HARE BRAINED

I never believed in the Easter Bunny. The very idea seemed implausible at best to me. Even at the tender age of five I couldn’t ignore the fundamental disconnect between the egg and the rabbit.

Rabbits don't lay eggs. They don't even eat eggs. What eggo-centric lunatic dreamed up this harebrained mythology?  Rabbits are cute and soft, but they are not bright. They eat grass and they poop,  Bunnies are basically just tiny, long eared cows. With short legs.  And I think their contribution to the world's methane surplus has been sorely under rated. Did I mention they were not good at mathematics? 

Listen - if you put an egg in front of a rabbit, the rabbit with nudge it aside to get to the grass underneath, even if it is plastic grass. You could even write the rabbit’s name on the side of the egg, and the rabbit would still ignore it.

And yet every year we insist upon convincing our toddlers that for some reason a rabbit has chosen to hide vast numbers of eggs all over our back yards. Under bushes. Behind flower pots. In trees. What is wrong with us?! Rabbits can’t climb trees.

You might as well tell your children that elephants have been herding water buffalo in your flower bed, or that squirrels are using your attic to store up their winter supply of canned beets. Why do we insist upon telling our children this particular absurd story?

Where is this rabbit supposed to get all of these eggs? And from whom is he supposedly hiding them? From the chickens, perhaps - otherwise known as “the mothers”. If you think about it an Easter Egg Hunt is a mass kidnapping and we are encouraging our children to be accessories after the fact. The F.B.I. should be involved in this story line, or at least Farmer McGreggor.

The very idea is so silly that most of the eggs hidden today aren’t even real, They're plastic. And they are filled with chocolate and licorice and sweet tarts, and other things that rabbits don’t eat! Show me a rabbit that eats sweet tarts and I will show you a candidate for hossenfeffer..

Children eat those things. They aren't healthy for the children, but they eat them anyway. Just like they eat old gum, or crickets. Those aren't good for children either, but given half a chance , any toddler with happily stick a live cricket in their mouth. And a few teenagers, too.

And I understand that the Easter Egg hunt is for the children's entertainment. It’s just supposed to be fun. But couldn’t it be logical and fun at the same time? Couldn’t we have an Easter chicken hiding the eggs? Why does it have to be a bunny rabbit?! Maybe instead of hiding the eggs,  he could be the one looking for the eggs. Although, again, why, I have no idea. There seems to be a subtle hidden nastiness inside the Easter Rabbit,

The birth of the Easter bunny is about as murky as the reasoning behind him being a him. And yes, the gender-bender nomenclature claims Mr. Bunny is a male fertility symbol – known in any other context as a creepy old man.- or a creepy old rabbit.  

The description of male rabbits during their mating season is "Mad as a March Hare".  Because the reality is they will copulate with anything that even remotely resembles a female rabbit. Anything.

It was the immortal Bede, the 7^th century rumor trolling English monk,  who claimed the Jewish festival of Passover occurred during the month of “Eostre”, who was an ancient Gallic fertility goddess, which means she was a woman, which seems more sensible as far as fertility is concerned. And definitely less ominous than the image of a male heir to all that sexual energy.

In 1835 Jacob Grimm – the elder of the brothers of the same name – suggested there was “linguistic support” for a “Proto-Indo-European goddess named 'Ostera' who brought the dawn each morning. In reward for delivering this gift of life the sleepy Proto-Indo- European males threw things at her, eggs maybe, told her to come back in an hour and probably called her the “B” word. 

Wrote the grim Mr. Grimm about this heathen Easter “ ...there seem to have lingered among the people Easter-games so-called....I allude especially to the custom of Easter eggs...”. To which I am forced to reply, “What the hell does that mean? 

Are we talking some kind of Proto-Indo-European symbolic Ostera eggs or egg eggs? According to Grimm's theory the Easter Egg hunt is a sort of primitive endurance contest, involving stuffing your face with “pastry of heathenish form”, and/or a “Cool Hand Luke” egg eating contest, only now with psychedelic colors. So you can over think this thing any way you want, and it still makes no sense.

