As I mentioned in my last post, two things we can now be sure the internet will deliver up at Easter are rehashes of the tedious “Jesus never existed” thesis and memes telling us that “Easter is actually pagan!”.  The one above has become one of the most popular in recent years, so much so that its “Ishtar = Easter” claim has taken on internet factoid status. More recently, online New Atheists seem to have finally worked out that the “Ishtar” claims are New Age garbage, so they now prefer ones like these:    

Of course, in typical online New Atheist style, both the “No More Make Believe” and “Philosophical Atheism” groups on Facebook pontificate about  evidence reason, scholarship and fact-checking, but then merrily post any old crap if it has a suitably anti-Christian slant. So let’s actually apply some reason, look at some scholarship and do some fact-checking and see how these glib little memes stand up to the kind of critical scrutiny supposed “rationalists” should apply consistently.

Ishtar and Easter

   Back in 2013 someone posted the “Ishtar = Easter” meme on the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science’s Facebook page. Around the same time someone noted this on the  Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science site (in a post that no longer exists), posted a link to a Scientific American article that made a rather poor attempt at debunking the meme, and then they actually made a smart point:

“There have been many of these types of ideas spreading around through documentaries & books these days. Many of them seek to connect Christian traditions with pagan ones. I must say, I can understand the reasons behind the claims: However, there still has to be historical proof to back such claims.”

Fact-checking using evidence? What a great idea. Unfortunately the 25 responses the post received displayed little to no sceptical analysis, let alone any actual reference to source material or evidence.  Most of the comments simply droned on about how the idea was “highly plausible” or some general comments about how “Christians adopted many pagan practices and beliefs”. There were also some even more crackpot contributions, such as the guy who doubles down and says Easter is not derived from Ishtar … but from the goddess Isis! There was one lonely comment from someone who actually bothered to do “some simple Googling” and managed to work out that Easter and “Ishtar” have nothing to do with each other, however he got completely ignored. So much for fact checking by the fans of the so-called “Foundation for Reason and Science”.   Let’s take the claims in the meme one by one:   “Ishtar is pronounced ‘Easter'”   No, it isn’t. In modern English, it’s pronounced the way it looks, with “Ish-” as the first syllable. The original Akkadian name is 

which was probably pronounced “ISH-tar” or perhaps “EESH-tar”, but not “EAST-er”. Any similarity between the way the modern English form “Ishtar” looks and the modern English word “Easter” sounds is purely co-incidental.  

“Easter is originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex.”  

Contrary to popular opinion, the idea that ancient deities were somehow the gods or goddesses “of” simple, particular things is far too simplistic. Ishtar was the Akkadian counterpart to the Sumerian goddess Inanna and came to be identified with the Semitic goddess Astarte. Inanna had some associations with fertility – she was associated with the date palm and with wool, meat and grain – but she was primarily a goddess of kingship, war sexuality and the planet Venus. There is some evidence that the later Ishtar cult involved sacred prostitution, though this is disputed, since it comes from a very late account by Herodotus.  

“Her symbols (like the egg and the bunny) were and still are fertility and sex symbols (or did you actually think eggs and bunnies had anything to do with the resurrection?).”  

Ishtar was associated with several symbols, but “the egg and the bunny” are not among them (see below on the actual origins of those symbols and traditions). Her symbols seem to have been the star, usually with eight points, the lion and the gate.  

“After Constantine decided to Christianize the Roman Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus.”  

This sentence doesn’t make much sense on two levels. Firstly, Constantine did not decide “to Christianize the Roman Empire”. He converted to Christianity in 312 (or maybe just came out openly as Christian then) and in 313 he decreed toleration of all religions, ending the periodic persecution of Christianity in the Empire. Despite this, he did not embark on any campaign to impose Christianity on the Empire and, at least initially, took an outwardly neutral path on religion so as not to alienate the still largely pagan senatorial and equestrian classes on which he depended for his administration. Later, he passed edicts that ended most state sponsorship of the pagan cults and sought to limit public pagan worship, though it’s unclear how rigidly the latter were enforced. The conversion of the emperor and his family to Christianity and, more importantly, the removal of massive imperial funding of pagan temples and centres certainly did have the effect of greatly increasing conversions to Christianity over Constantine’s reign and that of his successors, but the Empire was not “Christianised” until the reign of Theodosius, who made Christianity the state religion in 380 AD; 43 years after Constantine died.  

