Is the holiday Easter, so named in English and observed by many members of the churches of Christendom, in fact named after a pagan goddess?
Up until recently, the primary reference I was aware of that made this assertion was The Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop, a 19th-century Scottish protestant theologian. However, Hislop’s work has received criticism, so I decided to find out whether there is a more readily accepted source for the origin of the name Easter.
According to the Wikipedia article about the goddess Eostre, the English name for the churches’ celebration of the resurrection of Christ does in fact come from the name of this goddess.
What Bede Says About Eostre and Easter
The original source cited by the Wikipedia article is chapter 15 of De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time) by Bede (aka Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede), an English monk of the 7th and 8th centuries CE. See an online text of that chapter, “De mensibus Anglorum,” at this link — if you can read Latin.
In case you can’t read Latin, here is a translation of the relevant passage, quoted in the Wikipedia article, evidently taken from the English translation of De temporum ratione by Faith Wallis:
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.
As with many other celebrations in Christendom, tradition western observances of Easter include pagan features such as rabbits and eggs, traditional symbols of fertility.
Alexander Hislop’s Comments About Easter in The Two Babylons
I mentioned that Hislop has received criticism. The Wikipedia article on The Two Babylons appears to be written by someone who agrees with that criticism, some of which has as its source an “evangelical” organization called the Christian Research Institute. This stresses that when using Wikipedia as a reference, you have to recognize what kind of reference it is — an open-source online encyclopedia written and maintained by many authors and editors, some of whom have their own agendas.
The entire text of The Two Babylons can be found online in more than one place, including Google Books — here is a link to the chapter on Easter.
One interesting thing about Hislop is that he points to the name Easter/Eostre and its striking cognates found in the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, the Greek goddess Astarte, and the Phoenician goddess Ashtoreth — really all the same deity and all associated with sex and fertility.
Here’s a representative excerpt from Hislop:
What means the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name,… as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar….
Such is the history of Easter. The popular observances that still attend the period of its celebration amply confirm the testimony of history as to its Babylonian character. The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now.
ARK — 30 March 2010
A. Roy King 