Surprise: Hot Cross Buns Are Actually Little Pagan Treats

Every Easter long weekend, the annual scourge of shut bottle shops and apocalyptically dense traffic on the Pacific Highway is soothed by the timely release the nation’s favourite baked item: the hot-cross bun.

The sweet little yeasted buns come in a handy pack of six or twelve, and are always sold at a charitable price across the nation’s supermarket chains. Despite some of the more cursed flavours (looking at you choc mocha), I’m never not happy to see one grace my table. But despite our love for the bun, the history of how our favourite Easter treat came to exist and its titular link to Christianity is pretty murky.

Here’s the how the usual HCB folklore goes: Each little cross commemorates Jesus’s crucifixion on Good Friday, while the spices in the dough supposedly symbolising the ones that were used to embalm Jesus. The bun’s first confirmed appearance within the Christian canon is in the 14th century, when monks at the St Albans Abbey in England would bake ‘Alban Buns‘ to commemorate Good Friday.

Instead of the modern cross we know and love, which is made from a combination of flour and water, bakers of ‘Alban Buns’ simply used a knife to embed a cross in the dough of the bun. However, if you dig a little deeper, there are historical references to ‘crossed buns’ that date back to ancient Rome. Archaeologists unearthed  ‘crossed loaves’ in a neighbouring city near Pompeii, which were preserved by volcanic magma.

The most similar bun to the one that we enjoy from Woolies every year was baked by Saxon Pagans to commemorate the season of  Spring. Encountered by Christian missionaries in the late six century, the Pagans would bake buns marked with a cross as a tribute to their goddess Eostre, who represented fertility and rebirth. A pagan version of the hot cross bun used the cross to represent the four quadrants of the moon, and was eaten as part of a month-long festival that celebrated the end of winter.

As Britain became increasingly Christian, pagan practices were banished or subtlety co-opted. Historians believe that the early ‘Eostre’ pagan celebrations is how we ended up with ‘Easter’ in the first place. Interestingly, hot cross buns had a hot comeback in sixteen century England, becoming so popular that Queen Elizabeth banned them from being sold outside of Good Friday, funerals and Christmas, considering them “too special to be eaten any other day”.

The pagan roots to the hot cross bun also explain the wealth of superstition around the treat, which ranges from having friendship cementing powers, to magically remaining fresh for an entire year.

So remember my druids, culture is fluid and thus it’s perfectly acceptable to burn wicker effigies while hunting for Easter eggs this weekend.