Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 36, Number 64, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 April 1904 — ODD THINGS ABOUT EASTER. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

ODD THINGS ABOUT EASTER.

gll People Appear to Celebrate the Spring Festival. All peoples appear to celebrate Easter tn one shape or another, the festival signifying a rejoicing at the reawakening of nature in spring. Though associated in thia manner with the vernal equinox, it to nevertheless particularly a moou-fes-tlval, and most of its folk lore has to do with the lunar orb in one way or another, The Council of Nice, in the year 351 A. D., decided that Easter day should be the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox; and if the full moon fell on Sunday, then Easter Sunday was to be the Sunday after. The moon suggests a likeness to an egg. which is the symbpl of resurrection, and the rebirth of things. Now, the Chinese celebrate Easter by ■asking so-called ’’moon-cakes," and indulging in various amusements that are supposed to have to do with congratulating or rewarding the moon. In their celestial cosmogony the orb of night represents the female principle in nature, and they believe that a beautiful woman Bvee there—the goddess of the palace of the moon. __ —i On a gold throne, whose radiating bright-

ness Dazzles the eyes, enhaloing the scene, Sits a fair form, arrayed in snowy whiteness. She is Chang-o, the beauteous Fairy Queen. Rainbow-winged angels softly' hover o'er her, Forming a canopy above the throne; A host of fairy beings stand before her, Each robed in light and girt with meteor zone. The above is a translation from a Chinese poem, describing the Woman in the Moon.

The Chinese believe that a man, a frog and a hare also dwell in the moon, and the last-named afiimal constantly appears in their art and in that of Japan, painted upon the disk of a lunar orb. Nearly all over the world the hare is associated with the moon mythologically, and it is on this account that the rabbit has so much to do with Easter.

There has been much dispute as to why the hare should have anything to do with the moon, but nobody has arrived at any satisfactory conclusion on the subject. It is evidently a folk-lore notion of extreme antiquity, which partly accounts for its wide distribution. The rabbit is nocturnal in habit, coming out at night to feed, and that may have

started the idea. It is asserted by students of such matters that the left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit killed in the dark of the moon represents the last quarter of the moon, and on-that account is lucky. A legend accounting for the rabbit in the moon is of Hindu origin, and was introduced into China with Buddhism. Buddha, according to this narrative, was a hare at one stage of his existence, and lived in friendship with a fox and an ape. Indra came to them disguised as a hungry pilgrim, and the for and ape procured food for the god. But the hare was not able to capture anything suitable for the table, and, sooner than be inhospitable, he threw him Self into the fire in order to become food for the guest. As a reward for his self-sacrifice Indra translated him to the moon, where he sits at the foot of a cassia tree, pounding drugs for the genii in a mortar.