"A red egg sits on the other side"
an essay about Easter in Crete
Somehow, even though it’s been several years now since I lived in Crete, Easter isn’t really Easter for me until the Greek one arrives. A part of me, no matter how far from the island I am, is waiting to hear those particular bells in my own heart and somewhere behind my eyes at the same time (that’s where they ring when I remember it), and to see the red eggs cropping up in the kitchens of all the yiayiades (grandmothers), before it can really descend.
That year in Crete was the first time Easter itself, as the Passion, as the garden and the tomb and the resurrection—which were things I realized I could hardly fathom but could certainly fall on my knees before—actually came to life for me. They came to life in Greek, with the scent of salt in the air and on my tongue in the morning, and unnamed flowers blooming in the dark.
According to the Western calendar, Easter just passed, calculated as the Sunday following the full moon following the spring equinox, which speaks most closely to the resurrection that lives within the earth. Here in California, the jasmine is blooming, filling up the night. In Crete, Easter won’t arrive until May 5th this year, due to the mysteries of the Orthodox calendar. By May on the island as I remember, the tips of the oatgrass and her milky pods are starting to brown. The tiny dry-petaled barbary nut irises (Moraea sisyrinchium) are coming up between Minoan stones. The pomegranates are opening out their petals. The heat-streak of summer gathers the edges of things in gold.
So we have a whole moon cycle this year between Western and Greek Orthodox Easters. A moon season of resurrections. Of surrender and return. Into this between-time, I wanted to reshare an essay I posted last year called The Bells of Good Friday, which is a reworking of a reflection on my experience of Easter in Crete five years ago now.
The original essay is published in my book The Venus Year. But like certain pieces of writing, every time I return to read it, I want to change things. I want to add, cut, modify, and reweave based on new angles of memory, or new seams of understanding. I did so last Easter, while visiting Oxford over Easter weekend to see an exhibit at the Ashmolean about Knossos.
For those of you who have the book, this isn’t exactly the essay in there, but it’s (sort of) close.
Before I share it (scroll down if you’d like to jump right into the piece), it feels crucial to acknowledge the pain beyond the bounds of any language that continues to be unleashed upon the people and trees and earth of Palestine right now— massacres of doctors and nurses and the wounded in hospitals; massacres of families trying to get flour from aid trucks; a whole new term created for categories of child survivors, many of them infants: WCNSF, Wounded Child No Surviving Family— as the genocidal invasion by Israel rages on, in a region where the memory of Easter still reverberates and reverberates forward and backward, a 2000 year-old shockwave of love that we have hardly begun to integrate.
I can’t help but feel these moments are connected across vast distances— the crucifixion of Jesus in both Western and Orthodox Easters, which this year spans the season of Muslim Ramadan in Gaza where people are fasting despite heavy bombardment and terror and starvation, and upcoming Jewish Passover— and that in this reverberation across time there is a great cry for the blood feuds to end.
I can’t help but feel how all of these Abrahamic root-systems touch inside a single landscape where milk and honey are shared articulations of fertility and of peace. Where all the sacred plants are the same. God, what has happened to us all?
So please Great Divine Creator of all , Mother of the whole cosmos, of the perfect structures of each of our hearts and souls and the root systems and leaves of every tree, have mercy on us all, all, all. Pour down your white petals of peace, of peace, and pour down your bright oil of miracles.
Easter, an essay
originally written spring 2019 in Crete and published in The Venus Year; expanded spring 2023 in Oxford
Into the dark night, the bells of the neighboring village ring that Jesus is dead. It is a slow, two-toned ringing over and over, hour by hour as the stars thicken and the small owls call. Dogs bark. The sea is darker even than the sky. The sound—into the stars and dark and mountains, the sea, the quiet night green, the barking dogs, the loneliness of distances—loosens itself from time. Jesus is dead, right now. Mary is weeping on her knees, her hair cut off to the chin in mourning. Her headscarf has slipped, and she is covered in stars. She will not leave the lemon-blossom woven coffin. Her keening is in the bells and in the dark warm night. The sound of the bells travels far. Beyond our mountains, and down by the sea, other churches are ringing them. There is nowhere the news doesn’t reach.