The only connection between Constantine and Easter is his calling of the First Council of Nicea in 325 AD, with the aim of settling several disputes within the Christian churches.  While the primary issue for the Council was sorting out the Arian Controversy over the nature of the Trinity, the Council also ruled on when Easter should be celebrated.  This issue had been controversial within Christianity for some time, with Eusebius reporting that as early as 190 AD there had been disputes about whether the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus should be celebrated in line with the Jewish Passover or only on a Sunday, since Jesus is reported to have risen from the dead on the Sunday after his crucifixion.  Most Christians in the west of the Empire celebrated the Resurrection on a Sunday but in the east many churches kept in sync with the Jewish Passover, with the relevant day often falling on a weekday as a result.  So the Council of Nicea ruled that it should always be celebrated on a Sunday and seems to have ordered that it should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after March 21.  

Obviously the fact that Christians were having a dispute about when Easter should be celebrated indicates that there was already a celebration of Easter long before Constantine, so the claim that somehow “Easter was changed to represent Jesus” (whatever the hell that means) is clearly garbage. And the only reason their celebrations of Easter were connected to the vernal equinox is because that is the time of the Jewish Passover and Jesus was said to have been executed around Passover. So the date has a purely Christian origin that has nothing at all to do with pagan festivals (though Passover may have had a prehistoric origin in some kind of Semitic spring festival). Finally, there is no evidence of any association between Ishtar and the vernal equinox, let alone the Sunday following the first full moon after March 21.  

Those who peddle this stupid New Age “Ishtar = Easter” meme also don’t explain how the word somehow jumped all the way from the Middle East to England, skipping pretty much every single other Christian nation on the way. This is why, despite the fact the festival is called “Easter” in the English speaking world, in almost every other European language it is some variant on the Greek Πάσχα:  

French: Pâques; Romanian: Paşti; Portugese: Páscoa; Italian: Pasqua; Spanish: Pascua; Faeroese: Páskir; Swedish: Påsk; Icelandic: Páskar; Welsh: Pasg; Norwegian: Påske; Danish: Påske; Dutch: Pasen; Russia: Paskha.

  Πάσχα in turn is derived from the Hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach) meaning … Passover. Only an idiot could look at this and somehow conclude that the English word “Easter” had anything at all to do with the name of an ancient Akkadian goddess who was worshipped two millennia before the first English speakers and 4,000 kilometres to the south east of England. But there are a lot of idiots on the internet and, unfortunately, it seems some of them are associated with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

So How About the Goddess Eostre?  

If Easter has nothing to do with Ishtar, what about the claims about it coming from “the pagan goddess Eostre”? We are told that this is the “real” origin of Easter in other memes propagated uncritically by online New Atheists. Apparently she was a “pagan goddess of light and fertility” and a “Spring Goddess” who “breathed life back into the world”. Lots of online sources seem to know a great deal about her and tell us that she was associated with hares and rabbits (“thus the Easter Bunny, see?”) and eggs (“fertility symbols that have nothing to do with silly old Christianity!”). These things are all asserted with the internet’s usual breathless assurance and so it all seems perfectly clear that “Easter” was originally this pagan goddess’ spring fertility festival. Unless you bother to actually check on the sources of all these claims and find this is not clear at all. In fact, it’s actually highly uncertain and substantially wrong.  

To begin with, we have the grand total of one clear reference to any pagan goddess called Eostre, and even that is slightly uncertain. It’s actually found in an early medieval Christian work focused on that vexed issue of the calculation of the date of Easter. In 725 AD the prolific English monk and scholar Bede wrote De temporum ratione or “The Reckoning of Time” to help monks calculate Easter, but in the process he detailed various calendrical schemes, gave a potted history of the earth and, thanks to the work’s popularity, helped fix the BC/AD dating scheme as the standard. In his discussion of calendars he gives us the traditional Old English names for the months, with a brief discussion of each. Some of his etymologies seem to refer to the agricultural cycles of the year, such as Weodmonath (August) or “weed month” or Thrimilcemonath (May) “three milkings month” so called because in that month cattle were milked three times a day thanks to lush spring grass.  Others refer to pagan practices.  Bede says Halgemonath (September) is “Holy Month” because it was a “month of sacred rites”, possibly associated with harvest. And he says two months were named after goddesses – Hrethmonath (March) after Hrêða and Eostremonath (April) after our Eostre:

