Holiday has rich cultural meaning for millions of our people
Good Friday is part of the Christian Holy Week and is a holiday that, for millions of European people, commemmorates Christ’s crucifixion, leading to the celebration of his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Holy Week, which ends the Lenten period, is filled with religious and cultural customs which have a number of different expressions.
While many white people no longer believe in the Christian religion, the faith was very important to countless generations and the Easter season was a major event that has accrued a number of very rich cultural elements, both Christian and pre-Christian. As symbols of white history, holidays like Easter have been attacked consistently, and many racially-aware people are reviving an interest in such customs for themselves and their families.
Indeed, the Easter season has much deeper roots within our collective racial unconscious than the Christian faith alone. The season was celebrated by our pre-Christian ancestors as a period of rebirth, much as Christians still do. The name “Easter” comes from Eostre, a mysterious Anglo-Saxon Goddess. Suprisingly, not much is known about her, the only source being the Venerable Bede (672/3-735), an English monk and chronicler known as “The father of English history.” According to Bede, “Eosturmonath, which is now interpreted as the paschal month, was formerly named after the goddess Eostre, and has given its name to the festival.” The famous folklorist Jakob Grimm believed that she was called Ostara in German-speaking lands.
Image: Medieval crucifix shows Christ on a “flowering” cross, his head, with a solar halo, leaning to the “West,” the direction of the setting sun and metaphorical death, highlighting seasonal aspect of the holidayGood Friday was one of the three leading holy days (“holidays”) in significance for our Christian foreparents. Christmas, of course, marked the incarnation of Christ, Good Friday his crucifixion, and Easter his resurrection.
The English name Good Friday comes from the Anglo-Saxon “Godes Friday,” “God’s Friday.” Other white nations use different terms: Scandinavians call it Long Friday, Germans Lamentation Friday (“Karfreitag”). It is called Holy Friday in the bulk of Latin Europe and Great Friday in the Eastern Orthodox world. The latter name is closest to the modern English meaning.
Good Friday, along with the Easter season in general, is a target in the culture war in the West aimed at dismantling white self-consciousness. Jewish supremacists especially see the holiday as a threat, given the Christian teaching surrounding the crucifixion. According to the theology (which has been amended by some under pressure), the Jews accepted responsibility for Christ’s execution after the Roman Pontius Pilate expressed a reluctance to carry out the act on their behalf. The Anti-Defamation League has called the Christian New Testament “anti-Semitic” as a result, and Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, was ruthlessly attacked by those who otherwise pretend to preach “religious tolerance.”
As such an important holiday, Good Friday has a number of beautiful cultural practices across the white world. The traditional color associated with the holiday is yellow (gold), the heraldic color of both kingship and mourning. In the alchemical tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a mystical philosophical and scientific discipline which led directly to the foundation of chemistry and modern science as a whole, yellow/gold was the sign of perfection and completion.
In the English-speaking world, hot cross buns are eaten for breakfast. Eastern Orthodox people are enjoined to fast. The former Roman Catholic injunction against eating meat on Fridays is no longer enforced generally, though many Christians will substitute fish on Good Friday.
The idea of Spring, fertility, new life and the overcoming of death is seen in symbols associated with the season, such as the hot-cross buns, stamped with a “sunwheel” showing the coming of Spring. Fecund Easter bunnies, along with Easter eggs likewise stand for new life, and eggs were also sacred to the Greek Orphic pagans.
Like nearly all Western religious holidays, the Easter season was Christianized. The ancient practice of egg-rolling was later said to stand for the stone that was miraculously rolled from the opening of Christ’s tomb on Easter morning. Easter eggs were also consecrated with a prayer: “We beseech thee, O Lord, to bestow thy benign blessing upon these eggs, to make them a wholesome food for thy faithful, who gratefully partake of them in honor of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Such syncretism, as the practice is known, is certainly far from unique to Christians in European history. Roman religion identified local Gods and Goddesses with their own Pantheon, which they themselves had identified with the Greek system. (Indeed, all European religious systems derive from a common, though often distant, root). Neolithic menhirs and similar edifices were reconsecrated by much later pagan peoples for their own religious use. The famous Stonehenge, built by pre-Celtic “Old Europeans”, was later re-used by Bronze Age people whose agricultural solar religion had no direct connection to the faith of the original hunter-gathering founders, and was then forgotten until Iron Age Celts put it into use again. Later on, invading continental Anglo-Saxons, who practiced a Germanic heathenism, used the site after driving out the Celts, who themselves had become Christians and no longer used Stonehenge. Fantastic tales about Stonehenge and Merlin from the Middle Ages, based on myths from the immediate post-Roman period, show that the original purpose of Stonehenge was unknown to the later peoples who worshipped there. Similarly, the Easter season has layers upon layers of meaning that far pre-date the meaning attached to it today.