The bells loosen everything in me, and in the mountains. Whatever we may be hiding from ourselves, grief can do nothing before such a sound but rise through the body and stop you where you stand to listen. This is the sound of what it means to lose someone you loved, whether to life or to death, whether human or animal. This is the sound that says, he will not return ever again in this form, he will not return, he is gone, he is gone, he has gone beyond the beyond, where we cannot follow.
The bell is the sorrow of Mary, the sorrow of Jesus, the sorrow of all those who loved him. It is their humanness, even though divine, that reverberates across millennia, so that people kiss the coffin still, and the old man in the corner of the church weeps. I saw him while I sat obedient in the pews, nervous that I’d forget to keep my legs uncrossed, nervous that I would make my general ignorance and foreignness obvious. I listened to the liturgy of mourning in Greek, recognizing very little but Christos and Panagia and Theotokos. There was the scent of myrrh. Old and young women from the village had spent the night before adorning the white coffin with impossibly ornate strings of flowers and light— red and white wreaths, wild roses, burning candles, needled strands of lemon blossom. An icon of Jesus was laid like a body in the center.
Sitting there, my feeling was still abstract, academic—here was the death of the vegetation god, I thought. See how he is honored, just like all the older flower kings, lovers of their Goddess—Isis’s Osiris, Aphrodite’s Adonis, Ishtar’s Tammuz. Once women made flower pots for Adonis and threw them, weeping, into the sea. See how all of this is really an elaborate metaphor for the life and death of green, of plants, of that which nourishes us. The queen bee and her sacrificed lovers, the moon-priestess and her sun-beloved, rising and dying and rising again…
But alone under the stars on my porch later that night, the long, slow tolling is first of all the sound of loss. A very specific loss. Not a vegetation god but man. They say he was the Son of God yes, but he was also a man born from a woman. And the sound, which does not relent— it rings on for hours— sets a rhythm of loss through my body, so that there is nowhere to hide from what I mourn, nowhere to turn away, only the name of one I loved, and let go of, over and over, not in death but still a loss so great that it is the only space to understand it in, for what was is dead, and what will be can never return to what was.
Eventually I can really do nothing but perch on my wall and weep. I find myself even begging for the sound to stop. Please, please I say out loud. Please stop, oh god, they’ve killed him. Please no. What have we done, what have I done, please no. But there is no escaping it. Even the sea hears this news. There is no village whose bells aren’t ringing. I imagine all of Crete as one bell, and the next night, one light. Years later, I hear the exact same bells rung in a western village where I am living for a man’s funeral. But here, now, these are Christ’s bells and they ring past midnight. And they ring everywhere. I can hardly breathe or think until it is done. It is not two thousand years ago this happened. It is now, it is now, it is now, say the bells, say the mountains.
Was it ever simply the “vegetation god” we mourned in older rituals, or was it always our own dead, our people, our own mortality, our changing, inextricable from the earth but also singular, personal, beloved? And now, here, the bells are ringing for one who brought a Love so radiant to earth we are still only beginning to reckon with the depth of it, the reverberation of it, and his sacrifice that bridges worlds. His sacrifice that collapses certain wefts of time into a single blinding point. There is the whole green world in this yes, the whole animal world, the whole mineral world, the whole earth, the whole sky, all the waters, fertility and animal ecstasy and babies and loss and rebirth and renewal yes, and also this single specific man. I don’t understand it. All I know is that on my porch in the dark, it is alive, and it undoes me.
***
I wonder how many others have stopped on their own porches or at their kitchen windows, swaying. I wonder how many others are weeping too, remembering someone, or some choice, or some time, feeling grief rise and rise to their throats, pulled up by the sound. Maybe only into such vastness and also such love, the bell tolling mountains and ages, can we surrender what we have carried. Finally he is not just a silent scream inside me, but the reverberation across the whole land. Everybody is carrying this with me. I am carrying him—someone I loved, and also the one brought down from the cross, embalmed with aloes and myrrh, wrapped in linen by hands that loved him— with everyone else. I am carrying what they have lost, too. We carry all of this together. We are none of us getting out of here alive. We carry our mortality together. We carry the mortality of the ones we love together. We carry our wrongdoing, and we carry our greatest, deepest, sweetest hopes and longings.