“Eostremonath has a name which is now translated Paschal month, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour 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-honoured name of the old observance.” (Bede, De temporum ratione, XV)

The problem is that we have no other explicit references to this “Eostre” anywhere in any other source, which has led some scholars to suspect there was no such goddess and to posit that Bede didn’t have a clue what “Eostremonath” meant and that he simply invented an “Eostre” goddess to explain the obscure name. Old English language scholar Philip A. Shaw disagrees, noting some place names and Anglo-Saxon personal names that he interprets as references to this goddess. In his book Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons, (2011) Shaw notes two places called “Eastly”, one in Kent and one in Cambridgeshire, and one called “Eastrington”, in Yorkshire. He interprets the first two as referring to “district” (gé) of Eostre and the latter as the “enclosure” (tún) of the Eastrings, i.e. the “people of Eostre.” He also notes the Anglo-Saxon personal name “Easterwine”- literally “Esotre-friend”, which happened to be the name of a seventh century abbot of Bede’s monastery of Jarrow. Then there is the Middle English name “Estrild”, which seems to derive from the Old English form “Eosturhild”.    

So it seems Bede is probably right that there was such a goddess and that, unlike elsewhere in Europe, the Anglo-Saxons used the name of her month for the new Christian festival given that it fell around the same time of year. But to leap from this to claiming the festival itself was somehow “pagan” is simply wrong – Christians had been celebrating Easter at this time since at least the second century AD, which was around 400 years before Christianity came to England and encountered any worshippers of Eostre. The only thing Eostre seems to have given to Easter is her name. (Many thanks to Dr Levi Roach of the University of Exeter for drawing my attention to Shaw’s evidence and tempering my former scepticism about the existence of Eostre).

Edit 28/03/24: The quote from De temporum ratione is from the 1988 translation Liverpool University Press translation by Faith Wallis. But Roger Pearse has looked more carefully at the Latin text and argues a key part of the translation is somewhat misleading. See “Easter: A translation error in Bede, De Ratione Temporum”. Pearse notes a key phrase in the Latin original:

Eosturmonath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretatur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cuius nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant, consueto antiquae observationis voca­bulo gaudia novae solemnitalis vocantes.

He notes that Wallis has has treated “cuius”, “of whom/which” as referring back to “dea … Eostre”. This is certainly grammically possible, but he argues:

[T]he curious position of the “nomen habuit” – “it has a name” – seems designed solely to avoid this. The whole bit about Eostre is put between “Eosturmonath” and “nomen habuit”, precisely to keep it out of the way of the rest of the sentence. So I suggest that “cuius” should be understood to refer to “nomen”, i.e. to the season, not the goddess.

This means that instead of “now they designate that Paschal season by her [Eostre’s] name, as Wallis translates it, the text should read “now they designate the paschal season by its [the month’s] name”. So this means the text makes it even more clear that the feast’s name is only very indirectly from the goddess’ name – it is just a cut down version of the name of the month.

Rabbits, Hares and Eggs?  

So what about the pagan remnants that are Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny? As already noted above, there is no evidence linking Ishtar to eggs, rabbits or hares, despite the claims to that effect. And if we can’t even be absolutely sure if there was an Eostre, clearly we have no information about her being connected to eggs or bunnies if she existed – the single mention of her by Bede tells us nothing about her other than her name.  

Given that no eggs or rabbits appear in any of the Easter narratives in the gospels, most people assume they have to have pagan origins. After all, the usual Christian explanation that the eggs “symbolise the rebirth of Christ at his Resurrection” sounded dubious to me even as a child. But it seems that the tradition of decorating and eating eggs at Easter does have a medieval Christian origin after all.  

Christianity has long instituted days of fasting in association with various festivals and celebrations in its liturgical calendar and the earliest evidence we have of a 40 day fast before Easter comes in the festal letter of Athanasius from 330 AD. What a “fast” meant varied, but it usually involved abstaining from meat and often also required avoiding all animal food products, including cheese, butter and eggs. The fifth century historian Socrates Scholasticus noted at least some people abstained from eating eggs on fast days and the Council in Trullo in 692 AD recommended that people do so:

“It seems good therefore that the whole Church of God which is in all the world should follow one rule and keep the fast perfectly, and as they abstain from everything which is killed, so also should they from eggs and cheese, which are the fruit and produce of those animals from which we abstain.”

