"Eostre".
Eostre ("Easter") is the name of a putative goddess of the Anglo-Saxons. The Venerable Bede described her worship as something which had already died out by the time he began writing the first significant history of the Anglo-Saxons. In recent years some historians have suggested that Bede may have made her up because there are no known references to her preceding his work. Others point out that Bede is known as "the Father of English history" precisely because he has long been the source for most of what little we know about pre-Christian English history, which, of course, does not make him infallible.
What is secure in Bede's passage is that the lunar month around the month of April in the Julian calendar was called the Eostre-monath. And as the Christian tradition of Easter, which has also fallen in April, arrived in some Germanic-speaking regions, the people named the then-unnamed Christian day after the festival, that is, in English as Easter, and in German as Ostern. It is alleged that remnants of Eostre's characteristics can also be found in Easter Bunny character, based on Jacob Grimm's research into connections between the 'Ostern Hare' and the Germanic Ostara, which he believed to be another name for the same goddess. However, this is speculative, as no evidence has been found for a pre-Christian association between Eostre and a rabbit or hare.
Those who question Bede's account of a goddess suggest that "the Anglo-Saxon Estor-monath meant simply 'the month of opening' or 'the month of beginnings'." (Stations of the Sun, Professor Ronald Hutton).
The name Ostara was in fact a plural, referring (according to Grimm) to the multiple days of the festival. He proposes that it was also the name of a goddess, but no earlier texts stating this are known. Grimm suggested that the parallels between the names 'Eostre' and 'Ostara', months 'Eostremonat' and 'Ostaramonath', and holidays 'Easter' and 'Ostern' implied a common origin.
As with Bede, there is no ancient textual proof of Grimm's assertions. Unlike Bede, Grimm presents himself not as a recorder of tradition, but as one who is trying to reconstruct it through inference. Grimm speculated that "This Ostarâ, like the AS. Eástre, must in the heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries." (Deutsche Mythologie).
Similar words, which it has been suggested are variations of Eostre's name, include Ostare, Ostara, Ostern, Estre, Eostre, Eoster, Eostra, Eastre, Eostur, Eastra, Eastur, Austron, Aurora, and Ausos. There is no certain parallel to Eostre in Old Norse though Grimm speculates that a "spirit of light" named Austri from the Eddas might be related.
However, oestrogen actually derives directly from the word oestrus (rut). See Etymology in Oestrus.
The name Eostre also bears some resemblance to the name Ishtar, a Babylonian goddess. Other variants on Ishtar include Astarte and Ashtoreth. This resemblance has resulted in some Neopagans and Christians opposed to Easter believing that Easter is Ishtar's festival. (Fakelore is often constructed to support such speculative continuities.) There is, however, no evidence that Ishtar was ever worshipped in Europe, nor any strong evidence that the myths of the two goddesses were related.
Some of the most determined proponents of an Ishtar/Easter connection are not Neopagans but certain fundamentalist Christians. One very notable former advocate, Ralph Woodrow, whose Babylonian Mystery Religion includes the Easter/Ishtar hypothesis and condemns the celebration's trappings as unchristian, has reversed his former position and now does not support this pagan connection. However, there are others who still do and provide a curious example of Christians and neopagans alike supporting theories of a continuity of Goddess worship in the absence of any conclusive evidence.
Jacob Grimm noted this similarity in names and speculated on a possible connection based on this and some minor similarities in rites attributed to the two goddesses. It is also sometimes suggested that a link between the two goddesses might have been made through Greek Aphrodite / Roman Venus. In support of this theory some cite that Indo-European '(a)wes-ter' and Semitic 'istrt', roots to which the two names were closely related, both referred to the planet Venus, which of course was also associated with the Roman goddess of the same name.
A distracting apparent early reference to 'Easter' in the King James Version of the Bible translation of the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles 12:4, is simply an anachronistic mistranslation of the Greek pascha ("Passover"), in which the committee of James I of England followed such earlier translators as William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale. The Acts passage refers to the seven-day Passover festival (including the Feast of Unleavened Bread); "it is reasonably certain that the New Testament contains no reference to a yearly celebration of the resurrection of Christ."
The association of Eostre with the Spring Equinox is important in neopagan belief as part of the Wheel of the Year. Neopagan celebrations of the Equinoxes involve goddesses from diverse cultures.
The belief that Eostre had hare's ears or a hare's head may well derive from Nigel Pennick's Practical Magic in the Northern Tradition in which an image of the Saxon moon god Mona from A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence(is shown, with the accompanying text describing Mani both as a Goddess and as 'Eostre in her spring guise' [http://www.planetfusion.co.uk/~pignut/oestra.html.
Eostre is also worshipped by some neopagans, who associate her with various aspects related to the renewal of life: spring, fertility and the hare (allegedly for its rapid and prolific reproduction). Modern worshippers and writers describe Eostre as a "Goddess of dawn" based on the etymological relationship between her name and the Anglo-Saxon word for 'dawn'. Some Neo-pagans believe that she was sometimes depicted with a hare's head, though it is not possible to substantiate this belief as no known animal-headed deities appear in Germanic cult objects.
Anglo-Saxon England | Anglo-Saxon mythology | European deities | Fakelore | Germanic paganism
Ostara | Εόστρε | Eostre | Ostare | Eostre
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the "Eostre".
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