Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

  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:    

From the ‘No More Make Believe’ Facebook group
From the ‘Philosophical Atheism’ Facebook group


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.

The goddess Eostre, according to some neo-pagan hippy on Pinterest

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” () 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.

More neo-pagan New Age fantasy

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

152 thoughts on “Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

  1. Comical, isn't it, that the same people who cling to Jesus mythicism ("there's not enough evidence to prove he existed") will carry the Oestre fable to their graves based on a single reference by Bede?

    One sentence by Bede? QED!

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  2. Hi Tim, thanks for doing all that research. The end result of all this imagination would be somewhat amusing if it wasn't taken so seriously by some.

    I think there is one level where christianity may have been influenced by paganism, in a way. In England at least, and quite possibly elsewhere, christians appear to have "christianised" sites and seasons that were sacred to pagans. So the date of Christmas, nowhere mentioned in any reliable historical documents I have seen in reference to Jesus' birth, was likely used to commemorate his birth to christianise a pagan festival. Likewise churches were sometimes built on sites that had pagan meaning. At least, I think these things are so – do you know?

    As a christian, I have no problem with any of that – after all, if I was worried about that, how would I live on Marsday, and Tyrsday, or Wodensday or Thorsday or Freyasday? And as a christian, I would be very happy if easter eggs and bunnies were pagan in origin – I don't really like the way they have become so commercialised, appearing in our local supermarket immediately after the Christmas junk goes on half price sale in January. But it is good to have some well researched information. Thanks.

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    1. Did I miss it, or was there not a single scripture quoted or referenced in the entire article? Scholarly debates on the origin of Easter aside one fact is incontrovertible, ie, that there is zero Biblical evidence that any of the apostles or first century Christians understood that there should be a day set aside for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, nor did he ever command such. At a very basic level the inspired words of Colossians 2:8 and perhaps more succinctly Jesus’ words at Mark 7:13 certainly apply.

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      1. What kind of argument is that?

        “that any of the apostles or first century Christians understood that there should be a day set aside for the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, nor did he ever command such.”

        How exactly does this affect anything?

  3. "In England at least, and quite possibly elsewhere, christians appear to have "christianised" sites and seasons that were sacred to pagans."

    There's absolutely no doubt about that. Many churches are built on top of or out of or even inside of older cultic centres and sites. A lot of saints' days are former pagan festivals and a few saints (Christopher, Brigid) are simply rebadged pagan deities. And many former customs were retained and simply lost most or all of their former associations. So we still put up Christmas trees and the good people of Abbots Bromley still take the 1000 year old reindeer antlers from their parish church and dance around with them each September centuries after everyone has forgotten why.

    And we know that a lot of this was a deliberate conversion policy, as evidenced by sources like Gregory the Great's instructions to Bishop Mellitus in 601 AD. But this doesn't mean that every folk tradition or obscure practice has some pagan origin. Unfortunately a lot of the older breed of anthropologists and folklorists found gods and pagan cults under every toadstool and any vague parallel somehow had to be a derivation.

    "So the date of Christmas, nowhere mentioned in any reliable historical documents I have seen in reference to Jesus' birth, was likely used to commemorate his birth to christianise a pagan festival."

    Ummm, no actually. See my post on that subject: "The Great Myths 2: Christmas, Mithras and Paganism".

    "But it is good to have some well researched information. Thanks."

    You're very welcome. Of course, I'm fighting even more of an uphill battle against this crap than on most of the topics I tackle here.

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    1. Although there was a later habit of Converting ‘pagan’ temples to Christian sites, this was by no means universal. Martin Of Tours ( c. 360) spent quite a lot of time rampaging around the countryside destroying ‘sacred’ sites, especially those connected to tree worship. He then set up parish churches in towns and villages, rather than the countryside.

      Most of the earliest Christian churches in Europe were new foundations, generally outside city walls and precincts, partly for economic reasons, but also because they provided funeral services and in many instances burial grounds. These had to be outside the town boundaries to observe the hygiene laws.

      I suspect that the reuse of existing building by other faiths , pagan to Christian and vice versa, was as much to do with the difficulty of building in stone during the European dark ages, as with the reclamation of faith. The conversion of existing church buildings to mosques in Istanbul and Damascus is a similar phenomenon, reversed in Córdoba .

      Sacred springs connected with healing are probably a rather different phenomenon, though.

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      1. You’ll find a section on the misconceptions regarding the conversion (and destruction) of temples in my critique of Catherine Nixey’s silly book The Darkening Age. On the whole temples seem to have been “converted” or reused, as you say, when they were abandoned. The image of Christians forcibly taking over former pagan buildings is largely erroneous. The ones that became churches did so in much the same way an Anglican country church down the road from where I grew up became an B&B and the way my great-aunt’s Dominican convent became first a Buddhist centre and now a school for catering.

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        1. What sources did you use to write the article above plus above estar plus the article you mentioned? The author’s and the text – article, book, whatever.

          I’m not doubting you but it’s hard to find the direct historians and specially it’s hard to use your articles to make a point when those miss the references

          1. This was one of my earliest articles on this site, written back when I used more of a blogging content format. But I refer to several sources and articles. So what details do you need citations for?

  4. It's a thankless task to have to correct not only the internet atheists, but also the hidebound fundamentalist Protestants, who are so wedded to this rubbish, but thank you for doing so.

    Regards
    Jason

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  5. I've been attacked as a wicked close-minded atheist by both hardline Catholics and Protestants, as a Christian apologist by New Atheists and as a crypto-Catholic by both New Atheists and fundamentalist Protestants. All these insults from the crazies can get confusing.

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    1. It just means you’re doing it right.
      I’m disappointed I don’t get the same level of hilarious nonsense, I need to work harder.

  6. I just want to say, Tim, that you're the best.

    Also, re: above, "Unfortunately a lot of the older breed of anthropologists and folklorists found gods and pagan cults under every toadstool", I'm reminded of the saying that when an anthropologist says that something had a symbolic ritual meaning, it means that the anthropologist doesn't understand what it was actually about. (And this is from the anthropologists themselves, not dissing them.)

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  7. Tim, you are transforming my life. 🙂 I am former atheist with Slavic background, and I was always uneasy about the traditions we have around eggs. Slavs decorate them elaborately on Thursday before Easter. Even much of our secular art was profoundly influenced by egg imagery (look up Faberge Eggs – they are stunning). You are reconnecting me back to my civilization's roots – eggs are "kosher" and fun, my family will employ them in celebration every year from now on. Much gratitude to you!

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  8. Thank you for this. I love a good debunking and this is the most thorough debunking of all the Easter meme nonsense that I've seen. I love that you were able to track down the source of the stories to a single guy. It's very satisfying to know where the stories come from.

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  9. Then how did the name Easter came to be attributed to the day of resurrection? Do you know? It is obviously not in any of New Testament books. What is the earliest instance where a Christian work designates the day of resurrection as Easter? What is the meaning of the term Easter? Does that word has any meaning related to resurrection?

