I thought it was a bit early to be talking about Ēosturdæg, but Ostara gets celebrated earlier and the nonsense has started on social media already. So, here we are. This was not the post I was intending to write for Ēosturdæg (in fact, I have another one mostly written in drafts) but it is the one I feel compelled to write because I had the misfortune to be scrolling TikTok this morning.
There exists a certain pagan-phobic subset of Christians that refuse to use the word Easter. Some that I knew during my Christian days would stubbornly refuse to call the holiday anything other than “Resurrection Sunday” (despite the fact that other names for the holiday derived from Latin exist). And why would they do this? Because according to them, the word Easter comes from the name of the goddess Ishtar.
It’s funny, because they’re half right. Easter does come from the name of a pagan goddess… but not that one.
To understand the basic etymology of the name and why English speakers generally call the holiday Easter, we need look no further than the Venerable Bede1.
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated as “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess named Eostre, in whose honor 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-honored name of the old observance.
De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time), The Venerable Bede
For those unfamiliar with Latin, “Paschal” in this context is the celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In this passage, Bede explains to us that an older English word has been grafted onto this celebration that is now dominate in England at the time of his writing.
So, Ēostre was a goddess in what we now called England who we know existed from this one singular reference from an English monk writing in the 700s CE. She may or may not have had cognates in other Germanic cultures, such as Jacob Grimm’s hypothesized Ostara. Honestly, this is an area of rather fascinating scholarly debate. I will save further discussion of that for my other upcoming post though.
Meanwhile, Ishtar (or Inanna, as she was known to the Sumerians) was a goddess worshiped by various cultures in and around Mesopotamia.2 The name Ishtar comes from Akkadian, a Semitic language.3
The probability that Ishtar influenced the development of Ēostre as a goddess or a linguistic concept in a completely different language family (Indo-European) is incredibly low. The Wiktionary entry for Ishtar even notes that this is a debunked modern folk-etymology.4 But if you want to explore the actual etymology of Ēostre in much greater depth (and gain a terrible headache) I suggest you check out the book I reviewed last month by Philip Shaw.
In conclusion, Easter comes from an Anglo-Saxon name for an Anglo-Saxon goddess that attached to a Christian holiday as a localized name through the normal processes of syncretism and assimilation. While the name may be pagan in origin (if you believe Bede as I do), it has been used in a Christian context for a minimum of 1300 years. If it was good enough for Bede in 725, it’s probably fine. But if you’re going to be weird about words with pagan origins I’ve got some bad news about the days of the week…
Post-Easter Edit
I’ve see so many progressive Christian clergy slandering the Venerable Bede this week that it’s making my head spin. You do not have to accuse Bede of “making shit up” to make the case that the celebration of Easter as we know it is a Christian phenomenon. In case I was not clear above, having the local name stem from a possible pagan goddess does not make the holiday itself pagan. Easter is an entirely Christian holiday and not “stolen” from pagans. That doesn’t invalidate pagans who wish to celebrate Eosturdæg as a day devoted to Eostre or pagans who wish to celebrate the equinox as Ostara. Something doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid.
- Bede was a monk who lived from about 672 CE to 735 CE. He wrote an An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, as well The Reckoning of Time, which is the single best source for reconstructing the pagan Anglo-Saxon calendar. Here’s the Wikipedia entry if you want a jumping off point to read more about Bede. ↩︎
- Here’s the Wikipedia entry on Inanna if you again want a jumping off point for further reading. ↩︎
- Somewhat ironically, “paschal” from the Latin “pascha” actually comes from another language in the same family as Akkadian: Hebrew. ↩︎
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ishtar ↩︎
Forþ-weard 