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jltsiren 5 days ago

You need to look at the bigger picture.

The English word "east", and the equivalent words in most European languages, ultimately mean something related to the dawn or sunrise. There is plenty of evidence for various Indo-European dawn goddesses with names linguists generally consider related to Eostre.

Dawn goddesses were generally part of an older layer of mythology that became less relevant over time. They were often replaced with other deities that inherited some of their aspects, or they gained new aspects while keeping the name.

We know that both Old English and Old High German had one of the spring months named after something related to the east and/or dawn. We know that European agricultural societies tended to have spring festivals. We know that as Christinanity spread, it absorbed pagan festivals and pagan traditions, and sometimes even kept the names. Such as something similar to "Yule" instead of "Christmas" or "Navidad".

Maybe Anglo-Saxons never had a goddess specifically called Eostre, and maybe their spring festivals were not specifically about worshipping a particular god. But some European languages chose to use a Germanic name for the Paschal season, and that name seems to be connected to some pagan spring festivals. Whose names are ultimately related to a dawn goddess their distant ancestors worshipped.

tptacek 5 days ago | parent [-]

The Greek and Latin term for Easter is "Pascha". People are right to flag the noodling on the Germanic/English term as basically irrelevant.