Interestingly, from a paper by Richard Sermon, Archaeological Officer for Bath and North East Somerset:
Small world, isn’t it?
Which provides an interesting angle to view linguistic transmission, but still fails to connect the celebration of the feast of Hebrew Pesach, (that is picked up in Christianity as Greek Pascha and then passed without much change into the rest of the Western European languages), which has no connection to fertility rites that were the point of the OP’s question.
No that isn’t what I meant. Ain’t no coincidence about it. I just meant it isn’t “pegged” in that it takes its date from Passover. In does, as you say, almost the opposite in that it is calculated to NOT fall on Passover even though both are spring lunar-calendar feasts.
You are correct.
I’m the one who used the term “pegged.”
Sorry, I’m no scholar of this stuff (and it’s been fascinating reading the posts of those who are).
I should have said “related to,” or something like that. I didn’t mean “pegged” in the sense of “Passover plus 3 days” or anything like that.
Just curious if it could have gone the other way: that the names of the months had north German origins, and were brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons?
Otherwise, how does it happen that Dutch, in an area covered by Charlemagne’s empire, wouldn’t have been similarly influenced to adopt the Easter name?
There were many later influences on the Dutch language that were different from England and Germany.
In the late medieval period the region that is now the Netherlands was part of the Duchy of Burgundy. The Valois Dukes of Burgundy were French-speaking, and there was a close relationship with what is now eastern France.
Later, much of the Netherlands became part of the Spanish Empire under the Hapsburgs.
Yes, easter’s value has been maintained over the years because it’s the last festival before planting season for farmers. Farmers are religious due to superstition of wanting a successful year. That’s why the rural communities are so religious, it’s for selfish reasons, not Christian reasons. They’d warship the devil if it assured a good crop.
That’s about it. Easter is another spring fertility rite, hence bunnies and eggs. Equinox and Maypole orgies are there too. The nominal Xian Easter story of betrayal, execution, and resurrection, times nicely with seasonal promise of continued life because food.
XMas (a totally mis-timed nativity date) links with the winter solstice, when the sun stops shrinking and promises to return for another year. Easter is the spring fertility festival. Midsummer in the northern temperate zone is nothing to celebrate, but the return of dead spirits aka Hallowe’en marks harvest time. The holy calendar is agricultural; Xianity hangs onto that framework.
Mcmechanic and RioRico, I am sure that a lot of fertility rites have been attached to Easter. That, however, does not mean that Easter “is heathen” which was the question of the OP, based on a bit of linguistics.
The fact that very few languages use Eostre, Easter, or Ostren, in contrast to the dozen of languages that use words related to Pasche,
the fact that the celebration of that feast, with no references to fertility, for hundreds of years,
and the fact that the celebration, (minus any fertility references), occurs for hundreds of years prior to the adoption of the fertility goddess names (in a limited number of locations) in reference to the celebration, demonstrate very conclusively that the answer to the question of the OP is “No.”
That is not to say, (and I make no claim), that the season of the year has not resulted in the attachment of such fertility rites to themes surrounding the celebration of Easter. However, Easter differs from Christmas in several ways. At one time or another, in one location or another, Christmas has been celebrated in a number of different months of the year. Easter has always been celebrated near the Jewish Passover with a number of scriptural references to tie the feasts together. The association with the winter equinox certainly won out over every other tradition, but nothing indicates that Christmas began as a celebration of the equinox. Celebrations in May, September, January, and other months argue strongly against that. On the other hand, the association of Easter with Passover began with the celebration of Easter, itself.
Picking up fertility themes and adding them to Easter is pretty standard human activity. Jumping backward from that to claiming that fertility rites led to Easter is nothing more than (poor) folk etymology.
tomndebb, I didn’t say Easter originated as a fertility rite; but like much else of Xianity, the accretions from other belief systems are thick. And it was mighty convenient for Xians to have a spring festival to celebrate, in keeping with prehistoric traditions. (cite)
Mayan calendar carvers adjusted dates to fit crucial events. Biblical editors adjusted holy texts to tell their desired story. Adjustments are hardly noticed a couple millennia later.
