Did a Pagan Goddess Inspire Easter?
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- Опубликовано: 29 мар 2023
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Thank you for the work you do, and all the misinformation you clear up.
Yes easter is pagan. As a wiccan for us it's called ostara and we celebrate life, growth, and renewal. The goddess we work with march 20-23 is Eostre
hahahaha
Nevertheless - What's up with the eggs? What's up with rabbits?
Maybe Easter didn't come from Eostre but it clearly has many elements that are *_not_* biblical. If you want to celebrate RESURRECTION DAY and leave out the Easter eggs and the baskets and the rabbits and any other obviously pagan elements, fine, but don't try to sell me the idea that Easter is not pagan. Why don't you just celebrate the Passover or some post-crucifixion/resurrection variation on that? Passover is biblical.
That you would defend Easter I find very offensive.
@@rubiks6 The easter bunny and eggs are not pagan though. Both are medieval.
10th c. CE or later: Easter eggs start cropping up in medieval sources. Seems to be linked to Lenten prohibition. I.e. people ate a ton of eggs after Lent ended.
1682: First mention of the Easter Rabbit in a German source Georg Franck von Franckenau
This video made me realizes that Neil Gaiman is a far better Fantasy Author than he is a Historian.
YUP
Man, I wonder what he does for a living...
Well, in defence of his work, what people believe about their gods shape the world of the gods and mythical creatures. That's why Mad Sweney used to be an ancient god-king of the Tuatha dé Dannan before being a leprechaun
That was one of the things that tempered my enjoyment of American Gods as a book, though the gods are also somewhat based on modern beliefs about them, not just real history, and I guess misinformed memes count.
@@alymaldonado Did Neil Gaiman take inspiration from Jungian Psychology? I get a lot of "collective unsconscious" vibes from it.
I feel like Occam's razor would have the Anglo Saxons calling it Easter simply because it fell in that month they were already used to referring to as Eastermonth.
Bishop: "New converts we will be celebrating Paschal again soon!"
Anglesax1: "Oh that thing that happens in Eastermonth? Hurray!"
Anglesax2: "Yeah I love Easterₘₒₙₜₕ."
Bishop: "Stop calling it that!"
all Aglesax: "No!!"
That's my hunch too....with the added possibility that the bishop didn't care.
Sounds like us Anglo-Saxons. Magna Carta 1215 was denounced by the Pope at the time.... it's *still* part of our laws though (mostly ignored, but hey ho).
Pretty young girls still give out colored eggs in Bohemia, as symbols of youth and fertility. Doesn't get much more 'pagan' than that, even with people worshipping a rabbi's literal blood and mother.
@@Dunge0n The Greek Orthidox say Easter eggs come from Mesopotamia, from a Christian story having to do with St. Mary Magdalen.
Yeah, almost every non-English or Germanic speaking culture uses some variation in "Pasha" or "Feast of the Resurrection.
I kind of wish you had gone a step further and discussed where eggs and bunnies in Easter actually did come from.
In retrospect, I should have. Future video to come, but briefly, both are Medieval
10th c. CE or later: Easter eggs start cropping up in Medieval sources. Seems to be linked to Lenten prohibition. I.e. people ate a ton of eggs after Lent ended.
1682: First mention of the Easter Rabbit in a German source Georg Franck von Franckenau
@@ReligionForBreakfast The Wikipedia page for Easter Eggs says that they were originally adopted from the Nowruz tradition
@@ReligionForBreakfast Cool! Thanks for the update! I had thought that dyed eggs were an older near eastern tradition.
As for eggs at Easter, aside from their symbolic meaning, they were forbidden food during the Lenten fast; so on Easter Sunday, eating eggs was regarded as a ‘treat’ of sorts. This was especially true for poorer people who did not keep animals for slaughter, and could not afford to buy meat. In anticipation of Easter, in many traditions, the eggs were colored during the last days of Lent to mark the end of penance and fasting. In many countries, the colors used are highly symbolic - the traditional red of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, for example, symbolizes the blood Christ shed for mankind. One must remeber that cultural similarity does not equate to cultural sameness. Many other cultures use dyed eggs in their traditions, but just because they do, does not mean that all go back to a common root. That's an all too common misconception.
@@ReligionForBreakfast I wonder if there is a biological link to this as well. I know chickens will produce eggs year round if they are given a certain number of hours of light a day.
I wonder if eggs in a pre-electrified society stop over winter (especiallyat higher lattitudes like europe), and pick back up again sometime around the equinox?
Thank you SO MUCH for mentioning Hislop. So many people parrot ideas from that book and don't know how poor the arguments are, and how little research went into it.
I agree I thank him for saying I didn't lie.
To be honest, though, I doubt most of the people that parrot this stuff without at least talking about the broader ideas of cultural exchange and syncretism don't care that zero actual research was involved.
The continuation of this farce owes a lot to a following book by Ralph Woodrow. He rehashed Hislop's work and his book became very popular.
He eventually realized how lame were Hislop's arguments and to his credit wrote another book to dispel the falsehood of the first one.
That second book has been around for many years but people still hold on to Hislop's original myth.
I too have the book and it is all just sheer speculation, wishful thinking on his part, and with a definite "preconceived" idea about how and why he connect all those dots. Just the wording alone!
It is completely void of actual facts and/or real evidence. All the wishful thinking on Hislop's part still doesn't make it factually so.
All MAN-made religions are bad! Even the one he himself belonged to.
I wish more people did their own research/homework, so they would have their "own" foundation, and not someone else's who could actually be wrong AND they wouldn't even know it. The book, "The Two Babylon's" is a perfect example, for all believers, of being deceived and not even knowing it. It's important to know why you do something and/or why you don't do it. It's very important to know its "actual" origins. Take care
I think much of the people who latch onto ideas like Hislop's; are ones who want to double down on their Catholics are all secretly Devil Worshippers fantasy.