  By the Middle Ages, abstaining from eggs on fast days and in Lent had become the standard practice in western Europe. Thomas Aquinas made this requirement perfectly clear:  

“Eggs and milk foods are forbidden to those who fast, for as much as they originate from animals that provide us with flesh … Again the Lenten fast is the most solemn of all, both because it is kept in imitation of Christ, and because it disposes us to celebrate devoutly the mysteries of our redemption. For this reason the eating of flesh meat is forbidden in every fast, while the Lenten fast lays a general prohibition even on eggs and milk foods.” (Summa Theologica, II.2. 127)

So this prohibition gave rise to two European customs maintained to this day: eating pancakes and pastries on “Shrove Tuesday” before the Lent fast began and eating eggs on Easter Sunday when it ended. Using up what eggs, milk and butter people had before the fast made sense rather than letting this perishable food go to waste. And since hens would be paying no attention to any fasts and still laying through Lent, there would have been plenty of eggs on hand to eat on Easter Sunday morning. In fact, eggs gathered in the week ahead of Easter could have been stored or hard boiled in preparation for Easter Sunday morning, when they would have been quite a treat to peasants who had just endured over a month on a diet of bread, vegetables and some fish.  

We have the first references to these eggs being decorated in the thirteenth century, but that practice may have started earlier. What we don’t have is any reference to any pagan spring festival or customs involving eggs. The most logical source of Easter eggs, therefore, is the Christian practice of a Lenten fast in which this readily available staple could not be eaten.  

The “Easter Bunny” is a modern commercial take on the northern European association of hares (not rabbits) with Easter. The Osterhase or Easter Hare was just one of several animals associated with Easter, including the Easter Fox, the Easter Stork and the Easter Goose. Again, there is no evidence of any pagan origin here. Hares are generally shy and solitary animals, but in early spring they become more social as part of their mating behaviour.  So around March in most of northern Europe hares can be seen in the fields “boxing” – with males competing for mates and females occasionally rebuffing males physically. The sight of groups of hares in the fields would have been a sign of the onset of spring and that Easter was around the corner for rural people without calendars. Similarly, foxes, storks and geese either return to northen Europe or come out of winter dormancy in early spring and so, like the hare, became associated with the coming of Easter. Later, the German and Dutch tradition of the Easter Hare came to the US and became the (rather cuter and therefore more appealing and commercial) “Easter Bunny”, and then spread to the rest of the world as a way of selling more confectionery. So, again, no paganism.

Where Does All this Crap Come From?  

So Ishtar had nothing to do with Easter, Eostre had little to do with the Christian festival other than its name in England and Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny aren’t pagan either. So where did all this crap come from? One of the interesting things about having spent several decades tracking down crank pseudo history is how often I find these dumb ideas can all be traced back to single sources. In this case we have memes being shared uncritically both by New Agers and neo-pagans and by vehement New Atheists. Which is deeply ironic, given that the source of these memes seems to be a nineteenth century fundamentalist Christian minister.  

Alexander Hislop (1807-1865) was a minister in the Free Church of Scotland and parish schoolmaster in Caithness. He was a vehement critic of anything to do with Catholicism and became convinced that while good Protestants like him followed the true faith of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church was actually the ancient Babylonian mystery cult of Nimrod, an obscure pagan figure mentioned a few times in the Old Testament. According to Hislop, Satan allowed the Emperor Constantine (him again) to hijack the true Christian faith and lead it into idol-worship and Papist errors and that it was only by recognising this and throwing off any pre-Reformation vestiges that people could return to true Christianity.  

Hislop initially published this thesis as a pamphlet in 1853, but then added a large amount of material to it and published it as The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife in 1858. Hislop’s book is a remarkable case study in the level of abject nonsense that can be created out of a stupid initial assumption, a burning desire to find (or create) evidence to support it and the motivating energy of good old fashioned bigotry. So Hislop takes sources that have since been shown to be wrong and new information from digs in the Middle East that he didn’t understand to create a fantasy of stunning complexity and idiocy. We are told that the mitres worn by Catholic bishops take their shape from the “fish head hats” worn by the ancient priests of the god Dagon, though this ignores the fact that Catholic mitres didn’t take their current form until at least the tenth century and earlier forms didn’t look anything like the bizarre hats in Hislop’s dubious illustrations of these pagan priests. And where Hislop was unable to come up with evidence he simply makes strings of assertions, like “Nimrod was born on December 25” or “Christmas tree baubles are Babylonian sun symbols” – none of which have the slightest substantiation.  

