Easter: sex and drugs celebration! Magical plants and ritual sex are at the heart of this ancient fertility ritual. The celebration we know as Easter dates back long before the time of Christ, and has its origins in traditions that involved ritualized sex and consumption of a wide variety of potent psychedelics and aphrodisiacs, including marijuana. Incubated deep in prehistory, Easter developed through centuries of spring fertility festivals in ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, pagan Europe and Christian Rome, to become the fractured mass of a resurrected god and egg-laying chocolate rabbit that we know today. The most recognizable trail of the modern Easter Bunny leads from pre-Christian Germanic peoples, who worshiped the love and fertility goddess Ostara. Ostara was revered in many cultures under many different names, including Astarte, Esther, Ishtar and Eastre. She is the source of the name “Easter” as well as words like “estrogen.” We get the story about the egg-laying rabbit from Ostara, as legend has it that Ostara changed her pet bird into a magical hare which laid eggs for children during her festival. According to exhaustive research by German entheobotanist Christian Ratsch in his book Marijuana Medicine, Ostara’s spring worship involved the sacrifice, roasting and consumption of a sacred hare, quaffed down with hemp beers, followed by public, collective lovemaking. The Germanic fertility goddess Freya was similarly honored with cannabis as a sacrament. Cannabis, eggs and fertility were closely associated among Germanic pagans. Ratsch discovered that the hardy Nordic peoples would feed cannabis seeds to hens, so that they could lay eggs through the long winter season. As spring equinox approached, they would use stalks of the plant as arrows to “shoot away winter,” ushering in a season of verdant growth and urgent lovemaking. Cannabis orgies in celebration of Ostara were eventually outlawed by the Catholic Church. Pagan sacraments like hemp beer fell victim to secular laws, like the Bavarian Purity Act of 1516, which outlawed beer made from anything but hops and barley. Only the sacred hare survived, transformed into a chocolaty economic opportunity for candy makers and dentists. full artical
