Pagan Festival
Easter originally began as a Pagan festival, celebrating spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and long before Christianity. Ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome all embraced the religious rites that greatly resemble the holiday called Easter.

According to historian Alexander Hislop, a Free Church of Scotland minister, who was known for his criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church, wrote that the term Easter is not Christian, but rather Chaldean in origin. “It is not a Christian name. It bears its Chaldean origin. Chaldeans are Aramaic-speaking people indigenous to Iraq. They have a history that spans more than 5,500 years, dating back to Mesopotamia, known as the cradle of civilization, which is present day Iraq.

Ēostre or Ostara
The word Easter comes from the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and dawn – Ēostre, or Ostara, in whose honor an annual spring festival was held. Some of our Easter customs come from this and other pre-Christian spring festivals.

In Greece, Easter is called Pascha, in Italy and Spain it is called Pasqua, in France it is Paques, and in Denmark it is Paaske. In Germany and English-speaking countries like England and America, Easter took its name from the Pagan Goddess Ēostre – the goddess of spring and fertility. On the old Germanic calendar, the equivalent month to April was called “Ōstarmānod” – Easter-month.

The colorful eggs widely used during Easter, is about the old legend of a bird that was changed into a hare in the spring. The popular story involves the origin of the Easter Bunny. Essentially, the tale is that Ostara, the ancient Germanic goddess transformed a bird into a hare, and the hare responded by laying colored eggs for her festival.

Ēostre first makes her appearance around thirteen hundred years ago in literature the Venerable Bede’s Temporum Ratione. Venerable Bede tells us that April is known as Ēostremonath, and is named for a goddess that the Anglo-Saxons honored in the spring. He wrote, “Ēosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month.”

Bede the Venerable, was an English monk at the monastery of St Peter, and its companion monastery of St Paul in the Kingdom of Northumbria of the Angles. Bede was one of the greatest scholars of the Anglo-Saxon period.

After that, there isn’t much information about her, until Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm in the 1800s. Jacob told that he found evidence of Ēostre’s existence in the oral traditions of certain parts of Germany, but there’s no written proof.

According to Carole Cusack of the University of Sydney, Australia: The Goddess Ēostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Traditions: “it has been established that within medieval studies there is no one authoritative interpretation of Bede’s mention of Ēostre in DeTemporum Ratione. It is not possible to say, as it is of Woden, for example that the Anglo-Saxons definitely worshiped a goddess called Ēostre, who was probably concerned with the spring or the dawn.”

“Also, Ēostre doesn’t appear anywhere in Germanic mythology, and despite assertions that she might be a Norse deity, she doesn’t appear in the poetic or prose Eddas either. However, she could certainly have belonged to a tribal group in the Germanic areas, and her stories may have just been passed along through oral tradition. It’s fairly unlikely that Bede, who was a scholar as well as a Christian academic, could have made her up. However, it’s also possible that Bede misinterpreted a word, and that Ēostremonth was not named after a goddess, but after a spring festival.

Ēostre – The Connection Between Easter and Ishtar
St. Bede, an English Catholic monk, wrote, “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honor 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-honored name of the old observance (The Reckoning of Time, 725 CE).

Easter is quite similar to other major holidays like Christmas and Halloween, which have evolved over the last 200 years or so. In all of these holidays, Christian and non-Christian, or Pagan elements have continued to blend together.

In 325 CE, Emperor Constantine, who favored Christianity, convened a meeting of Christian leaders to resolve important disputes at the Council of Nicaea. The most fateful of its decisions was about the status of Christ, whom the council recognized as fully human and fully divine. This council also resolved that Easter should be fixed on a Sunday, not on day 14 of Nisan. As a result, Easter is now celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.

Astarte
Easter could also stand for Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of sexual love, and fertility, but also has associations with war. It is and one of the titles of the Queen of Heaven Beltis, whose name as pronounced by the people of Nineveh was evidently identical with that now in common use. The Canaanites burned offerings, and poured libations. Astarte, the goddess of war and sexual love, shared many qualities with her sister, Anath and they may originally have been thought of as a single deity.

Ishtar
The name found by Sir Austen Henry Layard, an English Assyriologist, traveler, cuneiformist, art historian, draughtsman, collector, politician, and diplomat, on the Assyrian monuments, was Ishtar.

Ishtar is the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex, and her symbols like the egg and bunny, were and still are fertility and sex symbols.

Ishtar, or Inanna in Sumerian, was a Mesopotamian goddess, whose worship is widely attested in historical and archaeological records. It is claimed that Christian celebrations of Easter were originally dedicated to Ishtar. This claim is based on the supposed similarity of the two words: Ishtar/Easter, and the role of Ishtar as a fertility goddess, Ishtar’s own death and resurrection, and the idea that Ishtar’s symbols were the rabbit and the egg.