I know I’m overwrought over this. The Easter bunny is just another one of those little contradictions in logic accepted without question by most people, one of those silly little stripped gears in the workings of our cultural machinery, that don’t make any sense but seem to be required to hold our society together.  Like Daylight savings time. Or that bar on boy’s bicycles. Or Keanu Reeves’ movie career.

You could get excited about outrageous, silly things like the Easter Bunny  Or you can just ignore them, and pretend there is a logic to them, and live your life in some semblance of calm. But to do so would be a fraud and you know it!

The truth shall set you free. And the truth is the the spring Easter Bunny is a violently, sexual predator.  I don’t know who said the thing about truth and freedom, whoever said it would be so argumentative they will probably out live the rest of us.  We deserve to know why it is that an Easter Bunny would hide eggs. And if the answer isn’t good enough, we have a right to pick our own illogical anthropomorphic creature upon which to base our Easter fun.

In a nutshell - or an an egg shell -  Rabbits are an old German symbol of fertility, for obvious reasons. And the egg is a symbol of...I guess breakfast and birth  And if you put those two together, the Easter Egg Hunt becomes a rabbit symbolically hiding his fertility all over your back yard, where your children are encouraged to hunt until they find it.

Are we nuts?  When they are five or six years old we send them looking for the symbol of fertility in their own backyard.. When they are twelve we don't even want them to be taught about this in the public schools!  No wonder Americans are so screwed up. We get our childhood from a furry Casanova, and our adolescence from Queen Victoria.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because, oddly enough I once had a male rabbit actually find his fertility  in my back yard. All over my backyard. And the deposit he left behind did not smell like eggs -  at least not fresh eggs. And I ended up with about fifty million female rabbits in my backyard for the next twenty-four hours or so. My dog was too scared to go outside. And I certainly didn’t want any small children going out there, either, because I wasn’t sure I could explain what they would see. Or suffer. Not to mention their propensity for picking things up and putting it in their mouths. What an Easter that was.

But, getting back to the mythology - Why in God's name would you want your children to find the secret of fertility? And I think I have found the solution to that question. So you can have a grandchild, that’s why. Grandchildren are essential because they help you torture your adult children, thus completing one slice out of the circle of life pie chart.

It’s curious that the chickens, who actually lay the millions of eggs that are stashed under bushes and flowers and lawn chairs on Easter Sunday, are not considered symbols of fertility. The feminists’ version of this is that these chicks do all the work while some crowing cock gets all the credit.  Thank goodness feminism has been totally discredited. Still, those hard boiled chicks may have a point.  Scrambled, like everything else in our polyglot culture, but a point never-the-less. I just wish I knew what the hell it was.

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CRACKING THE EASTER EGG

I don't believe there ever was a person named Jesus. There was, however, a man named Yodshuru. A thousand years after Yodshuru died, the first hand-written English translations of the New Testament used the letter “J” to represent the Hebrew sound for “Yod” . Then, in the 400 years after Gutenberg printed his first bible, the entire English language went through “The Great Vowel Shift”, and the vowel “Y” lost its Hebrew roots entirely and sound wise became the consonant “J”.  A few more linguistic adjustments and “Yod-shu-ru” became “Gee-zuhs”   Back in the first century one in every ten males in Yehudah (Judea) was named Yod-shua. And there wasn't anybody named Jesus. But for convenience sake we'll keep calling him that.

There is only one reliable reference to Jesus outside of the New Testament. At the end of the first century a Roman book appeared, “Antiquities of the Jews”, written by Joseph ben Matityahu, known in the Roman world as Titus Flavius Josephus (above). He was the son of a priest at the Jerusalem temple and his mother claimed to have the royal blood of King David in her veins. In other words he was a snotty entitled rich kid.

In 67 A.D, during the Jewish rebellion, Josephus became the prisoner of the Roman General Vespasian. Hearing that Vespasian was looking for prophets willing to predict his future success, Josephus had an epiphany, and predicted Vespasian would be named Emperor. When that actually happened, Josephus was rewarded with his freedom, moved to Rome and became an historian and a soothsayer. In short, his successful second career was built entirely on telling powerful rich people what they wanted to hear. So everything he writes has to be read with a jaundiced eye, including what he wrote about Jesus.