I like all the randos in the comments telling the guy with the PhD that he needs to "do more research" because what he has been studying for years goes against what they heard in a TikTok video.
Hislop was a Renaissance man at heart. "Scholars" during that time proclaimed so much purely fabricated stuff as fact that modern historians and archeologists are still trying to correct it.
Congratulations on joining Nebula! I've been wondering about it for a while.
Occam's razor doesn't really work, when what your looking at is many thousands of years of humans doing weird stuff.
@Mnemosyne Vermont
Seems to me like you don't understand the concept of citations and sources.
@@mnemosynevermont5524 I am sure to trust his claims that are supported by sources and well explained logic. Than your 'trust me bro' he is a fake
@@MohamedRamadan-qi4hl
Classic troll rhetoric, push off.
@@mnemosynevermont5524 not really i explained my logic very clearly. You just can't counter it. So you use 'oh you are a troll!'
As far as I understand, Easter symbols and traditions are different and cary in different parts of Europe. For example, here in Finland, the symbol of Easter is a rooster that lays eggs once a year, and that time when it's happen is Palm Sunday. Most of the Finnish traditions related to Easter are a mixture of folk traditions and church traditions. Palm Sunday is also a day when Finnish children dress up as witches and go from door to door handing out decorated willow branches and wishing for health and long life, and the children are given treats as a pay.
Palm Sunday is followed by Log Monday which is dedicated to spring cleaning (because Jesus taught to remove the log from your own eye), Stick Tuesday which is dedicated to planing wood sticks for a light sources, Bell Wednesday which is dedicated to purifying cattle with cowbells (before being let out to pastures), Spirit Thursday, which is dedicated to exorcising evil spirits with portable fire and Easter bonfires, and Long Friday, which was believed to be about a 48-hour long day because the God mourns Jesus which made time pass more slowly on that Friday. Also, it is said that on Long Friday, or Good Friday, the fire refuses to be lit, the wind does not blow, the sun does not shine, animals do not eat, birds do not sing, people's minds are depressed and food spoils faster than usual, which is why it was necessary to make protective cloth dolls that bring some good luck.
After this comes Yarn Saturday, which was previously dedicated to yarn dyeing and people stayed indoors (it was believed back then that there were evil spirits moving and wandering around because God fell into a deep mourning mode and neglected His guardian job). On Sock Sunday, the danger was finally over, so people went out to dance without socks, swing on the swings, do fertility rituals and "play" in the bushes and saunas (but nowadays we only have domesticated Easter rituals like growing small portion of grass indoors and making small yellow chick dolls).
The traditional Easter food in Finland is seasoned rye porridge, mämmi, that is sweetened in the oven with syrup and it is eaten with cream or milk. And the name of the holiday in Finnish is "pääsiäinen", a nightmare for etymologists, which means "a small celebration for getting out from fasting."
In the Philippines, no one used to go out on Good Friday because God was mourning and isn't available, too.
so like most things, Christianity sucked until it came to Europe
@@VikVaughnMISC It's because Christianity didn't really have anything going for it, in terms of a cultural and seasonal festivals etc etc. Christians needed to convert Pagans, and the only way they could do it without continuous killing, was to eventually adapt and adopt and re-write pagan practices. It's why certain Christian sects get rid of all the Christian holidays, it's because they acknowledge he pagan origins in which they were actually birthed. It's why Pagans are sometimes tired of Christians in the West, because they think we are appropriating Christian holidays when in reality we are just doing what our ancestors have been doing for centuries in one version or another.
Lol! As a non-english person i always found this hypothesis very amusing, since even the tiniest bit of research would immediately show that the holiday has a completely different (and pretty unified) name across most of the non-english world.😂
Like German "Ostern"? Again, this "hypothesis" only deals with the origin of the word and customs in the English-speaking world, not to the origin of the holiday.
@@ghenulo yeah but Easter eggs seem to be adopted from Slavs, given the strong Slavic egg painting basis set around the same time as Easter, the churches decision to overlay Easter with that Holiday during the 8-9th century when they were converting them. Just as they made a lot of the Slavic gods Saints
Pretty virgin girls still give out colored eggs in Bohemia, as symbols of youth and fertility. Doesn't get much more 'pagan' than that, even with people worshipping some dead rabbi's literal blood and mother.
@@ghenulo The Germans are the ONLY people who call Easter with a name similar to "Easter". Even the Dutch say "Pasen" (from Aramaic "Paskha"), the Swedish say "påsk". Several dialects from North Germany say "Pasen", too, and there is evidence that the whole northern half of Germany used to say "Pasen".
@@Dunge0n you wish. We killed off pagans.
my understanding is that the linguistic evidence for Easter deriving from a proto-West-Germanic (or even earlier to a Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European language-dialect) is fairly strong. while there isn't agreement on _what_ the earlier word was (likely deriving either from a word for "dawn" or "spring"), cognates with Easter are documented in Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old High German.
notably, the modern German word for Easter is "Ostern" (Oster- in compounds), so clearly there was a common ancestor-word to the Old High German and Old English (and all those other Old West Germanic language-dialects), that likely sounded something like "Austrǭ"
personally, i'm most convinced by the analysis that Easter ultimately comes from a PIE word something like "wósr̥," meaning very simple "spring [the season]." and that seems also the simplest explanation: Easter just meant spring, so "Easter month" was "spring month."
sure, i imagine there were personifications of spring (Easter) that were worshipped and invoked, but the choice of Anglo-Saxons to call the most important holiday in Christianity "Spring" is likely similar to their choice to call the second most important holiday (Christmas) after a contemporaneous holiday (Yule). Yule even had (and has) the expanded meaning "the time around the winter solstice (or more recently, Christmas), i.e. the beginning of winter."
words like Yule and Easter were already in use to describe the beginning of seasons, and they had associated rites, so as the societies that used them reconfigured toward Christian rites that occurred at roughly the same time as the pagan ones...these words were readily applicable.