Ishtar was the goddess of love and war and sex, as well as protection, fate, childbirth, marriage, and storms—there’s some fertility in there, but as with Aphrodite, there is also an element of power. Her cult practiced sacred prostitution, where women waited at a temple and had sex with a stranger in exchange for a divine blessing, and money to feed hungry children or pay a debt.

Ishtar’s symbols are the lion, the morning star, and eight or sixteen pointed stars—again, symbols of power.

The word Easter derived from Ēostre, the goddess of the dawn, and bringer of light. English and German are in the minority of languages that use a form of the word Easter to mark the holiday. Elsewhere, the observance is framed in Latin pascha, which is derived from the Hebrew pesach, meaning of or associated with Passover. Ishtar and Easter appear to be homophones: they may be pronounced similarly, but have different meanings. Ishtar doesn’t seem to be connected to eggs in any explicit way. However, there are plenty of other older traditions that involve the egg as a symbol of rebirth and feature it prominently in creation mythologies.

Creation Mythologies
Ancient Egyptians believed in a primeval egg from which the Sun god hatched. The Sun was sometimes compared to an egg, it was laid daily by the celestial goose, Seb – the god of the earth. The Phoenix is said to have emerged from this egg. The egg is also discussed in terms of a world egg, molded by Khnum from a lump of clay on his potter’s wheel.

Hinduism makes a connection between the content of the egg, and the structure of the Universe.: The shell represents the heavens, the whites the air, and the yolk Earth. The Chandogya Upanishads describes the act of creation in terms of the breaking of an egg:

The Sun is Brahma—this is the teaching. In the beginning this world was merely non-being. It was existent. It developed. It turned into an egg. It lay for the period of a year. It was split asunder. One of the two egg-shell parts became silver, one gold. That which was of silver is this Earth. That which was of gold is the sky … Now what was born there-from is yonder Sun.

In the Zoroastrian religion, the creation myth tells of an ongoing struggle between the principles of good and evil. During a lengthy truce of several thousand years, evil hurls himself into an abyss, and good lays an egg, which represents the Universe with the Earth suspended from the vault of the sky, at the midway point between where good and evil reside. Evil pierces the egg and returns to earth, and the two forces continue their battle.

In Finnish mythology, Luonnotar, the creator goddess, and Daughter of Nature, floats on the waters of the sea, minding her own business, when an eagle arrives, builds a nest on her knee, and lays several eggs. After a few days, the eggs begin to burn, and Luonnotar jerks her knee away, causing the eggs to fall and break. The pieces form the world as we know it: the upper halves form the skies, the lower the earth, the yolks become the Sun, and the whites become the moon.

In China, there are several legends that hold a cosmic egg at their center, including the idea that the first beings were born of eggs. The Palangs trace their ancestry to a Naga princess who laid three eggs, and the Chin would not kill the king crow because it laid the original Chin egg from which they emerged.

Mythology
The cosmic egg, according to the Vedic writings, has a spirit living within it, which will be born, die, and be born again. Certain versions describe Prajapati as forming the egg, and then appearing out of it himself, and Brahma does likewise

In the ancient legends of Thoth and Ra. Egyptian pictures of Osiris, the resurrected corn god, show him returning to life, once again rising up from the shell of a broken egg.

The ancient legend of the Phoenix is similar to the above one. This beautiful, mythical bird was said to live for hundreds of years. When its full lifespan was completed it died in flames, rising again in a new form from the egg it had laid.

The Phoenix was adopted as a Christian symbol in the first century CE. It appears on funeral stones in early Christian art, churches, religious paintings, and stonework.

As with many symbols, the Easter egg has continued to shift. When the Lenten fast was adopted in the third and fourth centuries, observant Christians abstained from dairy products – milk, cheese, butter, and eggs. In England, on the Saturday before Lent, it was common practice for children to go from door-to-door to beg for eggs, which were the last treat before the fast began.

The act of coloring eggs is tied to the idea of rebirth and resurrection. While egg decorating kits offer a vibrant means of decorating eggs, the link between life and eggs was traditionally made by using a red coloring. Among Christians, red symbolizes the blood of Jesus. Among Macedonians, it has been a tradition to bring a red egg to Church and eat it when the priest proclaims: “Christ is risen” at the Easter vigil and the Lent fast is officially broken.

Lent
Tammuz – the Sumerian Dumuzi, in Mesopotamian religion, god of fertility embodying the powers for new life in nature in the spring. The name Tammuz seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid, The Flawless Young, which in later standard Sumerian became Dumu-zid, or Dumuzi.  

