At Easter, the celebration of Christ's death and resurrection serves as a special moment for Christians reflect on the meaning of life and sacrifice of the one who founded one of the greatest religions of the world. However, many cannot see the relationship between this religious celebration and the habit of giving people chocolate eggs.
History before the Chocolate Egg...
To answer that question, we need to go back to the time when Christianity itself was far from becoming a religion. In several ancient cultures spread across the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and the Orient, we observed that the use of the egg as a gift was quite common. In general, this type of manifestation took place when natural phenomena announced the arrival of spring.
Not by chance, several of these eggs were painted with some engravings that tried to represent some kind of plant or natural element. In other situations, the decoration of this festive egg was done by cooking it together with some herb or root impregnated with some natural dye. Throughout antiquity, this custom still remained alive among the pagan populations that inhabited Europe during the Middle Ages.
During this period, many of these people performed rituals of worship for Ostera, the goddess of spring. In her most common representations, we observe this pagan goddess represented in the figure of a woman who watched a bouncing rabbit while holding an egg in her hands. In this image there is a conjunction of three symbols (the woman, the egg and the rabbit) that reinforced the fertility ideal celebrated among the pagans.
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the woman, the egg and the rabbit
The entry of these symbols to the set of Christian festivals happened with the organization of the Council of Nicaea, in 325 d. Ç.. During this period, the clerics were expressly concerned to increase their number of faithful through the adaptation of some ancient traditions and religious symbols to other events related to the ideal Christian. From then on, we would observe the painting of several eggs with images of Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary.
At the height of the medieval period, wealthier nobles and kings used to celebrate Easter by presenting their own with the use of eggs made of gold and studded with precious stones. Until we got to the famous (and much more affordable!) chocolate egg, it was necessary to develop the cuisine and, before that, the discovery of the American continent.
By coming into contact with the Mayans and Aztecs, the Spaniards were responsible for the dissemination of this sacred food in the Old World. Only two hundred years later, French cooks came up with the idea of making the first chocolate eggs in history. After that, the energy of this caloric extract extracted from the cocoa seed also reinforced the ideal of renewal systematically disseminated at that time.
By Rainer Sousa
Graduated in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
SOUSA, Rainer Gonçalves. "Origin of the Easter Egg"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/pascoa/a-origem-ovo-pascoa.htm. Accessed on June 28, 2021.
