 A more striking example should be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a Christian society. At Christmas, we may express our inner feeling for the mythological birth of a semi-divine child, even though we may not believe in the doctrine of the virgin birth of Christ, or have any kind of conscious religious faith. Unknowingly, we have fallen in with the symbolism of rebirth. This is a relic of an immensely older solstice festival which carries the hope that the fading winter landscape of the Northern Hemisphere will be renewed. For all our sophistication, we find satisfaction in this symbolic festival, just as we join with our children at Easter in the pleasant ritual of Easter eggs and Easter rabbits. But do we understand what we do, or see the connection between the story of Christ's birth, death and resurrection, and the folk symbolism of Easter? Usually we do not even care to consider such things intellectually. Yet they complement each other. Christ's crucifixion on Good Friday seems at first sight to belong to the same pattern of fertility symbolism that one finds in the rituals of such other saviors as Osiris, Tammuz and Orpheus. They too were of divine or semi-divine birth. They flourished, were killed, and were reborn. They belonged in fact to cyclic religions in which the death and rebirth of the God-king was an eternally recurring myth. But the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday is much less satisfying from a ritual point of view than is the symbolism of the cyclic religions. For Christ ascends to sit at the right hand of God the Father. His resurrection occurs once and for all. It is this finality of the Christian concept of the resurrection. The Christian idea of the Last Judgment has a similar closed theme that distinguishes Christianity from other God-king myths. It happened once and the ritual merely commemorates it. But this sense of finality is probably one reason why early Christians, still influenced by pre-Christian traditions, felt that Christianity needed to be supplemented by some elements of an older fertility ritual. They needed the recurring promise of rebirth, and that is what is symbolized by the egg and the rabbit of Easter. Note, concerning the finality of Christ's resurrection, Christianity is in a scatological religion, meaning it has a final end in view that becomes synonymous with the Last Judgment. Other religions in which matriarchal elements of tribal culture are preserved, for example, Orphism, are cyclical, as demonstrated by Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York, Bollingen, Pantheon, 1954. End of note.