ORIGINS OF
THE NAME "EASTER":
The name
"Easter" originated with the names of an ancient Goddess and God. The
Venerable Bede, (672-735 CE), a Christian scholar, first asserted in his book
De Ratione Temporum that Easter was named after Eostre (a.k.a. Eastre). She was
the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people in Northern Europe.
Similarly,
the "Teutonic dawn goddess of fertility [was] known variously as Ostare,
Ostara, Ostern, Eostra, Eostre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron and
Ausos." Their names were derived
from the ancient word for spring: "Eastre." Eostre's sacred animal
was a rabbit, and a symbol of the rebirth of life in the springtime was the
egg.
Similar
Goddesses were known by other names in ancient cultures around the
Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime. Some were:
- Aphrodite,
named Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus) after the two places
which claimed her birth.
- Astarte
from ancient Greece
- Inanna from
ancient Sumer
- Demeter
from Mycenae
- Hathor
from ancient Egypt
- Ashtoreth
from ancient Israel
-Ishtar from Assyria
- Kali,
from India
- Eostre or
Ostara a Norse Goddess of fertility.
An
alternative explanation has been suggested. The name given by the Frankish
church to Jesus' resurrection festival included the Latin word "alba"
which means "white." (This was a reference to the white robes that
were worn during the festival.) "Alba" also has a second meaning:
"sunrise." When the name of the festival was translated into German,
the "sunrise" meaning was selected in error. This became
"ostern" in German. Ostern has been proposed as the origin of the
word "Easter".
There are
two popular beliefs about the origin of the English word "Sunday."
- It is
derived from the name of the Scandinavian sun Goddess Sunna (a.k.a. Sunne, Frau
Sonne).
- It is
derived from "Sol," the Roman God of the Sun." Their phrase
"Dies Solis" means "day of the Sun." The Christian saint
Jerome (d. 420 CE) commented:
"If it
is called the day of the sun by the pagans, we willingly accept this name, for
on this day the Light of the world arose, on this day the Sun of Justice shone
forth."
PAGAN
ORIGINS OF EASTER:
Many,
perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal
day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. Cybele, the
Phrygian fertility goddess, had a consort, Attis, who was believed to have been
born via a virgin birth. Attis was believed to have died and been resurrected
each year during the period MAR-22 to MAR-25.
Gerald L.
Berry, author of "Religions of the World," wrote:
"About
200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in
Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill ...Associated
with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris,
Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving
vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival
began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a
day of rejoicing over the resurrection."
Wherever
Christian worship of Jesus and Pagan worship of Attis were active in the same
geographical area in ancient times, Christians:
"...
used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on the same date; and
pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was
the true prototype, and which the imitation."
Many
religious historians and liberal theologians believe that the death and
resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before
the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in
order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Others suggest that
many of the events in Jesus' life that were recorded in the gospels were lifted
from the life of Krishna, the second person of the Hindu Trinity, or were taken
from the life of Horus, an Egyptian god. Ancient Christians had an alternative
explanation; they claimed that Satan had created counterfeit deities in advance
of the coming of Christ in order to confuse humanity. 4 Modern-day Christians
generally regard the Attis and Horus legends as being a Pagan myths of little
value with no connection to Jesus. They regard Jesus' death and resurrection
account as being true, and unrelated to the earlier tradition.
The ancient
Norse year was divided into two seasons: Summer and Winter. Summer began at the
festival of Eostre (also know as Ostara), which is close to the Spring Equinox.
Winter began at the festival of Winternights, which is close to the Autumn
Equinox. Between these two festivals was the festival of Midsummer (known as
Lithasblot) at the Summer Solstice, and the festival of Jul (or Yule), at the
Winter Solstice. There are other minor festivals that are celebrated in between
these four major ones, as listed below.
A point to
make out is that many Norse festivals are known as a Blót. The word basically
means 'worship' or 'sacrifice' and it was a sacrifice to the gods and the
spirits of the land. The sacrifice often took the form of a sacramental meal or
feast.
Ēostre or
Ostara (Old English: Ēastre], Northumbrian dialect Ēastro, Mercian dialect and
West Saxon dialect (Old English) Ēostre, Old High German: Ôstara is a Germanic
goddess who, by way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian:
Ēosturmōnaþ, West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ, Old High German: Ôstarmânoth, is the
namesake of the festival of Easter in some languages. Ēostre is attested solely
by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that
during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held
feasts in Ēostre's honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time,
replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of
Jesus.
Old English
Ēostre continues into modern English as Easter and derives from Proto-Germanic Austrǭ,
itself a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European root h₂ews-, meaning 'to shine'
(modern English east also derives from this root).
The goddess
name Ēostre is therefore linguistically cognate with numerous other dawn
goddesses attested among Indo-European language-speaking peoples. These
cognates lead to the reconstruction of a Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess; the
Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture details that a Proto-Indo-European
goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the
similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various
Indo-European groups and that all of this evidence permits us to posit a
Proto-Indo-European haéusōs “goddess of dawn” who was characterized as a
"reluctant" bringer of light for which she is punished. In three of
the Indo-European stocks, Baltic, Greek and Indo-Iranian, the existence of a
Proto-Indo-European “goddess of the dawn” is given additional linguistic
support in that she is designated the “daughter of heaven”.
