Easter

The word for today is "Easter".

Easter
[ee-ster] -noun
1. an annual, moveable Christian festival held in commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, observed on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, as calculated according to tables based in Western churches on the Gregorian calendar and in Orthodox churches on the Julian calendar
2. also called Easter Sunday (or Easter Day, Resurrection Day or Resurrection Sunday), the day on which this festival is celebrated
3. the period between Good Friday and Easter Monday
4. the Easter season; the week following Easter

Easter during springtime is when the Christian faith readies itself to communally celebrate the most important date on its various calendars, and when family and friends usually give each other chocolate bunnies and eggs as gifts. But what does the word "Easter" mean exactly? In an attempt to find an answer, this word for the day post will take an in-depth look at the meaning behind the word "Easter" and its historical journey into religious significance.

What follows is an origins story of epic etymological proportions, filled with contentious conjecture, murky half-truths and mercurial myths. Setting out on a perilous pilgrimage to trace the beginnings of Easter reveals a tantalising trail of gods and goddesses, stretching from the humble bunny and woodland hare right back in human history to the ancient Babylonians, with seemingly little relevance to the biblical resurrection of Christendom, or its oldest holiday, the word has now come to mark in the English speaking world.

The English language is a veritable showcase for the melting pot of words. Reference site Dictionary.com describes the English language (more or less as we know it, give or take some Celtic and Norse influences) as a motley combination of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and Germanic dialects, which coalesced between the 9th and 13th centuries. Since those times, it has continued to import and borrow words and expressions from around the world, and meanings have mutated along the way. Some specimens in the English vocabulary have followed unusually circuitous routes to their place in the contemporary lexicon, and the word "Easter" is one such example.

The first thing to note is that while many theories have been presented on the exact origins of the word "Easter", there is no lexical investigation that provides a definitive answer. The most popular theory on why the English word "Easter" is unlike the term used for the festival in most other major languages, however, suggests the answer lies in its sharing this difference with another European language, German. In German, the word for Easter is believed to come from Teutonic folklore about a spring goddess of the dawn.

The Easter Logos: From Dawn to Deity

Summarily, the etymological case presented by reference sources is of a Germanic tribe's goddess providing her name to the most important festival in Christianity, thereby giving a Germanic root to the history of the English word "Easter", and an ancient nod to the historically precedented dealings between Christianity and paganism, too. Not everyone agrees with this version of events because, as we shall see, a lack of physical evidence leaves the debate dependant on which side you take and open to conjecture.

On this long philological odyssey, we need to take a short stopover for a quick discussion on paganism because it often gets a bad rap. Some make the claim paganism is a recent new-age ploy, invented as an alternative to organised religion when the appeal of Christianity began to decline in the 20th century. Although current codified Wiccan thought and neo-Druidic faiths are modern revisions of what are mistakenly assumed to be ancient traditions (and sometimes just plain invention when it comes to some Norse myths), this doesn't mean all pagan traditions are post-Christian revised histories, mere products of a growing insurgence against Christianity in the last four or five hundred years or so. The problem is we can't be certain on the specifics, and the waters of real paganism have been muddied by revisionist pagan traditions purporting to be the real thing.

For example, we know almost nothing about pagan religious practices in the Viking Age. It was a period of considerable religious change in Scandinavia. Part of the popular image of the Vikings is that they were all pagans, with a hatred of the Christian Church, but this view is very misleading, too. It's true that almost the entire population of Scandinavia was pagan at the beginning of the Viking Age, but the Vikings had many gods, and it was no problem for them to accept the Christian god alongside their own. Most scholars today believe that Viking attacks on Christian churches had nothing to do with religion, but more to do with the fact that monasteries were typically both wealthy and poorly defended, making them an easy target for plunder. So they weren't inventing a pantheon of gods in protest against a new religion.

The Viking gods - even if most of their modern myths appear to have been written after Christianity - hark back to a Proto-Indo-European religion, again not directly attested, but its reconstruction has been attempted based on the existence of similarities among the deities, religious practices and mythologies of the Indo-European peoples. Thor, for instance, ultimately stemming from this Proto-Indo-European religion, is a prominently mentioned god throughout the recorded history of the Germanic peoples, from the Roman occupation of regions of Germania, to the tribal expansions of the Migration Period, to his high popularity during the Viking Age, when, in the face of the process of the Christianisation of Scandinavia, revisionist Norse myths and tales became popular.

Thus, while the rites and rituals today may be modern captions, the picture formed by the etymological chain takes the origins of the pagan gods further back than Christianity. The word paganism, however, comes with many negative connotations; it might conjure up the peculiar, perhaps even the sinister, but that is because for two thousand years Christians have been writing tracts and treaties that damn these so-called pagans to hell. In reality, paganism was a religion for a great many peoples, helping them to make sense of the universe, acting as a comforter in times of need, and helping them mark the passage of time. It is a mark of its influence that it is still doing this today.

When this ancient religion came under attack a thousand years ago from Christendom, Christianity was a new crusading faith that sold itself on the premise pagan ethics brought war and theirs brought peace, in a bid to bolster its number of converts. As its influence spread north across Europe towards their holy aim, Christian practices forged a long history of assimilating pre-existing pagan cultures and regional religious rites it encountered, and this piecemeal integration of rituals and customs has conversely resulted in Christian practice helping to cement the evidence of a pre-Christian pagan existence.

Those wishing to demonstrate the origins of traditional customs and lore in pagan times often cite a letter sent by Pope Gregory I in the year AD 601 to Abbot Mellitus, the first Bishop of London in the Saxon period, who was at the time about to join Saint Augustine of Canterbury on the mission to England. Very often quoted, but rarely in full, the letter is taken to mean that the Church in England initially adopted a general policy of gradual appropriation rather than direct confrontation towards the Anglo-Saxons. On the matter of the English people, Pope Gregory had said:

The temples of the idols in that nation ought not to destroyed; but let the idols in them be destroyed; let water be consecrated and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected and relics placed there.