Not surprisingly, Hislop’s book became a best-seller and remains very popular among the loonier elements of fundamentalist Protestantism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses still cite Hislop as an august authority in regular articles repeating his claims. The infamous tract publisher Jack T. Chick was a huge fan of Hislop and several of his crazier evangelical comic books were simply rehashes of Hislop’s thesis (such as his 1987 comic “Why is Mary Crying?“). And white supremacist groups of the “Christian Identity” variety also regularly feature Hislop’s claims in their material.  

Hislop seems to be the ultimate point of origin for the claims that Ishtar and Eostre were the original source of Easter, thanks to the wickedness of Catholics and, of course, Satan. He devotes a whole section to the pagan origins of Easter in his chapter on the wicked Satanic festivals of the Catholic Church:

“What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name.It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name,… as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar …” (Hislop, p. 103)

  He goes on to detail a fervid fantasy about Middle Eastern gods being taken to Britain by, of course, the Druids, who he claims worshipped the Babylonian god Baal. Then he makes the following series of leaps:

“If Baal was thus worshipped in Britain, it will not be difficult to believe that his consort, Astarte, was also worshipped by our ancestors, whose name in Nineveh was Ishtar. The religious solemnities of April, as now practised, are called by the name of Easter – that month, among our Pagan ancestors having been called Easter-monath.” (Hislop, p. 104)

  He then traces this pagan Easter and its Catholic customs via a circuitous route via the 40 day fast of “the Yezidis, the Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan” and, somehow, the “Pagan Mexicans” and the cults of Adonis, Osiris, Ceres and Tammuz before it was imposed on the poor Christians of Britain by the wicked and Satanic Church of Rome. He concludes:  

“Such is the history of Easter.The popular observances that still attend the period of its celebration amply confirm the testimony of history as to its Babylonian character.The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now.” (p. 107-08)

Pretty much all the elements of the memes above can be found here, though not the Satanic hot cross buns, which Hislop condemns as celebrating “the goddess Easter” and therefore also evil. I imagine Mr Hislop was not much fun at parties.  

Hislop’s junk scholarship was very popular and while his whole thesis generally only appealed to his hardline Protestant audience, his claims permeated nineteenth and early twentieth century culture. So we can find them popping up in esoterica, in tracts by Theosophists and occultists and in Freethinker pamphlets, which recycled anti-Catholic material with uncritical enthusiasm. And now we find the supposedly “rational” New Atheists of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and the  the “No More Make Believe” and “Philosophical Atheism” Facebook groups cluelessly regurgitating this hoary fundamentalist Christian nonsense because they don’t check their facts and just take any nonsense that appeals to them on … faith. Oh, the irony.  

Update – April 19 2017:

In a great victory for rationalism, I have now been blocked by the the “No More Make Believe” Facebook group. I suppose that’s one way of dealing with pesky people who point out their errors of fact.

Update – March 23 2024:

This is one of my oldest articles and has more of a blog-style than my more recent material. But I will leave it up for now, since the content is bascially what I would write today and I have amdended it a couple of times to add new material. I have added a reading list below, since some critics have tried to dismiss this article because it “has no sources”, despite my sources being clearly listed and linked to in the text. I would also note my video on this – Is Easter Pagan – and my interview with Dr Andrew Henry on the same subject.

Further Reading:

Adrian Bott, “The Modern Myth of the Easter Bunny”, The Guardian, April 23, 2011

Ronald Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, (Oxford University Press, 1996) – “A Egg at Easter”, pp. 401-411. See also p. 411, n. 34 on the modern origins of the “Easter Bunny”.

Philip A. Shaw,  Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons (Bristol Classical Press: 2011)

A Dictionary of English Folklore, ed.s Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud (Oxford University Press, 2003) – “Easter eggs” p. 105.

Stephen Winick, “On the Bunny Trail: In Search of the Easter Bunny”, Folklife Today, March 22, 2016