  10. As I explain in the article, "Easter" is only used in English. Virtually every other European language uses some form of the word Πάσχα "Pascha", which means "Passover". Because Jesus was executed on the Jewish Passover.

    But English uses "Easter" and German uses "Ostern" because Easter falls in a month that seems to have once had a pagan festival called "Eostre" in Old English and "Ostara" in Old High German. All we can say is that English and German took on the old name for their Christian festival, while other languages retained the traditional Christian name. We have no other information about this "Eostre"/"Ostara" festival, so we simply don't know if any pagan elements from it survive in Easter traditions. But, as I detail above, Easter eggs and Easter bunnies/hares don't seem to be pagan in origin, despite all the online claims to the contrary.

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    1. This difference in naming may reflect that Christianity in Britain , although present and organised before the 4th century, may have developed along independent lines as the Western Roman Empire fragmented and lost contact with outlying regions. The main purpose of The Synod of Whitby, which took place in the generation before Bede , was to reconcile ( ie convert) the Celtic and Roman practices around the shared faith. One of the main topics was the difference in calculation of the date of Easter, which was causing some social disruption.

      Perhaps the retention of the naming of the festival is just a vestige of the indigenous and isolated Church in Britain?

      1. I do believe that the Welsh term for Easter is a variant of Pascha.

        Welsh is held to be the oldest extant ‘Celtic’ language of the British Isles, predating Scots Gaelic (which was a bought over the Irish).

        Which suggests that the Welsh, and their forbears the Romano-Britons simply adopted the commonly used Latin name for Easter, and only those stubborn old Germanic types used the other.

        Besides, I don’t think rabbits are even indigenous to the Middle East, and the bunnies in all the modern pictures look suspiciously like European rabbits.

        It used to be thought that the Normans introduced rabbits to Britain, although there has recently been found some archeological evidence (literally some rabbit bones) to suggest that the Romans might have bought them over because they were considered a delicacy 🙂 Either way, it suggests they are not, in fact, indigenous to Britain.

    2. I think the cognates of Ēostre in IE languages (I have seen no doubts about the connection yet) are a good argument in favor of the feast being named after a goddess. Or in favor of the existence of the goddess in general, from which the naming would probably follow.

          1. Those might be somehow connected to Eostre, but we don’t know. There are several leaps of supposition required to get you from them to “so they are cognates of Eostre”.

  11. Good read! Thank you!

    I'm still wondering how we wound up using the term Easter when most other languages use a word rooted in or connected to Passover. Any thoughts?

  12. "Early English missionaries took that term with them when they evangelised, for example, in Germany (where their ancestors had come from).

    There were certainly Anglo-Saxon missionaries to the pagan areas of old Germania, such as Willibrord's and Willehad's missions to Frisia and the two Edwalds in Saxony and Boniface in Hesse and elsewhere.

    But do you have any evidence that supports the idea that they brought the word "Eostre" with them? Because if any exists, then the Old High German "Ostara" is not am original Germanic cognate at all and the idea of a pagan Germanic "Eostre"/"Ostara" goddess and/or festival shared across the pre-Christian west Germanic world becomes much less likely than Grimm suggests.

  13. It apparently got called Easter by early English Christians because it normally took place in April, which the English called Eostremonath. Early English missionaries took that term with them when they evangelised, for example, in Germany (where their ancestors had come from). And so "Easter" seems to have stuck in English. For a similar reason the English called Pentecost "Whitsun".

  14. Dear Tim,

    Interestingly, Easter is called Ostern in modern German and "Ost", the root word of Ostern, means east.

    Strange coincidence (or Germanic conspiracy;-)?
    Seriously, though, I'm uncertain what to make of this etymology.

  15. As I note in the article, German is the only European language other than English that uses a Germanic word for "Easter", rather than a variant based on the Greek Πάσχα (Pascha). So even in the other Germanic languages we have Faeroese: Páskir; Swedish: Påsk; Icelandic: Páskar; Norwegian: Påske; Danish: Påske; Dutch: Pasen etc.

    We don't know what the etymology of "Easter" and "Ostern", but the former comes from the Old English "Eostre" and the latter from the Old High German "Ostara". As I say above, these words may refer to a goddess, or may refer to an "opening" (eg the opening of spring) or may refer somehow to "the east" and therefore the dawn. We simply don't know and can only note the possibilities. The problem lies in people – both New Agers/neo-pagans and New Atheists – who state one of them as a fact because it suits their agendas.

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  16. Thank you for your prompt answer. I apologize if my comment appears twice – I thought I accidently erased my query.

    I found a comment that Steve Hayes made quite intriguing, where he poses the idea of "Early English missionaries took that term with them when they evangelised, for example, in Germany".

    So I thought, maybe the etymology is more a simple case of a translation attempt rather than a complex invoking of goddess names or references to the dawn.

    Yes, no, maybe?

  17. That would be a very big "maybe", unless I see some evidence to support that claim. As I note in my reply to Steve, it's true that there were Anglo-Saxon Christian missions into pagan continental Germania, so it's possible that the Old English word was taken over with these missionaries. But I would need to see some solid evidence for this. I asked him if he had any and he's not replied yet. I suspect he doesn't.

  18. According to the German Wikipedia etymology for Ostern, there are regional differences in how the holiday has traditionally been referred to.
    The more southerly arch diocese of Cologne with its Frankish-German called it pāsche, while the bishop's seat of the more northerly Mainz region favored the use of the anglo-saxon term "ostarun", meaning "morning red" or "dawn".

    de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostern#Etymologie

    Perhaps this north-south differentiation can be due to the influence of English missionaries, who most likely would have approached Germany from the north?

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  19. Just a small note, German is not the only European language not to have a Pascha variant. Estonian doesn't either. In Estonian it's an expression indicating the end of fasting: lihavõtted, "meat/flesh-taking". There's also an expression which just means "resurrection feast". But no expression derived from Pascha. NOR from Easter.

      1. In Polish it is a reference to when the resurrection happened. Literally the Big, or more accurately Great, Night. Equally, the Great Night can be seen as the Passover feat itself. It’s not linked to any other kind of festival as such, so that doesn’t undermine the theory it has nothing to do with a pagan deity celebrated in Britain, who may not have been celebrated anyway. Besides, by the time Christianity was adopted in Poland in 966 it was already fully fledged in this respect.

  20. By chance, is anyone here a native German speaker, or know one? Preferably a German speaker who's had some technical linguistic training in the development of proto-Germanic dialects in the 1st millennium AD. Here's why I ask:

    I recall reading somewhere the suggestion that the word "Easter" does NOT come from the Germanic noun root _oest_ ("the dawn" or "the east") with a SUFFIX added to it, but rather the Germanic verb root _stehren_ ("to stand") with a PREFIX added.