Easter’s connection to the calendar underlines the pre-Christian roots of the holiday, and such computations served a vital economic role for our preindustrial foreparents. Planting and reaping all depended on exact calculations, and so religious holidays helped to determine the course of the seasons in everyday life. The fact that clergy represented the intellectual class for the bulk of our existence (pagan and Christian alike) highlights the importance of such events. The date for Easter is determined by computus — Latin for “computations” — and is based on astronomical, not theological, considerations. Since the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in 1582, Western churches have had a slightly different date for Easter than many Eastern Orthodox churches, who retain the Julian Calendar. However, in 2007 the dates coincide. Holidays like Easter, whose dates change according to such calculations, are called “moveable feasts,” as opposed to holidays like Christmas, which are “fixed feasts.”
Easter is dated from the Spring Equinox, and the computus is quite complicated, showing the intellectual sophistication of the religious establishment in the Christian era, which also preserved classical learning, founded the university system, defended the West from Islamic invasion, and provided a key element of Western self-awareness for generations.
Culturally speaking, the Easter season is a rich opening for parents to educate their children about our priceless shared history. Especially for white children who are taught in school and thanks to the mass media that whiteness is “boring” and is not “cool,” seasons like Easter are a chance to explicitly head off the demoralization, internalized oppression and self-hatred before they take root. They’re also a lot of fun.
Some Traditions
Ukrainian Easter eggs (Pysanky) are world-renowned for their beauty and deep layers of symbolism: each figure painted on such an egg holds a different message. The sun represents luck, deer health; chickens stand for the fulfillment of wishes, and floral designs for love. (Such eggs are also popular in other Slavic lands). In Germany, similar eggs are hung by children from branches, much like Christmas ornaments. Hot cross buns, usually eaten for breakfast on Good Friday especially, were used as evil-thwarting charms, symbols of the light of the sun defeating darkness. Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, was the date of the Last Supper, and historically kings and other rulers would wash the feet of the people on that day. It is a day to express humility, much as Palm Sunday is observed in Italy, where people resolve long-standing disputes. The theme of humility is seen in a record from 1307, when England’s King Edward I gave out hundreds of Easter eggs, some covered in gold, as gifts.
Easter eggs in Germany are called “Dingeier” — eggs that are “owed” as gifts to children. As with Halloween (“trick or treat”), the coals for bad children at Christmas, and wrapping paper there is a mischievous element to the giving of Easter eggs. In many places, the eggs are hidden before a competitive egg-hunt, and the general tone of fun mischief is reflected in children’s nursery rhymes from all across Europe. One from Austria contains something of a threat:
“We sing, we sing the Easter song:
God keep you healthy, sane and strong.
Sickness and storms and all other harm
Be far from folks and beast and farm.
Now give us eggs, green, blue and red;
If not, your chicks will all drop dead.”
The association of the Easter season with children is also reflected in an old superstition: children born on Good Friday would be baptized on Easter Sunday, and would carry with them the lifelong gift of healing.
Fig pudding and fig pie is the special dessert on Palm Sunday in England, where the day is also known as Fig Sunday. Figs stand for fertility in European esoteric symbolism. Greeks eat fish on the day; the fish predates the cross as an early Christian symbol, with the Greek word for fish, ICTHS, meaning Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. The fish, representing the esoteric element of water, is also a symbol of sacrifice, holding as it does a place “between heaven and earth.”
Welsh people call Easter Day Sul y Blodau — Flowering Sunday. The Welsh national flower, the daffodil, is a symbol of the rising sun.
Germans decorate poles with streamers and flowers for Easter, the poles being related to male generative powers.
In many parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, the Holy Saturday before Easter Sunday is filled with the smell of cooking as people prepare special dishes for the feast to come.
The dawn services of Easter Day in many churches are again reflective of the general solar aspect of the season. In England people climb local hills to greet the new day, while the “Easter bonnet” is reflected in the custom of wearing new clothes — again, the idea of new life springs eternal.
Easter Monday is a day of games — soccer in England, and egg shackling, knocking hardboiled eggs together, across the European-derived world.
Aware parents of European descent increasingly take important cultural events like the Easter season as a chance to teach their children about the value of our people.