Egg-Cellent Holiday: How the Egg Saved Civilization
James Dugan
Andreas KolleggerThe full moon peering inside your window this Easter night is known as the Egg Moon. After spending a long day looking at chicks, finding eggs in grass, and dying and painting them, I am ready to throw them at Mr. Johnson’s windows across the street (who cuts his grass at 8 o’clock every Saturday morning from April to October). But there is magic when a holiday comes with a Full moon, especially as ancient and soul restorative as Easter. The magic is in the egg.
Full Moons are always fascinating from the legends to how they affect the tides. When there is fertility involved, it gets very interesting. Celtic Traditions of Spring (very cool site to check out) bring about the many traditions that hold the egg as sacred. The golden yoke is the God, the white is goddess, and what is planted now will reap the benefits during the Yule or Christmas time. The first full moon of Spring is a holy and sacred time of joy and re-birth, so go ahead, celebrate!
With any Full Moon post, the werewolf has to appear. A very sinister icon for this time of year, we can have a honest discussion of Lycanthropy (humans changing to animals) without scaring our children or starting a cliché ridden Twilight rip-off. Every society and culture seems to have lycanthropy from wereshark in Polynesia to werebear in North America. We even have seen an appearance of werecrocodile.
Ovid, a name eerily close to Ovum, which is an Egg, started the whole craze in the Metamorphoses. King Lycaon, thinking that Zeus was a bit hard-boiled, tried to feed his dead son to Zeus. Zeus turned Lycaon into a ravenous man eating animal for his cracked notion. Though the Full Moon has not shown any data that human behavior is negatively manipulated on its appearance, human experience knows that driving on such a night defies science.
EraPhernalia VintageThe Egg is a Gift and the natural light produces the hens to lay more eggs. In an excellent look at how nature repays humans for their kindness, the egg did come first when it comes to man and nature living together: 10 fantastic facts about eggs. The hens lay more eggs due to a hormonal response and the farmer and you reap the benefits. This is before artificial lighting, which causes the hens to work hard all year. We have learned to celebrate the egg in our meals as a great source of protein but also as a centerpiece in our first meal, the time of day with the most hope.
The moon shines tonight reminding us of the egg’s symbolic and literal importance to human existence. Whether you believe Easter has important religious connotations or not, Spring is a season of re-birth and hope. All we have to do is look at the egg and teach our children how important it really is. So let’s paint those shells, dye those eggs, hide them around the house and hold a chick, and think how precious it is to know spring and its meaning. This year we are blessed with a second reminder: the encompassing light in the night sky known as the Egg Moon.
Happy Easter Lunch Breakers
Reader Comments (2)
Glad someone got cracking to create an entertaining holiday essay!
I loved the astral and earthly symbolism as well as the ties to
Myth and religion. Egg-shell-ent!