For if those temples are well built it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation seeing that their temples are not destroyed may remove error from their hearts, and knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.

The Church came to describe this policy (in the words of the Catholic Encyclopaedia) as an attempt "to sanctify any practices which could be utilised for a good purpose". It was nothing new for Christian churches to re-attribute seasonal pagan festivals with distant saints or events to convert people to Christianity, whilst condemning paganism at the same time. Similar suggestions have been made over Christmas being fixed to incorporate the winter solstice, or as illustrated by the historical placement of a Saint Valentine's Day to supersede an ancient fertility ritual.

By this reasoning therefore, some believe Anglo-Saxon Christians adopted the name of a goddess for the Mass of their Lord's resurrection in the same way. Opposing authorities claim, however, that the word "Easter" is not the atypical victim of a Christianity con of the times, especially when people in the pagan camp begin to cite many of the alleged pagan celebratory practices for the spring goddess festival. There seems to be little evidence regarding the conversion of the natural religion in this instance: no taking over to wipe out traditions and deities celebrated with symbols of fertility - gradual or otherwise - and replacing it with their own doctrine of a crucifixion and resurrection story.

Even if it seems apparent that the Anglo-Saxons fused the name and the service of their own accord, there is insufficient evidence to associate the Christian celebration with any pagan spring celebration itself, or to theorise as fact any pagan customs that might have been held. Some go further to make the claim that the evidence is not even substantial enough to suggest with any authority this was the act of 8th century Anglo-Saxons converts unwilling to give up their ancestral spring customs - borrowed from Germanic paganism or not.

On the other side of the spiritual spectrum, it may understandably be confusing to non-Christians why a moveable date that can vary by more than a month over the passing years was chosen by Christianity to represent the death day and subsequent resurrection of their godhead to godhood. Indeed, it is a striking lack of biblical authority - just as elusive as any strong evidence for a goddess, some would argue - that has helped to promote the idea that Easter must be a combination of several pagan festivals.

It is accurate to state that Christmas and Easter share a lack of biblical authority for their celebration by Christians, and that, arguably, it is this thinking that lies behind a number of ecclesiastical and secular historians converging on a theory that the name of Easter is rooted in pre-Christian, Germanic pagan rites of spring. Most notably, due to its seasonal nature, it has been open to comparison with ancient pre-Christian spring festivals, where for some reason it is thought the symbols of springtime and rebirth (the bunny and eggs) along with the custom of giving flowers got to stay, but the goddess was lost in obscurity.

The Christian resurrection feast, however, was celebrated for centuries before the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons named it Easter, in their own relatively small part of the world, and many Christian adherents argue that the root reasons for naming the festival after a spring goddess were neither because it was pagan in nature, nor remotely connected with its spring feast. Some even claim the evidence such a spring goddess existed at all is suspect.

Notwithstanding that the name used today in the English and German languages may have linguistic links to Germanic paganism (and possibly Eastern mysticism), Christian scholars are keen to emphasise there is no connection or apparent assimilation that could have caused the word to be adopted as the name of the Christian spring feast, apart from possibly a slight similarity in satyr symbolism: spring and the rise of the dawn as a metaphorical resurrection, or more probably, because the two old observances - which both followed great feasting after a period of penitence - happened to coincide during the shared season of spring.

It is during such a season the search begins, sometime after the year AD 500, at a stage of development in the English language termed as Old English, when the West Saxon name for a goddess of spring adopted from Germanic paganism, "Eastre" (or the regional Northumbria spelling of "Eostre") first makes an appearance. Leading authorities reference a shared etymological origin with the modern day word in German for the Christian observance of Easter, "Ostern", originally said to be the name of Germanic goddess Ostara - the Old High German equivalent of Eostre - and her pagan festival of fertility and spring, and probably initially of sunrise.

The sunrise link was first forged by 19th century scholars claiming that Eastre and Ostara were descended from a Proto-Germanic dawn goddess called Austro, derived from the word "austron" meaning dawn, or "toward the sunrise", itself a descendent of the Proto-Indo-European root aus-, meaning "to shine" (especially when of the dawn). As a result of this linguistic history, other theories devised from the word's form have suggested that, by natural progression, the modern English word "east" also derives from this root. Other related words given in reference include the Old Norse word "austr" meaning "to the east" and the Old Slavonic word "ustru" for "like summer".

The Easter Myth: From East to Feast

Sticking with sunrise worship and the direction of the dawn, other research throws up claims that say the dawn goddess Austro goes further back to an eastern ancestry, linking her to Ishtar, a female deity of fertility, love, war, and sex hailing from ancient Mesopotamia, and who, by association, would be the original incarnation of the spring goddess Eastre.

Strong evidence against this theory, however, is the veneration of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar as a love goddess and not a dawn deity or a sprite of spring - divine aspects that classic mythologies, set across different civilisations, have found to distinguish. Although in some historical mythologies a dawn divinity was given certain aspects of a love goddess - in that she was imagined as a beautiful, young woman - it is clear the aspect of a love goddess was deemed separate from that of a pretty personification of dawn in a number of major mythological traditions, including between deities Aphrodite and Eos of the ancient Greeks, and their equivalents in the Roman Parthenon, Venus and Aurora.

Consequently, Ishtar's close counterpart is cited to be the sultry Sumerian deity Inanna, arguably the forerunner to love goddesses Aphrodite and Venus, and their other earlier assimilations, such as Astarte, a great goddess of ancient Egypt and of important Mediterranean seaports. The link trying to tie Ishtar to Austro thereby is tenuous to say the least; critics say at worst it is using a play on the superficial similarity between the Anglicised version of Ishtar and Easter to create an Internet meme that has no evidential basis, or at best is a mythical mix-up having possibly arisen due to a case of mistaken identify - confusing the Proto-Germanic dawn goddess Austro as the Middle Eastern goddess of sexual love Astarte.