The Marys know what we have seen. What we are living. They know what we are crying over. He knows most of all. They all say —we each have travelled to this place. You are not alone. He went there, beyond the beyond, the one for whom the bell tolls, and she knelt weeping, hair shorn in the dark of the mountain valley as the stars thickened softly in the warm night. They have gone before us. We too will survive it. So the bells say.
There is a profound peace in the silence that follows, at last, beyond midnight. Only cricket song, and the dogs barking, and the small shy owls, and the stars again.
But Mary remains in the sea-warm dark, head bowed, holding a soft but unwavering light. For three days and nights she will stay by his body. Under her cloak, she is another woman. Under her cloak, she comes bearing deep red eggs.
***
By the sea the next night, they burn a great effigy of Judas in the bonfire. At midnight people pour suddenly out of the church carrying the candles of his renewed life toward the bonfire. The light has come from Jerusalem, it is said. The old women receive it first, the ones who’ve been there all evening praying. People light each other’s candles, fathers and mothers and children and grandparents, until everywhere around me in the dark are little flames.
So, it has happened. The miracle. Mary Magdalene brings her oils to anoint his body, weeping, only to find the tomb empty. The Gardener speaks to her, and, turning round, she does not know him at first. Then suddenly she knows him, oh does she, with her whole being! — Rabboni? Rabboni? It is you!
Children light firecrackers and somebody sets off a series of fireworks over the island of Mochlos, so that briefly the four-thousand-year old ruins are illuminated under the showers of sparks. My favorites are the golden ones that fade slowly, falling in arcs of light like grape clusters. I’ve loved those best since I was a girl. There is light everywhere now— the fireworks, the bonfire, people I know and people I don’t know milling around with candles, hugging each other, hugging me, getting the flames very close to everyone’s hair.
Young men—and old—light off homemade bombs that make me nearly jump out of my skin. The village dogs are terrified. One goes into a panic and tries to dig herself to safety in the hearth. The whole next day her face is gray from the ashes.
I am not fond of the unexpected bomb-blasts—why do people celebrate Jesus’ resurrection with so much gunpowder, I ask a friend, getting a little sick of the sound. But sometime in the night I wake, remembering the Kouretes, the young men called on by Rhea to protect baby Zeus from Kronos in a cave high in the Cretan mountains, which they did by dancing and shouting and banging great shields in a deafening cacophony. I’m still not entirely sure what it means, but maybe, like the burning of Judas— as old as Dionysos, far older than Christ, a knitting together of older and newer ways—the fire and the blasts burn away poison, dread, fear, betrayal, and all that needs to die in order to make way for life reborn.
***
A red egg sits on the other side.
I don’t know anything about its story in the Eastern tradition that night. I just know that I’ve seen a lot of red-dyed eggs since Thursday. Only red, no other colors. People have brought such red eggs to our house. They are beautiful and bright. We are not meant to eat them until after the resurrection.
After midnight, after Jesus has been resurrected, I eat a traditional meal, a soup of goat intestine and liver, artichoke and fennel, with my then-boyfriend’s family. As is customary, we hit our red-painted eggs against each other's to see whose shell is strongest and breaks all the others. This brings great luck, and protection. His mother wins, and I am glad. She’s been at church all evening with the other women of her village, mourning Jesus’ death with more devotion than anyone else I know.
When I ask, people tell me that the eggs are painted red for the blood of Christ. For the miracle of his death and resurrection. I’m unconvinced at first when I hear this, because I don’t yet know the story of Mary Magdalene and the red egg, where this particular tradition comes from, so it seems like a stretch to me. I think to myself— it’s an egg, and it’s red. Surely this is also the blood of a woman? Surely, somehow, it is both? I mean, an egg? And in my mind I keep seeing red eggs under Mary’s cloak where she is kneeling at the foot of the cross in unthinkable grief. Where she is bowed at the tomb. Which Mary is it I see in my heart’s eye? Mary his mother, Mary of Magdala, both? I’m not sure. Sometimes they blend into one.
Much later, I read about the legend of Mary Magdalene going before Emperor Tiberius Caesar in Rome to proclaim the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection. She is the first to officially speak the words Christos anesti. But the Emperor laughs at her when she speaks them and says that a human being can no more be resurrected from the dead than one of the eggs on his feast table might turn red. She then picks one up and in her hand it promptly, miraculously, turns red. According to this legend, the Emperor then takes her more seriously, and agrees to exile Pontius Pilate for condemning an innocent man to death.
