THE PAGAN ORIGIN OF EASTER

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”.