As the given Greek name of Ishtar, Astarte was connected with fertility, sexuality, and war, and is believed to have been accepted by the Greeks under the name of Aphrodite. The worship of Astarte by the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians moreover, Hebrew scholars now claim, is mentioned in the Old Testament. Scholars feel that the goddess Ashtoreth often mentioned in the Bible is a deliberate conflation of the name Astarte and the Hebrew word "boshet" (shame) indicating the contempt the Hebrews felt for her cult. Taking this as a starting point, others have imaginatively re-routed the claim to suggest that, with the name for this goddess of fertility spreading throughout Europe, in time, "Ostara" became the Old English word for the Anglo-Saxon goddess. During the 2nd century, early Christians attempting to convert pagan worshippers called their Christian celebration "Ostara" which later became "Easter", giving rise to the misconstrued merging of a love goddess with a spring deity.

However, 21st century scholars have made attempts to provide an etymological link between dawn goddesses and female deities representing sexual love, too. In 2010, Michael Janda made the claim that the name of Aphrodite may have preserved her redacted role as a dawn goddess. His argument follows the "shining" etymological route of her name to mean "she who shines from the [ocean's] foam" (from "aphros" meaning "foam" and "deato" meaning "to shine"). Also focusing on this "to shine" aspect in Aphrodite's name is the 1997 publication of the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, edited by J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams. It put forward as evidence of Aphrodite's dawn goddess credentials a proposed etymological connection with an early Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess known as Hausos, a continuation in name of goddesses Eos and Aurora.

Moreover, scholars have used the linguistic evidence pointing to Hausos' existence to argue for the later appearance of the Post-Germanic dawn goddess Austro, and so, by extension, to be the antecedent of Ostara and Eastre. An argument could be made, therefore, that Austro is an extended stem of the Greek and Roman dawn goddesses, sharing Hausos as an etymological root. Notwithstanding that unlike in Germanic tongues, in Latin the cognate root austr- came to mean south and not east (the Latin word "oriens" means "east" from which the term "orient" is derived), in Latin writings the name Aurora was used (by Virgil for example) for the east, suggesting a common root found in the Hausos connection.

Interestingly, if Aphrodite were proven to be etymologically connected to Hausos, too, then as an assimilation of Ishtar, Aphrodite could be the link (albeit still a very tenuous one) to provide Austro's name with a stronger eastern parentage than simply as the direction of rising sunlight her name suggests. This is not to postulate that all goddesses, or just those pertaining to the dawn, are merely from a single entity appearing across the vast centuries in different guises. But it does at least show that these goddesses may be etymologically linked, even when - like Ishtar and Austro - they are thousands of miles and many hundreds of years apart, and thereby, some would say, possibly giving some evidential basis, at least a linguistic one, to the Internet meme after all.

The importance of Hausos' existence does not stop there. The name for the spring season is said to be from this same root, and indicates the time of transition when a dawn goddess, as the goddess of spring, became involved in the mythology of the Indo-European new year. It could be that the aspect of the love goddess influenced this, for coupling a dawn goddess with attributes belonging to the spring season meant the promotion of fertility, a trait shared from Ishtar to Aphrodite. This fertility aspect was to show itself in a more pronounced way in Austro's offspring, through the manifestation of Ostara and her nubile English counterpart.

Still, whether or not the word "Easter" arrived to us from a Babylonian goddess by way of an ancient Greek assimilation and through an elusive dawn goddess from the Indo-European pantheon, or from the dawn deities Eos and Aurora and the self-same Hausos - and from her to Austro and on to Ostara, and the Saxon spellings of Eostre and Eastre - the origin and meaning of the word, and its association with the spring season is only linguistically apparent, scholars say.

What is less clear is what this has to do with the Christian version of Easter, and why a word so prima facie different in philosophy would have been adopted as its namesake in English, and in German. For while the word "Easter" - and the spring goddess the word is said to originate from - can be argued to have etymological connections to Ishtar, that is not the same thing as the Christian celebration itself having roots in any Babylonian fertility rites, a claim the Internet meme would have us believe.

To find an answer to the question of how a pagan spring goddess come to give her name to such an important religious observance in Christendom is not clear cut, because there is no strong evidence for the seemingly obvious connection with the usual suspects, ancient folklore and woodland wiccary. If pagan at birth, how did its meaning come to change? Was it due to forceful assimilation, or peaceful adoption of an old practice? The search must extend from the proposed etymological origin of the word, and the original meaning surmised from that, to focus on how the word came to be used and subsequently introduced into the shared Christian Anglo-German lexicon.

The Easter Trail: From East to West

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Philip K. Dick (from his 1978 essay 'How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later')

Tracing through the Christian practices of the season, there are a lot of words in its semantic basket to hunt through, but no apparent or discernible linguistic link as to why the word "Easter" was adopted, instead of the name already in use. The Catholic Church formally preferred another spring festival for the name of the feast, using the Latin term "Paschal" derived from the name of the Jewish festival of Passover.

This is a route that also takes the origination of the name of the Christian celebration of Easter back to ancient Egypt, but replaces the ancient Semitic civilisation of the Phoenicians with the Israelites this time. The Passover marks the story of the Israelites' exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt, and, interestingly, the name given here has linguistic links to ancient Babylonian and Greek, too, albeit through a theological route instead of a pagan one.

If you replace the goddess aspect with a god subject, to those interested in seeking out variations on a theme, it may even read like an alternative etymological timeline to the origin of its sister namesake Easter. Neither the Paschal name nor the word "Easter" used for the Christian observation has anything to do with a resurrection to godhood, but the word "paschal" does give a clue as to the origins of the religious ceremony itself.

Sources trace the original term for the Passover, the word "paschal", to be a borrowed word in Latin, via the Greek term "Pascha" used by early Christians for the Passover. There is no original Greek word for Passover. It was taken from the Hebrew word "Pesach", or "Paskha" in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, meaning Passover. Some believe the originating word for Passover is Aramaic in true origin. As a language Aramaic held a position similar to that occupied by English in the 20th century, and was adopted by the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires as their official language, and used by the Jewish people almost to the extinction of Hebrew as a spoken language.

