It's long been thought that the word Easter and the traditions we associate with it (the Easter Bunny and hiding eggs) stem from an old Germanic Saxon belief about the goddess Ostara. The Saxons believed that Ostara was sent by the Sun King during the spring to bring an end to winter. She bore a basket of colored eggs, and with the help of a magical rabbit would hide these eggs under plants and flowers to bring them new life. The name Ostara evolved into Oestre, or Easter.
Turns out this legend is a hoax, at least according to University of Tasmania researcher Elizabeth Freeman. Her research indicates that the Saxons never worshipped a goddess named Ostara. Ostara was simply invented by an 8th century scholar named the Venerable Bede, apparently because he thought it was a nice story:
"He has definitely made up that goddess," Dr Freeman said. "Bede is the first one to mention it. German academics have found no evidence of the spring goddess Oestre anywhere else before Bede." She theorizes that the Easter Bunny legend actually came from ancient Celtic culture, because the Celts "revered sacred hares".
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Professor Freeman doesn't offer any alternative explanation for the name of Easter, if not from Oestre. I want to see more evidence.
To me it sounds like something strange but true.
In any case, the fact that Easter, like Christmas, was moved to be close to Spring Equinox (or Winter Solstice for Xmas), in order to coincide with the already-present celebrations of other religions at those times does lead me to believe that they probably didn't take the name from the pagan holidays they were trying to subvert and suppress..
It may be that back then, this time of year was simply known as 'easter', for some comepletely unrelated, unreligious reason.
Besides, this is a little close to AFD to be taken seriously.
But I'm sure Neil Gaiman is very annoyed by this, since he has the nonexistent goddess Oestre in his novel American Gods.
Generally, a goddess will have a role and be connected with at least a few of the important legends of her pantheon. Hell, even Idun and her golden apples make a few guest appearances in Thor stories (the sagas, not the comic books), and she's got to be the ultimate Goddess bit player, little more than a plot point. Yet Ostara--has anyone EVER heard of her doing anything except inspiring Easter? People did not make up goddesses just to justify ONE holiday.
But you know what? The idea that the easter bunny derived from Celts' "revering sacred hares" is just as fishy and sketchy. Imagine if someone told you the idea of Santa Claus came from Scandinavians who 'revered fat men in red clothing'. Would you feel like you were getting the whole story? Or would you suspect that someone was trying to blow smoke?
"How hard would it be to invent a new holiday today? Maybe something at the end of April/beginning of May. ..."
Uh, ever heard of May Day, Platypus? Or Cinco de Mayo?
Probably the most successful attempt to create a holiday out of thin air in the last generation or two was Kwaanza (or however it's spelled), which a U.S. teacher in the 1970s proposed for the seven days following Christmas as a celebration of "African values." There are definitely some people holding Kwaanza celebrations, and not all of them connected with elementary schools under pressure to be culturally inclusive, but I wouldn't say it's caught on on a level with Easter or Valentine's Day, or even Mother's Day and Father's Day (the last two being other holidays arbitrarily invented during the past century or so).
Mother's Day, by the way, was originally organized as a day of social and political resistance in protest of warfare, but then the greeting card companies and florists got hold of it, and you know the rest.
I just thought it'd be fun to make a new one.
My wife teaches kindergarten, so I am familiar w/ kwanzaa (I think that's how it's spelled, maybe)and it's necessary inclusion into the holidays.
Walpurgisnacht is April 30th, the most evil day of the year. (If you've seen 'Dracula', that's why the villagers were so freaked out. And guess what the date was supposed to be during the Night on Bald Mountain scene from the original 'Fantasia'?)
It's May Eve, see, which was supposed in the Middle Ages to be the witches' most important holiday, when satan would come to party and all sorts of wicked supernatural things would happen.
I'm thinking maybe I should start celebrating Walpurgisnacht just to get the bad taste of Easter (with its hypocritical religious poseury) out of my mouth. Some kind of celebration of evil, only I'm not terribly interested in killing chickens and drawing magic circles with blood, so I figured I'd just rent a bunch of horror movies and get drunk. One Halloween a year isn't enough for me, buddy.
FWIW, only the American Mothers' Day originated as 'a day of social and political resistance in protest of warfare' (in the 19th Century). There has been a Mothers' Day (formerly Mothering Sunday) in the UK for centuries, the origin of which is a source of some controversy (natch).
Barghest:
Where I live, 'Witches Night' is celebrated at the end of April; it's kind of a mix of Guy Fawkes and Halloween in spirit, with people building bonfires and burning witches in effigy. And getting drunk, of course.
read more here: link
There is the version that Eostre turned a chick or bird into her favorite animal, the hare, and she had a fondness for children, not in the bad way. So thus after turning the bird into the hare the hare was sad and started trembling. The mood changed, there was no happiness and no sun, when the goddess asked about it, the rabbit responded it was because she transformed him. She couldn't change him back due to the fact that her magic was affected by this event. So the bird remained a hare for the most part of the year until Spring at the peak of the goddess' power, where she then turned him back. Once he turned back he gave all the children his eggs as gifts.
The eggs are symbols of life and resurrection and even the shapes and designs on the eggs mean something. So even if Eostre is made up, there is Ishtar, which could've inspired this. Hell Romans took Greek gods doesn't mean that they weren't legitimate. Maybe it was a late adaption due to merging cultures.
Without evidence of continuity there is no reason to assume that our modern painted eggs are a legacy of Ishar and the World Egg: egg symbolism is common to many cultures for fairly obvious reasons, just as circles, spirals, pyramids, birthing symbolism, phallic symbolism etc etc are common to many cultures without any intercultural communication.
The word here is 'analogous': the painted eggs of medieval Britain are more than likely analogous to the eggs of Babylonian mythology because eggs are carriers of new life, symbolic of spring, renewal, etc etc (as well as being good sources of protein for those without enough meat in their diets!). But 'analogous' does not denote continuity, or anything other than a human capacity to reach for the same symbols again and again...