[geeks] Goodbye, I guess

[der Mouse]

> i've increasingly thought of the catholic church as not so much a
> religion as the second roman empire.  and why [for instance] do they
> celebrate the saxon fertility goddess eostre's festival, complete
> with rabbits and eggs?  or samhain [celtic new year's] eve
> [halloween], complete with demon and undead costumes?

(You could mention Yule, too.)  Why?

One answer is that those are times of power, and just about everyone
observes them one way or another.  No matter what tradition $XYZ calls
the vernal equinox festival, it almost certainly observes it somehow.
(The "almost" is mostly a nod to atheism and similar traditions which
actively observe just about nothing.)

But that answers "why do they observe them?" not "why are their
observations so redolent of much more ancient traditions?".  For that,
there's another answer.  They do that for much the same reason
Microsoft does "adopt and extend": it's a lot easier to stamp something
out by preserving the appearance of it while reworking the underlying
substance than by trying to overtly and obviously eradicate it.
Especially when the thing you're trying to eradicate is deeply
ingrained in the relevant culture.  (The euhemerization[%] of
pre-Christian myths and rituals is a mixed blessing for those of us
interested in them.  It has doubtless preserved a lot that would
otherwise have been lost to fire and slaughter, but it has also mutated
stuff enough that it's sometimes hard to tell what the original was.)

[%] This is the sense in which I learned this word - the "adopt and
    mutate" practiced by early Christian monks and teachers, layering a
    Christian veneer atop much older myths and traditions.  It doesn't
    seem to have much to do with the definition I fond on
    dictionary.com; I don't know where it came from.

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