the most ancient of pagan traditions.The egg has fascinated mankind from time immemorial and in the lore of many civilizations the world itself came into being from a mysterious cosmic egg.

The enchanting legend of the Kalevala, Finland's sacred book of yore, relates how Iltamara, the mother of water, was sleeping at the bottom of the boundless ocean. She stirred in her sleep and a knee emerged from the waves like an island.

The master of the air swooped down from the empty skies and placed a golden egg on the divine knee.

He scarcely brushed against her, but the goddess shuddered and cracked the perfect egg: The broken pieces became the heavens and the earth, the sun, moon and stars, and the clouds. Hindu mythology also associates egg and sun.

“In the beginning in the nether world deprived of light there was a great egg,” recounts an epic poem of the Mahabharata, the great Indian saga.For the Sioux of North America, storms were enclosed in the invisible eggs of a bird called “Thunder-Spirit”.

The Lapps of the Scandinavian Arctic an d the Kabyle of North Africa, in a surprising co-incidence, share a tale about an ogre which hid its soul in an egg. In the Berber version- it is not clear what animals the Lapps chose- the egg was in a pigeon which was inside a camel which was in the sea.

The hero of the story eventually locates the egg and crushes it in his hands, killing the ogre and saving mankind from its abominable appetite

The egg as originator of the human soul is a theme in may tales from Bohemia, Denmark, Germany, Holland,Italy and Transylvania. None of which however imaginative and entertaining, manages to explain why eggs are so much part of Easter

There may be a clue in the custom of the ancient Egyptians to make ritual exchanges of eggs as symbols of fertility and eternity. They dud so at feasts marking the spring equinox.

Now the Christian Easter is calculated directly in relation to that period, falling on the first Sunday after the date of the first full moon occurring on or after March 21.

There may be a more mundane connection. In the Middle Ages, with consumption of eggs as well as of meat being forbidden during Lent, what better day than Easter Sunday to use up all the eggs laid in store during the preceding 40 days of fasting. 

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