    In support of this conjecture:

    (1) Early Greek-speaking Christians would've used the word anastasis is used in reference to Jesus's resurrection — the -stasis part implies "the act of standing", while the ana- prefix can signify either "upward" or "again," depending on context. As Christianity spread, it would've been natural to render unfamiliar Greek theological terms with a root-for-root "calque" translation.

    (2) In modern German, or so says Google Translate, the verb "to resurrect" is auferstehen — i.e., a prefixed form of the basic verb that means "to stand." Chop off the auf- part and what's left is not too far phonetically from "Easter."

    All this sounds plausible — but I don't know nearly enough about German to guess whether it's actually true! On the other hand, I know enough about languages in general to be aware that totally logical-sounding etymologies often turn out to be bogus.

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  21. I think the main problem with that idea would be the attestation of Bede for the Old English traditional month name of "Eostremonath", which has the Old High German cognate of "ostermonat" and the festival names "ôstartagâ" and "aostortagâ". All this evidence indicates a pre-Christian origin for the name. it just doesn't necessarily indicate a pre-Christian goddess.

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  22. I will see your Faberge eggs and raise you pysanky — Ukrainian-style Easter eggs dyed with a wax-resist method in successively darker dye-baths. The technique is not dissimilar to the "batik" method of fabric dyeing, and the resulting designs can be stunningly complex.

    Anyway, regarding the origins of the Easter egg, I'm very reluctant to give up the "pagan fertility symbol" theory, because:

    (1) The function of the egg recalls the swollen womb of female mammals — it nurtures the baby inside it.

    (2) The shape of the egg suggests a mammalian testicle — thus, it represents the masculine reproductive principle as well as the feminine reproductive principle. (I might add that the Russian noun yaitsa, literally "eggs," can be used in exactly the same rude way that we use "nuts" or "balls" in English. Anthony Burgess, in A Clockwork Orange, punningly invents the Nadsat slang word "yarbles," as in "The millicent kicked me in the yarbles, oh my bratties.")

    (3) The shape of the egg ALSO suggests a human woman's breast. Google on the so-called "Diana of Ephesus" — a famous statue in which Diana/Artemis appears to be wearing a blouse sewn out of hardboiled eggs, à la Lady Gaga, but in fact she's got about a hundred tits.

    (4) The appearance of the yolk inside suggests the unconquerable solar-god, who always manages to defeat the Eclipse Dragon, and always returns after winter.

    (5) Finally, eggs cooked in the shell are an essential part of the Jewish seder during Passover — which may not be as old as Jewish tradition claims, but certainly was around long before Christian Lent. Other elements of the seder are explained as overt symbols of the Exodus story, but not eggs.

    None of this proves a pagan origin for Easter eggs, but it suggests to me that the "eggs were given up for Lent" idea is not the full explanation.

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  23. Sorry, but points 1-4 only add up to a small "maybe". Even if we grant all of that potential symbolism, there is no reason to think that these associations somehow mean these associations have to be pre-Christian. Not all customs have to have a prehistoric past: people come up with new customs all the time and they can and do have both conscious and subconscious symbolic resonance.

    Point 5, however, is wrong. Despite modern Jewish claims that eating eggs at Seder is an ancient custom, it is not attested anywhere until a German commentary by Rabbi Moses Isserles (1520-1572). Whereas we have references to Easter eggs being eaten (and decorated) as early as the thirteenth century. It could actually be that the Christian custom influenced the Jewish one, especially if a Lent surplus of eggs meant there were plenty of them in the markets around Passover and Easter.

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  24. Tim O'Neill said:

    "I've been attacked as a wicked close-minded atheist by both hardline Catholics and Protestants, as a Christian apologist by New Atheists and as a crypto-Catholic by both New Atheists and fundamentalist Protestants. All
    these insults from the crazies can get confusing."

    That sounds similar to the plight of Christian biologists, be they protestant or Catholic, who dare make statements such as "The evidence for evolution is overwhelming". Of course these poor biologists are obviously under the power of Satan and are liberal heretics.

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  25. There's literally 0 evidence associating Ishtar with 'sacred prostitution' because the latter is a made up Victorian concept.

    Herodotus' reference is about Mylitta, a different Mesopotamian goddess. Ishtar was (like Isis in Egyptian tradition) synchretized with most goddesses in the fertile crescent to various degrees but synchretism is not equivalence. Herodotus also doesn't describe 'prostitution' in the technical sense. Mylitta appears to be a Assyrian equivalent to the Sumerian Ninlil/Sud. In Akkadian times, Ishtar took over Ninlil's role to a large degree but the Akkadians wrote down lists of deity equivalencies and Ishtar is clearly stated to be the same as Inanna and several other deities she is simply not stated to be equivalent to Ninlil or Mylitta. The situation is incredibly complicated, hymns to one goddess will steal titles and copy language used to praise another goddess, early scholars (probably inspired by contemporary Hinduism) created a simpler picture by cherry picking the evidence that seemed to confirm what they expected to see. Male deities similarly steal titles and poetic phrases from each other all the time but scholars are much quicker to stuff every goddess into one 'divine feminine' than they are to argue that the god of wisdom is actually an aspect of the hero deity. Any actual understanding of ancient paganism requires one to avoid any simplifications and accept that the beliefs of ancient people were confusing and contradictory, at least from a modern perspective.

    Even today if you go the British Museum you find the name "Astarte" labeling any random Near Eastern figurine. Since it was impossible to identify the represented goddess in many cases, early archaeologists just assumed that there was only one goddess and used Ishtar/Astarte as a generic label and then used the labels as evidence that the people of the ancient near east only had one goddess who was worshiped in different aspects.

    The whole concept of a 'fertility goddess' is a Victorian invention based on their ideas of cultural evolution. The basic idea is Protestant with stoic influenced prudishness is the height of evolution so sex obsessed polytheism is the lowest form of evolution. Much of the evidence came from the original prudish stoics; the Roman sources that portrayed all bad rulers and foreigners as being unable to control their sexual appetites except even the Romans never mentioned actual pagan sex rites (the word orgy comes from Greek mystery cults but the word had no sexual connotations in the classical world).

    There's an Akkadian word 'harimtu' that is often translated as 'Sacred Prostitute' but in no ancient text is a harimtu ever paid for sex or associated with any religious function. But in Victorian times any loose woman was a whore so they just made the translation up and it remains in encyclopedia articles to this day.

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  26. While the notion that the worship of Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte involved ritual orgies may have been a later misunderstanding, Ishtar's randiness is well established in the Sumerian/Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. In fact, her insatiability plays a key role in the plot.

    The goddess Ishtar falls head over heels in love with the mighty demigod-king Gilgamesh, who tells her to get lost. In essence, he says that she's a total slut, but NOT one of those adorable sluts with a heart of gold, like Shamhat the temple-harlot (whose name apparently implies "she who plies her trade at the house of Shamash, the sun-god").

    No, says Gilgamesh, Ishtar is a spiteful, selfish slut of the worst sort, and every one of her countless male lovers has come to grief after she got tired of him. Gravely insulted, she stomps off to daddy (one of the chief gods) and demands Gilgamesh's head.

