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Is Easter Pagan?

Ella S.

Dispassionate Goth
Passover is Jewish. Much of Easter, from a Christian perspective, is a form of Passover modified to reflect the Passion of Christ. Ash Wednesday, fasting, communion, etc. are all Christian elements.

The name "Easter" is Germanic and had pagan connotations but English is a Germanic language and is riddled with these sorts of things. Even the name "God" and the word "Hell" come from Germanic paganism so I don't think it's as simple as etymology.

The question that I have is whether "easter eggs" and the "easter bunny" have pagan roots and whether or not the time that we celebrate Easter was influenced by Germanic paganism. I know that the Orthodox Church celebrates the similar holiday of pascha and they go by a different calendar. I do not know if these particular elements are pagan or not.
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
Early Christianity often promoted itself by co-opting the rituals, heroes, and festivals of those it came into contact with. Many Christian 'saints' were originally pagan heroes.

Christmas, for example, is clearly NOT the birthday of Jesus since, according to the story, Jesus was born during the tax season. Instead, it is a co-opted version of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a mid-winter festival.

Easter is names for Astarte, a Canaanite goddess of sexuality (essentially the same as Ashura, as mentioned in the Bible). Many of the rituals are loosely associated with Celtic druidism.
 

Ella S.

Dispassionate Goth
Early Christianity often promoted itself by co-opting the rituals, heroes, and festivals of those it came into contact with. Many Christian 'saints' were originally pagan heroes.

Christmas, for example, is clearly NOT the birthday of Jesus since, according to the story, Jesus was born during the tax season. Instead, it is a co-opted version of the Roman festival of Saturnalia, a mid-winter festival.

Easter is names for Astarte, a Canaanite goddess of sexuality (essentially the same as Ashura, as mentioned in the Bible). Many of the rituals are loosely associated with Celtic druidism.

Would you mind if I asked for a source linking Easter with Astarte?
 

Daemon Sophic

Avatar in flux
Eostre was a pagan goddess of fertility (Spring time festival regarding the return of life to the land/crops/animals/etc...). Her name was taken as Easter.
Eggs -- again, a big symbol for fertility and upcoming life is all from Eostre's celebrations.
 

Kooky

Freedom from Sanity
Éostre/Ostara may or may not have been an actual Anglosaxon/Germanic goddess, and the connection between her, the eggs, and the hare don't seem all that clear, and a lot of popular understanding of the pagan roots of Easter seems to be the result of very tenuous connections or in some cases outright fabrication.

Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think | Folklife Today

[...] Ostara herself is a shadowy figure in Germanic folklore. Her story begins with Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess who is not documented from pagan sources at all, and turns up in only one early Christian source, the writings of the English churchman Bede. Bede may have been right that there was such a goddess, or he may have been spreading the received wisdom of his era, and scholars have debated this point for years.
Jacob Grimm, the brilliant linguist and folklorist, is one of many scholars who took Bede at his word, and in his 1835 book Deutsche Mythologie, he proposed that Eostre must have been a local version of a more widespread Germanic goddess, whom he named Ostara. It’s impossible to tell if Ostara as a goddess ever existed outside Grimm’s proposal.
In 1874, in another book also titled Deutsche Mythologie, Adolf Holtzmann speculated about the already-popular German tradition of the “Easter hare” (the tradition from which our Easter bunny derives) by associating it with the goddess, thus claiming for the first time a connection between Ostara and the hare [...]
 

Brickjectivity

Turned to Stone. Now I stretch daily.
Staff member
Premium Member
Peter Cotton Tail easter eggs etc......................
I remembered a good response but could not remember what it was. Fortunately I was able to find the thread. I remember we had a thread with some sensational and surprising posts on this topic. Here is one of them:
No.

This has been debunked time and time and time again.

It is an argument that betrays ignorance of the origins of Easter (called Pascha elsewhere in the world, after the Jewish word Pesach). The so-called goddess is likely an invention too.

Easter is based on the Jewish holiday Pesach in which lambs are slaughtered (which Christianity associates with Jesus dying on the cross), and celebrates Jesus' resurrection. The egg as a symbol goes back into antiquity and has long been associated with resurrection, new life, for obvious reasons that transcend religious boundaries.

Easter even used to be calculated to coincide with the Pesach holiday until the Christians divorced themselves from Judaism.

It's not Pagan to use an universal symbol, i.e, an egg. It's a cross-cultural practice.

It's pretty obvious it's about Jesus rising from the dead and not some made up Germanic goddess that, even had she existed, would have not been remotely heard of in the Mediterranean world that birthed Christianity .

The more likely etymology of Easter is 'east' i.e, where the sun rises - thus 'dawn', and from here you see the link to the idea of rising and resurrection.
@Rival

I would not have thought of this.
 

Aštra’el

Aštara, Blade of Aštoreth
Is Easter Pagan?
No.

Easter is names for Astarte
No, it is not. Astarte is connected with the names Aštoreth, Ištar, and Inanna, but not Easter.

(essentially the same as Ashura, as mentioned in the Bible).
There is no “Ashura” in the Bible. The names “Asherah” and even “Ashtoreth” can be found, but not “Ashura”. The Christian holiday of Easter has nothing to do with Asherah or Ashtoreth.

Many of the rituals are loosely associated with Celtic druidism.
What rituals in particular are you referring to?
 
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