Octopodial Chrome

As Easter approaches, I thought I’d post an article by the learnéd Cædmon Parsons which I found on a mailing list I frequent:

Most of us may well prefer to use the word Pascha for Feast of the Lord’s Resurrection but, please, let us not be so uncouth as to attack the venerable word Easter which is a part of our Orthodox heritage and a genuine survival from the days when Britain was Orthodox in her faith.

There is absolutely no evidence for a Germanic goddess with a name in any way resembling the word Easter. Rather than the term being derived from a goddess, the supposed goddess is derived from the term. She was postulated by certain 19th century Germanic scholars in an attempt to explain the etymology of the word. These same scholars (foremost among them the Grimm brothers, famous for their folk-tale collections and less well-known as the discoverers of the Indo-European linguistic family) had a very definite nationalist/ethnic agenda in which they were trying to rediscover the real roots of German culture. Thus the folk-tale collection’s avowed purpose was to search for survivals of pre-Christian Germanic religion and culture.

The later connection of this invented figure to Astarte was sheer fundamentalist propaganda based on a coincidental similarity in sound. Having dismissed Nativity/Christmas because its timing coincides with a number of pagan solar festivals, those fundamentalist groups which criticise all celebration of holy days thereby sought to discredit Easter whose general timing is well laid out in the Bible. If there was a connection, it would be the only case of a Sumerian/Canaanite word coming into the Germanic languages without first passing through Hebrew and/or Greek into Latin and then into Germanic via the medium of Christianity.

There is some by no means conclusive evidence of a festival or holy day connected to the spring solstice. However, every recorded instance of the word’s usage has clear Christian connotations (i.e., if it ever was a pagan festival, it had effectively disappeared by the time people wrote using the term Easter). As to why this word is used in English and German: it is used in German for the simple reason that the pagans of modern-day Germany were missionised by Anglo-Saxon Christians such as St. Willibrord or the two St. Hewalds. The Germans thus got Easter the same way the Russians got Pascha—from those who evangelised them.

Although the Grimm Brothers probably did conflate the issue, the goddess Eostre may be a valid concept. However, the only mention of a goddess Eostre is recorded in Bede’s 8th century De tempore Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time)—the book which helped popularise BC/AD dating. Since there is no other corroborating evidence Bede may be mistaken. However the term for Pascha was not named from this doubtful Goddess. Instead it is most likely that Easter (Pascha) comes from the Saxon month of Eostre (April) which was used for the spring period.

In other words, the term Easter no more honours Eostre than a Wednesday Night Service at your local Protestant church honours Odin (Wednesday = Woden’s Day).

In England itself, this is the type of theoretical issue Anglo-Saxonists enjoy arguing. There appears to have been a very strong cultural bias among the Anglo-Saxons against other languages. While their Latin missionaries and then their own churchmen obviously knew and used Latin, there was remarkably little borrowing from Latin into English at this time. In almost every instance, the English Church took existing English words to express ecclesiastical terms (thus sanctus was translated by hælig [holy, healthy, whole] and Old English uses hælige John not St. John, hæliged [hallowed] rather than sanctified, &c) rather than simply borrowing the Latin (the modern preponderance of Latin loan words for ecclesiastical terms is a product of the post 1066 Norman invasion). In addition to Latin books, Old English had the most active vernacular literature (primarily Christian) of any Western area prior to the millennium. There is an extant translation of the gospel of John which is the oldest translation of the Bible into a western vernacular with the exception of Bishop Wulfilas’s Arian translations into Gothic (itself another Germanic language).

In other words, the presence of the word Easter is actually a product of the vibrant Orthodoxy of the Anglo-Saxon Church which unlike later periods did not suppress the resident culture in favour of an all-embracing Latinism but rather transformed (in accord with the guidelines given to St. Augustine of Canterbury by St. Gregory the Great) the entire language and culture. Although I myself generally use Pascha because it is the common usage among Orthodox now, I find attempts to dismiss as pagan a true survival of English Orthodoxy very problematic.

Furthermore, there does not seem to be any English form of the word Pascha; Orthodox England never called the feast anything but Easter.

Word-list (from J.R. Clarke-Hall’s A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary)

east

adj. east, easterly

adv. eastwards, in an easterly direction, in or from the east

eastan

from the east, easterly

eastanwind

east wind

eastcyning

eastern king

eastdæl

eastern quarter, the East

easte

the East

eastende

east-end, east quarter

Eastengle

the East Anglians: East Anglia

Easteræfen

Easter-eve

Easterdæg

Easter-day, Easter Sunday

Easterfæstan

Easter-fast, Lent

Easterfeorm

feast of Easter

Easterfreolsdæg

the feast day of Passover

Eastergewuna

Easter custom (appears only in the 9th century sermons of Ælfric where he is reffering to Christian Easter practises)

Easterlic

belonging to Easter, Paschal

Eastermonath

Easter-month, April

Easterne

east, eastern, oriental

Easterniht

Easter-night

Eastersunnandæg

Easter Sunday

Eastersymble

Passover (lit. Easter gathering)

Eastertid

Eastertide, Paschal season

Easterthenung

Passover

Easterwucu

Easter Week

Eastre

Easter, Passover, (possibly) Spring.

And while I find the etymological connection of Easter and astiehen (to rise up) doubtful, the pun of Eastre, astah (risen) is very obvious in Anglo-Saxon.

So you see there’s nought wrong with saying Happy Easter!