    Her father's reply boils down to: "Ishtar, sweetie, let's face it — you ARE a colossal slut. One cannot fault the King of Uruk for merely pointing what everyone, everywhere, ALREADY KNOWS. Besides which, it's not yet Gilgamesh's appointed time to die, so what can I do?"

    This sends Ishtar into full-blown Veruca Salt mode, and her insufferable whining eventually persuades the other gods to punish Gilgamesh indirectly — by slaying his best friend, the hairy-bodied wild man Enkidu. Enkidu's death about halfway through the epic then sets things in motion for the second half.

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  27. You forgot BBQ among the civilized temptations that Enkidu faces. But you're right — when Enkidu is dying and in a fever-delirium, he at first irrationally blames the temple-harlot for his predicament, and heaps nasty curses upon her. But then the sun-god Shamash rebukes Enkidu: "If not for the temple-harlot, you would never have learned to enjoy beer and cooked meat! Plus you would have never been dressed in the robes of a prince and dined at the table of King Gilgamesh, etc." So Enkidu retracts his curses and blesses the temple-harlot instead: "May her beauty be forever famous! May all of her clients be excellent tippers! May she have a long and comfortable retirement!"

  28. Two questions for Tim:

    1. How do you decide what posts get the "Great Myths" designation?

    2. You've touched on the alleged pagan origins of Christmas and Easter. Do you think you might ever cover whether or not Halloween was originally Samhain?

  29. There are some bits of pseudo history, such as the claims about Eostre and Easter etc above, that I only see repeated by New Atheists occasionally. There are others, however, that are constantly repeated, several of which form key elements of New Atheist pseudo historiography. They are the ones I'm focusing on in the "Great Myths" series of posts.

    I haven't considered an article on Halloween/Samhain because, as far as I can see, the connection between the two is pretty clear and uncontroversial.

    1. Nope. All Saints’ Day was originally on May 13 (which might actually have had an anti-pagan motif, because that was the day the Pantheon was rededicated as the Church of St. Mary and All Saints, IIRC, and All Saints’ Day came from that dedication feast; and it fell on a pagan Roman holiday day, although it was pretty late so I don’t know if anybody pagan Roman was left). The holiday moved to November 1 when a new All Saints’ chapel was dedicated in Rome, and apparently the Franks liked the idea and brought it back home. So the November feast gradually got more popular and spread, and eventually it got to Ireland. In something like the 10th century. (The Greeks and Easterners celebrated All Saints in the spring after Pentecost, and the Irish originally celebrated All Saints on April 20.)

      In early Christian Ireland, October 31 was the feast of St. Quintinus (of Rome) and the missionary St. Faelan/Foillan (brother of St. Fursa/Fursey).

      November 1, “samain slanaig,” (blessed Samain) was the feast of Ss. Lonan, Colman, and Cronan.

      Samhain in Ireland and Scotland in pagan times was the time when everybody had to travel to their local king’s place for an assembly with court cases, and to pay their taxes, finish up contract terms, etc. This continued into medieval and early modern times.

      (The idea that all doors were open, including the doors of the otherworld/afterlife, was a consequence of everybody being away from home, watching the court cases and paying their taxes. Or so I would guess.)

      It is possible that traveling to the king’s place included visiting the local burial mounds or such, but there’s no particular death association other than the turning of the year. There is an association with visiting the fairies or being kidnapped by them; but Tam Lin is definitely about taxes, and the fairy rulers were probably supposed to hold court and have open borders at the same time as mortal human ones.

      1. And St. Brigit was probably a totally real person. Her miracle stories copy patristic Greek and Latin saint stuff. The more realistic or Irish features of her legend are pretty much direct strikes on the Irish caste system, which managed to survive paganism for a long time. She is an “unfree”/slave woman with no possessions, but she demonstrates more generosity than any king. Also, she ends up in a position of rulership over her free father, her slaveowner, and a good chunk of Kildare. From the pagan point of view, she is subversion on the hoof. She is a demonstration of Irish monasticism overturning the pagan Irish world, not anything to do with goddesses. The more you research her and the other early female monastic saints in Ireland, the more you see how radical a break they were.

        The only story stuff we know about the goddess Brigit casts her as a minor figure, the embarrassed wife of Bres the Beautiful, an extremely ungenerous king; and the mourning mother of their son Ruadan. She does practically nothing, so it’s hard to get much personality from her.

        Everything else that we “know” about the goddess Brigit is based on some minor, conflicting details in other stories, a brief reference in Cormac’s Dictionary, and a bunch of imaginative Victorians and neo-pagans.

        Etymologically, “Brigit” is one of the Bri- names associated with hills. So if she was a goddess of anything in particular, it was “that there hill.” There would probably be different personalities and attributes associated with different hills. (Similar to Anu/Aine, another goddess name with lots of hill associations in different places, and very different stories.) Hills were associated with things like fire, mining, kingship, poetic inspiration, etc., so it is logical enough. But just like the minor well goddesses and the less minor river goddesses, you could have a lot of similar minor hill goddesses without them really being super-popular beyond their specific locale.

        1. Its also quite possible Brigid or some variant of it was a really common personal name in early Medieval Ireland.
          Bryn, which means basically means ‘hill’ is still a fairly common name in Wales to this day.

          So could Brigid just be a mish-mash of various minor deities, local spirits and Saints.

          Its rather like Robin Hood, which is likely a combination of various Medieval outlaws, guerillas and some ne’er-do-wells. Of course, Robin was also just a really common name in Medieval Britain.

    1. Either way, there is no way “Erce” can be seen as a cognate with “Eostre”. They are not connected linguistically at all. “Erce” is either a vocative of eorcnan (true, genuine, holy) or perhaps a form of a hypotentical earth goddess name *Eorce.

  30. Another issue that never seems to be dealt with in the “pagan deity to biblical God/Jesus” ideas is how did any of the pagan deities become transcendent in popular culture?

    It’s not believable that a deity like Zeus for example is hitting on women as part of his character he is famous for and then suddenly morphs into the God of the Jews who prohibits sex outside marriage and an entire continent doesn’t notice.

    Kind of off topic I know.

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  31. I’ve seen atheist Facebook groups point out the pagan origins of Islam by claiming that Allah was an Arabian/Mesopotamian moon God, another idea which originated with fundamentalist Christians.

  32. Here’s something New Christians forget to mention as they are poo-pooing the history of Ostara/Easter by that “one guy named Bede.” He was a monk who translated the Gospel of John and also helped establish the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ. Also, St. Bede was one of the greatest teachers and writers of the early Middle Ages and is considered by many historians to be the single most important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of Charlemagne in 800…but not according to the writer of this silly blog.

    So many New Christians denounce history and science yet somehow twist it to support their opinions regarding the myth of Jesus…Oh the irony!