In its Biblical Greek form the word "pascha" has only one meaning; it always signifies the Passover when mentioned in the Greek New Testament. It is never used to refer to any celebration of a holy resurrection. Similar in this to the word "Easter", it was nevertheless adopted as its name. Being a post on word origins, it is intriguing to note that the two words chosen to name the same festival have links that stretch back to Babylonia, with theories over the origins of the word "Easter" appearing to share similar historical routes with the Aramaic word "pashka". The adoption of this word may also be a possibility why the Anglo-Saxons chose a more regional sounding name for the festival, instead of a foreign sounding one originally meant for a Jewish festival, with its sustained use cemented by rifts between the Church and succeeding reformations in the country.

The two holidays Passover and Easter have close connections, however, and a religious rationale as to why it was chosen. Unlike the date of Christmas, which is fixed on the solar calendar, the date of Easter is determined according to the lunar calendar because of its association with the Jewish festival. Based on biblical scripture, it is believed that the celebration of Passover took place just before the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Since the date of Passover is moveable, the date of Easter, which was originally based on Passover, is also moveable. Jewish feasts are all moveable because their calendar is based on the moon rather than the sun, but the festival of Passover was kept to its spring season for the ritual requirement of lambs and their blood, and so by association Easter became a spring festival.

There is evidence Christians originally celebrated the resurrection of Christ with observances every Sunday, but that at some point in the first two centuries, it became customary to celebrate the resurrection specially on one day each year. Many of the religious observances of this celebration were taken from the Jewish festival of the Passover, and Easter was celebrated by some Christians on Passover. It was possibly to dissociate this practice of Easter from the Jewish feast, alongside the effort to get everyone to celebrate on the same day, that the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 formalised the date of Easter for an annual single-day Sunday observance.

Calendars have been a problem in Christianity, but it offers up more clues as to why the festival was named Paschal. The method for determining the date of Easter is complex, courting courted controversy in past centuries. Church officials at the Council of Nicaea decided Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday after the first "paschal" full moon following the spring equinox, also known as the vernal equinox. The policy was adopted, but the use of different paschal cycles has persisted into the 21st century to contribute to the disparity between the eastern and western dates of Easter.

This was further enhanced when Eastern Orthodox churches chose not to follow the Gregorian calendar, after it was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in a papal bull in February 1582. The Julian calendar is named for the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar and was introduced in 45BC, but it had fallen behind because of a miscalculation in the length of a year, which meant about an extra three days were being gained every four centuries. Fast forward to the Gregorian calendar, introduced by Pope Gregory's decree to bring dates of festivals in line with the actual seasons.

As a result of which religious Easter events today are timetabled on two different calendars, one followed by the Western churches (Catholic, Anglican and Protestant) and the other by the Eastern churches (Greek, Russian and other forms of Orthodoxy). Orthodox Christians follow the ancient Roman Julian calendar while the Western churches prefer to use the Gregorian calendar, which is the internationally accepted civil calendar in our modern times.

Christian churches in the West have their spring equinox fixed on March 21 for these purposes, which means that they can observe Easter on a Sunday anywhere between March 22 and April 25 every year. The paschal full moon spoken of is not the full Moon seen in the sky, but a notional moon being the 14th day of a lunar month. It is based on eighty-four year paschal cycles, established in the 6th century, and rarely corresponds to the astronomical full moon. The Eastern churches use the same calculation, but based on the Julian calendar (on which March 21 is April 3) and a 19-year paschal cycle.

Adopted by many European countries, England and Wales refused to go along with the contentious Gregorian calendar at first however, probably because of continuing clashes with Roman Catholicism after the English Reformation. By 1751, however, they caved in and adopted it. The news clearly did not go down well in the Gwaun Valley, which carried on ringing in the Julian New Year regardless. This fertile stubbornness (in the spirit of a spring goddess perhaps?) is not possibly surprising from a country that decided to call an observance, already centuries old, by a different name than the one used by the majority of Christendom.

For the Latin term eventually, borrowed from words originally denoting the Jewish Passover from Talmudic Hebrew, came to stand for the Easter festival in most other languages as well. Consequently, even in other languages, Easter is the festival of an exodus derived from Judaism. The Latin transliteration of the Aramaic and Hebrew words formed the basis for the loanwords in French as "Pâques", in Spanish as "Pascua" and in Italian as "Pasqua", in addition to the Russian "Pashka" and Turkish "Paskalya" to name a few.

Some Celtic and Teutonic nations use it as well, as in the Scottish "Pask" (although most call it Easter); in Dutch it is "Pasen", in Danish "Paaske" and Swedish "Pask", while even in the German provinces of the Lower Rhine the people call the feast Paisken, not Ostern. Admittedly though the Latin term "Paschal" can be used in English to refer to Easter too, the English language has been one of the notable exceptions to fuse a different name with the Christian festival.

The Easter Story: From Fast to Feast

The Christian content of Easter is relatively easy to explain; it is a single-day feast held annually on a Sunday in spring to celebrate Jesus Christ's resurrection three days after his death by crucifixion. Although pinned down to a single Sunday observance, Easter is really an entire key cycle in the Christian church year, with its whole liturgical year of worship arranged around it. Easter Sunday is preceded by a forty day period of fasting and repentance known as the season of Lent, culminating in Holy Week, and followed by a fifty day Easter Season that stretches from Easter to Pentecost.

Depending on which side of the world you live in and which Christian calendar you're looking at, preparations begin over a month in advance of the feast day itself. Its prelude is Mardi Gras, French for Fat Tuesday, which in a majority of English speaking countries is also known as Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, and is treated by followers as a last rush of food and fun the day before the fasting for Lent begins. Lent starts on Ash Wednesday in the Western churches and Clean Monday in the Eastern churches, and is a forty day period (not counting Sundays for Western churches) of reflection and penance leading up to Easter Sunday. The forty days are said to symbolise the period in the Bible Jesus spent alone in the wilderness before starting his ministry, a time in which Christians believe he survived various temptations by the Devil.