Life-blood red stains the egg of resurrection. Somehow I am brought back to the beginning of everything with this red egg. A young virgin Mary faced on a bright gust of wind with the Archangel Gabriel, telling her she will conceive and bear the Son of God. Mary whose womb is the red egg. Mary whose blood during childbirth is never spoken or written (that I know of). Jesus born as all humans are into a tide of female blood, blood also of the cosmic womb since he was both man and God. Somehow, this is a woman’s mystery as much as a man’s mystery that Jesus knew, that Jesus went inside of. A wombic mystery. Somehow he goes away into the womb of death, his wounds spilling blood that later Christians will worship and even take refuge within, and emerges from the tomb alive again. Mary Magdalene sees him there, and the eggs turn red in her basket (so another story goes), and worlds that have never touched with this kind of absolute love are married, united in him.
On the porch that night, with the bells ringing and ringing, maybe some of what I felt was the feminine courage of his dissolution, of his giving away, of the body itself as the sacrament. At the same time I felt the masculine courage of a father placing his body in front of his children and his beloved, to take the arrow instead of them. I felt also, unexpectedly, a kind of labor; the courage of a mother giving birth not knowing if she will survive, as no mother can be certain of, surrendering absolutely to pain, and only then being utterly transformed as she births a wholly new life.
I felt his body radiating outward an almost unbearable and yet wholly inevitable Love.
And so somehow, the living water is red as well as a clear upwelling spring. It is both.
***
The next morning the feasting begins. We will eat and drink all day, and most of the night. Small birds seem to be making love constantly on the roof-tiles. Bees fly in and out of my studio all day, and swallows. One lands on the lightbulb, swinging. All the traditional songs are love songs. The flowers are starting to go to seed, and Orion and Taurus and the Pleaides set before midnight in the sea.
Every day for the next forty, people will greet each other saying Christ Has Arisen, and In Truth He Has—Christos anesti; aleithos anesti. Just as Mary Magdalene first spoke. It is said that on these forty days, the dead walk among us, and the spirits, and the saints. Flowers are blooming everywhere now. They cannot be stopped, nor the fruits (pomegranates are swelling, grapes are swelling, figs are swelling), nor the spring waters rising, nor the new babies being born.
Because meanwhile, as Jesus is being crucified in one liturgical cycle, in another, Mary is just a few weeks pregnant, swelling in time with the fruit.
And so it begins all over again.
A Cretan Post-Script—
My friend and lyra teacher Antonis Leontidis, a brilliant Cretan lyra player, singer and composer from Rethymno, Crete, is crowdfunding his second album "Asprougas" ('Ασπρουγας), which means “white earth” in the Cretan dialect, and refers specifically to a white kind of clay that is found in abundance in the Mylopotamos area where Antonis and his family are from.
As Antonis describes it—
Throughout the album, the compositions connect to each other in a gradually culminating journey that narrates aspects of human life, and our perception of the present and the timeless within it.
"Asprougas" originates in Crete, but the themes it deals with concern a universal perspective of modern life.
Here, it encounters the international group of musicians that participate in its composition: Sol Ligertwood on cello from Scotland, Stefanos Floras on oud from Paris and Thessaloniki, and Juliette Weiss on double bass from Paris.
He’s made a gorgeous film about the vision behind the album, which includes samples of live performance, and footage of traditional Crete. Watch & support here.
Below is a little taste of Antonis’ music from his first album, Krifo, but to support this new project, the links are above.
Finally, stay tuned for Chapter 4 of Mother Animal, which I’ll be posting for paid subscribers on Sunday April 21st.
It continues themes from a fortnight past’s An Annunciation in Ochre, examining conception folktales and myths that have to do with finding babies right in the earth itself.
After that, a few weeks later, we will start to dive into motifs and stories that map pregnancy, beginning I think (can’t promise, I might have a last minute change of mind) in the Neolithic & Bronze Age Aegean!
Hi Sylvia, I love your writing and work. Currently delighting in the mysterious, fecund, and absolutely heart-mending realm of the Sooth Divination cards. I love them dearly. I am curious if you plan to reprint The Venus Year anytime soon, I cant find it anywhere to purchase. Take care and thanks again.