Your cite is BS. Just opinions.
Easter is based on Passover, which is a pre historical feast. Christianity is based on Judaism.
The ancient Jews knew full when the Spring Equinox was but Passover is not set on it. Being set by a lunar calendar, the date of Passover is adjusted and falls on the night of the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.
“In the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s life, feast days in the new Christian church were attached to old pagan festivals,” Professor Cusack said. is a lie which is so very wrong. This idiot doesn’t even know what “feast day” is.
First of all, a “feast day” has little to do with “feasting”. A feast day is for a saint, and is "The Catholic Church assigns one date out of the year for each and every canonized saint — known as the saint’s feast day. The saints are remembered on their individual feast days with special mention, prayers, and possibly a scripture reading.
" ParTY!!!**
"What Is a Catholic Feast Day? - dummies
In other words, you have the riotous good time of prayer and lighting a candle or two.
We know when Jesus was crucified, Passover Friday, and thus he was Risen on Sunday, aka Paschal Sunday. That date wasnt picked to correspond to any pagan day, that date was well known. You can say it had something to do with Passover, sure. But Passover is not heathen or Pagan.
Some people think Christmas was picked to compete with Saturnalia. Well, they were on different dates, and by that time saturnalia was pretty forgotten. It may have something to do with Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, but in any case- again, Christmas was a day 'celebrated" by prayer and maybe lighting a candle. No parties, no feasting, no gift giving, etc. That didnt start until Charlemagne who wanted a excuse to have a holiday celebrating the day of his coronation.
To prove this cite is full of crap: “Eostre was a goddess of spring or renewal and that’s why her feast is attached to the vernal equinox,” Professor Cusack said."
We know exactly this about Eostre : “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’ and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month.” One line, by Bede. No other period mention anywhere. So, Professor Cusack is making shit up.
https://www.manygods.org.uk/articles/essays/Eostre.shtml
That’s it. Bede doesn’t describe the goddess. He doesn’t say anything about the feasts that were held for her. He certainly doesn’t mention hares or eggs.
And the bede may well have been wrong:
*The trouble is that they are wrong. The colourful myths of Eostre and her hare companion, who in some versions is a bird transformed into an egg-laying rabbit, aren’t historically pagan. They are modern fabrications, cludged together in an unresearched assumption of pagan precedence.
Only one piece of documentary evidence for Eostre exists: a passing mention in Bede’s The Reckoning of Time. Bede explains that the lunar month of Eosturmonath “was once called after a goddess… named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated.”
However, even this may only have been supposition on Bede’s part. In the same section he says the winter festival of Modranecht was so named “because (we suspect) of the ceremonies they enacted all that night,” hardly the statement of a historian with first-hand information…Eosturmonath may simply mean “the month of opening”, appropriate for a time of opening buds and arguably a better fit for the rest of the Anglo-Saxon months. They tended to be named after agricultural or meteorological events, hence “mud-month” and “blood-month”. Only one other month is, according to Bede, named after a goddess – Hrethmonath – and like Eostre, there is no other evidence of Hretha anywhere.*
Known Anglo-Saxon deities like Woden and Thor are paralleled in Norse and Germanic pre-Christian religion, but there are no such equivalents to Bede’s Eostre and Hretha, which strengthens the case for them being inventions…There are no images of Eostre, no carvings, no legends, and no association with hares, rabbits or eggs.
*Usefully, though, there was already a tendency (stemming from Victorian anthropology) to imagine repressed pagan roots dangling from anything sufficiently working class and folksy; and though academia had moved away from this, pagan revivalism had not. By asserting Christian appropriation of pagan customs as fact, modern paganism could claim both precedence and wrongful treatment…
Pagan origins were thus claimed for everything from Father Christmas to Morris dancing and the Easter bunny was retroactively recast as Eostre’s sacred hare, grafting a faked pagan provenance on to a creature first mentioned as late as 1682. *
No doubt, some folk traditions have become part of what we do to celebrate Easter- eggs, bunnies and what not. But Easter is not and was not a pagan holiday.
