The Goddess of Easter
As recounted by the English monk Bede, the 7th-8th century “father of English history,” the former pagans in England called April, or the month marking Jesus’s resurrection, “Ēosturmōnaþ,” Old English for the “Month of Ēostre.” According to Bede in his De temporum ratione (“The Reckoning of Time”), the Christian holiday “was called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month.” Ēostre is variously depicted by scholars as a fertility goddess and a goddess of dawn and light. The dawn connection could explain a linguistic link between Ēostre and the word “east.” Eostre became associated with the festival of Christ’s passion. Yet in England during the period of conversion in the late seventh century, and from then on until now, the bishops also used Eostre as a name for Pascha presumably because the timing of both heathen and Christian festivals depended on the equinox, when the sun rises due ‘east’.1
Eostre appears to have been Bede’s vernacular name for Pascha, as it is ours. At the same time we should not forget how extraordinary it is to keep a heathen name for the most important feast in the Christian calendar. If we look into Bede’s writing further, we will see that the survival of forms of this Germanic word in English and German Christianity, where other languages incorporated forms of the Judaeo-Latin Pascha, bears witness to an early inculturation of Christianity in Northumbrian paganism.
Inculturation might be defined as the conversion of heathens by an insinuation that they are Christians in all but name already. The most famous example of this process appears in a recommendation by Pope Gregory, in a letter to Abbot Mellitus of Canterbury in 601, that heathen shrines be reconsecrated to Christian use: “dum gens ipsa eadem fana sua non uidet destrui, de corde errorem deponat, et Deum uerum cognoscens ac adorans, ad loca quae consueuit familiarius concurrat.” (HE I. 30) This translates as: “While this people see that their own same temples have not been destroyed, they will lay down the error from their hearts, and knowing and worshipping the true God, they will hasten together more readily to the places it suits them to go to.”2
The ēostre word, at least to judge by the efficacy of its modern English reflex, was invoked to bring heathens to Christian ideology in precisely the same way. Moreover, in order to win this degree of respect from the early bishops, the ēostre festival, whatever it was or for how long it lasted each spring-time in Bernicia, was probably enacted on a grand scale. It is worth noting the plural of festa ‘feasts’ in Eostre’s claimed observances, as Bede gives them in his De temporum ratione. This plural, as with that of the later OE form ēastron, may reflect a geographical spread of one feast on the equinox in Bernicia in heathen times, or a sequence of feasts in one place there, or both. It seems that the same feasts were claimed for Christianity by an inculturation of Pascha within ēostre which was initiated in Northumbria some time between 619, when Paulinus arrived in York, and the Council of Whitby in 664, when the calculation of Easter got its Roman make-over.
The character of the ēostre cult in Bernicia in the pre-Christian period, in the sixth century and first half of the seventh, may be surmised by following the implications of Bede’s words on the Anglian months. In ch. 15 of De temporum ratione, Bede claims the Angles knew the winter and summer solstices, keeping a farming calendar which divided the year into two six-month seasons. For Bede, who used the Julian calendar, the solstices were fixed at 25 December and 24 June and the equinoxes at 21 March and 24 September, none of these being true to reality.3 The Bernicians could not have known the solar turning points without having a calendar of their own, one which was either inherited from the Romano-British or developed from their own observations in which a wooden pole was at one time aligned on an arc at a distance from a fixed post in order to observe and mark the daily positions of sunrise on the horizon.
In the practical regard, Bernicians or their Celtic predecessors or subjects could have marked the full set of data over time, without the need for Victorian or Dionysian tables, by observing and marking a year’s worth of sunrises on one site. After many years to correct and compensate for British skies, a solar calendar would have been complete.4 A day for the spring-autumn equinox, when the sun rises due east, could have been obtained by marking a point on the arc mid-way between the solstices. Bede’s explanation for the eostur-name may be read in this practical context, where, as we have seen, he says that his ancestors used this name for the paschal season, ‘consueto antiquae obseruationis uocabulo gaudia nouae solemnitatis uocantes,’ [in English] ‘thus naming the joys of a new ceremony with the customary title of an old observance.’5 The phrase antiqua obseruatio, connoting ‘old observation’ as much as ‘old observance’, blends heathen ritual with calendrical science.
