About this time of year one hears a lot of commentary about the festival of Easter, wherein it is asserted to be a Christian reframing of some older pagan festival. This is nonsense, but the belief is well-fixed in the popular mind. In the case of Easter, the claim is often made that the commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection has its roots tied to an Anglo-Saxon goddess.
The suggestion was first made by St Bede the Venerable, a Catholic priest and monk who lived at Jarrow in the North East of England and died in A.D. 735. Bede is known for his “Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” but in his text “The Reckoning of Time” Bede tells us the name “Easter” comes from an Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess named “Eostre.” He gives no source for this speculation. Very little is known about this supposed goddess, and concrete proof of any popular belief in her was not uncovered until the 1950s. But at the time of the arrival of Christianity during the late Roman Empire, English was not spoken in Britain. Various Celtic languages were in use and Latin, as it was a Roman Province. The Anglos and Saxons and their pagan gods did not even arrive in Britain until the 5th century, by which time Easter was already a well-established Christian festival known by its Latin name “Pascha.”
The term “Easter” for the Christian festival was probably actually derived from the Latin term Albis, which meant springtime and the Roman Christians used the word to refer to Holy Week.
With the spread of Christianity to the north, the Germanic peoples adopted this word from Latin and turned “albis” into “eostarum.” The old High German language is the ancestor of both modern German and English languages which would better explain how it came into English. Even now in most other European languages Easter is called by some variant of the Latin name.
This is not to assert that there are no pagan influences on Christianity, and the venerable Easter egg may be one example. Since an egg is a dead shell from which new life emerges, the egg has long been a symbol of birth and rebirth. Graves in Africa have had decorated ostrich eggs placed on them as early as 60,000 B.C. Decorated ostrich eggs have also been found in Egyptian and Sumerian graves as well as gold copies of eggs. Early Christian writers used the chicken egg as a model to explain the Holy Trinity, because an egg is one but has three interrelated sections, being the yellow, the white, and the shell. There is evidence that many early Christians abstained from meat, cheese and eggs during Lent, the 40 days before Easter, so the return of the egg at Easter was a joyful event. The earliest “Easter eggs” were often dyed red, to represent the blood of Christ, a symbol which is still popular in Eastern Europe.
In the 19th century, several German writers attempted to link the Easter bunny, or Easter hare, to the goddess Oester, making him her sidekick who gave out eggs to children as treats. There is no historical evidence for this claim. Bede does not link the hare to Oester or anyone else. There is evidence that German Lutherans in the 16th century spoke of a mythological Easter hare, who would arrive at the beginning of the Easter season to award eggs as treats to good boys and girls and refuse to give them to the naughty. This obviously mimics the traditional view of Father Christmas, or our Santa Claus and his somewhat Pelagian distribution of toys. German immigrants to the United States brought the bunny figure with them in the 19th century.
So where did the whole Easter thing come from if not an alleged Anglo-Saxon goddess?
Well, Jesus of Nazareth and his family, disciples and friends were all Jewish and lived in the land of Judea when Pontius Pilate was the governor. Jesus was executed by the Romans around A.D. 33, during the Jewish festival of Pesach or “Passover.” Christians believe that three days later Jesus arose from the dead. Suffice it to say that Easter’s origins probably have something to do with that rather than with Germanic legends.
Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest.
Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.