In his book “Antiquities”, Josephus says that in the spring of 62, Ananus was named the new high priest of the Temple. Josephus describes him as “rash”, but then Josephus knew it was better to blame the Jewish priests for destruction of their temple, rather than the Romans, who had actually knocked it down. But what he says Ananus did, was logical. Seeking to quickly establish his authority and silence those calling for a suicidal Jewish uprising, Ananus ordered the arrest of James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ...” And that is the only historical mention of Jesus outside of the New Testament.  Josephus says James was tried, found guilty of heresy and stoned to death.

Most historians suspect that James' execution was quickly followed by the elimination of all of Jesus' apostles still in Jerusalem, which is why the only apostle we definitively hear from after the year 62 was Peter. Earlier he had been sent north to deal with the troublesome new convert, Paul. And this also explains why Paul was able to have such an influence over early Christianity . He was wealthy and connected, while Peter was poor, and connected to nobody but Jesus. The mass execution of first generation Christian leaders also explains why Ananus was high priest for less than four months. All of this supports the accuracy of Josephus' brief mention of Jesus.

There seems no reason to think Jesus was not crucified. Lots of people were crucified by the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Carthaginians, even Judea had been nailing people onto wood long before the Romans took up the practice. When the Persian king Darius I captured Babylon in 519 B.C., he claimed to have crucified 3,000 people. But the Romans got it really organized. After the slave army of Spartacus was defeated in 71 B.C., Crassus crucified 6,000 captives along the 120 miles of the Appian Way between Rome and Capua. So the Romans crucifying Jesus would have been as common-place as Texas executing a random African-American. What made the execution of Jesus special, according to Christians, was that three days later Jesus rose from the dead. Of course that was not unheard of either.

The most Christ-like of all the born again gods was Mithra (above). He was the son of the virgin Anahita, born in a cave on 25 December. He became a traveling celibate Zoroastrian priest, and carried his ministry of peace and forgiveness out of India into the Persian empire. Sacred texts say that having angered Persian authorities in 600 B.C., and after a last meal with his 12 followers, Mithra was crucified on a cross. After he was taken down,  Mithra's dead body lay in his tomb for three days, until the spring equinox, when “...the light burst forth from all parts, the priest cried, Rejoice, O sacred initiated, your God is risen. His death, his pains, and sufferings, have worked your salvation." So the idea of resurrection was not new, either. It was a neat literary invention - turning a god into a living man, rather than the usual device of turning a man into a living god.

Robust Mithraism was adopted by enlisted and NCO's of the Roman army, who spread it across Europe and North Africa.  Mithra was even worshiped at midnight services on Vatican Hill and at military outposts along the Rhine border and Hadrian's Wall. The omniscient Mithra was the Good Shepherd, the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah, the god who became a man so he could die to atone for your sins. Standard Catholic theology is that Mithria was a false god sent by Satan to confuse Christians. That seems to me a convoluted logic, on Satan's part, and it assumes that God's motives can be quantified and comprehended by humans. And requiring such proof seems to prove a lack of faith. But that's just my opinion.

Doubters often suggest that Jesus survived crucifixion by trickery or drugs, and that is certainly possible. But considering the standard crucifixion protocols, it is unlikely. Crucifixion was not just a form of execution. It was also a form of theatre. First, in public, the convicted was stripped, tied to a post and scourged. That meant, being whipped with broken iron fish hooks, jaggedly opening his back down to the muscle and bone. It was a bloody mess. This would have left Jesus, in the words of one medical expert, in the initial stages of shock, and in “at least serious and possibly critical” condition. The intent was not to kill him, but to so weaken him so as to make the next day's execution certain and smooth.

After recovering overnight the condemned would have been striped naked again, had a 100 lb cross beam tired across his shoulders, which he then carried to his execution site. There he would have been thrown to the ground onto his back – reopening his wounds - and either had nails driven through his wrists or more likely had his hands tied to the cross beam. The cross beam, with the prisoner attached, was then lifted up and set atop a post, creating either the Roman cross or more likely a “T”. It need only been tall enough to get the victim's feet off the ground.