The forty days of Lent can also possibly symbolize the 40-years that Tammuz lived. Since Lent ends with Easter when it is tradition to eat ham. This symbolizes the remembrance of Tammuz, who was killed by a wild boar.

Christianity
Despite having its roots in Paganism, Easter was a festival that later professing Christian leaders came to embrace, and claiming it as their own. According to Grolier’s Encyclopedia, the leaders of the church, became more than willing to adopt ancient Pagan customs into their worship.

The name of this holiday called Easter, and the time it is celebrated have led many to believe that an earlier holiday existed on this day, before the Christian observance.

Ancient nations joyously celebrated the end of winter, and the resurrection of the sun, and some devoted the festival to Ēostre, Germanic goddess of spring. The Christian Church fathers turned this holiday into the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Jesus.

Many believe that these “church fathers” embraced the symbols of Easter for strategic reasons. These religious leaders believed that the only way they could persuade the Pagan world to accept Christianity, was by adopting many of the rituals the new converts held dear.

“The church, while intolerant of Pagan beliefs, was able to harness the powerful emotions generated by Pagan worship. Often, churches were sited where temples had stood before, and many heathen festivals were added to the Christian calendar. Easter, for instance, was a time of sacrifice and rebirth in the Christian year, and takes its name from the goddess Ēostre, in whose honor rites where held every spring. She in turn was simply a northern version of the Phoenician earth-mother Astarte, goddess of fertility.” (The Last Two Million Years, 1981, p. 215)

Easter was originally the celebration of Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of fertility and sex. Her symbols like the egg and the bunny were and still are fertility and sex symbols. After Constantine decided to Christianize the Empire, Easter was changed to represent Jesus, but at its roots, Easter, which is how you pronounce Ishtar, is about celebrating sex and fertility. What gives credence to this argument in the minds of many is the idea that the Church takes Pagan practices and symbols and baptize them by adopting them to fit into the contexts of the faith.

It is well known that under the Roman Empire, Christianity did adopt the Pagan rituals of conquered peoples in an effort to help convert them. It worked pretty well as a strategy as it allowed the conquered peoples to continue a semblance of their observances as they remembered, and with time the population would be replaced with those who only knew the new traditions.

How Easter Was Adopted Into Christianity
Around mid-300 CE, Christianity was increasing in popularity in Rome, then the center of the world. In 312, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and put an end to the ongoing persecution of Christians. However, he knew that just because he had converted, it didn’t mean that Pagans would stop following their rituals and traditions. So he slowly started to adopt existing Pagan rituals into Christian festivities. In 325 CE, the church council – known as the Council of Nicaea – first decided that Easter’s celebration should fall on the Sunday after the first full moon of the spring equinox. And thus Easter Sunday was born, and symbols associated with nature’s rebirth and renewal came to be associated with the rebirth or resurrection of Christ.

The Easter Bunny and Easter Eggs
In early America, Easter festival was popular among Catholics than Protestants. The New England Puritans regarded both Easter and Christmas as too tainted by non-Christian influences to be appropriate to celebrate. These festivals tended to be opportunities for heavy drinking and merrymaking.

The fortunes of both holidays changed in the 19th century, when they became occasions to be spent with one’s family. This was done partly out of a desire to make the celebration of these holidays less rowdy.

Both Easter and Christmas were restructured as domestic holidays, because the understandings of children were changing. Prior to the 17th century, children were rarely the center of attention. As historian Stephen Nissenbaum writes,

  “…children were lumped together with other members of the lower orders in general, especially servants and apprentices – who, not coincidentally, were generally young people themselves.”

From the 17th century onward, there was an increasing recognition of childhood as time of life that should be joyous, not simply as preparatory for adulthood. This “discovery of childhood” and the doting upon children had profound effects on how Easter was celebrated.

It is at this point in the holiday’s development that Easter eggs and the Easter bunny become especially important. Decorated eggs had been part of the Easter festival since medieval times, given the obvious symbolism of new life. A vast amount of folklore surrounds Easter eggs, and in a number of Eastern European countries, the process of decorating them is extremely elaborate. Several Eastern European legends describe eggs turning red, which is a favorite color for Easter eggs, in connection with the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In the 17th century a German tradition of an “Easter hare” bringing eggs to good children came to be known. Hares and rabbits have a long association with spring seasonal rituals, because of their amazing powers of fertility. When German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania in the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought this tradition with them. The wild hare also became supplanted by the more docile and domestic rabbit, and another indication of how the focus moved toward children.

