Paganism and Easter

“Welcome to the world of bullshit, my dear. You have arrived.” - Elton John

The amount of bullshit on the internet is truly outstanding. In this post, I cover one of big loads of crap that's floats around. Put on your waders, folks. It’s going to get deep before we get to the other side.

The bullshit is a meme that goes around social media this time each year. If you haven’t seen it, although I don’t know how you missed it, it’s a picture of the Burney Relief with the following wording over it:

Easter was originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols (like the egg and bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols (or did you actually think eggs and bunnies had anything to do with the resurrection?) After Constantine decided to Christianize the Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus. But at its roots, Easter (which is how you pronounce Ishtar) is all about celebrating fertility and sex.

Let me run through the error of this meme. While Ishtar’s domain includes fertility, her primary domains are war, sex, and wisdom. Her animal is not the bunny but the lion. And while bird imagery is found on some of Her Mesopotamian artifacts, eggs have nothing to do with Ishtar. Constantine did not establish a holiday named after Her. The Easter holiday here in the West was originally, and still is in the East, called Paschal. And Ishtar’s name is NOT pronounced: “Easter.”   

Now that we’ve sloshed through that manure, there is evidence that the name “Easter” might have a pagan origin. The primary source for this is an 8th-century monk named the Venerable Bede.

Bede was tasked with establishing a date for Paschal that met the criteria of the Medieval Western Church. In his book De Temporum, Bede wrote:

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honored name of the old observance.

In this passage, we learn that the Saxon calendar had a month called Eosturmonath, named after a Saxon goddess named Eostre. Also, some 8th-century Christians in England continued to use this term for the Christian observance of Paschal. The modern Western name of Easter is a holdover from this practice.

Bede is the only source that the Saxons had a goddess by that name. Much later, in 1835, Jacob Grimm (yes, that Grimm) hypothesized that the Old High German tongue might contain references to a Saxon goddess named Ostara. 

Assuming there was a Saxon goddess named Eostre/ Ostara, what do we know about Her? We know nothing. Some scholars speculate that She was a goddess of the Dawn or possibly the East. But there are no records that the various pagan spring practices involving eggs and bunnies were associated with the goddess Eostre.

I know some people like to tease Christians. And some Christians ignore facts, making them easy targets. However, I feel an obligation to accuracy.