The Roman guards would remain on watch until the man died. If the weather was unpleasant or dinner awaited them, the guards might break the victim's legs or even stab him in the side, to hurry the process along. Other wise death would eventually occur because of cardiac failure, shock, acidosis, asphyxia, arrhythmia, dehydration, sepsis, suffocation , or even being torn apart by vultures or wolves. You do not survive crucifixion because friends slip you a mickey after you're on the cross. In fact a sedative would more likely suppress breathing and hurried death along.

During the siege of Jerusalem , our old friend Josephus saw three of his frat brothers hanging off their own crosses. He begged the Romans for their lives, and the officer in charge “immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to ensure to their recovery, Two of them died under the physician's care, while the third recovered.” So even with the best and prompt medical care available, the survival rate, once you were up on the wood, was only 33%. And the best was certainly not available to Jesus.

So, to put it all together, there very well might have been a man we call Jesus, and he might very well have been a significant religious leader, who might very well have died on a cross. The ideas he was preaching had been around for a long time, and they would survive his death. And people were willing to believe such a man, if he existed, had died for their sins. There is no proof that any of that happened, and no proof it did not. It depends on what you believe.

And every Easter, that all depends upon.you.

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EASTER MURDER Chapter Three

I find it perfectly logical that so much began in Florence. Wool from Europe and dyes from Asian ports met in Tuscany, which was far enough from Rome that religious strictures against profits could be stretched, and in a region so poor the nobility, the only people with any money, were willing to experiment with capitalism. A cultural and economic “rinascità”, or renaissance, was set off. And riding the first wave in 1378 was Salvestro de'Medici, a black sheep of his clan.

Salvestro led the popolo minuto, the little people, the unskilled Ciompi textile workers in demanding the right to form their own guilds. Their rulers, the popolo grasso, the fat ones, initially gave in, but a month later, when the workers followed one of their own, Michele di Lando, in storming the Palazzo Vecchio, the textile makers closed their shops, and Salvestro remained silent. Within days hunger forced the unpaid workers to surrender. But the Medici family had established their reputation as defenders of the common man. And thanks to Salvestro they built a great fortune by using that populist image selectively

And on the heartless application of violence. One hundred years later, on 26 April 1478, as soon as Lorenzo Medici escaped from the cathedral, he dispatched forces to retrieve his brother's mutilated body, left to bleed out on the cathedral floor. From a second story window of his home Lorenzo then appeared to a crowd of supporters, showing he was still alive, if wounded. His survival inspired the Medici forces to strike back without pity.

Archbishop Francesco Salviati was already in custody in the Palazzo Vecchio. He was quickly joined by his brother, Jacopo Salviati, and his cousin, Bartolomeo Salviati.  In addition, armed men were dispatched to the Pazzi home, where Francesco Pazzi, still bleeding, was arrested. They were all questioned at an rump trial by the eight members of the City Council. The results were, it might be said, per-ordained.

Within the hour Francisco Pazzi was stripped naked. A noose was thrown around his neck. Then he was pushed from the second story window of the Palzzo Vecchio. The drop was not intended to be far enough to break his neck. It was intended that he should slowly strangled for the amusement of the jeering mob gathered in the square. And while he still writhed at the end of the rope, Archbishop Salviati, also naked, was shoved out the window, to writhe in desperate agony until, as an observer noted, his eyes bugged out. Once both men were finally dead, the ropes were cut and the bodies dropped into the square, where the mob beat and dismembered the corpses. One enraged man, said a witness, even bit into the dead Francesco's chest.

Next out the window was the two Salviati cousins, to dance to the crowd's delight, who then vented their blood lust upon the dead bodies. Then the priests, Setefano da Bagnone and Antonio Maffei de Volterra, the pair who had attacked Lorenzo, had their noses and ears cut off, before being castrated. Then, they were thrown from the window, to dance for the mob. Now, eager to prove their loyalty to the Medici family and with their blood lust released, the mob tracked down as many Pazzi and Pergia supporters as they could find, breaking into private homes and public buildings, even churches, to kill them. At least eighty were butchered that Easter Sunday on the streets or in their homes, with many thrown from the Vecchio's clock tower. Guilt in the murder or the plot was no longer required. The Pazzi name was enough.