@@gnarzikans how would you get the t in Easter/Oster? Do you know other examples of epenthetic t between s and r in Germanic? Also PIE w is usually retained word-initially in Germanic so thats another issue. I think the conventional derivatiom from the same root as Aurora and Eos makes a lot more sense phonologically.
@@samnjohnson that's a really good point, and the assumption is that the t comes from a metathesis of z/ts (which are especially similar sounds before an r), perhaps similar to *stelaną from *tsel or *spenô from *pstḗn
@@gnarzikans Easter is the dawn of the new year, especially in nothern climate accounting.
@@gnarzikans yeah that makes sense, those metathesis examples look pretty plausible! seems like you could have some suffix starting with t, which is later metathesized as a scenario. Where the t comes from needs to be explained for *h2ews- also since the other IE cognates don’t have it. The biggest issue imo for *wosr- is explaining where the w went, and there are other Germanic words that mean spring and preserve the w like expected like Old Norse vár “spring” which lines up really well in terms of expected sound changes: *wosr- > *wasra- > vár
It is also incorrect simply to equate Eostremonath with April. Bede equates it with the paschal lunation, which is the lunar month ending in April, so in some years most of it would fall in March. The Anglo-Saxon calendar was lunar, so its months cannot be equated with those in the Julian calendar.
Thank you, you're right I should have added the phrase "occasionally March." Near the end I say "the month it most often fell," but could have applied that qualifier to every instance.
We quickly get into very strange territory when those eager to dispel millennia-old traditions point to pagan influences. As far as I know, few evangelicals-however fervent on high holidays-truly object to calling Thor’s Day “Thursday.” It’s tiring even to imagine the mentality that sees the history of language as one big nefarious plot rather than a series of understandable choices, conscious or otherwise, with little, if any, real malice or ill intent.
Ok but what does Thursday have to do with the video?
Was it really understandable though? I understand we were forced to be converted as a Christian nation. And there was plenty of conscious ill intent and real malice done.
Finally someone says it!
Also just a fun fact that not everywhere Easter is called "pascha" etc. in Polish we call in Wielkanoc ("Great Night"), but for example in Kashubian, Polabian (now extinct sadly), Upper and Lower Sorbian Easter is called Jastrë, jostråi, jutry and jatšy respectively, which was probably a borrowing from Proto--Germanic *Austrǭ.
There were some sources iirc that said that the Kashubians worshipped a God called "Jasterbog" but I don't have much information on that.
Interesting, here in Croatia we call Easter “Uskrs”, idk how you would correctly tranlate it into english but I think it would be “The resurrection”
i love the word Jasterbog! Thank you for introducing me
The West Slavic names probably comes directly from German. Seems more likely than proto-Germanic. This certainly is the case for Sorbian. Sorbian settlement areas used to be much larger but they gotvGermanised. Place names in my country clearly show how much of the area East of the river Elbe was Slavic before.
«Velykden» - «Great Day» in Ukrainian
14:00 I’m so glad you mention this book by Hislop - early in my fundamental evangelical learning “The Two Babylons” was recommended and devoured that book. Probably one of the hardest teachings I’ve had to unlearn to learn actual history.
I ADORE LINGUISTICS. It's fascinating hearing where words came from, the cultures that went into them, and how their use has changed. Plus, the invention of gods is a time-honored human tradition, and I hold that the adoption of an old word with an old idea attached to it, filtered through hundreds of years of misunderstanding, to name a new god is very interesting and valid.
"Ostarmanoth" is the name given to April by Einhard in his Life of Charlemagne, suggesting it wasn't just the Anglo-Saxons using that name. (In fact, it's very interesting to compare his list of months to that of Bede!) Personally, I've long wondered whether could be a connection to the old Frankish homeland, Austrasia. But that's just idle speculation.
Einhard was writing a century after Bede. So the path mentioned in the video - Anglosaxon monks bringing the name over to the continent when they did missionary work in the Frankish Empire - is still possible, and we can't just assume that the name came from the mainland.
We English did it first! Stop appropriating our history! Bloody continentals 😅
@@varana Why can't we assume that the name came from the mainland? There is literally no evidence that her name originated from any particular place. All we know is that Beda mentioned it 125 years after the mission in Kent. It could have been present in most of Germany for all we know as that's were most of the anglosaxon gods came from.
Eostre means dawn and its where we get East from, too. So yes, there is a connections to "aust" which also means east and comes from the same source. Eostre is the month in which the dawn begins to come earlier, or that the new year dawns. There probably was a goddess called Dawn too (pretty much all pagans had one) but that's not where the month's name came from,.given the meanings of all the other Germanic months.
@@christopherstein2024 Definitely came from the mainland. You can trace back the word to proto-Indo European. Orthros is the name of matins in Greek because it means dawn. It's in Hindu, too.
I'm so glad you made this video! I've looked for some videos debunking Hislop's work in the past with little success. So many misconceptions among Christians and non-Christians alike come from "The Two Babylons" and they're accepted as fact. I hope more people come across videos like these.
For those interested in the Ostara/Bird/Bunny/Colorful Egg rabbit hole, I found the below article from the library of Congress helpful.
It dates it to late 19th century authors (1874) Adolf Holtzman, and K. A. Oberle (1883).
It also talks about Jacob Grimm using these references and adhering to the theory of Pagan origins because he was an advocate for preserving German Paganism in the 19th century.
Ostara and the Hare: Not Ancient, but Not As Modern As Some Skeptics Think April 28, 2016 Posted by: Stephan Winick
Thank you! Funny you can't find it unless you go to someone's post on twitter who linked it.
