Says Hyslop:—“The hot cross-buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of
Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do
now. The buns known, too, by that identical name, were used in the
worship of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Easter (Ishtar or Astarte),
as early as the days of Cecrops, the founder of Athens, 1,500 years
before the Christian era.” “One species of bread,” says Bryant, “‘which
used to be offered to the gods, was of great antiquity, and called
_Boun_.’ Diogenes mentioned ‘they were made of flour and honey.’” It
appears that Jeremiah the Prophet was familiar with this lecherous
worship. He says:—“The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the
fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven
(Jer. vii., 18)”. Hyslop does not add that the “buns” offered to the
Queen of Heaven, and in sacrifices to other deities, were framed in the
shape of the sexual organs, but that they were so in ancient times we
have abundance of evidence.
Martial distinctly speaks of such things in two epigrams, first, wherein
the male organ is spoken of, second, wherein the female part is
commemorated; the cakes being made of the finest flour, and kept
especially for the palate of the fair one.
Captain Wilford (“Asiatic Researches,” viii., p. 365) says:—“When the
people of Syracuse were sacrificing to goddesses, they offered cakes
called _mulloi_, shaped like the female organ, and in some temples where
the priestesses were probably ventriloquists, they so far imposed on the
credulous multitude who came to adore the Vulva as to make them believe
that it spoke and gave oracles.”
We can understand how such things were allowed in licentious Rome, but
we can scarcely comprehend how they were tolerated in Christian Europe,
as, to all innocent surprise we find they were, from the second part of
the “Remains of the Worship of Priapus”: that in Saintonge, in the
neighbourhood of La Rochelle, small cakes baked in the form of the
Phallus are made as offerings at Easter, carried and presented from
house to house. Dulare states that in his time the festival of Palm
Sunday, in the town of Saintes, was called _le fete des pinnes_—feast of
the privy members—and that during its continuance the women and children
carried in the procession a Phallus made of bread, which they called a
_pinne_, at the end of their palm branches; these _pinnes_ were
subsequently blessed by priests, and carefully preserved by the women
during the year. Palm Sunday! Palm, it is to be remembered, is a
euphemism of the male organ, and it is curious to see it united with the
Phallus in Christendom. Dulare also says that, in some of the earlier
inedited French books on cookery, receipts are given for making cakes of
the salacious form in question, which are broadly named. He further
tells us those cakes symbolized the male, in Lower Limousin, and
especially at Brives; while the female emblem was adopted at Clermont,
in Auvergne, and other places.