Believers call the week before Easter Sunday, Holy Week. For Western churches it is included in Lent, for Eastern churches this is an extra period of fasting after what they term as their Great Lent. The Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday (or Lazarus Saturday in Orthodoxy) and includes Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Maundy Thursday commemorates Jesus' last supper with his disciples, but date-fixing theological research indicates this was a Wednesday, and not a Thursday as traditionally thought. Meanwhile, Good Friday honours the day of Jesus' crucifixion; and Holy Saturday focuses on the transition between the crucifixion and resurrection. The following fifty day period after Easter Sunday is called Eastertide, and includes a celebration of the time Christians believe Jesus ascended to heaven, ending with Pentecost Sunday.

As the start date of Shrove Tuesday and Lent is dependent on Easter Sunday - a moveable feast based on the cycles of the moon as we have seen - the days that mark these religious events are not on the same fixed date every year, either. It does not fall on the same set date every year like Christmas, because the single-day Sunday observance is not on a fixed date on the religious calendar, meaning that the start date for the observances that precede and follow it will differ each year.

Subsequently, as there is no one calendar uniformly used by the Christian world to work out the date of Easter Sunday, this has resulted in two sets of shifting dates every year with no consensus as to when or what day it should be celebrated. This means that the Orthodox Easter sometimes falls on the same day as Easter in the West (as it did in 2010 and 2011) or occur as much as five weeks apart. Attempts at unity were made in 1990, when the Vatican approved a proposal for a fixed date like Christmas, subject to agreement by other Christian churches and governments, while in the 21st century scholars have argued for fixing Easter to the first Sunday in April.

The month of April is possibly the first - and only clue - as to why the word "Easter" came to used for an observance that, on the face of it, appears to have no linguistic connection or similarities in its cyclic practice with the claimed pagan origins of its namesake. This (some say dubious) single piece of documentary evidence is to be found in the writings of an Anglo-Saxon cleric and historian, who lived in England in the 8th century, known as the Venerable Bede. The problem with Bede when it comes to a pagan penchant for all things Christian, however, is that often there is no collaborating evidence. For instance, we only know of Pope Gregory I's letter advising the gradual assimilation of the Anglo-Saxons through Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, written in AD 731.

Similarly, in Bede's The Reckoning of Time there is a passing mention of a goddess - which some scholars argue may only have been supposition on Bede's part. Bede explains that the lunar month of Eosturmonath "was once called after a goddess... named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated." Some attest that this refers to the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the month of April, named after the spring goddess in whose honour feasts had been held, but had died out by the time of his writing and been replaced by the "Paschal month". But with no other collaborating evidence, Bede's writings can be problematic when the issue of Bede's truthfulness comes into question, but, as it stands, it is the only available evidence that points to a pagan link.

To discredit Bede, and avoid the pagan connotations, there are counter claims that Eosturmonath may simply mean "the month of opening", appropriate for a time of opening buds and arguably a better fit semantically for the rest of the Anglo-Saxon months, while others have interpreted Bede's writings to mean that the word "Eostre" was an astronomical term the Anglo-Saxons gave to the spring equinox. The official Church line lays claim to the origins of the word, too, by suggesting the Saxon name for April was a corruption of the Latin phrase "Festa Paschalia", the name of the Holy Week liturgy in the Roman rite - the vigil leading up to the "Dominica Resurrectionis" (The Resurrection of the Lord), the proper name for Easter Sunday.

The theory goes that, as for 1500 years there was one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church with its universal language as Latin, when the language entered Saxon usage it naturally became corrupted, and Bede was incorrect about the name "Eosturmonath" coming from a defunct goddess rite. Although the theory does not adequately explain how one of their own Saxon scholars could be so ignorant of this lingual transposition as to feel the need to make up a goddess myth, Easter, according to the Church's definition therefore, is simply the corruption of the Latin word for a (religious) feast "Festa" as it entered into Anglo-Saxon common parlance. Analogous to a person being saddled with a nickname simply because some child could not say their given name correctly, "Easter" is misspeak for the full Latin name given to the Holy Week. For whatever reason the first part was adopted and the second part - drawn from Judaism - was dropped.

The precedence given for this is the term "Ember" days, which is said to come from the Latin "Quatuor Tempora" (The Four Seasons of the Year) with the word "Ember" being a corruption of "Tempora". This was a quarterly period of fasting and prayer, three days a week (the Wednesday, Friday and Saturday) for four weeks in the liturgical calendar of the Western Christian churches. There were four Ember weeks, one during Lent. The origins of the observance are open to considerable debate. Some hold that the concept of the observance pre-dates the Christian era, and that since Ember days have never been observed in the Eastern Churches, any pagan origins must lie in the west, pointing to specific ancient Roman roots, if not further north to Celtic origins.

Pagan spring goddess or no, by the 13th century, the succeeding centuries had witnessed the word's transition into "Ester" in Middle English. When the Bible was translated into English, this word was was initially used for the Passover, as evidenced by one of the first appearances of the word. This was in an English language version of biblical scripture that included the gospels of the New Testament - the King James Bible. From the translations of 16th century scholar William Tyndale, it is a book that some academics defer to as the biggest influence on the English language - not only changing the way we speak, but helping to turn English into a universal language. Very literally, it was a 17th century bible that conquered the known world.

If we consider a bible to be the main source of all things Christian, then it is of some interest that the King James Bible uses the word "Easter" only once in its Authorised Version and, as sources point out, it is not talking about Easter as the religious moveable feast. In this biblical context, the word was translated by Tynedale as Easter to mean the Passover from the word "Pascha" found in Greek scripture. Research shows that in the early English versions the word "Easter" was frequently used as the translation of the Greek for the Passover. However, when the Authorized Version was formed in 1611, the word "Passover" was used for the first time in all passages in which "Pascha" occurred, except in Act 12:4, until this, too, was replaced with "Passover" in the Revised Standard Version.

