History for Atheists: Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs

If Easter has nothing to do with Ishtar, what about the claims about it coming from "the pagan goddess Eostre"? We are told that this is the "real" origin of Easter in other memes propagated uncritically by online New Atheists. Apparently she was a "pagan goddess of light and fertility" and a "Spring Goddess" who "breathed life back into the world". Lots of online sources seem to know a great deal about her and tell us that she was associated with hares and rabbits ("thus the Easter Bunny, see?") and eggs ("fertility symbols that have nothing to do with silly old Christianity!"). These things are all asserted with the internet's usually breathless assurance and so it all seems perfectly clear that "Easter" was originally this pagan goddess' spring fertility festival. Unless you bother to actually check on the sources of all these claims and find this is not clear at all. In fact, it's actually highly uncertain.

To begin with, we have the grand total of one reference to any pagan goddess called Eostre, and it's pretty dubious. It's actually found in an early medieval Christian work focused on that vexed issue of the calculation of the date of Easter. In 725 AD the prolific English monk and scholar Bede wrote De temporum ratione or "The Reckoning of Time" to help monks calculate Easter, but in the process he detailed various calendrical schemes, gave a potted history of the earth and, thanks to the work's popularity, helped fix the BC/AD dating scheme as the standard. In his discussion of calendars he gives us the traditional Old English names for the months, with a brief discussion of each. Some of his etymologies seem to refer to the agricultural cycles of the year, such as Weodmonath (August) or "weed month" or Thrimilcemonath (May) "three milkings month" so called because in that month cattle were milked three times a day thanks to lush spring grass. Others refer to pagan practices. Bede says Halgemonath (September) is "Holy Month" because it was a "month of sacred rites", possibly associated with harvest. And he says two months were named after goddesses - Hrethmonath (March) after Hrêða and Eostremonath (April) after our Eostre:

"Eostremonath 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." (Bede, De temporum ratione, XV)

That would seem to settle it - here is an early medieval source telling us that the month in which Easter (usually) falls was named after a pagan goddess called Eostre, so the festival is pagan. Except things aren't quite that simple.

We have no other references to this "Eostre" anywhere in any other source. Our sources of information on early Germanic mythology are scanty and fragmentary, but it is odd for us to have just one reference to a deity and no other indication of their worship: no references to her in other Christian sources, no inscriptions, no charms mentioning her name, no place names indicating her cult sites and no cognates of her name in later Old Norse texts on the Viking gods. Bede was writing in the early eighth century and a couple of generations after England had converted to Christianity. Even then many pagan practices and ideas would still have survived, but how familiar with them a devout monk living in the monastery of Jarrow would have been is not clear. The lack of any other references to this goddess is suspicious and there is a very good chance Bede didn't have a clue what "Eostremonath" meant and that he invented an "Eostre" goddess to explain the obscure name.

The month name was not only found in England, however, and the prolific nineteenth century philologist Jakob Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame) noted that in his day some Germans still called April "ostermonat". He also pointed to the Old High German version of the same month name: "ôstarmânoth" and the recorded Old High German words for two festival days: "ôstartagâ" and "aostortagâ". He concluded from this that Bede must have been right and that a feast of "Eostre" or "Ostara" must have been held at this time.

Grimm was very good, however, at finding Germanic gods and festivals in the most fragmentary and obscure of evidence and while the Old High German cognates for the month name and festival days may indicate something pre-Christian, they don't necessary add up to a goddess. The very cautious modern scholar of all things pagan, Ronald Hutton, accepts that Bede and Grimm may have been right, but we can't be very sure:

"[T]he Anglo-Saxon eastre, signifying both the festival and the season of spring, is associated with a set of words in various Indo-European languages,signifying dawn and also goddesses who personified that event, such as the Greek Eos, the Roman Aurora, and the Indian Ushas. It is therefore quite possible to argue that Bede’s Eostre was a German dawn-deity who was venerated at this season of opening and new beginnings. It is equally valid, however, to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon “Estor-monath” simply meant “the month of opening”, or the “month of beginning”, and that Bede mistakenly connected it with a goddess who either never existed at all, or was never associated with a particular season, but merely, like Eos and Aurora, with the Dawn itself.” (Hutton, Stations Of The Sun, p.180)

The etymology seems to trace back to the Indo-European root "*aus-" meaning "to shine" which in turn is the root for the modern English word "east" and a range of cognates referring to "the dawn", to "shining" and to the "sun". So "Eostremonath" could refer to an otherwise totally unattested goddess, a goddess not associated with Easter or it could be a reference to the month when the sun shines again as winter gives way to spring. We simply don't know.