Jacopo Pazzi was trying to reach Pisa, but only managed to get as far as the tiny mountain village of Castagno, about seven miles west of Florence, before he was captured, beaten and returned to the city. He then flew out the Palazzo Vecchio window, like his nephew and sons. After he was buried in the family crypt, a drunken mob disentered his corpse, and dragged it through the streets. It was then reburied outside the city walls, but dug up again, this time by children, who used the head to pound on the Pazzi family front door. When no one answered, the rotted corpse was dragged to the river Arno and tossed into the water. It was last seen, decomposing in the shallows.

Those Pazzi males not killed outright were arrested. and confined in the new prison fortress in Volterra, twenty miles southwest of Florence. It was so secure, it is still being used as high security prison today.  Guglielmo Pazzi, Francesco’s brother, was spared execution only because he was married to a Medici daughter. He was banished from Florence for life, along with all Pazzi females, old men and children. All Pazzi gold and silver in Europe were ordered seized, their homes, businesses and estates plundered and confiscated. No Pazzi was ever again allowed to hold public office in Florence. The family crest of two dolphins was removed wherever found, as were all images of Pazzi faces in paintings . So complete and absolute was the Medici revenge, that the name Pazzi became, in English, to define anyone who could be implicated in a crime - a patsy.

Then there was the case of Giovanni Batista da Montesecco, a cousin to the Duke of Urbano. He had originally been chosen to kill Lorenzo, but bowed out after realizing the murders were to occur in the cathedral during Easter services. But neither had he warned the Medici of the plot. Arrested after being implicated by the unfortunate Setefano and Antonio, Giovanni revealed how deeply Pope Sixtus' had been involved. In return for his testimony, he was merely beheaded. Sixtus' nephew, and the man who had officiated at the Easter Mass, Cardinal Raphael Riario, was held incommunicado for a month before Lorenzo decided he was only naive. He then allowed him to return to Rome.

Bernardo Bandini, who had helped Francesco Pazzi murder Guiliani Medici, managed to get as far away as Constantinople. But the Medici bank reached that far, and 18 months after the attack Bernardo was kidnapped and hustled aboard a fast ship back to Florence. Immediately after his arrival, on 29 December, 1479, Bandini also flew out the Palazzo Vecchio window, still dressed in his Muslim disguise.   Leonardo Di Vinci sketched him hanging there (above).

After the Easter Sunday massacre, all of Italy had to pick sides, and most either joined the Pope or chose not to support the Medici. The King of Naples, Ferdinand I, sent an army to lay siege to Florence. And while the King of France offered an army to Lorenzo, the surviving Medici son knew the cost of such support would be disastrous for the rest of Italy. And thus bad for business. So in December of 1479 Lorenzo changed the rules of the game. He sneaked out of Florence, and took ship for Naples. He was instantly imprisoned by Ferdinand, but the monarch was convinced by Lorenzo's own wounds that the Pope had precipitated this crises. Also, Naples was clearly on the French wish list of Italian properties to grab, if an invasion was possible. Ferdinand forced Sixtus to reconcile with the Medici, and the war quickly came to an end. From that day forward, Lorenzo would be known as Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Sixtus (above left) would sit on Peter's throne for another six years, and be best remembered for this Easter Sunday attack, for the Sistine Chapel he had built, for two decrees approving of black slavery in the new world, and for appointing Tomás Torquemada (above right) as the Grand Inquisitor of the infamous Holy Office of the Inquisition. This worldly Pope died in 1484 a bitter and disappointed man.

Lorenzo Medici (above) ruled Florence for another fifteen years, gradually more openly as a dictator. .He tracked down the new born son his brother had fathered with Fioretta Gorini, and had the boy brought into the family home and raised and educated as a full Medici. When he died in 1492, Lorenzo de Medici would mostly be remembered for his wise rule, and the great public art works he commissioned, including the magnificent tomb containing his own and his brother' Guiliano's bones in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, a tomb designed and carved by Michelangelo.

But the ultimate Medici victory over Sixtus came when Lorenzo's son, Giovanni de Medici, became Pope Leo X in 1513, and was succeeded by Giuliano's son, Giulio de Medici, as Pope Clement VII in 1523.   It is said, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.   And the Medici of Florence did both.

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