Granted the usage of Easter was dismissed from the final drafts, but it must be noted that the word "Easter" was not procured from the scripture it translated. The scriptures in Greek and Latin never use the word "Easter" for Passover. Arguably it was Tynedale's translation that brought the word into the Christian conciousness, or more probably suggests that its original use by Tynedale to describe the Passover meant the word had already entered the local lexicon, and Anglo-Saxon Christian conciousness, as something distinct from the Passover, but at the same time connected to it.

In 1611, when the King James Bible first published the translation that reproduced the majesty of biblical language in the vernacular into print, the God of the time was that of the flourishing moderate and humanist Anglicanism in the early 17th century, set against what the Anglicans saw as the ritual austerity of Puritanism, the ideological austerity of Calvinism, and the elaborate hierarchies and rituals of Roman Catholic popery. The context of the times may offer up clues, but we may never really know by which substantial reasons Tynedale used the word "Easter". Was there an Anglo-Saxon movement in English due to the language controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries? A Roots English drive for linguistic purism (what we today might possibly call a push for plain English) widened to include Germanic words?

What we do know is that over time the Old English "Eastre" became the name adopted for the Christian Paschal festival, but whether it was from a heathen festival held at the vernal equinox in honour of a Teutonic goddess of the dawn, which happened to fall at about the same time, will depend on what you believe. The appearance of "Passover" and "Easter" in the scholarly beginnings of an English language bible is arguable evidence, however - regardless of whether Bede's paltry supposition of a goddess is true or not - that from the redundant ramblings of a historian monk to the consideration of the word "Easter" into the English language version of the Bible, it marked a moment when the word can be said to have fully entered the Christian English-speaking psyche.

The Easter Bunny: From Hare to Hunt

Today, in addition to Easter's religious significance, it also has a commercial side, as evidenced by the heaps of chocolate Easter eggs that appear in stores each spring. As with Christmas, over the centuries various folk customs and (some say revisionist) pagan traditions - including Easter eggs, toy bunnies and chocolate gifts - have become a standard part of this holy holiday. No spring event matters more than Easter in the United Kingdom: we spend over £5.5 billion on food and drink in the supermarkets. We buy three and a half million more eggs a day for Shrove Tuesday to make pancakes. The only time of year we fork out more is at Christmas.

In Britain, we have been buying chocolate eggs at Easter for nearly 140 years, and every year the major supermarkets devote whole aisles to chocolate and chocolate eggs. On average we spend about £450 on Easter chocolate across the whole nation annually, which works out as eight eggs for every child. Novelty Easter products like pigs, bunnies and lambs are all the rage, with sales of them soaring by nearly a quarter in the last couple of years. Alongside chocolate there is another Easter product that has been big business for supermarkets. Hot cross buns have been an Easter tradition since the late 1600s. It was initially believed that hot cross buns were eaten by the pagan Saxons, a claim cited in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Although baking Easter fare and decorating eggs are common motifs among the varying Easter customs across the Christian world, in Western societies, customs such as egg hunting and the Easter Bunny extend far from the domain of church, and are often secular in character. It is for this reason that some Christians believe the holiday's substance has started to blur by the commercial push to purchase anthropomorphic bunnies in pastel coloured ribbons, or gifting each other chocolate eggs. Sensitivity has naturally heightened over Internet memes, therefore, that spread misinformation about any proposed pagan roots, of what is an important part, of their belief.

A major misapprehension by sources, which suggest the English language captured the coinage from a Saxon goddess with Germanic ancestry, is the attempt to argue that these modern Easter customs and rituals are somehow linked traditions surrounding both festivities when there is a decided lack of evidence for it. Bede, the only written source for the goddess link to the word "Easter", stated that the festival of Easter was named after an old observance of Eastre's feasts during the month of Eosturmonath. He did not mention anything survived of these feasts except that name, and the lack of evidence is such the suggestion has been made that Bede made her up. Secular academia is still divided on this point, however, because it remains unclear what his motive for doing so might have been.

Writing more clearly for the Guardian is Adrian Bott, who claimed in a 2011 article entitled "The Modern Myth of the Easter Bunny" that the goddess Eastre and her Germanic counterpart Ostara never existed. In the world according to Bott, they are the inventions or revisionist theories of modern day paganism, specifically because no other collaborative evidence exists regarding any rituals to do with the goddess. There are no known symbols of Eastre, because, as the sole source, Bede fails to mention any. As a result, we cannot know if eggs were symbols of Eastre, nor can we say for certain that Eastre's symbol was a hare, although this is said to stem from an unsupported guess made by the folklorist Adolf Holzmann in 1874.

Holzmann, believed to be baffled by the Easter Hare tradition and finding it unintelligible, guessed that the hare was probably the sacred animal of Eastre's sister source, Ostara. Later writers misrepresented his guess as a statement of fact. This was compounded further when the hare symbol was confused for a bunny rabbit (rabbits were introduced to Britain by the ancient Romans and are not an indigenous species, so it would not have possible for them to have been sacred to any regional goddess). In his 2011 article, Bott laments that although there are no authentic images of the so-called spring goddess, "no carvings, no legends, and no association with hares, rabbits or eggs, a swift Google search turns up heaps of repeated Eostre lore. Even the usually formidable Snopes allocates Eostre her customary sacred hare, without any historical justification".

Bott's argument is that these customs, rather than proving the Christian assimilation of a pre-exiting pagan culture, are proof that the mass assimilation of paganism by Christianity is merely the invention of Victorian revisionism: theories pasted together to either boost the resurgence of paganism or in apology of this takeover "myth". The Church of Rome, however, was notorious for decimating existing beliefs or assimilating them to their cause (even if they were doing it under the guidance of saving souls), and Bott's apparent suggestion that this wasn't widespread church policy towards the end of the article adds unnecessary bias to his argument.