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    1. What a bizarre comment. Firstly, I have no idea who or what “New Christians” may refer to, but as “the writer of this silly blog” I can assure you that I am not one. I am also not very interested in supporting any “myth of Jesus”, but I’m equally unclear on what that refers to.

      Secondly, I’m pretty clear on who Bede was and his stature among early medieval scholars. Probably more clear than you, to be frank. I refer to him, accurately, as “the prolific English monk and scholar” and acknowledge the influence of his De temporum ratione, making a point of noting that “thanks to the work’s popularity, [it] helped fix the BC/AD dating scheme as the standard.” Where the hell you got the idea I was not aware of the importance of Bede’s scholarship is another mystery.

      As far as I can make out, your weird comment seems to be driven by the fact that I cast doubt on the etymology Bede gives for “Eostremonath” and therefore the existence of any goddess called “Eostre”. My scepticism here is not based on any denigration of Bede as a scholar, just on the fact that this is the one and only reference to any such goddess, and there are no other indications that any such goddess existed. This is why many scholars, including some of the best and most respected in the field (e.g. Hutton) share my scepticism.

      So you seem highly confused about what I’ve said and, particularly, about why. I can only suggest you read this blog’s FAQ.

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  33. Very good article on the whole — but the bit about the etymology of ‘Easter’ is a bit off, so I thought it might be worth weighing (I’m a Germanic philologist, so I maybe care more about the details of etymology than is strictly healthy or necessary).

    The feminine n-stem noun _ēastre_ (Proto-Germanic *austr-ōn-) really should mean something like ‘feminine one associated with the dawn’. This entity probably qualifies as a ‘goddess’, though really that will depend on just how you define what a deity is. We can’t say anything about her, which probably implies there wasn’t much mythology associated with her — but that doesn’t preclude feasting being held in her honour (a good parallel here is maybe the Vedic Uṣaḥ, whose name is from the same Indo-European base: there are Vedic hymns to her, which implies sacrificing and feasting, but little concrete mythology — in sharp contrast to more deity-like deities such as Indra).

    The only point at which Hutton’s idea of ‘beginning’ could enter the picture is the further association of the personified ‘dawn’ with a month in spring — Hutton’s idea that it could be the other way around is, to put it bluntly, pretty absurd. That would require us to assume that from the IE base for ‘dawn’ (*h₂aus-) we formed a derivative meaning ‘opening’ or something (not attested, or even hinted at, _anywhere_ else), and then from that a month was named. I can’t see how ‘opening’ would fit into this any which way. Much simpler to see the direct line of derivation of: dawn > dawn-personification, who then had a month named after her (or more likely, a feast named after her, and then a month named for the feast — such a mediation is suggested by the presence of a neuter name *austraⁿ ‘Easter-feast’, and would help explain how the name entered Christian tradition: not directly from a pagan deity, but from the name for a feast).

    At any rate, none of this really helps the New Atheist view. The idea that the name ‘Easter’ might really have been used for a pagan goddess is plausible (by far the simplest view from an etymological perspective), but hardly all that significant. Her association with Pascha may reflect an old name, but that’s it. Nothing about the Anglo-Saxon celebrations of Easter differs in any real way from the general early medieval celebrations.

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    1. Thanks Nelson. Dr Levi Roach of the University of Exeter was kind enough to point me toward some more recent research on Eostre which has had me revise my initial scepticism about her existence. As a result, I’ve edited the article and removed the etymology comments and the Hutton quote.

      1. I know I’m a bit late here, but still… In the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names (published 1991) by AD Mills (Emeritus Reader in English at Uniersity of London, member of the Council of the English Place-Name Society and the Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland), every place-name beginning with East, the author claims to literally mean ‘east’ or ‘more easterly’, with the exception of Good & High Easter in Essex: ‘(Place at) the sheep-fold’ with distinguishing affixes from possession in Anglo-Saxon times by a woman called Godgyth or Godgifu, and from OE heah ‘high’; Eastington, Gloucestershire, near Stonehouse: ‘Farmstead of a man called Eadstan’, OE personal name; Eastling, Kent: ‘(Settlement of) the family or followers of a man called Esla’, OE personal name; Eastoft, Humberside: ‘Homestead or curtilage where ash-trees grow’, OScand – eski = place growing with ash-trees + toft = site of a house, building, curtilage, homestead. No mention of any Eostre, goddess or no.

  34. When I was younger, I heard the rolling of easter eggs symbolised the boulder rolling away from Jesus’s tomb is there any eidence of this or is it just made up?

  35. The fact that the standard Greek word for feast or festival used in the NT and LXX is eortē with pascha being a specific type may also have some etymological bearing especially with eortadzo as a verb coming to mean to celebrate the Passover and being used as a figure for the Christian life as early as 1 Corinthians 5.8. Haven’t got Lampe’s Patristic Greek Lexicon with me but wouldn’t be surprised if there was some slippage especially in more Jewish influenced strands of Christianìty between Christian usage of pascha and eotre to describe the main Christian festival long before any N European connection.

  36. Dear Tim,
    Thank you for this. But there is something I don’t understand. How can you say “So Easter has nothing at all to do with Ishtar and Eostre may not even have existed.” after saying
    “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.”

    I mean did you simply forget to edit the rest of the article after being presented with Shaw’s evidence?

    1. “I mean did you simply forget to edit the rest of the article after being presented with Shaw’s evidence?”

      Yes. I’ll do so. Thanks for pointing this out.

  37. Wow….I am really surprised that you qualify as an expert.There is proof that Christianity has pagan roots all over the world… Not sure why you are denying it. Please do all a favor and stop it.

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    1. “Wow….I am really surprised that you qualify as an expert.”

      I have never claimed to be an “expert”. I just draw on the work of those who are.

      “There is proof that Christianity has pagan roots all over the world”

      “All over the world”? What? And while some Christian festivals and ideas have pagan roots, others don’t. Christianity itself ultimately doesn’t, given that it has Jewish roots.

      “Not sure why you are denying it. “

      I’m “denying” the roots of the very specific claims I critique in detail in my article. And that is not actually “denying” them, it’s debunking them. There’s a difference.

      “Please do all a favor and stop it.”

      Er, no. I think I’ll keep countering stupid, historically-illiterate crap with detailed, scholarly and carefully-argued debunking thanks. How about you educate yourself a little better.

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  38. Actually, for Atheists (at least this one) it doesn’t matter what the origins of a particular holiday are.
    It still does not make god any more believable.

    The explanation is no more than yet another somewhat longwinded way, to bolster a patriarchal religion.

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    1. “Actually, for Atheists (at least this one) it doesn’t matter what the origins of a particular holiday are.
      It still does not make god any more believable.”

      Go tell someone who believes in any “God”. I don’t. The fact remains that if atheists talk about fact checking and accuracy they need to stop peddling bullshit New Age memes and nonsense that have their origin in kooky nineteenth century evangelical Protestant garbage.

      “The explanation is no more than yet another somewhat longwinded way, to bolster a patriarchal religion.”

