Happy Easter Deny Ignorance

[chr0naut]

Of course

But you must point out the origin of Easter as the pagan Ostera, a celebration of the equinox and spring.

You must be aware that egg decoration is symbolic of new life and fertility, with the feast and imagery dating back centuries. Usually fruits and lamb. Like Christmas, today's Easter is mostly a Germanic pagan-Christian hybrid of the two competing spring holidays.

The Missing 411 is funny though. Please let me know when people find Jesus, because i don't think anyone knows where he is anymore. Check Valhalla and Zoroaster's Paradise too.

Easter has nothing to do with observance of the equinox. Easter's timing was originally based on the Jewish calendar 'feast of Passover' (a multi-day event), which has been observed for at least 3,000 years in the Levant. Because the Jewish calendar is lunar, Passover coincides with the equinox.

Christians have adopted parts of the Jewish celebration as the time period of the Crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was originally coincident with the days of the Hebrew feast, and it was thematically linked, too. However, most Christians over the centuries have used calendars that are solar or lunisolar, and so the dates have diverged.

The Paschal (Passover) event of Jesus' death and resurrection has been celebrated across the world for about 2,000 years, in cultures that know nothing of an Anglo-Saxon language, or goddess. The origins of Easter were in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth about AD33.

The single historical mention of a goddess called Ēostre was by Bede, in the 8th Century CE and does not equate the equinox, nor rabbits, nor eggs to her. It has been argued that the goddess was actually an invention of Bede, definitely, many of the details are later speculative additions and are historically unevidenced. It is my belief that there may have been a Saxon goddess by that name, but I will not speculate further.

Ēostre - Wikipedia

The month name Eastermonað in West Saxon language is cognate with 'the East and the dawn' and wasn't necessarily anything to do with observance of a goddess and the use of a pre-existing month name does not imply that Christians were practicing pagan rites at all. We do something similar when we talk of Wednesday and Thursday without even the slightest thought about the Marvel comic characters.

Here is a paper by an archaeologist with expertise in Anglo-Saxon linguistics:

From Easter to Ostara: the Reinvention of a Pagan Goddess?

It could simply be that the attribution of Easter to Ēostre/Ostara is just a Dan Brownesque construction based upon a vastly stretched similarity of words.

The use of eggs in celebration of Pesach originated in the Northern Middle East. Traditionally, Christians fasted for Lent and hard-boiled eggs would keep safely for a few days, and so were available as food when the fast was broken at Pesach. The eggs came to be ceremonially blessed and decorated as the tradition developed.

The Easter Bunny was a specifically Lutheran tradition. An Easter Hare would bring decorated eggs and sweets to children that had been 'good' over the Lenten fast.

Easter Bunny - Wikipedia

- They still haven't located the body, after millennia of trying...