University of Sydney Professor Carole Cusack
“Since pre-historic times, people have celebrated the equinoxes and the solstices as sacred times.

The spring equinox is a day where the amount of dark and the amount of daylight is exactly identical, so you can tell that you’re emerging from winter because the daylight and the dark have come back into balance. People mapped their whole life according to the patterns of nature.”

Following the advent of Christianity, the Easter period became associated with the resurrection of Christ.

“In the first couple of centuries after Jesus’ life, feast days in the new Christian church were attached to old Pagan festivals.

Spring festivals with the theme of new life, and relief from the cold of winter became connected explicitly to Jesus having conquered death by being resurrected after the crucifixion.”

Easter’s Changing Date
In 325 CE, the Council of Nicaea determined that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

“That is why the date moves and why Easter festivities are often referred to as moveable feasts. There’s a defined period between March 25 and April 25 on which Easter Sunday must fall, and that’s determined by the movement of the planets and the Sun.”

Pascha, Easter, and The Goddess of Spring
In most countries in Europe, the name for Easter is derived from the Jewish festival of Passover.

“So in Greek the feast is called Pascha, in Italian Pasqua, in Danish it is Paaske, and in French it is Paques,” Professor Cusack said.

But in English-speaking countries, and in Germany, Easter takes its name from a Pagan goddess from Anglo-Saxon England who was described in a book by the eighth-century English monk Bede.

“Ēostre was a goddess of spring, or renewal, and that’s why her feast is attached to the vernal equinox,” Professor Cusack said.

“In Germany the festival is called Ostern, and the goddess is called Ostara.”

Rabbits and Eggs – Ancient Symbols of New Life
Many of the Pagan customs associated with the celebration of spring eventually became absorbed within Christianity as symbols of the resurrection of Jesus.

“Eggs, as a symbol of new life, became a common people’s explanation of the resurrection; after the chill of the winter months, nature was coming to life again,” Professor Cusack said.

During the Middle Ages, people began decorating eggs and eating them as a treat following mass on Easter Sunday after fasting through Lent.

This is actually something that still happens, especially in eastern European countries like Poland. The custom of decorating hard-boiled eggs or glass-blown eggs is still a very popular folk custom.

The first association of the rabbit with Easter, according to Professor Cusack, was a mention of the “Easter hare” in a book by German professor of medicine Georg Franck von Franckenau published in 1722.

He recalls folklore that “hares would hide the colored eggs that children hunted for, which suggests to us that as early as the 18th century, decorated eggs were hidden in gardens for egg hunts,” Professor Cusack said.

Commercialization, Confectionery, and Greeting Cards
Due to commercialization during the 19th century, rabbits become a popular symbol of Easter, together with the growth of the greeting card industry. Postage services were affordable, and people wanted to keep in touch. Hallmark grew big by launching images of cute little rabbits and Easter eggs on cards.

In the 19th century, the first edible Easter bunnies were made in Germany from sugared pastry, and Cadbury confectionery company in England began manufacturing chocolate eggs. Chocolate that used to be bitter and only drunk, became sweetened and turned into a sweet treat; chocolate Easter eggs were marketed.

Today, chocolate eggs and egg hunts are a popular part of Easter celebrations around the world.

Why Easter is Celebrated With Eggs
Eggs represent new life and rebirth, and it’s thought that this ancient custom became a part of Easter celebrations. In the medieval period, eating eggs was forbidden during Lent – the 40 days before Easter, but on Easter Sunday, eating an egg was a real treat.

Eggs occupy a special status during Easter observances, because they’re symbols of rebirth and renewal. In this regard it is a handy symbol for the resurrection of Jesus, but it is a symbol that has held this meaning long before Christianity adopted it.

Easter Spending in the United States in 2022 by Statista
This statistic displays consumers’ total planned Easter spending in the United States from 2009 to 2022. In 2022, U.S. consumers planned to spend just under 21 billion U.S. dollars on the occasion, a slight decrease compared to 2021. Back in 2009, total planned Easter spending was estimated to reach fewer than 13 billion U.S. dollars.

This statistic shows consumers’ planned Easter spending in the United States in 2022, by product category. In 2022, U.S. consumers planned to spend approximately three billion U.S. dollars on candy as part of their Easter celebrations.

Households with children were expected to spend an average of $250 on the holiday. From Easter egg hunts and gatherings with loved ones to new spring outfits for the entire family, nearly nine in 10 consumers with children planned to celebrate the holiday in 2022.

In 2021, American consumers planned to spend about 2.98 billion U.S. dollars on candy for Easter.

$20.8 Billion: Total Easter-related spending expected in 2022 ($170 per person celebrating. $1.9 billion on Easter candy.