While you’re biting the heads off your chocolate bunnies, you might wonder how cartoon rabbits became so central to Easter celebrations. It’s tempting to assume that because there’s no biblical basis for the Easter Bunny, rabbits and hares have no religious significance—but that’s just not the case.
Leviticus 11:6 states that the hare is an unclean animal: “The hare, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you,” but in Christian art, it is regularly associated with rebirth and resurrection.
In fact, the symbol of a circle of three hares joined by their ears has been found in a number of churches in Devon. Like much of our cultural “bunny” symbolism, the meaning of this image remains mysterious—and The Three Hares Project has been set up to research and document occurrences of the ancient symbol, examples of which have been found as far away as China.
Rabbits and hares have also been associated with Mary, mother of Jesus, for centuries. Their association with virgin birth comes from the fact that hares—often conflated mistakenly with rabbits—are able to produce a second litter of offspring while still pregnant with the first.
Virginity or fertility?
Titian’s painting The Madonna of the Rabbit depicts this relationship. Mary holds the rabbit in the foreground, signifying both her virginity and fertility. The rabbit is white to convey her purity and innocence.
Linking rabbits with purity and virginity is odd, however, since they’re also associated with prolific sexual activity, a reputation Hugh Hefner appropriated for his now infamous Playboy logo. Hefner’s striking sexism aside, rabbits’ reputation for fecundity has also meant that they’ve been used as a symbol of fertility for centuries and have become associated with spring.
Modern bunnies
The earliest reference to an egg-toting Easter Bunny can be found in a late 16th-century German text. “Do not worry if the Easter Bunny escapes you; should we miss his eggs, we will cook the nest,” the text reads. A century later, a German text once again mentions the Easter Bunny, describing it as an “old fable,” and suggesting that the story had been around for a while before the book was written.
In the 18th century, German immigrants took the custom of the Easter Bunny with them to the United States and, by the end of the 19th century, sweet shops in the eastern states were selling rabbit-shaped candies, prototypes of the chocolate bunnies we have today.
So whether bunnies are unclean, symbols of prolific sexual activity, or icons of virginity, the enigmatic Easter Bunny looks likely to remain a central part of Easter celebrations.