While it is true that the Victorian age was known for its pagan apologists - a view summed up well by Israel Zangwill, a Victorian humorist who is quoted to have said that if you scratch the Christian you find a spoiled pagan - for anyone who has studied anthropology or pre-Christian religions, the pagan origin in Christian holidays is unsurprising, even if it was to simply borrow a name or two from the local lexicon. Especially when there are other historical examples in other countries such as Greece and Italy where ancient customs were replaced by Christianity.

Possibly as a consequence of Bott's bias, it is why the article fails to adequately consider the textual evidence of the Saxon word's use in English place names, and in the names of Anglo-Saxon individuals, which at the very least suggests a nod to a regional goddess (instead of just the name of a month), if not from Northumbria then possibly Kent. Furthermore, Bott omits evidence that more than 150 votive inscriptions from the second or third century AD were discovered near Morken-Harff in Germanyin 1958. The inscriptions were set up to goddesses called the Matronae Austriahenae, loosely translated as "the eastern matrons" or "the matrons of the easterners". The name Austriahenae suggests that this was a root used in naming goddesses, strengthening the Austro link, coming from the same Germanic root and said to have sired Ostara and Eastre.

Bott not only fails to address the real linguistic evidence of antecedent goddesses such as Austro or Hausos, but how two genealogically connected peoples separated by a large span of seawater for centuries came to etymologically share spring goddesses and give her name to the same Christian festival. If not taken from a regional goddess, then how is it a Teutonic goddess also became the name for Easter in German? Bott dismisses Easter's lexical link to Ostern by suggesting that Ostara was a Victorian invention, created by modern pagans picking up the thread left dangling by Bede. However, Christian sceptics fail to offer stronger alternatives to the original whereabouts of the words "Ostern" or "Easter" - apart from suggesting the word "Easter" is about the equinox, because the feast probably became known as Easter when the moveable feast was tied down to spring.

The argument seems to ignore the issue of how it came to be that both Germans and English adopted a word for Easter with close etymological connections, if no such goddess ever existed. Moreover it should go without saying that, even if Ostara were to materialise as the 19th century invention of Germanic folklorists, the Saxons could have adopted Eastre from a surrounding Celtic belief. It would not immediately prove she was a Victorian invention, or that she was only invented in the 8th century by the imaginings of a priest, with no sufficient explanation is given as to why a Christian scholar of the time would invent a pagan presence for the name.

And while trying to pack away the unwanted meanings hidden in the word, the argument over the historical accuracy of Bede's writings is one that can be made of biblical authority - all the important festivals in Christianity are a form of revisionism. For example, while the sunrise motif linking Eastre to past Proto-Indo-European dawn goddesses may be argued as revisionist, Christian scholarly thought is not immune to revisionist thinking itself.

Christians employ revisionist methods constantly; the theory that the Roman name for the rite of Holy Week, Festa Pascalia lent itself to the word "Easter" is one such effort. There is no documentary evidence for it, and it is based on religious assumption. In the same vein, some will pick and choose when to use Bede's books as evidence, citing the cleric as proof of Christianity's velvet glove approach to conversion, while discounting him on the pagan origin of the word "Easter." What holds clarity throughout is that the historical inaccuracies (and myth-spreading) of religious authorities and the theories forged by modern thinkers on the pagan roots of Easter have both colluded to aid in the controversy surrounding the feast's celebrations.

The Easter Egg: From Feast to Feast

When looking at how this important date in the Christian calendar got its name, the goddess theory does at least offer up an etymological explanation for the apparent absence of a Latin derivative for the concurrent designation of Easter in both German and English. Additionally, with a lack of religious scripture authorising Easter giving converts free reign, it is interesting how both words show apparent linguistic similarities in their development. Even in the mother language of Catholicism, Easter is so named after a pre-Christian festival because of its chronological connections. Most Catholics, however, prefer to recognise the relationship with Passover (not surprisingly given the Biblical links) rather than the link to a pagan goddess, and argue that the English-named holiday does not correctly sum up Easter in other countries.

As it is generally only English and Germanic lands that use the term related to Easter, therefore, there are some who make the argument that to focus on the word "Easter" and its proposed pagan origins is to hold a Saxon-centric view of Christianity. But criticism of such bias overlooks an important factor: the English language went on to become a universal language for centuries, ever since English bibles began to spread the word. Disregarding the influence of the word, and the language that helped it become the world's largest religious denomination, can be argued as holding a Catholic-centric view of Christianity.

Further still, as revising history is not the sole playground of the pagan, neither is it only pagans that argue for Easter's pagan roots. Christians against practising Easter rites cite an absence of religious scripture authorising the festival as their reason for not joining in the resurrection observances. Notwithstanding the allowance scripture makes on how holy days can be commemorated, the Bible doesn't tell them to celebrate it, neither when nor how, so they see no reason to. The result of this adherence to the strict letter of scripture means there are Christian denominations that not only refuse to celebrate Easter for this purpose, but claim it to be unholy.

In denouncement of the Easter festival as sinful (and the pagan parthenon all the same devilish pageant of characters popping up like time travelling interferences) some Christians have likened celebrating Easter to practising sun-worship, while some smaller factions of the Christian faith suggest the Passover be observed instead, citing biblical authority and historical precedent for their claim. Alongside the opportunities the goddess theory gives for the festival's in-house critics to dismiss it, opposing accounts have tried to retrace the word "Easter" back to Latin and a more Christian origin, revisionist theories much the same to the Festa Pascalia.

In similar attempts to modern paganism re-adopting the Easter festival, but providing even less evidence, sources point to an ancient reference in Latin about Easter week and the white clothing donned by people who were baptised during that time, hebdomada alba meaning white week, and which, it is surmised, through a translation error later appeared as "esostarum" in Old High German to eventually become Easter in English. Another claim by the proponents against theories of pagan ties with Christianity agree with an etymology that suggests Easter is rooted in an Anglo-Saxon word from an earlier form of "ostern", but adherents conveniently connect the word's meaning "to rise" to the resurrection of Jesus rising from the dead, rather than the rising light at dawn.