More neo-pagan New Age fantasy

Rabbits, Hares and Eggs?

So Easter has nothing at all to do with Ishtar and Eostre may not even have existed. What about the pagan remnants that are Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny? As already noted above, there is no evidence linking Ishtar to eggs, rabbits or hares, despite the claims to that effect. And if we can't even be sure if there was an Eostre, clearly we have no information about her being connected to eggs or bunnies if she existed.

Given that no eggs or rabbits appear in any of the Easter narratives in the gospels, most people assume they have to have pagan origins. After all, the usual Christian explanation that the eggs "symbolise the rebirth of Christ at his Resurrection" sounded dubious to me even as a child. But it seems that the tradition of decorating and eating eggs at Easter does have a medieval Christian origin after all.

Christianity has long instituted days of fasting in association with various festivals and celebrations in its liturgical calendar and the earliest evidence we have of a 40 day fast before Easter comes in the festal letter of Athanasius from 330 AD. What a "fast" meant varied, but it usually involved abstaining from meat and often also required avoiding all animal food products, including cheese, butter and eggs. The fifth century historian Socrates Scholasticus noted at least some people abstained from eating eggs on fast days and the Council in Trullo in 692 AD recommended that people do so:

"It seems good therefore that the whole Church of God which is in all the world should follow one rule and keep the fast perfectly, and as they abstain from everything which is killed, so also should they from eggs and cheese, which are the fruit and produce of those animals from which we abstain."

By the Middle Ages, abstaining from eggs on fast days and in Lent had become the standard practice in western Europe. Thomas Aquinas made this requirement perfectly clear:

"Eggs and milk foods are forbidden to those who fast, for as much as they originate from animals that provide us with flesh … Again the Lenten fast is the most solemn of all, both because it is kept in imitation of Christ, and because it disposes us to celebrate devoutly the mysteries of our redemption. For this reason the eating of flesh meat is forbidden in every fast, while the Lenten fast lays a general prohibition even on eggs and milk foods." (Summa Theologica, II.2. 127)

So this prohibition gave rise to two European customs maintained to this day: eating pancakes and pastries on "Shrove Tuesday" before the Lent fast began and eating eggs on Easter Sunday when it ended. Using up what eggs, milk and butter people had before the fast made sense rather than letting this perishable food go to waste. And since hens would be paying no attention to any fasts and still laying through Lent, there would have been plenty of eggs on hand to eat on Easter Sunday morning. In fact, eggs gathered in the week ahead of Easter could have been stored or hard boiled in preparation for Easter Sunday morning, when they would have been quite a treat to peasants who had just endured over a month on a diet of bread, vegetables and some fish.

We have the first references to these eggs being decorated in the thirteenth century, but that practice may have started earlier. What we don't have is any reference to any pagan spring festival or customs involving eggs. The most logical source of Easter eggs, therefore, is the Christian practice of a Lenten fast in which this readily available staple could not be eaten.

The "Easter Bunny" is a modern commercial take on the northern European association of hares (not rabbits) with Easter. Again, there is no evidence of any pagan origin here. Hares are generally shy and solitary animals, but in early spring they become more social as part of their mating behaviour. So around March in most of northern Europe hares can be seen in the fields "boxing" - with males competing for mates and females occasionally rebuffing males physically. The sight of groups of hares in the fields would have been a sign of the onset of spring and that Easter was around the corner for rural people without calendars, thus the German and Dutch tradition of the "Easter Hare" which came to the US and became the "Easter Bunny". So, again, no paganism.

Where Does All this Crap Come From?

So Ishtar had nothing to do with Easter, Eostre may not have even existed and Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny aren't pagan either. So where did all this crap come from? One of the interesting things about having spent several decades tracking down crank pseudo history is how often I find these dumb ideas can all be traced back to single sources. In this case we have memes being shared uncritically both by New Agers and neo-pagans and by vehement New Atheists. Which is deeply ironic, given that the source of these memes seems to be a nineteenth century fundamentalist Christian minister.

