Religion
In reply to the discussion: Young People Today Have No Idea What Easter Is Really About. [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)We take names for things and recycle them.
I always think of the robin as a sign of spring. However, the robin that the word referred to 600 years ago is emphatically *not* the bird I look for. The first referent was in Britain. I live in Houston and there's not a lot of commonality in bird species between here and London, apart from a few invasive species.
Of more interest are the rituals and traditions that are country/culture-specific and accompany Easter, and their origins. I personally can't tell if they're late incrustations or hold-overs from pagan times. Most of them are spring-festival features--bunnies, eggs, lilies. Not much in keeping with Passover. The growing seasons are all wrong. (Even the traditional egg at Passover seders is late--other bird eggs are small and hard to get to, and 600 BC Jerusalem didn't have chickens.)
In Russian folklore it's often fairly clear where the holdovers are. The things that aren't Byzantine and which were local and preserved in 19th century folklore expeditions were typically old or modified old rituals and traditionals.
The usual "Two Babylons" rhetoric draws a parallel not between Ishtar/Isis and Jesus traditions but between Tammuz/Horus and Jesus traditions.