I can feel the irritation at the start Andrew 😂 But great video, very interesting.
Initial draft of the script was much more irritated. The start required a rewrite.
"Eo" isn't two syllables in Old English. It represents a dipthong, [e] flowing into [ʊ] or [ə:]. So "Eostre" has two syllables in Old English - not e:-os-tre:, but eʊs-trə. (The Old English dipthong "eo" regularly becomes "ee" in Modern English - deop > deep, þreo > three - hence our modern pronunciation "Eester," even if we don't spell it that way.)
I guess the one thing I learned about Christian holidays is that they weren’t intentionally trying to convert pagans by plagiarizing holidays, but rather that Christians were attempting to figure out historical events without archaeological evidence by cross referencing calendars from loose dates given in the Bible (which for some cases, wasn’t very accurate like in the case for Christmas). Still though, the unintended consequences of converting pagans by having those holidays around the same times as those festivals is tremendous.
I would be really curious to find out what a hand these Christian festivals really had on conversion as compared with, for example, the fearlessness and joy of so many of the early Christians in the face of persecution, torture and death by the state, ie., the early martyrs of the Ancient Roman Empire and the role Christians played in historic disasters like the Great Plague and adopting the unwanted infant girls left to die from exposure in a patriarchal culture, because families needed male heirs. I mean it couldn’t possibly be that the gospel of God’s self-sacrificial love triumphing over the power of death could have had any attractiveness on its own merits compared to the pagan cults focussed on gaining of political and military power and fertility or worse on human political figures as a sort of demigod (the cult of Emperor-worship), could it?
@@lornadoone8887 I’m a little more cynical about it tbh. I think ever since Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome, it became no better than any other religion. Then again, I haven’t identified as a Christian since 17, and I’ve since educated myself on many of the post-biblical philosophical origins of modern Christianity like Neoplatonism (this is where the modern Christian concepts of the afterlife and the soul come from). To put it simply, I think the love of Christ was all but lost when Christians stopped being persecuted and obtained power.
Put it this way, if Jesus were alive, he would just send his disciples to pagan festivals and spread the gospel there instead of having his own festivals coincide.
Christmas is another matter. A very old Jewish tradition says that a prophet was always martyred on the anniversary of his conception, making his life a perfect whole no. of years.
Apart from that they worked it out like this:
John the Baptist's father Zechariah was in the Holy of Holies when an angel appeared to him to tell him he was going to have a son - the only time anyone went in there was on Yom Kippur, which was Sept-Oct. on our calendar;
So, John the Baptist was conceived around the end of September;
In the 'sixth month' of his wife's pregnancy (around 25 March), the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her she was to be the mother of the Messiah;
9 months from 25 March is... there you go!
@@loreman7267 Ah, the good ol’ calculation hypothesis. I know this one, but it’s been awhile since I read it in full. Arguably, many dates of Christian holidays derived from theologians guessing the date based on scriptural clues. It’s still a little weird to me that Annunciation of Mary is accepted to be exactly on March 25th. Since it didn’t say exactly when John the Baptist was conceived other than the month. You did mention that Jewish scholars believed that great men were always conceived and born on the same month day, so that’s where we get the continuity between March and December.
Ironically pascals Spanish term Pasqua is used interchangeably with Christmas and Easter in some countries adding another kernel of confusion
That's historically what Christians been calling it.
@@angelahull9064 you mean Israelites
@@tulip811 there's Jewish Pesach and Christian Pascua
@@angelahull9064 where do you think they got "Pascua from"?
The primary way for most languages that don't use some variation on Easter is derived from "Pascha", a Greek transliteration of the Aramaic translation of... Pesach!
Thank you, all this tik tok telling me that as a catholic I worship some pagan god because I celebrate easter and the proof is in it's name, although as an Italian I call it pasqua and had no idea what easter meant prior to learning english
Well the catholic religion was based on ancient paganism. Im catholic too. Vatican is built on ancient goddess cybelle pagan ground and i noticed on greek island virgin mary churches were built on ancient athena and artemis pagan grounds. You could see historical remains. This is not bad. It is history.
@@janeslater8004 There's a lot to unpack in this comment...
I've always wondered if atheists & non-Christians were able to spread the "pagan Easter goddess" crap beyond the English-speaking world. Virtually all Mediterranean cultures & languages (which were evangelised long before the Anglo-Saxons of Britain) use some variation of Hebrew "Pesach" as their name for the feast day
@@janeslater8004 No, that's some silly garbage. The Catholic religion is based on Christ, on the events of the Gospel, and the teachings of the Apostles.
@@janeslater8004 The fact that Churches were built on pagan sites doesn't prove some esoteric doctrinal continuity. So to say that it is "based on paganism" is just idiotic and illiterate.
OMG, I actually spread this misinformation a million times every Easter, by wishing friends Happy Ishtar and quipping about bunnies, eggs, and fertility. Yikes. Listening with eager anticipation and touch of sadness, lol.
I'm happy you learnt something
@@chimeremnmaozioko17 Me, too
Eostre was probably pronounced by the Anglo-Saxons like "yostra" or "yoster" The Eo- form seems to be a diphthong (two letters representing a single sound) representing a "yo" sound rather than a two-syllable "ey-yo" ("ey-yo-strey").
An example can be found in the old spelling of York - written as Eoforwīc or Eoforīc by the Angles in 400AD. This later came to be written as Yorvik and eventually York.
Andrew, I’ve loved your channel for many years - and in support, just subscribed to Nebula via your link. Looking forward to seeing the next phase of your projects! 🌀🌿🌈
The Word "Osteran" seems quite plausible to me as a swiss person, because in my region of Switzerland we call easter "Ostera" aswell
Well Done Dr Henry! It's always a pleasure to watch your videos. Keep it up!