      And that is just inarticulate gibberish. I’m not bolstering any religion at all, you idiot. Get a grip.

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        1. Yes, who cares about silly things like “detail”? Only people who bother with things like reason, accuracy and logic care about that stuff.

          This blog is devoted to critiques of those atheists who bray loudly about being rational and paying attention only to the objective analysis of evidence and yet who babble pseudo historical nonsense. It takes “detail” to show why they are idiots. If you don’t like “detail” because it gets in the way of things you believe because of prejudice, bigotry and stupid emotional distortion, you are an idiot as well. As an atheist and a rationalist, I’m a little tired of idiots like you.

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  39. I would have thought the chances of starving peasants giving up their one chance of regular free protein (eggs) for 40 days would be somewhere between slim and none. There would be precious little else to eat. As for Easter what I want to know is WHY it IS called Easter?

    1. “I would have thought the chances of starving peasants giving up their one chance of regular free protein (eggs) for 40 days would be somewhere between slim and none.”

      Firstly, most medieval peasants weren’t “starving”. Apart from periodic famines, agricultural production in the period increased steadily. And in periods were there was famine, Lenten fasting was relived (or simply ignored). Secondly, all the evidence indicates that this kind of Lent fast was widely practised. If it was not practised by some, the ones who did practice it were also the ones who celbrated Easter and so ate and decorated eggs.

      “As for Easter what I want to know is WHY it IS called Easter?”

      In England? Because they were conservative about these things and called the new Christian festival by the old pagan name. That’s all. If the western world had come to be dominated by the French, as it almost was several times, we’d all call it “Pâques” and none of this internet crap about “Easter” would exist. The fact remains that claims it had something to do with Ishtar or was “originally pagan” are total crap and rationalists need to stop repeating them.

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      1. It’s possible that the English called the festival ‘Easter’ because both Pascha and the Anglo-Saxon festival of Eostur were determined by a full moon. Pascha roughly follows the rule of Passover, its obvious and direct antecedent; it’s not actually on the full moon after the Spring Equinox like Passover is, but the first Sunday after that, in keeping with the tradition that Christ was crucified on a Sunday.

        As for the festival of Eostur – Bede’s ‘old observance’ – we can glean a little insight by working backwards from what he tells us about the month of Winterfilleth:

        ‘The old English people split the year into two seasons, summer and winter, placing six months — during which the days are longer than the nights — in summer, and the other six in winter. They called the month when the winter season began Wintirfylliþ, a word composed of “winter” and “full moon”, because winter began on the first full moon of that month.’

        If winter began with a full moon and there were two seasons, then it makes sense to suppose that summer began with a full moon, too. If we go back six months from Winterfilleth, we get to Eosturmonath. So the beginning of summer, and the festival of Eostur, would have been the full moon of Eosturmonath.

        The upshot of all this is that it’s much easier to see how the cultural inertia of the Eostur festival would have transferred itself to the incoming Pascha festival if they were both keyed to the full moon at the same time of the year. (There’s a small but important difference in that Pascha was timed from the Equinox, whereas Eostur was timed from the Solstice (Modraniht), meaning that they wouldn’t always have aligned. When they didn’t, Pascha would have come first.)

        1. (Sorry, that should be ‘rose from the dead on a Sunday.’ Out of coffee error.)

          I should also point out that if Eostur was indeed a festival at the full moon of Eosturmonath, it explains why there were multiple ‘feasts’ as Bede has it, since the full moon lasts for multiple days.

    2. Those who didn’t own hens probably had no eggs, my guess is Easter was the only time many had eggs.
      It still doesn’t mean there is zero pagan connection to eggs, just that no evidence has been found.

      1. “It still doesn’t mean there is zero pagan connection to eggs, just that no evidence has been found.”

        Given that there is no evidence of any pagan origin and plenty of evidence that the tradition was related to Christian fasting, Occam’s Razor says the latter is most likely.

  40. Nice work here. I was making a complimentary statement to a blogging friend who is a Christian this week and I used the word “Easter.”
    What followed was quite incredible. I was told not to use the word and the “dialog” which followed was eventually deleted leaving only my scolding up. I appreciate that you have checked your sources. How I got this far in life and had no one tell me I was being “disobedient to God” is now quite a mystery to me.
    Again, thanks for the informative article.

  41. I believe Easter eggs and Easter bunnies have nothing to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and are a distraction from the real meaning of this time.

    1. “This time” may have that “real meaning” for you. For others it’s simply a secular holiday and eggs etc are part of it. Just as the old pagan Eostre festival lost all its former meanings and became Christian, much the same is happening again as Christianity declines in the western world.

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  42. Thank you for this excellent analysis. I cannot speak for every Christian but I welcome this level of reason and truthfulness. In honesty, I prefer “Resurrection Day” over “Easter” because it comes closer to what I celebrate, but but do not consider the second controversial or heretical. This history is not just for atheists. I’ll definitely visit your site again.

  43. Quick question:

    Who exactly is “Zalmoxis” and why do people compare him to Jesus as evidence that Christians copied his character?

    1. They are referring to a Thracian deity known largely from a passage in Herodotus:

      “I am told by the Greeks who dwell on the shores of the Hellespont and the Pontus, that this Zalmoxis was in reality a man, that he lived at Samos, and while there was the slave of Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus. After obtaining his freedom he grew rich, and leaving Samos, returned to his own country. The Thracians at that time lived in a wretched way, and were a poor ignorant race; Zalmoxis, therefore, who by his commerce with the Greeks, and especially with one who was by no means their most contemptible philosopher, Pythagoras to wit, was acquainted with the Ionic mode of life and with manners more refined than those current among his countrymen, had a chamber built, in which from time to time he received and feasted all the principal Thracians, using the occasion to teach them that neither he, nor they, his boon companions, nor any of their posterity would ever perish, but that they would all go to a place where they would live for aye in the enjoyment of every conceivable good. While he was acting in this way, and holding this kind of discourse, he was constructing an apartment underground, into which, when it was completed, he withdrew, vanishing suddenly from the eyes of the Thracians, who greatly regretted his loss, and mourned over him as one dead. He meanwhile abode in his secret chamber three full years, after which he came forth from his concealment, and showed himself once more to his countrymen, who were thus brought to believe in the truth of what he had taught them. Such is the account of the Greeks.” (Persian Wars IV.95)

      This seems to indicate some kind of tradition among the Dacian and other Thracian tribes of a god who vanishes and then appears again three years later. This is interpreted as a “dying and rising god” archetype, though whether the god actually dies is unclear from Herodotus’ description, which is more interested in giving a naturalistic description of how the god’s sect arose. The reference to him being underground for “three years” is supposed to be some kind of parallel to Jesus being in the tomb for three days, which only works if you concentrate on the word “three” and ignore the word “years”. It’s a classic example of the kind of weak “parallels” which were beloved by late nineteenth century folklorists who tried to cram everything religious into a paradigm of “universal archetypes” and which is still used by New Agers and the more clueless end of Mythicism to this day, despite most actual historians of religion rejecting this awkward methodology decades ago.