Scholarly debate will continue to remain divided, but based on such slim evidence there are those who believe that there is every reason to trust what Bede says (however tenuous) about Eastre. She was a goddess whose name was attached to a month by the pagan Saxons, and when the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity, the name of the month in which Easter usually fell was transferred to the name of the festival itself. It is not unheard of; there is precedence of this happening elsewhere. An analogy that can be given is of Thursday, which was named after the Norse god Thor ("Thunor" in Old English) from the Scandinavian religion, a subset of Germanic paganism, to mean "Thor's day" in worship of the god of thunder. The pagan practices attached to worshipping such a deity on Thursday have not survived, its relevance lost in history leaving only the name itself from Norse paganism.

Likewise with Easter, because there is no clear evidence of any surviving celebrations connected with a pagan goddess merging with the Christian feast of Easter, it lends credence to the theory that it was merely the name of a month taken after a forgotten goddess. Besides, the existence of a spring goddess is not proof per se of the precedence of paganism in the Christian festival of Easter. In other words, it could be it was just the name of a month, which happened to originate from the name of a goddess and coincided with and lent its name to the Christian festival.

But due to this, the pagan goddess link separating the English and German languages from the rest remains unclear for supporters of opposing views. They have sought to dismiss the pagan link to the name, arguing that no such goddess existed. Such proponents are keen to place emphasis on the fact there is no definitive evidence pointing to any of the modern rites adopted today as having very early pagan roots, which would connect it directly with a spring goddess. Although the egg is believed by some quarters to have been a symbol of the rebirth of the earth in pre-Christian celebrations of spring, the Easter egg itself is believed by others to have been defined by early Christians as an Easter symbol of the resurrection of Jesus: the egg symbol was likened to the tomb from which Christ arose.

This symbolism is thought to have given rise to the traditional Easter egg hunt, a custom traced back by believers to the 17th century Protestant Christian Reformer and German monk Martin Luther, where it probably arose from the idea of eggs being the tomb of Christ. However, the Easter egg is attested to only as far back as 1825, following an earlier pace egg in the 1610s. The Easter rabbit appears by 1888 and becomes the Easter bunny by 1904 in children's lessons. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that these paganish customs of Easter seem to have grown popular around 1900; before that they were limited to Germans and German immigrants in America.

Once again it is the Germans who appear to have reintroduced paganism into the Christian spring rite, and having set it firmly in the American psyche, it became widespread across a 20th century world willing to soak up Americana. Similar to Halloween customs, they have grown to gain secular appeal and are celebrated by people who do not necessarily identify themselves as pagan or Christian. The term "Easter egg" has become so pervasive as to have been adopted from Easter egg hunts to mean an intentional inside joke, hidden message, or feature in a work such as a computer program, film, book, or crossword that you have to "hunt" to find.

Perhaps this is Bott's point. Modern pagans, mistakenly thinking the Christian observance had pagan roots, helped to revise Easter into one of the holidays most intertwined with pagan symbolism and ritual. Even if the pagan connections behind the word "Easter" are not, as one might suspect, clues to an assimilation of a pre-Christian observance, they have helped to incorporate the celebrations into the wider consciousness and make it into a secular holiday.

Bott's main bone of contention appears to be the mythical (or revisionist) attachment of today's modern secular-friendly rituals to a long forgotten pagan goddess (whose existence we only have Bede's word for) and who may have indirectly happened to give her name to a corresponding Christian feast, possibly a century or so after the fact. Notwithstanding the name transferred to the festival is rooted in paganism, it does not necessarily mean the rituals are (or were not at least merely reinvented at a much later date to be), or that the Christian feast itself assimilated a pre-existing pagan festival.

When compared with the name for Easter in other languages across the world, the accumulative evidence of European languages where the words for "Easter" and "Passover" are etymologically related or share the same name is much stronger. These clear linguistic indicators linking the festival of Easter to the Jewish festival of the Passover are also collaborated by biblical scripture, shared symbolism and by its position in the calendar. Turning the focus to the first full moon of the spring equinox lends clues to the naming of the Christian rites in languages outside of English and German, and why the festival is moveable.

In contrast, the pagan symbolisms of deifying the dawn and promoting fertility as related to the etymology of the word "Easter" may not at first glance give a clear hint at why this word would have been used as the name of the festival. The relationship between the words "east" and "Easter" is easier to ascertain than any obvious relationship between the word "Easter" and the festival it has named. What is apparent is that tying the moveable feast to be set in spring resulted it in being called Easter by local folk, but why the Latin term was ignored in the local vernacular is unclear. With the rest of Christendom using a term derived from the Hebrew Passover - because of the calculation of the Sunday following the first full moon after spring equinox - why did the Germans and English adopt a different word derived from the dawn?

Could it just be down to historical bad blood? The Germans and the English have had a distinctly similar turbulent history with the Roman Church, consequently breaking away and reforming Christianity; so it could be that when transforming the language of the religion into the vernacular a symbolic choice was a made. Problems arise because there is no strong evidence either way, with the only evidence of a goddess coming from an historian monk, whilst the apparent reason for the consideration of the word "Easter" for "Passover" in the definitive English language version of the Bible, indicating the word's presence in the Christian English-speaking psyche, is unknown.

Little of the original Latin rites of Easter offer up any clues as to the origins or meaning of the English word "Easter", or how it came to be adopted in place of the Latin term. Neither pagan nor Christian rites can be attributed with strong certainty to the word "Easter". While the word may host pagan links to an early spring goddess of some sort at its root, or at least to etymologically symbolise the dawn or the east, it seems that the same cannot be said for those rites shared by the religious and secular alike today.

Simply put, the answer of how we travelled from goddess bunnies with hot buns to baby bunnies and hot cross buns is that we did not - or at least there is no evidence, as it stands thus far, to suggest we did. What evidence there is suggests the timely transference of a Saxon name, which may, or may not, have once been the name of a spring goddess rooted in Germanic paganism. If anything, Easter is pagan in name only - but, then, isn't everything these days?

Published 20 April, 2014

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