The German goddess of fertility - Eostre

[Deidre]

There may have been a pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon goddess by the name of Eostre whose festival month coincided with the Christian holiday. Our only source for that is Bede, and it's not clear where he's getting the information or if he's engaging in some "creative scholarship," as folks like him often did. It's equally likely that the Germanic word for the holiday simply refers to the concept of dawn or rebirth. We really don't have enough evidence to know either way.

Where people go astray is in claiming that the eggs and rabbits were sacred to Eostre, something for which there is no evidence whatsoever. It comes from the false assumption that any symbolism drawn from the natural world must be pagan in origin. Christian imagery has always included animals and plants. So even if we were to accept Eostre as a goddess, it's not logical to leap to the conclusion that any particular aspect of Easter celebrations can be connected to her. It's sort of like Christmas trees, another pseudo-pagan tradition that actually comes out of the Victorian period and has no real connection to anything pre-Christian.

I agree. Particularly odd to me is why the obsession (I'm using that word lol) with ''purity'' and ''fertility.'' It has surprised me to learn that such ''values'' weren't exclusive to religious folk.

 

[Vishvavajra]

I agree. Particularly odd to me is why the obsession (I'm using that word lol) with ''purity'' and ''fertility.'' It has surprised me to learn that such ''values'' weren't exclusive to religious folk.

It's true. People have tended to be very lazy in framing fertility as a religious concept. It's a universal human concern, which is why it shows up in religion. Nor is it a particularly "pagan" concept in the realm of religion (whatever we understand that word to mean). That sort of hidden assumption is why you get a lot of Christian practices being called out as "pagan," as if people should have suddenly become less interested in fertility on conversion. One could say all the same things about "purity," which is something particular to human psychology.

In fact, I'm not sure religion really adds new concerns to the human experience, so much as it provides a medium in which to express them and try to address them. Sometimes it seems to do a terrible job of it, making things even more complicated, but the root concerns were already there, kicking around in people's consciousness.