Happy Easter! Happy Spring! Today marks the Christian holiday of Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What’s funny about Easter is that much of what we do and associate with the holiday is hardly Christian or has anything to do with the resurrection of Jesus.  The truth is it all originates from Pagan traditions of the Germans and Anglo-Saxons with the worship of the Teutonic Goddess of the dawn, spring and fertility. Her name is Eostre, meaning “east” and “aurora” or “shining”, and is where some believe we get the name for the holiday Easter. Eostre’s traditions and myths are where we get things like eating chocolate bunnies and hunting around for brightly colored eggs. These were all symbols related to her celebration at the vernal equinox, the official start of spring, and are all symbols of renewal, rebirth, and fertility. None of these have much to do with Jesus and his horrific ordeal on the cross or anything else associated with the Christian holiday of Easter.

The Christian holiday of Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, doesn’t have a fixed date.  Easter Sunday varies based on when Passover takes place, although at one time the date depended on when the first full moon after the vernal equinox occurred. But there’s more to Easter than just Easter Sunday. 40 days before Easter is the start of Lent, a time for self-sacrifice and spiritual reflection. Three days before Easter Sunday is Good Friday. This is when Jesus’s actual death on the cross is honored. In the Bible it is said that Christ was resurrected three days after his death, which is then celebrated with the culmination of Easter Sunday.

Originally the date was always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Equinox but in 325 AD the Council of Nicea wanted to set a more fixed calendar for holy dates.  The dates were still tied to lunar events such as full moons and would become known as the Ecclesiastical Lunar Calendar.  The Ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a lunar month and thus changes all the time based on when the full moon took place. In Western Christianity the holiday of Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon (Paschal is derived from the Hebrew “pesach” meaning “Passover”).  Since this is when Passover happens in the Jewish tradition, this is when the Church decided to set the Easter holiday since the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus happened after Passover.

This was one of those things that I always found really fascinating. Growing up in a loose Catholic upbringing I found it so odd that this was a holiday that changed dates all the time when everything else seemed to stay put. It was especially odd to me how it was that the date of Jesus’s death and resurrection would change all the time {honestly, I still find that odd}.

How did these two celebrations, the worship of Eostre and the resurrection of Christ, ever come to be such a mishmash of a holiday? It’s thought that Roman Catholics in Germany during the 15th century began to make connections between their Germanic cultural celebrations involving eggs and bunnies and their new religious celebrations of the rebirth of Christ. Things like eggs being seen as a symbol of Jesus’s resurrection and bunnies as the rebirth of the spirit of Christ were new things and were part of the melding of these two traditions. Some of these connections seem far reaching, but they make sense in the long run. It was the coming together of culture and faith since the Pagan traditions in Germany were just part of the culture of the country more than any kind of specific religious tradition, especially when you consider that Paganism was never and has never been an organized faith.

When it comes to the connection with rabbits and egg laying, I always love one of the stories connected to Eostre. One year Eostre was late with the start of spring and when she arrived she found a small bird who could no longer fly because his wings had been frozen from the snow.  Feeling guilty but also feeling compassion for the bird, she turned him into a hare and gave him the ability to run at high speeds so he could outrun hunters.  She also wanted to honor his origin as a bird and gave him the ability to lay eggs in all the colors of the rainbow on one day a year.  However, at one point the hare angered Eostre and she cast him into the sky where he would reside as the constellation Lepus (The Hare) and where he would always be at the feet of Orion (The Hunter).  She did allow him to come back to earth one day a year, on her feast day at the spring equinox.  On this day he could lay his eggs but he had to give them away; it’s said that he would lay his eggs around the tall grasses and children attending celebrations that day would find the colored eggs as they played and they would be granted luck when they found one.

By the 1700s these Germanic spring traditions started to make their way to the United States with new immigrants. Soon the traditions of dying eggs to give as gifts, the decorating of spring baskets with flowers and food, and games like egg hunts began to spread. Before long these traditions were part of the holiday along with the religious traditions of the Church.

Over time many Christians became wise to the fact that much of what they knew of Easter really had nothing to do with their religion and many people began to actually turn to the Bible for answers. To the surprise of a lot of people Easter is never mentioned in the Bible. There is one ill-translated reference in the King James version where the word “Easter” is used when the original word used was “pesach” meaning the translated word should have been “Passover”. As a result of all the confusion and the realization that there was a lot of Pagan elements to the holiday, including the name itself, many churches have taken to calling Easter Resurrection Day {frankly, I like that and I think it’s much more fitting}.

As someone who has followed a Pagan and new-age spiritual path for over 25 years I’ve always had a little trouble with Easter, until recently. Sort of like how I had a similar problem with using the word God without Goddess attached to it when talking about the Divine. Easter, at least in name, is certainly Pagan. Most of what is connected to Easter, also Pagan. The reason for Easter, not really Pagan, and the timing doesn’t really work since it is clearly connected with Christian myth and timing. It is kind of interesting because it often feels like the time between the equinox and Christian Easter becomes a big drawn out spring celebration.

Here is something to consider. I know for many people, especially those that are Pagan or non-religious, Easter is approached as either a completely secular celebration or it’s just ignored altogether. I think that when we do that we might be missing a great spiritual opportunity. Where we might look at the spring equinox or Ostara as a celebration for renewal, rebirth, fresh energy and fresh starts, Easter is a time that we can look at sacrifice and resurrection. The Christian idea of resurrection isn’t just this funny “zombie Jesus” concept that many of us non-Christians joke about at Easter, but it’s the idea of putting yourself and your life through a trial by fire, so to speak, and coming out of it on the other end a new, transformed, and empowered soul.

Christian or not that’s a powerful concept and fitting for this time of the year at spring. It’s also something that I like to think of as “spring cleaning for the soul” and something that ALL of us would benefit from once a year, so why not have our own Easter or Resurrection Day even if it has nothing to do with the Christian concept of the holiday.

So take a few minutes today on this Easter and consider these ideas and share your thoughts in the comments below.

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