Easter Magic - Eggs & Tombs
Feast of Myths: Magical Rabbits, Fertile Eggs, Mary Magdalene, Dark Caves
Easter Sunday Magic.
We made easter eggs with Orphea this morning for her Easter Egg hunt, whilst listening to music we recorded during the writing of Magdalene Mysteries, in a kind of wild-harp-medicine-song, gnostic-resurrection-musical-mystery-play style. Orphea sang along with us in a jig style. And randomly shouted “hallelujah” (not our words). One song hums and sings to the phrase “He is Risen, She is the Light of the World”
(Here is an experimental recording made by me and Linda Go a few years ago)
What a strange day this is for me. I remember this time in my childhood as a magical world of food, ritual and crafting. Making pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, the brass bands walking through the streets and everyone carrying green fronds on Palm Sunday. Crafting the easter bonnets and decorative egg displays, leading up to the final initiation – more chocolate easter eggs on Sunday than you could possibly eat in one day. Everyone headed out to Hope Valley and Mam Tor, to take the sacraments offered in the local pubs, and often the many cars were lined up in stuck traffic.
In the background was Songs of Praise and men talking in serious voices and wearing long white frocks and black-trim glasses, as easter bunnies hopped around in glee and magical mischief. In England, where I was from, Easter was always about celebration, food, feasting, a turnpike of time that announced the incoming of Spring.
In Ireland the women gathered on the Black Sabbath, on Saturday, to Keen for “Our Lad” – singing the Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire, the Keening of the Three Marys. This ritual happened at home, by the hearth, performed by the women – and was frowned upon in church. This was a moment they touched noses with Mother Mary in resonance and kinship, and keened alongside her for all their own mother losses.
(Here is the Keen of the Three Marys by Mary McLaughlin, who I learned it from)
Across the moors and dales of the old ways, the Hare or Rabbit was the deity of the magic of women and of womb-craft and fertility. It was also a wily trickster spirit.
I’ve come to deeply appreciate this interweaving of two worlds, of two stories, of two traditions that meet for a clandestine knees up. It’s true: myths really do mate.
Later on, I learned another magical twist to this tale, of a fallen woman with long wild hair and a smart mouth, who walked at dawn along a high ridge with the other Mary magicians, carrying lanterns in the darkness, a light infused with the first rays of sun and a luminous fading moon. They walked in procession down to the cave mouth, and gathered inside a dark tomb in a circle, with their tinctures and balms and anointing oils in small jars and cups and poultices, priestesses of the plant mysteries. With Angels present, they tended to that which was ready to be reborn and became the Mistresses of the Resurrection. In some tellings, the cave is empty and dark like the void, and the mystery unfolds in the garden, where two lovers of magic meet again.
In Womb Awakening we recount the story that Magdalene visited Rome to do a bit of her own feminine egg magic: “The tradition of the “magical eggs” that were deeply connected with Goddesses such as Oestra, Astarte, and Inanna were continued in the legends of Mary Magdalene. It is told that following Jesus’s death, she was invited to a banquet given by Emperor Tiberius Caesar. When she met him she held a white egg in her hand and proclaimed, “Christ is risen!” Caesar laughed and said that this was as likely as the egg turning red. Before he finished speaking, the egg magically turned bright red. Magdalene then declared, “Christ is risen, for Jesus has burst forth from the tomb.” Today, many Eastern Orthodox Christians end the Easter service by sharing bright red eggs and proclaiming to each other “Christ is risen.”
Eggs are used in Mexican tradition to perform limpias, which clear and renew the body. Eggs have been used in magical practice across many traditions, and are a contained womb world that we can touch, feel, perceive and nourish or cleanse with.
I’m open to all the stories, listening intently as if an old fairytale is being spelled out to me. I take them very seriously, but never quite literally. God forbid we let our thinking minds lead the way and try and make a practical recipe out of strange magical soup.
Whatever this day means to you, whether it’s the regenerative plants rising from the cracked winter soils, or the magical feminine egg cracking open with new life, or the door of the tomb cracking open to receive the new light into a holy man, I wish you the magic wand of resurrection. May your rabbit nose twitch with new possibilities.
I do believe that underneath all the layers, there is something of this mystery that speaks to a deep truth of life, and that we can rebirth. Dark becomes light again.