    1. Yes, I’ve seen those. As usual, Carrier overstates the case. Yes, there are a few genuine “virgin birth” and “dying and rising gods” stories and yes, they may have had some influence on the Jesus stories. But that is not good evidence for him being mythical since we have similar stories told about people who existed.

      1. Isaiah 7 (in the septuagint at least), and Isaiah 53 contain virgin births and resurrections. I personally don’t think Jews would have had to pilfer from pagan texts to get these ideas, even if Pagans did hold these ideas too.

    1. That was his argument that Jesus was originally “historicised” as existing during the reign of Alexander Janneus, circa 100 BC, and only later came to be depicted living in the early first century AD. This is an idea with a long and highly kooky pedigree and is, of course, complete nonsense. I’ll cover it in a future article in my Jesus Mythicism series.

  44. This is very interesting information. I just wish you could keep your tone a little less stridently Anti-anti-christian.

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    1. I’m not anti-anti-Christians. I’m only anti the ones who mangle history. I don’t care about the others at all. I’ll use any tone I like.

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  45. Thank you for this informative article; I will definitely reference it next Easter-time when my timeline gets molested with inane memes.
    Just a small addition: you mention “Ostara” in one of your replies. The reference point for most 19th-century writers would probably have been Jacob Grimm’s “Deutsche Mythologie” (1835), chapter 13, where he mentions her in the context of old-German designations for the months of the year. After referencing Bede, he writes: “Dieses [!] Ostarâ muß gleich dem ags. Eástre ein höheres wesen des heidenthums bezeichnet haben, dessen dienst so feste wurzel geschlagen hatte, daß die bekehrer den namen duldeten und auf eins der höchsten christlichen jahrsfeste anwandten […] das ahd. adv. ôstar bedeutet die richtung gegen morgen (gramm. 3, 205), ebenso das altn. austr, vermutlich ags. eástor, goth. áustr? die lat. sprache hat das ganz identische auster auf die mittagsseite (den süd) verschoben. In der edda führt ein männliches wesen, ein lichtgeist den namen Austri, ebenso könnte ein weibliches Austra heißen; der hochd. und sächs. stamm scheint umgekehrt nur eine Ostara, Eástre, keinen Ostaro, Eástra gebildet zu haben [Fußnote]. […] Ostara, Eástre mag also gottheit des strahlenden morgens, des aufsteigenden lichts gewesen sein, eine freudige, heilbringende erscheinung [Fußnote], deren begrif für das auferstehungsfest des christlichen gottes verwandt werden konnte.”
    Of course this careful philological argument then took on a life of its own, and 19th-century poets, nationalists and mysticists fell headlong for the idea of a goddess whose celebration was more “authentic” and more “German” than the Christian Easter holiday.

  46. Careful application of Occam’s Razor to etymology makes me believe that there is a common root to both the name Easter and its German variant Ostern and Bede’s Eostremonath: Both are based on “East” (germanic = aust, old englisch = ēast, old german = ōstan) and the derived word for dawn (germanic = austron, old german = ōstan, old englisch = Eastre (and in the Northumbrian dialect actually Eostre). Eostremonath is simply the month during which the sun rises exactly in the east – which happens at the spring equinox, an important date for astronomical calender calculations and the event defining the date of Easter. Bede’s goddess Eostre looks to me like the same kind of bad pseudo-etymology that in later times gave rise to the Ishtar-interpretation in the first place.

    As for Easter eggs: Even Wikipedia nowadays admits that the custom can be traced back to Mesopotamia in the 3rd century or even earlier. Which, and the following is pure speculation on my part, is around the same time the Jews added a burned hard-boiled egg (Beitzah) to the ritual passover meal, in commemoration of the destruction of the temple. Jesus famously equated his rising with the rebuilding of the temple, so the symbol would have an entirely different meaning for the early Christians, which at that time were still heavily entangled with Jewishdom.

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    1. “Bede’s goddess Eostre looks to me like the same kind of bad pseudo-etymology that in later times gave rise to the Ishtar-interpretation in the first place.”

      Maybe. Or a goddess associated with the spring equinox could also have been associated with the dawn (as per Jacob Grimm’s conjectural etymologies) and so had a name based on the Germanic root for “the east”. We just can’t say. As I note, the other evidence in personal names and place names indicate that Bede didn’t make her up.

      “Even Wikipedia nowadays admits that the custom can be traced back to Mesopotamia in the 3rd century or even earlier.”

      Except all of the “sources” for that in the citations the Wiki article gives are modern and all seem to be relying on each other and ultimately on Ellis (1877) who cites Hyde (1694). That’s not very impressive. And they trace it back to Christians in Mesopotamia.

      “and the following is pure speculation”

      Yes, it is. We have no idea when or where the Beitza was added to the seder, but eating eggs at Passover actually seems to have been a medieval Jewish practice influenced by Christianity, not the other way around.

  47. Eostremonath is simply the month during which the sun rises exactly in the east – which happens at the spring equinox, an important date for astronomical calender calculations and the event defining the date of Easter.

    It’s one of the two months, the other during the autumnal equinox. It could be nothing more than a coincidence that Eostremonath in the month after (not containing) the spring equinox.

    1. And in the blog post where he says these things he links to two crappy web articles, the first of which actually debunks pretty much all the “pagan holiday stuff” claim and the second is full of total nonsense like “[Eostra’s] symbol was the rabbit because of the animal’s high reproduction rate”. The single reference to Eostre in Bede makes no mention of bunnies or any other symbols and represents … everything we know about Eostre. Isn’t this guy supposed to be a mighty historical historian person with an “Ivy League Degree +3 Against Error”?

      He’s getting into his usual sneering frenzy over an article by Tom Holland. Tom is a great guy and a fan of this blog. I can’t say I agree with a lot in that article, but I know him well enough to know it was written largely to annoy people like Carrier. I also know that he found Carrier’s rage-blog hilarious, especially his “pagan Easter” blunders. Tom’s comment to me yesterday: “You hardly need me to point it out, but he writes like an evangelical”. Indeed.

  48. People are now saying hot cross buns are of pure pagan origin, others saying a 12th/13th Century Monk.
    I am interested in what the true history is if anybody knows.

    1. People “say” all kinds of things, largely because they heard some other people “say” these things and decided they liked them. Unfortunately people tend not to bother to check these things that they like to hear others “say”.
      Hot Cross Buns are Christian in origin and can be traced back no further than the eighteenth century. Here is Dr Peter Gainsford on the subject.

  49. It’s fascinating to witness the internet indoctrination folly. Ishtar is not pronounced Easter, and she had nothing to do with Easter. Rabbits and eggs were never a symbol of hers.

    The closest thing to a pagan goddess that would have similar associations would be Ostre and she was Germanic in nature…and was not widely worshiped. So UT OH…more misinformation being parroted JUST LIKE what takes place in organized religion.

