Sorry Cecil I could be wrong but …
My understanding is it comes from the sacred animal of Aostre/Eostra ( the germanic spring goddess who gave her name to Easter ) who’s sacred symbols where an egg and a hare.
Over the years said hare has been corrupted to a bunny.
Thanks to Tusculan who gave me this link
Webster - Easter bunny and told me that in the Netherlands it is the Paashaas (literally, Easter Hare), not a bunny.
Hmmm…Since I notice the last question went unanswered in Cecil’s reply, I’m going to add the following comments :
No, we usually don’t have chocolate easter bunnies in Paris. More commonly chocolate poultry (in this case the link with eggs is obvious) or sometimes chocolate easter fishes.
Anyway, we’re rational people over here, and not ignorant enough to believe that bunnies lay eggs. Instead, eggs are dropped by flying bells (usually depicted with angel-like wings on the side). So we’d rather eat chocolate bells (like this one than these poor cute bunnies.
And, bunnies are cuter and more marketable as an image. Note the idea is a symbol of fertility, and thus the young of the species represents that best.
I think he said all this (though he didn’t name the goddess) in his column …
What did you think Cecil got wrong?
Well, uumm, he didn’t actually say where the bunny comes from. Though he mentioned the spring goddess he didn’t actually point out that a hare was her symbol. Thus the connection between easter and bunnies …
The problem with this is that there is only one piece of direct evidence that anyone ever believed in a goddess called Eostre (or whatever) and that is the comment by Bede in his De Temporum Ratione. All he says is that the Anglo-Saxons in England had formerly called their equivalent of April ‘Eosturmonath’ and that this had been named after a goddess called ‘Eostre’. And that’s it. No mention of what she was the goddess of or anything about hares or eggs.
The hare association with her only came much later when more modern historians suggested that she was the goddess of the spring and/or fertility and therefore assumed that she was linked to that other symbol of the spring and/or fertility, the hare. But that’s just speculation. There is no actual evidence for a connection.
Moreover, as Cecil mentions, some historians dispute Bede’s Easter=Eostre theory. They think that Bede was just bullshitting. It doesn’t help that he was probably wrong about the origins of some of the other month-names as well.
The first question to ask is whether the bunny is uniquely English, which I don’t see addressed in the column. Even if there was a goddess Eostre, and even if the word “Easter” does derive from that name, the name “Easter” occurs only in English. Every other language calls it some variation of “Passover”.
The first question to ask is whether the bunny is uniquely English, which I don’t see addressed in the column. Even if there was a goddess Eostre, and even if the word “Easter” does derive from that name, the name “Easter” occurs only in English. Every other language calls it some variation of “Passover”.
There’s a funny David Sederis story in “Me Talk Pretty Someday” about cross cultural Easter/Bunny/Bell confusion.
In German it is Ostern and Ostara or Austara have been suggested as “German” variants of Eostra, but a connection throughout the Germanic culture is not that surprising.
My three books on germanic mythology are split on the issue:
[ul]
[li]Grimm: Deutsche Mythologie (first edition 1835) “not unlikely”, overall positive[/li][li]Herrmann: Deutsche Mythologie (1898) “no reason to doubt existence”[/li][li]Golther: Germanische Mythologie (1895) “hardly credible”, explicit reference to Grimm[/li][/ul]
All three give Bede as the only source for the goddess Eostra.
My favorite explaination for this was…
ANCIENT SAXONS: Eostre was the Saxon version of the Germanic lunar goddess Ostara. She gave her name to the Christian Easter and to the female hormone estrogen. Her feast day was held on the full moon following the vernal equinox – almost the identical calculation as for the Christian Easter in the west. One delightful legend associated with Eostre was that she found an injured bird on the ground one winter. To save its life, she transformed it into a hare. But “the transformation was not a complete one. The bird took the appearance of a hare but retained the ability to lay eggs. …the hare would decorate these eggs and leave them as gifts to Eostre.”
Since the statement about “estrogen” is certainly false (and can be checked with only a trivial effort), I cannot take any of this at face value.
Here’s the column
And the Goethe Institut comes down on the side of the sceptics.
Astarte. Pretty close to Easter…
http://www.geocities.com/Baja/Canyon/3778/Mythmyst/Astarte.htm
But what connection is there with Western Germanic culture? You can’t just jump over thousands of miles and thousands of years like that on the basis of three letters.
Acts 12:4
And when he had apprehended him, he put him in a prison, and delivered him to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to bring him forth to the people.
I wasn’t trying to connect to anything German. I had understood the word was from the Bible. I’ve give you the bunnies may be German. or maybe not.
(Sigh!)
12:4 ὃν καὶ πιάσας ἔθετο εἰς φυλακήν,
12:4 on kai piasas etheto eis phulakên,
παραδοὺς τέσσαρσιν τετραδίοις στρατιωτῶν φυλάσσειν αὐτόν,
paradous tessarsin tetradiois stratiôtôn phulassein auton,
βουλόµενος µετὰ τὸ πάσχα ἀναγαγεῖν αὐτὸν τῷ λαῷ.
boulomenos meta to pascha anagagein auton tô laô.
That’s Greek to me! 
What about Ishtar, the sex/fertility/something or other goddess of the Babylonians? Or Ashtera, another one of those fun Canaanite deities? (The Canaanites were really into sacred prostitution and human sacrifices for one reason or another.)