Another really good and interesting video! I appreciate that you actually do your research and present it in a non-sensational manner. Keep it up!
As someone whose first language is not English I always find it annoying when Anglophone people make wild universal claims based on English etymology. Like, Easter was based on a goddess named Eostre? Cool, but have you ever thought about the apparently little-known fact that English is not the only language in the world, and the celebration has very different names in most other languages? Care to detail how "Eostre" explains Pascha, Pasqua, Húsvét, Wielkanoc, etc.?
Actually our language comes from several. What is your point???
@@toddaulner5393i guess its that if Easter was a pagan Anglo Saxon or Germanic Ritual it would be exclusive to Germanic Peoples
which it is not
Fascinating! Assuming Bede did, in fact, correctly identify the etymology, he was obviously an extremely diligent scholar. Imagine how much time he may have spent tracing the root word just for a single reference.
It is great to see scholars nowadays continuing to put such effort into seemingly small and trivial curiosities. All knowledge is worthwhile. God Bless, and Happy Easter season everyone!
The Easter Bunny is going to get you for that.
I like how the whole "Easter is eostre" is completely anglocentric and completely pretends there are no other languages other than English and that no one practiced it before Christianity reached Britain even though we know people did
Not really. It explains the Germanic origins of the name and the fertility symbolism, which is distinct from the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.
@@ghenulo that's not what the conspiracy is about tho, it states that Easter is fake because it comes from this barely attested pagan goddess, which is dumb cause you can only imply this if you believe no Christian celebrated Easter until the Germanic pagans in Britain did so
@@ghenulo It's one possible explanation, but then there would be the question of why it only appears in a few Germanic languages
Anglos have a tendency to see themselves as the navel of the world after all...
...but I'm surprised the fact that Eostere sounds exactly like how most Germanophones pronounce "Ostern" in their regional dialects (Ostere/Ostärä/Oster) from Luxemburg to Austria was completely ignored. Especially interesting since the Dutch, the Frisians and the Northern Germans as well as the Skandinavians use, like the Latins, a word derived from "Pesach". Meaning the root of Eostere should probably be searched in Central Europe rather than in Kent.
@@mnk9073 You may have missed it in the video, but it's possible that Ostern and its equivalents derive from the Anglo-Saxon word which may have been used and spread by Anglo-Saxon missionaries who played a central role in the conversion of Germanic pagans in the Frankish Empire during the 8th century.
Watching your videos makes people smarter. Thank you for such an excellent breakdown. Can you do a follow-up where you talk about where the rituals *do* come from, rather than where they don't?
would love to see religion for breakfast do breakdowns on where different religious holidays and rituals come from!
It makes people smarter as long as the information is accurate. Ultimately, knowledge by authority is just blind faith. I definitely enjoy the videos, though.
@@bcataijiauthority and expertise aren't synonymous
@@bcataiji Sounds like somebody prefers their conspiracy theories
@@bcataiji In this one, he also teaches empiricism and how to identify linguistic qualifiers... both of which can make people smarter... but you can lead a horse to water...
Im glad the englocentrism of such myth was well adressed in this video
Were they not related people.
Bede lived at a time when pagans still existed. The last pagan burials are from late 7th century and English kings all converted in the 7th century but of course rustics still practiced paganism, as English Christians were invoking Anglo Saxon gods in magic spells as late as the 10th century. So the idea that Bede knew nothing of the cult is highly unlikely
Never mind that pretty young girls still give out colored eggs in Bohemia, as symbols of youth and fertility. Doesn't get much more 'pagan' than that, even with people venerating some dead rabbi's blood and mother.
@@Dunge0n You'd think you'd try to put your copy pasted comment somewhere more relevant but I guess not
@@Dunge0n or cutting off the foreskin of babies Semitic style.
@@Dunge0n Only the pretty ones???
This is a little like saying that because you live at the same time as Mormons, you must know about what they did in their temples in the 1850s
Keeps the presentations coming. You are one of the few people I've watched that stays calm about religious subjects. Very cool
This is interesting. In my mother language (Hungarian) we have a word "kikelet". It means "the forthcoming of spring", but in mirror translation "ki" means "out" and "kelet" means the direction "east", so technically it is "outeastening".
As an Orthodox Christian, was nice to see Pascha represented. Blessed Holy Week to the rest of ya'll. Here in 2023, we're a week after you.
@ReligionForBreakfast , that's a whole different video that you probably covered as well.
Oh, I'm glad you're on Nebula now, that's very exciting! I signed up using one of the joint CuriosityStream-Nebula deals, but I've really only been using Nebula when a channel I'm subscribed to on YT has exclusives there. I've had a hard time finding new channels there, since I usually go by other channels' recommendations, and most of the people I've seen advertising it only shout out video essayists (who I'm sure are very good! I'm just not really into that stuff at the moment). So I'm excited to follow you and check out the series you mentioned!
This was really fascinating. I've done videos on this and knew some of it but this is really thorough. subscribed and thumbs up.
great video as always many thanks
I love this type of video. Myths with a sliver of truth tend to be the most interesting to watch someone take apart.
What is it with 19th century religious thinkers/scholars causing messes for later thinkers/scholars to clean up? Seems like a recurring theme.
Great video Mr. Breakfast! Hope you and yours has a great Eos- Easter!
Amazing reseaerch. Thank you so much for providing a scholarly and unbiased approach to religion.
Interesting that the Celtic languages of the southern parts of UK call Easter Pask (Middle Cornish and also Breton) & Pasg (Welsh, but sounds similar when spoken). Point being that they maintain the European variation of the spring festival. (Caveat, I am not an expert in these languages but was taught them when I was growing up in Wales)
Yep, Pasg is basically a borrowing from Latin pascha.
Latin has got into Welsh. They call their parliament the Senedd Cymru.
