All right. Since it’s Easter and this is going around again and people are getting spicy in the comments, I’m settling shit on this post once and for all. Cause I’m getting pretty damned sick of being called ignorant and antisemitic (and worse) for pointing out DOCUMENTED HISTORY AND LITURGICAL CANON like I had anything to do with its creation. I was going to make this its’ own post to avoid making this one obnoxiously long but yanno what? My jar of Fucks To Give is fucking empty.
You want the sauce? Here’s the sauce. And then I don’t want to hear another fucking word about it until next year when somebody inevitably digs this up again.
All right. First things first. The word “Easter” or “Ostern” or something like it is only found in English and German-derived languages. In Spanish, it is Pascua. In Italian and Catalan, Pasqua. In French, Pâques. In Greek, Pascha. In Portuguese, Páscoa. I could go on, but suffice it to say that nearly all Romance languages (and many of their derivatives) use some form of a word derived from the Latin Pascha, meaning of or having to do with Passover (Pesach). The two holidays are linguistically and temporally associated. This does not make them the same, but the association MATTERS, because it shows that right from the beginning Christians associated Easter with Passover and not with some random pagan solstice holiday.
As for timing, let us turn back the clock to 325 CE and the First Council of Nicaea. Up until this point, Christians had relied on the Jewish calendar to determine the date of Easter, since they associated the holiday with the same timing as Passover. Part of the council’s agenda was to designate a date for Easter which was not dependent on the Jewish calendar but still occurred around the same time. Subsequent councils eventually decided that Easter would take place on the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon, or the first full moon in April. Please note that the word “Paschal” appears in liturgical observances right up to the present day.
So that’s why the timing of Easter and Passover are connected in Church liturgy. Whether it is correct for the Church to associate Easter with Passover in this way according to Jewish religious canon and history is a separate issue. I did not make up this association out of thin air. It exists in history and in language, and if it’s inaccurate for the two to be associated in this way, y'all need to take it up with Rome.
And YES, when modern pagans ignore this in favor of saying Easter was straight-up sourced from pagan traditions and pagan traditions only, that erasure of the Jewish connection with the holiday IS FUCKING DISRESPECTFUL. THAT is where the casual antisemitism comes in, and we ought to be fucking aware of it.
When Bede wrote in the 8th century that “Eostermonath” must have been named for a Germanic goddess of spring, he was SPECULATING. We do not have sources for this supposition or evidence of the existence of a goddess called Eostre or Ostara before this, only his theory. And as we all know, given enough time, very old things are taken as gospel. So when Jacob Grimm quoted Bede in his own work, 19th-century occultists took it to be true and based their subsequent musings upon that single source.
These days, we have Wicca to thank for the presence of Ostara on the calendar. And it wasn’t even originally part of the Wheel of the Year. After deciding in 1958 that they wanted to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes as well as the quarter days, Gardner’s coven just marked the vernal equinox as the spring solstice and called it a day. Unfortunately, he was working from the now-debunked claims of Edward Williams (also known as Iolo Morganwg) who claimed that druids celebrated festivals on the solstices and equinoxes based on the belief that the druids had built Stonehenge and therefore marked these occasions as sacred. (More on this in Prof. Ronald Hutton’s article, “Modern Pagan Festivals.”)
Moving forward a few years, we come to the infamous Aidan Kelly. In 1974, he took is upon himself to create a new version of the Wheel of the Year with new “historical” names for several holidays. He took his information from Bede’s speculation as well and named the spring equinox festival Ostara. (This is also the point where we get Litha and Mabon, but I digress.) And even Aidan Kelly acknowledges, and I quote, “The Venerable Bede says that (the spring equinox] was sacred to a Saxon Goddess, Ostara or Eostre, from whom we get the name “Easter,” which, almost everywhere else, is called something like ‘Pasch,’ derived, of course, from Pesach.”
So Kelly’s new Wheel was adopted by the Wiccans and their broad influence spread it to the rest of the neopagan community and everyone just took it as gospel. It’s thanks to modern paganism’s penchant for conflating most of ancient European paganism and not doing their homework that we now get this idea of Ostara as an ancient spring celebration of the goddess Eostre, who, as you’ll recall, might not have even existed. And of course, because modern witches love to pick a fight and feed their persecution complexes, that translated directly into the idea that Easter and Ostara were the same holiday and that Christians must have “stolen” it.
And let’s address this “stolen” holiday idea. Yes, pagan peoples were converted, and their traditions were sometimes preserved and adapted to fit new ideas in order to ease the transition. This does NOT mean pagan holidays were just straight-up adopted into the Christian calendar. What even would be the point of saying Christianity was the “true religion” if they just went about like, “Hm, yes, this pagan holiday looks good, let’s just add that to the list like we consider it just as important as our own,” if they considered pagans to be ignorant heathens and their gods to be demons and devils? You can’t have it both ways, people.
If the Church had adopted pagan holidays, THERE WOULD BE RECORDS. We have records for just about every decision the Catholic Church has made with regard to the minutiae of their belief system, to say nothing of the construction of their calendar. Syncretism occurs when two or more cultures exist in the same place for a long enough period of time that their traditions begin to blend together. This has been happening FOREVER. It is not unique to Christianity or even Europe. Pagan cultures syncretized and shared and changed over time as well. The fact that Ostara as we know it today is not an ancient holiday does not make it any less valid or worthy of observance.
The Ishtar thing is a fucking meme and I’m not even going to dignify it with an argument.
In conclusion, and perhaps most goddamn importantly - You Can’t Fucking Steal A Holiday. You can ban it, you can suppress it, you can wipe it from the record, but you can’t steal it. Stealing implies that it’s a commodity or property which is gone and can never be used or observed by the original culture ever again. No one is stopping you from observing, learning about, or celebrating the thoroughly modern holiday of Ostara in whatever way you prefer.
So there it is. Enjoy the sources, enjoy the weather, enjoy your holidays. Now everybody get the fuck off my lawn.
