The Ancient Spring Festival of Easter

The Culture
#1

Please will someone in Britain tell Cadbury that the festival of Easter, with its symbols of birth and new beginning, is much older than Christianity.

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#2

Here’s one short article about the pagan origins of Easter:

Traditions of Easter and cultural appropriation of Eostre)%20and%20new%20life.

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#3

While I disagree with the author in her woke assumption that “all cultural appropriation is wrong”, she actually doesn’t go far enough with the idea that Christianity appropriated all the symbolism of Eostre to embellish its narrative.
Because not just Eostre symbols, but the entire narrative about Jesus (at least the supernatural parts) is appropriated from Eostre and other pagan god myths!

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#4

I also didn’t like that woke assumption of hers.Thanks for pointing it out.

It was just the first article I found on the net that made the point about Easter’s pagan origins, and the meaning of it symbols. It was a very quick search.

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#5

“The traditional colors of the festival are green, yellow and purple.”
Those are also the traditional colors of Mardi Gras. (aka Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday and beginning of Lent, leading up to Easter.) They yellow is usually gold instead.

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#6

That’s interesting! More evidence of that connection.

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#7

Happily, our “Easter” still has a pagan name (as also in German “Ostern” and Dutch “ooster”). It’s kind of like if we still called Christmas “Yule” - which I tend to do, and I think the Scandinavians tend to. Our family kept a Yule Log with holes for five candles in it. We would light the candles and then drip their wax over the log, which was eventually covered in wax of several colors. One of my nephews now has it.

“In modern Germanic language-speaking areas and some other Northern European countries, yule and its cognates denote the Christmas holiday season. In addition to yule and yuletide in English, examples include jul in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, jĂłl in Iceland and the Faroe Islands, joulu in Finland, Joelfest in Friesland, Joelfeest in the Netherlands and jĂ”ulud in Estonia.” (Wikipedia)

But in nearly every other European language besides English, German and Dutch, the culmination of Holy Week has a non-pagan name, most of them some cognate of Paschal. In some West Slavic languages like Polish, Czech and Slovak, the names for Easter are something like “Great Night”: Wielkanoc (Polish), Velikonocni (Czech), Velka noc (Slovak) and in the Baltics, Lithuanian has Velykos, which seems to leave out the “night” part of the name. Two East Slavics have “Great Day” instead of “Great Night”: VialikdzieƄ (Belarussian) and VelykdenÊč (Ukrainian). Russian conforms to the ‘Paschal’ cognate expectation.

The reason the West Slavics celebrate Great Night is connected to the Easter Vigil on Easter Night, following the Vespers (evening) mass. This culminates the three-day Easter weekend which began Maundy Thursday evening.

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#8

Many thanks for all that interesting information, Zerothruster.

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