Heh. In Swedish Easter is called "påsk". I blame the vikings. Or something. :P
In Irish we say Cásca which is because Q Celtic/Gaelic languages often start with c/k/q sounds when P Celtic ones like Welsh start with p/b sounds
Simple answer: No.
Long answer:
The entire thing is a false dichotomy by misinterpreting traditional Easter activities and saying they came from specific, pagan rituals. Take the egg dying argument as an example. What’s often forgotten is egg dying comes from egg painting, which is a Slavic/German tradition that was already heavily associated with the Christian faith prior to it’s popularization in modern Easter celebrations.
Omg, Nebula finally wised up and added you? That's awesome!
If you raise chickens or have rabbits in your garden, you know that you don't need any goddess or religious feast to help you associate egg hunts and baby bunnies with the spring equinox
I recently discovered your channel (thanks youtube!) and am absolutely hooked! One of the things I absolutely love and appreciate about your content is how well contextualized and researched everything is and how willing you are to lean in to uncertainty. This video is a perfect example of how little we actually know about the origins of our beliefs.
As a 5 year Theravada Buddhist practitioner and currently a Buddhist chaplain in-training so much of the work we do is developing our own personal theology which requires much introspection. Part of this process for me has been developing a clear understanding of my relationship to my practice and how much uncertainty there is! How, for instance, even the oldest suttas were written hundreds of years after the death of the Buddha. Nothing is absolutely certain in regards to religious practices. What matters is your relationship to the practice, its capacity to develop your most beautiful qualities and lead you through the suffering in your life.
Thanks again for the education you're providing to the world so that there may be greater understanding of the beliefs that guide us as we move through this life together
"What matters is your relationship to the practice, its capacity to develop your most beautiful qualities and lead you through the suffering in your life."
I think your comment just changed the way I think about religion. I needed that, so Thank You!
I'm a Christian but I am also basically an "Agnostic Theist", which is to say that my belief system is clearly Christian, and yet I don't proclaim to know anything and despise dogma. What I find important is your personal relationship with the divine, like you said, not worrying about if God is one nature or two inseperable natures or whatever else was at one time a popular heresy or against common teachings. The truth of the matter is that the Church was built by humans and the leadership were all humans. They didn't magically know more than us and they often made doctrinal decisions for reasons of temporal power struggles, as humans tend to do. It's important to know what they said for the historical context of Christian practice, but I don't think the dogma of any Christian sect is superior to any other, it's just other people trying to understand their own religion at best. That can be useful signposts for you, but they aren't necessarily some divinely-inspired big T Truth. We all have to make that journey on our own, not outsource it to other people to decide for us.
@@joeyg.5102 My pleasure Joey! I'm glad to know my random musings on the internet were able to serve someone 😆🙏❤️ I would be really curious to know what you're been contemplating around your relationship to religion of you feel like sharing! Cheers
@@Tinil0 I love this! And couldn't agree more with your beautiful comment. It really is up to us to apply the teaching to our lives as best we can and develop a clear seeing, what is and what isn't useful.
One of my teachers offers this and at the end of their Dharma talks (Buddhist sermon if you will), "please take what was useful with you and disregard what wasn't!" And it always makes me smile, as its both playful and humble, as it recognizes that not every teaching will work for everyone, and some lessons are useful at different times. It's up to us to apply them to our experiences.
Thank you again for sharing such a thoughtful comment
Entertainingly edifying explanation elucidating Easter.
Voilà!
In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.
Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honour to meet you and you may call me 'V'.
Awesome alliteration, you two!
so excited to see you on nebula!
This video is of course only focused on English, but actually Easter is also called "Ostern" in German. Usually, it is assumed that this name is related to a word that can either mean the "East" (direction) or the "aurora" of the morning (see also latin: eos) directly, without taking the "detour" of a goddess in-between (sometimes the name is also explained as a direct translation from the latin name for easter, "white week", where the word for "white" ("alba" can also mean aurora)). Some theorize that if there ever was a goddess with the name "Eostre", it might just be a secondary name to a goddess like Freya, but again, even Grimm noted that apart from the one mention from England there isn't any mention of this supposed goddes at all.
Anyways, what's actually interesting about this is the socio-cultural history of this myth. In Germany, it is not connected to protestant purists trying to denounce the catholic traditions as "pagan", but to romantic nationalists who wanted to elevate a "Germanic" culture. The strict separation between "christian" and "pagan" traditions, including the eggs and rabbits at easter, has been infamously promoted heavily by the Nazis because they had the plan to create some kind of "pure", "german" culture without any Christian and especially Jewish contents
Our good friend Alexander Hislop's anti-Catholic conspiracy tome is also formative in the over arching theology behind Chick Tracts
12:39 - not just Woden/Odin, but Tyr (Tuesday), Thor (Thursday), Frigg (Friday) & Roman god Saturn for Saturday
Haven’t watched it yet but making my prediction now: it turns out the idea of the spring equinox and its connection to new life is something very common across societies with noticeable seasons.
Edit: nope
Exactly. Christianity is not original. All its tenets are inherited or plagiarized from past myths or philosophy. Nothing new under the sun
It would be a stupid connection since it comes right before the harvest in the Mediterranean where Christianity is from.
Eostre and Ostara is the same springtime goddess in Anglosaxon as well as Germanic repectively. 💐🌹🌺🌻🌼🌷
"Germanic" refers to Anglo-Saxon, Norse, German, Gothic and all other related peoples. The word you're looking for is "German" in that context
In Germanic languages Ostern not only means the springtime festival, it also means cheese making from Ost = cheese as well as fasting. I never heard of Eostre as an actually worshipped goddess outside of linguistic contexts. The only goddess linked to the spring festival is Freya. However, people did practice austerity until chicken laid eggs again and grass grew again so cheese, cream, and butter were plentiful again.
