Why is Easter called Easter?
The etymology of Christmas is not that hard to see. It is the Christ-Mass. That works.
Easter is etymologically weird. The fact that Easter, ostensibly celebrating the resurrection of the Christ, is associated with bunnies and eggs is weirder.
As is completely unsurprising, Easter (at least its name) is an appropriated holiday. The pagan Easter originally celebrated spring, renewal, rebirth, fertility (the bunnies and eggs make sense in that context). It is not too hard to see within the context of a new religion this festival morphing into celebrating the resurrection (i.e. rebirth) of the Christ.
The original Easter celebration, was put into a blender with Passover, and poof, the modern holiday was created. In fact the original name for Easter was “Pascha.” Here we see the etymological link to Passover. (In many languages around the world, the word used to denote Easter is actually a variation of “Pascha.”) In church, the Last Supper will often be described as the “Paschal Feast,” and in Spanish “Easter” is “Pascua.”
If thinking logically, Easter really should be an extension of Passover, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder after all. Which is why Passover and Easter often overlap. The reason they don’t overlap every year…well that brings us back to calendars. Depending on what calendar you use, Lunar, Solar, or dash of one with a pinch of the other, the exact date changes. (This includes how you denote the beginning of the month, and whether you include leap years). The Jewish calendar calculates Passover slightly differently than how the Christian calendar calculates Easter. (The Orthodox Calendar also calculates Easter’s date differently.)
Passover always falls on the 14th day of Nisan, and is always a full moon. (The Jewish months always begin on a new moon.)
Easter, as established by the Nicene Council (325 A.D.) was the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring Equinox (March 21) (and just to make things more complicated), unless that Full Moon fell on a Sunday, In that case Easter would be the following Sunday.) This was likely done for two reasons. 1. To distance Christianity from Judaism and 2. As a nod to Emperor Constantine, who called the council, began the Roman state support for Christianity and who had previously been a sun worshiper; linking Easter to the Equinox put it in the tradition of many Roman Festivals, and made Christianity more approachable for the average pagan.
Linking Easter’s date to the Equinox is the key point here.
In pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon Britain, there was an important Goddess, Ēostre. Ēostre, who entered the historical record by a reference by the Venerable Bede (8th Century). She was a goddess of the dawn gave her name to the Anglo-Saxon version of April (called Eosturmonath).
According to Bede in his book De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time) (725 AD):
Eosturmonath 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.”
-Wallis, Faith (Trans.) (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Pg. 54
Christians in Anglo-Saxon Britain converted to Christianity and continued to use the name of the old spring/rebirth festival and much of its iconography (bunnies, and eggs) continued to be associated with the holiday.
This is what makes history so compelling. The answer to a simple question like “Why is Easter called Easter?” is never as simple as it seems it should be. The answer leads to all types of interesting lines of inquiry, and we are only scratching the surface!
Happy Good Friday Everyone! (Which itself seems like an odd name…given what it commemorates…) and Happy Easter!
I knew much of the above but the sources below were helpful in researching this post:
(Source: N.S. Gill, Dating Easter, http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/godsreligion/a/aa040200.htm)
Wallis, Faith (Trans.) (1999). Bede: The Reckoning of Time.
I briefly mentioned Ēostre in another post a year ago…which planted the seed of this post…it took a year but here it is!
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