Did a Pagan Goddess Inspire Easter?

Select footage and images courtesy of Getty

[zacharytan]

I feel like Occam's razor would have the Anglo Saxons calling it Easter simply because it fell in that month they were already used to referring to as Eastermonth.
Bishop: "New converts we will be celebrating Paschal again soon!"
Anglesax1: "Oh that thing that happens in Eastermonth? Hurray!"
Anglesax2: "Yeah I love Easterₘₒₙₜₕ."
Bishop: "Stop calling it that!"
all Aglesax: "No!!"

[Salsmachev]

I kind of wish you had gone a step further and discussed where eggs and bunnies in Easter actually did come from.

[Vishanti]

Thank you SO MUCH for mentioning Hislop. So many people parrot ideas from that book and don't know how poor the arguments are, and how little research went into it.

[danielcuevas]

This video made me realizes that Neil Gaiman is a far better Fantasy Author than he is a Historian.

[wompa]

Hislop was a Renaissance man at heart. "Scholars" during that time proclaimed so much purely fabricated stuff as fact that modern historians and archeologists are still trying to correct it.
Congratulations on joining Nebula! I've been wondering about it for a while.

[danielmalinen]

As far as I understand, Easter symbols and traditions are different and cary in different parts of Europe. For example, here in Finland, the symbol of Easter is a rooster that lays eggs once a year, and that time when it's happen is Palm Sunday. Most of the Finnish traditions related to Easter are a mixture of folk traditions and church traditions. Palm Sunday is also a day when Finnish children dress up as witches and go from door to door handing out decorated willow branches and wishing for health and long life, and the children are given treats as a pay.

Palm Sunday is followed by Log Monday which is dedicated to spring cleaning (because Jesus taught to remove the log from your own eye), Stick Tuesday which is dedicated to planing wood sticks for a light sources, Bell Wednesday which is dedicated to purifying cattle with cowbells (before being let out to pastures), Spirit Thursday, which is dedicated to exorcising evil spirits with portable fire and Easter bonfires, and Long Friday, which was believed to be about a 48-hour long day because the God mourns Jesus which made time pass more slowly on that Friday. Also, it is said that on Long Friday, or Good Friday, the fire refuses to be lit, the wind does not blow, the sun does not shine, animals do not eat, birds do not sing, people's minds are depressed and food spoils faster than usual, which is why it was necessary to make protective cloth dolls that bring some good luck.

After this comes Yarn Saturday, which was previously dedicated to yarn dyeing and people stayed indoors (it was believed back then that there were evil spirits moving and wandering around because God fell into a deep mourning mode and neglected His guardian job). On Sock Sunday, the danger was finally over, so people went out to dance without socks, swing on the swings, do fertility rituals and "play" in the bushes and saunas (but nowadays we only have domesticated Easter rituals like growing small portion of grass indoors and making small yellow chick dolls).

The traditional Easter food in Finland is seasoned rye porridge, mämmi, that is sweetened in the oven with syrup and it is eaten with cream or milk. And the name of the holiday in Finnish is "pääsiäinen", a nightmare for etymologists, which means "a small celebration for getting out from fasting."

[macroeconomics]

It is also incorrect simply to equate Eostremonath with April. Bede equates it with the paschal lunation, which is the lunar month ending in April, so in some years most of it would fall in March. The Anglo-Saxon calendar was lunar, so its months cannot be equated with those in the Julian calendar.

[andrayellowpenguin]

Lol! As a non-english person i always found this hypothesis very amusing, since even the tiniest bit of research would immediately show that the holiday has a completely different (and pretty unified) name across most of the non-english world.😂

[misseli]

I'm so glad you made this video! I've looked for some videos debunking Hislop's work in the past with little success. So many misconceptions among Christians and non-Christians alike come from "The Two Babylons" and they're accepted as fact. I hope more people come across videos like these.

[gnarzikans]

my understanding is that the linguistic evidence for Easter deriving from a proto-West-Germanic (or even earlier to a Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European language-dialect) is fairly strong. while there isn't agreement on _what_ the earlier word was (likely deriving either from a word for "dawn" or "spring"), cognates with Easter are documented in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German.

notably, the modern German word for Easter is "Ostern" (Oster- in compounds), so clearly there was a common ancestor-word to the Old High German and Old English (and all those other Old West Germanic language-dialects), that likely sounded something like "Austrǭ"

[lunarAureola]

Finally someone says it!

Also just a fun fact that not everywhere Easter is called "pascha" etc. in Polish we call in Wielkanoc ("Great Night"), but for example in Kashubian, Polabian (now extinct sadly), Upper and Lower Sorbian Easter is called Jastrë, jostråi, jutry and jatšy respectively, which was probably a borrowing from Proto--Germanic *Austrǭ.
There were some sources iirc that said that the Kashubians worshipped a God called "Jasterbog" but I don't have much information on that.

[SunlightHugger]

I ADORE LINGUISTICS. It's fascinating hearing where words came from, the cultures that went into them, and how their use has changed. Plus, the invention of gods is a time-honored human tradition, and I hold that the adoption of an old word with an old idea attached to it, filtered through hundreds of years of misunderstanding, to name a new god is very interesting and valid.

[feelin_fine]

We quickly get into very strange territory when those eager to dispel millennia-old traditions point to pagan influences. As far as I know, few evangelicals—however fervent on high holidays—truly object to calling Thor’s Day “Thursday.” It’s tiring even to imagine the mentality that sees the history of language as one big nefarious plot rather than a series of understandable choices, conscious or otherwise, with little, if any, real malice or ill intent.

[RobertTaylor]

14:00 I’m so glad you mention this book by Hislop — early in my fundamental evangelical learning “The Two Babylons” was recommended and devoured that book. Probably one of the hardest teachings I’ve had to unlearn to learn actual history.

[DellDuckfan]

"Ostarmanoth" is the name given to April by Einhard in his Life of Charlemagne, suggesting it wasn't just the Anglo-Saxons using that name. (In fact, it's very interesting to compare his list of months to that of Bede!) Personally, I've long wondered whether could be a connection to the old Frankish homeland, Austrasia. But that's just idle speculation.

[LaineyBug]

For those interested in the Ostara/Bird/Bunny/Colorful Egg rabbit hole, I found the below article from the library of Congress helpful.
It dates it to late 19th century authors (1874) Adolf Holtzman, and K. A. Oberle (1883).
It also talks about Jacob Grimm using these references and adhering to the theory of Pagan origins because he was an advocate for preserving German Paganism in the 19th century.

Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think April 28, 2016 Posted by: Stephan Winick

[joshuaallgood]

I guess the one thing I learned about Christian holidays is that they weren’t intentionally trying to convert pagans by plagiarizing holidays, but rather that Christians were attempting to figure out historical events without archaeological evidence by cross referencing calendars from loose dates given in the Bible (which for some cases, wasn’t very accurate like in the case for Christmas). Still though, the unintended consequences of converting pagans by having those holidays around the same times as those festivals is tremendous.

[chendaforest]

I can feel the irritation at the start Andrew 😂 But great video, very interesting.

[benjaminacuna]

Ironically pascals Spanish term Pasqua is used interchangeably with Christmas and Easter in some countries adding another kernel of confusion

[bouncingbeebles]

Eostre was probably pronounced by the Anglo-Saxons like "yostra" or "yoster" The Eo- form seems to be a diphthong (two letters representing a single sound) representing a "yo" sound rather than a two-syllable "ey-yo" ("ey-yo-strey").

An example can be found in the old spelling of York - written as Eoforwīc or Eoforīc by the Angles in 400AD. This later came to be written as Yorvik and eventually York.