Based on this i'm creating a cheese worshiping cult that dances around a cheese wheel every spring equinox while wearing cheese hats waiting for the sun to align and cast its rays straight through the holes of a giant slice of swiss cheese
@@PUBHEAD1 I recommend you read the Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett.
@@zeideerskine3462 ah yes, Lancre Blue😊
@@PUBHEAD1 Connoisseurs of fine 🧀 who know powerful and lively specimen like Horace the Lancre Blue should enjoy the Alchemaster's Apprentice by Walter Moers featuring Izanuela Anasazi the fervent Cheesian.
Ost does not mean cheese
It's always a good day when religion for breakfast posts
Another insightful video
great video as always!
Because this idea tends to get presented as an explanation for why Easter imagery (pastel colors, eggs, bunnies) seems so unlike what we would expect from the Christian Easter story, it would be a lot less popular if we had the real explanation for that instead.
That's because the imagery is pagan in origin lol, this guy just didn't represent the full story and is either unaware of the rest of the evidence pointing to Easter being a dawn/spring goddess or is ignoring it
there is a lot of evidence to suggest Easter came for a distant Indo-European celebration around the time of spring. is this guy jewish? Abrahamics tend to get jealous of pagan festivals becuse they are superior to thier own. no kid wants to celebrate all saints day they want to celebrate halloween. no kid want to starve themsleves for Ramadan they want to find an tasty chocolate egg the Easter bunny hid somewhere. all non-"Christian"/pagan/atheistic kids hate the fact that santa will not be coming down the chimney for them close to the winter solstice.
That's because "Christian Easter" story didn't come from the Bible at all. No one can point out a passages in Acts or the epistle where the true Church celebrated Christ's resurrection, let alone with bunnies and colored eggs. The Church celebrated the festivals in Lev. 23, and Easter clearly isn't one of them.
@@alexdunphy3716 There's like, no evidence of the easter bunny from before the 17th century.
@@SpadesNoir ok and? I'm surprised its that old tbh.
THANKS FOR LYING TO ME REDDIT
Great video 👍
Thanks for posting these corrective videos! It's so helpful to address these stupid trends around the time that they pop around on social media.
This final was a relif for me, a brazillian. because all video I was thinking "but in Rome they speak latin. In Portuguese, a romantic language, easter is "páscoa" (Spanish = pascua; Italian = pasqua; french = paques), which already disprove any anglo-saxan influence in the holiday itself, at least since the begging.
here in Brazil, what I always heard was that easter was a pagan festival (not a god) celebrating the harvest. and the bunny and egg was symbols of fertility, but the fertility of the soil, because after the harvest they have to plant again...
Because most of these older festivals addressed here take place in the northern hemisphere it is not a harvest festival. Those take place in the late Summer through the Fall seasons again in the northern hemisphere.
It's strange, all these 'I always heard was that Easter was a pagan festival' claims always ignore that there IS another religion's festival linked to Easter, which long predates it, and which the name is an obvious derivative of. And Christianity doesn't even try to hid it! If you attend the Easter masses it will definitely come up! By which I mean passover (Pascha).
Unless, of course, the Jews also stole passover from the pagans. It's a double conspiracy!
Shout out to Neil Gaiman and American Gods. First time I hear of her.
Wish he called her Eostre though instead of Ostara...considering the latter is a tenuous reconstruction.
@@ReligionForBreakfasthi! First off, love the channel, and second, in the anniversary edition I've been reading, it has been written Eostre, for what it's worth.
ah ok, I was only aware of the 2017 TV show.
This was excellent. Thank you.
Congratulations on your new show!🤗
Historical evidences like that Beda one make my endorphin level rise up. Thank you for bringing it up!
The Matrona were also Celtic Mother goddesses and are the Morrigan, Badb and Macha.. Many goddesses existed in triplicates including the Fates, the Norns and others. In fact, it is possible that MacBeth was confronted by three weird sisters because triple goddesses were familiar to Shakespeare's audience.. Even Paris confronted three goddess: Juno, Venus and Minerva.
The other real life situation that might explain a connection with the East is that the remaining Celtic speakers of the island of England did most of their trading along the Atlantic coast, sailing alongside what is now France and into the Mediterranean, while the settlers from the eastern part of the island of England traded with peoples ranging from the Baltic and down the rivers of Eastern Europe to Anatolia.
Archaeologists are searching for and learning more about these two sources of trade.
There is no proof the Matronae are parallel to a triple Morrigan. Especially when the myths give that trio different names and sometimes extend her to seven names. Morrigan was also never a mother goddess. At all. Period. Having a child doesn't make a goddess a mother goddess any more than all of the gods who sired children are father gods.
Great video, thank you!
Glad to hear you're on Nebula now!
So is it like celebrating something in July and thinking it has to do with Julius Caesar?
Really interesting video, much to think about.
I do wonder, if Eostre was indeed a goddess connected to one small group of people, why it would be the name given to a month.
Your channel is pure gold
Another amazing video 🎉🎉❤
Always love your takedowns of these pseudohistory ideas! I spend time with some neopagans and it always bothers me when less informed of these groups perpetuate these ideas - pagans have enough to be upset at christianity about without making more things up
You'd think that people that have had their beliefs misrepresented and demonized for centuries would be self-aware enough to realize they're doing the same.
This and the ‘burning times’ supposed 9 million witch trial deaths are among the deepest-entrenched ahistoric beliefs among pagans. Really frustrating for sure.
@@allisonguthrie8257 I am a Neopagan and I agree with you 100 percent. 'Burning Times' guys are our religion's equivalent of Young Earth Creationists, and it infuriates me.
Pretty young girls still give out colored eggs in Bohemia, as symbols of youth and fertility. Doesn't get much more 'pagan' than that, even with people worshipping some rabbi's literal blood and mother.