Exactly. Jesus was in Jerusalem expressly due to Passover and hence that’s why Easter is celebrated when it is. This attempt to link it to a pagan festival that has no bearing on the holiday seems to be a hamfisted attempt to mock Christianity using pop history.
Also the feast day point is correct. Compare how St. Patrick’s Day has traditionally been done in Ireland. It has until recently been a day you go to church (a holy day of obligation in the Catholic Church). The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in Ireland wasn’t until 1903, and the first St. Patrick’s Day Festival in Ireland wasn’t until 1996 - probably influenced by the US way of celebrating the day, by partying. The Irish Free State banned the selling of alcohol on St. Patrick’s Day from independence until 1961.
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What has this to do with Easter? Are you suggesting that the Jewish people converted their exodus story from some earlier fertility celebration and managed to exclude all the fertility references from it? Are you suggesting that there was a Jewish fertility celebration adopted by Christians who then removed the references to fertility rites and also managed to persuade the adherents of Judaism to remove fertility rites from their celebrations and scriptures, as well? (And then managed to eliminate even the names of the fertility goddesses from the celebrations everywhere except among two remote Northern European tribes?)
Sure, Christianity had adopted (or stolen) lots of pagan celebrations, “baptizing” them as Christian feasts. (St.) Valentine’s day is a well-know example (that does not actually include scriptures). Another would be Hallowe’en, although that differs in being a case of an existing Christian feast from Southern Europe being attached to a Northern Celtic feast after the Christian feast had been established–and, again, did not include scripture. However, the thread, entitled “Is Easter Heathen” addresses a specific question about a specific feast and the answer is a simple, if emphatic, NO.
(I would also suggest that pretty much any “adjusted holy text” is well known.)
The thread title is IS EASTER HEATHEN? not WAS EASTER HEATHEN? I will stipulate that Easter indeed began as a Xian event coincident with Passover. That’s WAS. How about IS? I will argue that eggs and bunnies make Easter now a pagan fertility rite. And I have spent Semana Santa (Holy Week) on Italy’s Amalfi Coast east of Naples, where Easter was rather raucous, and in monstrously crowded Antigua Guatemala, where it was pretty damn pagan. That’s more obvious in Chichicastenango, home of the largest indigenous market in the Americas. The cathedral off Chichi’s central plaza is explicitly a Mayan temple. I will argue that wherever Xianity deeply imbibes or is layered atop traditional beliefs and practices, it goes heathen. That’s Easter in many places now.
WAS Easter heathen? No. IS Easter heathen? That depends on where you look, and how deeply.
I don’t think the OP was asking if there are non-religious elements attached to Easter today, because that’s self-evident. The Easter Bunny is not part of Christian myth, nor did Jesus hide eggs or introduce chocolate. That stuff that makes up the secular celebration of Easter clearly was added on to the religious aspects.
I think the OP is asking if, as is often said about Christmas, that an existing non-Christians (aka “heathen”) holiday had the Christian meaning grafted on to it. Was it a spring festival that people were celebrating anyways that the Church decided to give a religious meaning?
By those standards, the answer is no.
That sounds like an Arcade Fire album.
You really have no idea and it probably varied from place to place. Did the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Celts, Norse, what have you have spring festivals? Pretty clearly they did. When the Christians came in to spread their religion, did they make use of those preexisting festivals. They certainly did with respect to Halloween, so it’s reasonable they did with Easter as well. They probably let the pagans practice some of their rituals because trying to stop them completely would make selling the religion that much harder. So the Christians didn’t co-op a pagan festival as they did with Halloween, and most likely Christmas, put they probably let them merge in a way.
Maybe they we heathen, maybe not, but we have no evidence they were connected with Eostra.
Eggs however are a Christian thing, as Catholics were forbidden to eat them during lent, so of course they ate them at Easter, with rejoicing. Similar with meat.
So that disproves that.
dup