    It’s literally comical to those of us who have studied paganism. Christianity doesn’t have a hope because it has been reduced to idiocy and atheists are right there along with them to tout pure exaggerated lies.

    https://benstanhope.blogspot.com/2014/05/ishtar-easter-stop-getting-your-history.html?fbclid=IwAR3Bf1t7jtybOnO2kmeINvlie5q85c0vROYFsAgZQ8ZX5lyj2Az6mMWUb1U

    1. I’m not sure why you felt the need to state all this on a blog article that … already states all this and in much more detail.

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  50. The French have a lovely Easter tradition of church bells flying to Rome and then, on their return, dropping the eggs in the garden (for the children); no bunnies involved.

    1. According to internet experts on Twitter, this has to mean flying bells have a pagan origin. There can be no other explanation, as no Christians ever developed any folk traditions ever, apparently.

      1. “…no Christians ever developed any folk traditions ever, apparently.”

        But everyone knows any “man-made” tradition is BAD!!! /s

        As a Christian, I appreciate the research you’ve put into this.

  51. I think that eggs and hares as “fertility symbols” are universal among all people. A person in the stone ages probably looked at an egg and thought of rebirth so it’s not hard to see why they’d keep those associations throughout history, even though that’s not why they’re associated with easter. Spring would be reason to celebrate even without a specific religion. So people would probably associate universal spring symbols in their area with any religious holiday. Maybe. I always thought they called it easter because it came from the east :X

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    1. It must be fun to decide to “think” things based on hunches and no evidence. Unfortunately that’s a skill I have never developed. So, I’m stuck with arguing things from actual evidence rather than just “thinking” whatever appeals to me. Such a drag.

  52. I am born in Scandinavia and have lived here all my life, but I have *never* heard of any spring goddess called “Ostra”.

    1. Ummm, no. English doesn’t work like that. For example the name “Woodhouse” may seem to have a pretty straightforward meaning, with some combination of the words “wood” and “house”. Except the origin of the name may have nothing to do with “houses” and versions of it are likely to derive from the Middle English “Wodewose” and the Old English “wudu-wāsa”, which means “wild man of the woods”. Modern forms can take the same shape as certain modern words but that doesn’t mean those are the origins of the word.

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  53. This guy seems to be more interested in loudly debunking, than accurately debunking.
    Example: “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:”
    Uh, no. To demonstrate the etymology of a word, look at historical sources, summarized in any good on-line dictionary. Waving your hand at a map and listing countries with different words for something hardly proves or disproves the etymology of the term in English. (Merriam Webster says: “History and Etymology for Easter
    Middle English estre, from Old English ēastre; akin to Old High German ōstarun (plural) Easter, Old English ēast east.” That should have been his argument that the word didn’t stem from Ishtar.)
    > 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.
    Something else to ask is why the heck didn’t the original followers of this guy keep track of his birthday, deathday, and ascension day!!?? It doesn’t make sense that this information was utterly lost within a couple hundred years. Do you remember the date of 911? Yet these people totally lost track of when a guy literally came back from the dead and flew up into the sky? Sorry, no, not believable. While I believe Jesus was a historical figure, and well-meaning, either he was somewhat accurately reported as basically a whack-job, or possibly his head was on straight and instead it’s the witnesses that are whack-jobs. And the fact they did such a poor job tracing these dates has me thinking probably the witnesses were bad.
    > 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.
    Your debunker here seems to assume paganism, or spring rituals, didn’t exist before Eostre. That’s idiotic. We’ve got observatories going back to Stonehenge or earlier, all over the world, detecting the spring solstice. The date clearly had significance, and the fact it was marked in so many varied climates tells us it wasn’t just to determine a date to plant stuff. (The temperature you can feel tells you that, and perhaps more accurately since it auto-adjusts for early and late springs.) By process of elimination, Religion seems to be the most obvious of the remaining possibilities.

    1. “Uh, no. To demonstrate the etymology of a word, look at historical sources”

      Ummm, I do. The English word comes (indirectly) from Eostre. The European words for Easter are given to show that English and German are the exceptions, with the other European forms of the term deriving from the Greek for Passover. Because the feast was based on Passover, via the gospel stories, centuries before any contact with the Germanic term “Eostremonath”. So what exactly is your problem here?

      “That should have been his argument that the word didn’t stem from Ishtar.”

      Is there any chance anyone reading my article would not have got that from what I said?

      Something else to ask is why the heck didn’t the original followers of this guy keep track of his birthday, deathday, and ascension day!!?? It doesn’t make sense that this information was utterly lost within a couple hundred years. Do you remember the date of 911? Yet these people totally lost track of when a guy literally came back from the dead and flew up into the sky? Sorry, no, not believable. While I believe Jesus was a historical figure, and well-meaning, either he was somewhat accurately reported as basically a whack-job, or possibly his head was on straight and instead it’s the witnesses that are whack-jobs. And the fact they did such a poor job tracing these dates has me thinking probably the witnesses were bad.

      Okay. What has any of that got to do with my article?

      “Your debunker here seems to assume paganism, or spring rituals, didn’t exist before Eostre. That’s idiotic. We’ve got observatories going back to Stonehenge or earlier, all over the world, detecting the spring solstice. The date clearly had significance, and the fact it was marked in so many varied climates tells us it wasn’t just to determine a date to plant stuff. (The temperature you can feel tells you that, and perhaps more accurately since it auto-adjusts for early and late springs.) By process of elimination, Religion seems to be the most obvious of the remaining possibilities.”

      Another confused ramble. How does any of that relate to what I said? Perhaps there were other spring rituals. The point remains that those of Eostre had nothing to do with the date of Easter. Neither did any others, given we know that the date of Easter was derived from (i) the references to Passover in the gospels and (ii) the references to Jesus rising on a Sunday in the gospels. So the date of Easter is based on … the gospels. Nothing else.

      If you’re going to come back here and rant again, try to make some actual sense.

  54. I do not have time to read all these comments, so pardon if I am redundant, here, but…

    I have noticed an uncanny similarity with all the words, to the female hormone cycle, called “estrus”. As a person who researches word meanings for fun, I cannot believe this is mere coincidence.

    Just dropping this here.

    1. It is coincidence – the word “oestrus” has no connection to “Easter”, “Eostre” or any other word mentioned here. It comes from Latin via Greek and is related to a series of Indo-Eupean words relating to “being driven mad by pain”. No connection at all. See https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/oestrus

  55. “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).” What did you mean by this? I thought Passover was a Jewish festival, not a prehistoric festival.

    1. The origins of Passover are obscure, especially given that the events of Exodus don’t actually seem to be historical. So there is a possibility that Passover began as a spring festival in Canaan and took on elements of the Exodus story later.

  56. “…..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…”

    you said it.

    VERNAL EQUINOX PAGAN CELEBRATIONS. therefor Easter is pagan.

    you played yourself

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