I am curious a lot of Neopagans pick it because you grew up with some kind of low church/fundamental home or church?
I went from agnostic to theist to Eastern Orthodox Christian. Because even Americans who grow up Christian don't know what it is. We grow up of it in the US a version of it that deconstruction and reconstruction itself first from early modern Roman Catholicism but then after sect and church it schism from. It is so far removed from the ancient faith.
Whoa! I never thought I'd hear about "The Two Babylons" from anyone outside my church's teaching/lineage. It was taught to us from junior high, but it always seemed like hype material and a little off. Thanks for the commentary on it.
Most of these people and even atheist RUclipsrs read more of the Bible than most Christian’s to be honest xD and can interpret it impartially
More than a little off and his influence is spiritually toxic.
13:09 As he mentions in the video. It's incredibly important to note that just because the holiday celebrating the resurrection is called Easter in English, that doesn't mean that that is what it's called in every other language. In Spanish, for instance, it's called Pascua de Resurrección. And the word Pascua comes from the Latin Pascha which in turn comes from the Hebrew Pesach, which is the Jewish festival of Passover.
The Germanic peoples were late converts to Christianity in comparison to Southern European peoples, i.e. those in Greece, Italy, Malta, Spain and Southern France. In the Eastern Roman Empire, the lingua franca was Greek, and in the west it was Latin, and in neither of those halves of the Roman Empire did the early Christian church refer to the feast day of the resurrection as Easter, but called it Pascha, which in in turn is a reference to the Jewish feast of Passover. Why? Because the story of the resurrection is set around the time of Passover.
I'm SO glad you're on Nebula now! I'm only disappointed that I've had to let my subscription to it/Curiosity Stream lapse but once I start making money again I'll be back and you'll be there! Congratulations, or Thank You, or whatever is appropriate!
And thank you for the video. So helpful.
Very interesting n informative video..n I've read Alexander Hislop book sometime in 1999 n perhaps is the first book I've bought to do research on God etc..Thanks much for this video.
This video feels like a subtle jab at half the memes posted on r/atheism back in 2008
You content is impeccable as ever, but the added effort as a content creator at @3:00 😂, I see you Andrew!
Wonderful to see you've joined Nebula!
Yesss you're finally on Nebula! I'm glad :)
I'm glad this channel exists on this platform. It's an island of nourishment in a sea of bile
Real good, thanks for sharing with us.
Thank you for this!
What about the Homeric "rosy-fingered" Dawn, a.k.a, Eos? (Eos as in Eostre/East/Easter) It makes me think about the myth of the resurrection of Memnon (Trojan and Ethiopian at once)
tbh it made much more sense to me that it was just a spring celebration the same way Yule was taken over as a winter celebration
Thanks for sharing 🙏🏾
I have been fascinated by this subject for a long time now. I have learned more than I ever could find in 15 min of a presentation than I've ever been able to find. My personal opinion is that the Roman Catholic Church used Eostré for the conversion process. But that's just me. Great job!
There is also a link with the German word for Easter 'Ostern'. They have the same root, so the hypothesis of a local Anglo-Saxon goddess would be less likely.
As said in the video, it's possible that the German word 'Ostern' actually derives from the Anglo-Saxon word because Anglo-Saxon missionaries played an instrumental part in converting the pagan germanic population of the Frankish Empire.
@@cerdic6305 Thank you for your correction! Interesting to know is that the Frankish language is de predecessor of Dutch and in Dutch we speak of 'Pasen' and not of 'Oosteren' or something similar as Easter or 'Ostern'. These missionaries didn't seem to play influential role in how to name Passover in the Frankish language. Of all the West-Germanic languages it is odd that German and English seem to have a similar name for Passover (Easter - Ostern) but the language which is geographically situated between German and English was apparently not influenced.
@@lauradekeyzer1945 I agree it is a bit odd, which does make me think the theory of it being spread by Anglo-Saxon missionaries might be correct. As far as I recall the Anglo-Saxon mission to Frisia was much less successful than the one to Germania so it would sort of make sense.
I was waiting for you to mention the matronae Austriahenae inscriptions.
As far as the linguistics of her name, my understanding is linguists are reasonably confident it's derived from the PIE "h₂ews-" which means "dawn" however, "east" is also likely derived from that, specifically developing into "h₂ews-tero-" meaning "towards the dawn".
So, potentially referred to as a deity of the eastern people by outsiders and internally be a dawn goddess but these two types of referenced could be easily conflated due to how closely related the words for "dawn" and "east" were at the time?
Also probably related to the Greek Eos, the Vedic Ushas, and others.
Thanks for the information.
Great video
Eostre is a cognate name with Vedic Uśas, Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Baltic Aušinye and other Indo-European dawn goddesses. This is evidence for her being a dawn goddess too, especially if she was worshipped in April as a Spring goddess, because the link between the dawn and spring is apparent in Indo-European mythologies. This is some more educated speculation but i think it's a very strong argument for who Eostre is and what her cult was like
No other month was named after a goddess. You really think the dawn goddess was so important that she got a month and yet no people or places are named after her? It was the month when the new year dawned, nothing more or less.
Isn't the word "east" ultimately derived from the Indo-European word for "dawn"? And how would Bede have known about a Kentish goddess when he spent his life in what's now Tyne-upon-Wear?
He wouldn't, the point there was that the name of a Kentish goddess somehow might've become used across Anglo-Saxon England, perhaps because the missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons began in Kent the could've mistakenly assumed the word was used throughout the country and continued to use it for the rest of their mission. Obviously there's no evidence for any of that though
@@cerdic6305 Nah. In Germany, the month was also the dawn month, the dawning of the year.
so I finally seen al RFB videos. Really loved them. Applause, one day I'll have money and patreon this channel