Happy Medieval Easter!

For the people of Spain and its former colonies, Easter week looks nothing like the Eggs 'n Bunnies holiday familiar to Protestants.
Instead, the notorious Semana Santa or "Week of the Saints" is a bewildering and often gruesome window to the Dark Ages -- an era that has never ended for most of the world's population.
In Spain, Latin America and the Philippines, bizarre street performances, public displays of bloody masochism and carefully staged voodoo ceremonies knock the Vatican's elaborate theology down to a ritualistic battle between cone-headed sufferers and elegant demons.
In the Philippine province of Pampanga, delirious lunatics actually volunteer to be nailed to crosses on Good Friday.
Grotesque devils armed with wooden versions of drug-lord automatic rifles try to invade Mexico's rustic churches.
And processions of barefooted eerily-masked men carry relics and props through the squares of Spanish towns, their paths marked with bloody footprints from marching solemnly over the shards of smashed wine bottles.
If that wasn't enough, Semana Santa festivities always include creepy life-sized characters from the story of Jesus' last troubled week on Earth -- imagine a version of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" that doesn't just seem to drag on for six or seven hours, but that actually goes on for an entire week!
Like all Catholic religious ceremonies, Semana Santa may be "religious," but each day's events end with an orgy of booze and dancing and the fornication that is the ancient reason why everybody worships the arrival of Spring.
The Roman church decided in 325 CE that "Easter was to fall upon the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the Vernal Equinox," forever linking the resurrection of Jesus to the actual resurrection of the Northern Hemisphere's plants, animals and sunshine.