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Where Easter comes from: its source in the Jewish Passover, its date fixed by the moon at Nicaea, its fast (Lent) a fourth-century creation, and its English name alone drawn from the Germanic goddess Eostre...
Where Easter comes from: its source in the Jewish Passover, its date fixed by the moon at Nicaea, its fast (Lent) a fourth-century creation, and its English name alone drawn from the Germanic goddess Eostre. The eggs and the hare are folk symbols of spring folded into the Christian meaning.
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Across the ancient world the spring equinox brought festivals of renewal, fertility, and the return of life after winter. Easter sits within this long human pattern of marking spring, though the idea that it was simply borrowed whole from one pagan cult is usually overstated.
The earliest Christians tied Jesus's death and resurrection to the Jewish Passover, Pesach, at which it happened. In most of the world's languages Easter is still called some form of Pascha, from Passover, which is the festival's true root and name, not the Babylonian Ishtar of popular myth.
The Council of Nicaea sets Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, a lunar-solar reckoning that makes it a movable feast to this day. The date of the central Christian festival was fixed by astronomy, not scripture.
In the fourth century the church formalizes Lent, a forty-day season of fasting and penance before Easter, echoing Jesus's forty days in the wilderness. The forbidding of eggs and rich food during Lent is one reason eggs became a feast food at Easter's end.
The English monk Bede writes that the month of Easter was named for Eostre, a Germanic goddess of spring. English and German are almost the only languages that name the festival for her instead of for Passover, the one genuine pagan thread in the holiday's name.
Eggs, forbidden through Lent and a natural symbol of new life and of the sealed tomb from which Christ rose, become the Easter egg; decorated and gifted eggs are recorded across medieval Europe. Older spring-fertility associations with the egg fold naturally into the Christian meaning.
The first written record of the egg-laying Easter hare, the Osterhase, appears in Germany, the ancestor of the modern Easter Bunny. A folk custom with vague old associations of the hare with fertility and the moon, it became a children's tradition worldwide.
Alexander Hislop's book The Two Babylons claims Easter is secretly the worship of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar smuggled into Christianity. Scholars reject both the etymology and the theory, yet the 'Easter really means Ishtar' claim still spreads online every spring. A documented myth, flagged as debunked, not the true history of the festival.
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