An academic and a Christian missionary, Bede’s reference to Ēostre (or Ostara) is textually unique, to the extent that many throughout the centuries have asserted it was fabricated. It was only in the 1950s that archeological evidence was found supporting his claim of such a goddess in England. But recently, work was done at the University of Leicester on place names and their connections to Ēostre, which, arguably, buttress Bede’s version. In almost every other international language, the holiday is called by some permutation of “Pesach,” the Hebrew word for the Passover holiday/sacrifice. According to an essay by Hebrew University Prof. Steven Fassberg, during the period of history marking the birth of the Christian church, both Hebrew and Aramaic were used in the Galilee, where Jesus’s ministry was based. In Aramaic, the holiday is called “Pascha.”6
The Hebrew word “pesach” is a noun, but it can also be inflected as a verb to mean, depending on the biblical context, “skip over” in a physical sense (according to rabbinical scholar Rashi), or more spiritually as “spare” (as used in the Aramaic translation by Roman convert to Judaism Onkelos in the first century CE). The authors of the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek completed in 132 BCE, also used the Hebrew word, as in to save or to hide. This Greek version of the Old Testament was eventually used by most early Christians in the Roman Empire. The Gospel of John, written in Greek around the first-second century CE, goes further and uses the Passover motif in calling Jesus the “lamb of God,” an allusion to the priestly Passover sacrifice on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.
Interestingly, only the Hebrew noun “Pesach” is transmitted to Aramaic, not the verb forms, where it begins to take on a further meaning, the Christian observance of Jesus’s resurrection. Today, Modern Hebrew has readopted the Aramaic word “Pascha” to mean the Christian celebration of Jesus’s resurrection, not the Jewish Passover.
So how is it that one of the two major Christian holidays was named by Anglo Saxons after a pagan deity? And how is it that this name was not only tolerated, but eventually became its normative moniker throughout the English-speaking world? According to the 1835 “Deutsche Mythologie” by Jacob Grimm, “This Ostarâ, like the [Anglo-Saxon] Eástre, must in 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.” In other words, early Church fathers seemed to take the tack that if you can’t beat them, join them — and “usurp” an existing holiday for Christian purposes. Historically Easter is not the first instance of a pagan ritual described by Bede that is now imbued with Christian meaning. Also in “The Reckoning of Time,” Bede describes the Anglo-Saxon Pagans’ “Mōdraniht,” (Old English for “Night of the Mothers”) that was held on December 24, or Christmas Eve.
Many Christians are uncomfortable in acknowledging the Easter holiday’s pagan name. Others are taking a more philosophical approach and making a valiant effort to rebrand it. Many have desired to move away from the term “Easter” altogether, using “Resurrection Day” in its place.
Notes
1 John R. North, Eostre the goddess and the free-standing posts of Yeavering (Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
2 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans., Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969, repr. With corrections, 1991), pp. 106–7 (I.30).
3 The Reckoning of Time, trans. and comm. Wallis, pp. xxxix and 86–9 (ch. 30).
4 On the diffusion of customs and practices for dividing solar time, see Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 12–15. For possible symbols, the Northumbrian runic alphabet was so well established before the Christian period that it was retained and even reformed in Northumbrian monasteries in the late seventh century. See David Parsons, Recasting the Runes: The Reform of the Anglo-Saxon Forthorc, Runrön 14 (Uppsala, 1999).
5 De Temporum Ratione Liber, by Bede, ed. C.W. Jones, in Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Pars VI: Opera Didascalica 2, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 123.B (Turnhout, 1977), 331.
6 Amanda Borschel-Dan, “The pagan goddess behind the holiday of ‘Easter,’” The Times of Israel, April 2015.
