I suspected at once the use of some sign of witchcraft, which some peasants believe renders a person liable to be fetched away by the Evil One, and I replied, "Well, let us see! Perhaps I would!" He then said in an undertone: "If, on coming out of church on Easter Sunday, a man steps backwards, making a sign of disrespect, and if, whilst walking backwards, he looks through an egg, at the same time laughing aloud, he will see the future and the shape of all coming things in that egg. But, dear me, it will endanger a man's soul; and I wouldn't do it, and surely you wouldn't!"
I could not help laughing, though there was no egg to be looked through; and I thought that, if ever I had heard a meaningless absurdity, it was this. Yet by and by, when I came to investigate the subject, I found that this boorish nonsense could be traced back to the decayed creed of our pagan forefathers, and that it had a meaning, even as Greek fables have. "Easter Sunday," I found, was selected for that piece of witchcraft, because Easter was originally also a Germanic festival, in honor of the goddess Ostara, who represented the rising sun and the creative powers of nature in spring. To "go out backwards from church," indicated that the man who did this turned his back towards the east, where the Easter goddess Ostara was supposed to dwell; for churches were mostly built with their altar on the eastern, their main entrance on the western side. The "sign of disrespect" showed that the person making it returned for the moment to the heathen creed. The egg which was to be used, is the very symbol of Ostara, that is, of fruitful nature. Hence the people in Germany and other continental countries, as well as the agricultural population of some of the northern and eastern counties of England, present each other about Easter time with eggs. Little German children are playfully told on that occasion that a hare lays those eggs. The hare, too, is a symbol of the goddess Ostara, on account of fecundity. To look through an egg on the day of that goddess, was considered to invest a person with the power of seeing the germ of all things, and hence to forecast their development.
But now about "the laughter"! Why was a man to laugh when looking through an egg? Here I found that the laughter represented the smile of Nature in spring; that at the pagan festivals on Easter time a laughing chorus typified that smile; and what is more, I learnt that in the Christian Church, for many centuries after the overthrow of Paganism, the priest, on Easter Sunday, had first to tell his congregation a merry tale, and then to break out into what was called "an Easter laughter" (Oster-Geldchter). So, putting this and that together, I discovered that in the superstitious young peasant's mind a remarkable piece of Teutonic mythology stuck fast, of which he could not get rid, in spite of the proficiency he had obtained in the mechanical repetition of his catechism. And the more I observed and studied these matters, the more I became convinced that it was no use fighting against this kind of superstitions by simply calling them "rubbish" and "nonsense," for somehow the people clung to them as if they felt that there was a poetical treasure hidden in them, which only required a magic wand to come forth and charm their hearts. I then saw that these superstitions will never be entirely rooted out until a full scientific treatment of them has taken place, until they shall be universally known to be the last remnants of a decayed religious system, and until the results of such investigation shall have been popularized.
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