Alexander Hislop (1807-1865) was a minister in the Free Church of Scotland and parish schoolmaster in Caithness. He was a vehement critic of anything to do with Catholicism and became convinced that while good Protestants like him followed the true faith of Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church was actually the ancient Babylonian mystery cult of Nimrod, an obscure pagan figure mentioned a few times in the Old Testament. According to Hislop, Satan allowed the Emperor Constantine (him again) to hijack the true Christian faith and lead it into idol-worship and Papist errors and that it was only by recognising this and throwing off any pre-Reformation vestiges that people could return to true Christianity.

Hislop initially published this thesis as a pamphlet in 1853, but then added a large amount of material to it and published it as The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife in 1858. Hislop's book is a remarkable case study in the level of abject nonsense that can be created out of a stupid initial assumption, a burning desire to find (or create) evidence to support it and the motivating energy of good old fashioned bigotry. So Hislop takes sources that have since been shown to be wrong and new information from digs in the Middle East that he didn't understand to create a fantasy of stunning complexity and idiocy. We are told that the mitres worn by Catholic bishops take their shape from the "fish head hats" worn by the ancient priests of the god Dagon, though this ignores the fact that Catholic mitres didn't take their current form until at least the tenth century and earlier forms didn't look anything like the bizarre hats in Hislop's dubious illustrations of these pagan priests. And where Hislop was unable to come up with evidence he simply makes strings of assertions, like "Nimrod was born on December 25" or "Christmas tree baubles are Babylonian sun symbols" - none of which have the slightest substantiation.

Not surprisingly, Hislop's book became a best-seller and remains very popular among the loonier elements of fundamentalist Protestantism. The Jehovah's Witnesses still cite Hislop as an august authority in regular articles repeating his claims. The infamous tract publisher Jack T. Chick was a huge fan of Hislop and several of his crazier evangelical comic books were simply rehashes of Hislop's thesis (such as his 1987 comic "Why is Mary Crying?"). And white supremacist groups of the "Christian Identity" variety also regularly feature Hislop's claims in their material.

Hislop seems to be the ultimate point of origin for the claims that Ishtar and Eostre were the original source of Easter, thanks to the wickedness of Catholics and, of course, Satan. He devotes a whole section to the pagan origins of Easter in his chapter on the wicked Satanic festivals of the Catholic Church:

"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 ..." (Hislop, p. 103)

He goes on to detail a fervid fantasy about Middle Eastern gods being taken to Britain by, of course, the Druids, who he claims worshipped the Babylonian god Baal. Then he makes the following series of leaps:

"If Baal was thus worshipped in Britain, it will not be difficult to believe that his consort, Astarte, was also worshipped by our ancestors, whose name in Nineveh was Ishtar. The religious solemnities of April, as now practised, are called by the name of Easter - that month, among our Pagan ancestors having been called Easter-monath." (Hislop, p. 104)

He then traces this pagan Easter and its Catholic customs via a circuitous route via the 40 day fast of "the Yezidis, the Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan" and, somehow, the "Pagan Mexicans" and the cults of Adonis, Osiris, Ceres and Tammuz before it was imposed on the poor Christians of Britain by the wicked and Satanic Church of Rome. He concludes:

"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." (p. 107-08)

Pretty much all the elements of the memes above can be found here, though not the Satanic hot cross buns, which Hislop condemns as celebrating "the goddess Easter" and therefore also evil. I imagine Mr Hislop was not much fun at parties.

Hislop's junk scholarship was very popular and while his whole thesis generally only appealed to his hardline Protestant audience, his claims permeated nineteenth and early twentieth century culture. So we can find them popping up in esoterica, in tracts by Theosophists and occultists and in Freethinker pamphlets, which recycled anti-Catholic material with uncritical enthusiasm. And now we find the supposedly "rational" New Atheists of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and the the "No More Make Believe" and "Philosophical Atheism" Facebook groups cluelessly regurgitating this hoary fundamentalist Christian nonsense because they don't check their facts and just take any nonsense that appeals to them on ... faith. Oh, the irony.

Update - April 19 2017: In a great victory for rationalism, I have now been blocked by the the "No More Make Believe" Facebook group. I suppose that's one way of dealing with pesky people who point out their errors of fact.