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The Pagan Origins of Easter
By Adam Bartlett
Every year when Easter comes around I struggle a little more as I do with Christmas. I see all the stores advertising all their sales and all the decorations and all the revenue that it is bringing these stores. That is capitalism at its best and it is the direction of America, and unfortunately now it is also the direction of the "church." Each year as Christians (who are the church) sit back and continue to allow pagan rituals to be exercised with our church's blessing we open the doors for more and more error to enter.
It is not that there is such a detrimental effect on our children by allowing them to hunt for colored eggs or even believe the lie we propagate that bunnies laid them. It is the more subtle point that we are teaching our children that something false is acceptable if we do it under the guise of, and in connection with a day that is supposed to be "holy" in our remembrance. Why is it that something with pagan origins must be included in the two days we honor most, Easter and Christmas?
I tend to believe it is like most other things we continue to allow in our churches and homes with the flimsy excuse of "it's always been that way, why change it." I guess the point I am trying to make is that our mentality must change or we may as well forget about true holiness.
Jesus made a statement that we seem to take for granted:
John 15
14: Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.
Notice the condition on this: "IF" you do what I command you. He also made statements about our friendship with the world.
18: If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.
19: If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.
20: Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.
21: But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake, because they know not him that sent me.
22: If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin: but now they have no cloke for their sin.
23: He that hateth me hateth my Father also.
I hope you understand the importance of what these statements mean to one that claims to be a Christian. We cannot serve two masters and no matter what the excuse or justification pagan practices have absolutely no place in God's house or His children. What will it take for us as Christians to forget about what others might say or think and stand up for the truth and for holiness?
That is what the purpose of the church is supposed to be a place that teaches and exhorts us to personal holiness yet how can that happen when it is full of pagan practices and lukewarm participants?
If you have gotten this far then I encourage you to read the following articles about the origins of Easter. It is not hard to find this information just go to any search engine and type in, "pagan origins of Easter."
Please consider your spiritual condition and how allowing these practices could be hurting it.
In Christ, Adam
The Pagan origins of the Easter Bunny
Have you ever wondered where the celebration of the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Christ acquired its unusual name and odd symbols of colored eggs and rabbits?
The answer lies in the ingenious way that the Christian church absorbed Pagan practices. After discovering that people were more reluctant to give up their holidays and festivals than their gods, they simply incorporated Pagan practices into Christian festivals. As recounted by the Venerable Bede, an early Christian writer, clever clerics copied Pagan practices and by doing so, made Christianity more palatable to pagan folk reluctant to give up their festivals for somber Christian practices.
In second century Europe, the predominate spring festival was a raucous Saxon fertility celebration in honor of the Saxon Goddess Eastre (Ostara), whose sacred animal was a hare.
The colored eggs associated with the bunny are of another, even more ancient origin. The eggs associated with this and other Vernal festivals have been symbols of rebirth and fertility for so long the precise roots of the tradition are unknown, and may date to the beginning of human civilization. Ancient Romans and Greeks used eggs as symbols of fertility, rebirth, and abundance- eggs were solar symbols, and figured in the festivals of numerous resurrected gods.
Pagan fertility festivals at the time of the Spring equinox were common- it was believed that at this time, when day and night were of equal length, male and female energies were also in balance. The hare is often associated with moon goddesses; the egg and the hare together represent the god and the goddess, respectively.
Moving forward fifteen hundred years, we find ourselves in Germany, where children await the arrival of Oschter Haws, a rabbit who will lay colored eggs in nests to the delight of children who discover them Easter morning. It was this German tradition that popularized the 'Easter bunny' in America, when introduced into the American cultural fabric by German settlers in Pennsylvania.
Many modern practitioners of Neo-pagan and earth-based religions have embraced these symbols as part of their religious practice, identifying with the life-affirming aspects of the spring holiday. (The Neopagan holiday of Ostara is descended from the Saxon festival.) Ironically, some Christian groups have used the presence of these symbols to denounce the celebration of the Easter holiday, and many churches have recently abandoned the Pagan moniker with more Christian oriented titles like 'Resurrection Sunday.'
The Pagan Origins of Easter
By Royce Carlson
Easter celebrations were held hundreds of years before Christ was born as festivals of spring honoring Eostre, the great mother goddess of the Saxons. This name was fashioned after the ancient word for spring, Eastre. The goddess Ostara was the Norse equivalent whose symbols were the hare and the egg. From this comes our modern tradition of celebrating Easter with eggs and bunnies.
In the Mediterranean region, there was a pre-Christian spring celebration centered around the vernal equinox (March 20 or 21) that honored Cybele, the Phrygian goddess of fertility. Cybele's consort, Attis, was considered born of a virgin and was believed to have died and been resurrected three days later. Attis derived his mythology from even earlier gods, Osiris, Dionysus, and Orpheus, who also were supposed to have been born of a virgin and suffered death and resurrection as long as 500 years before Christ was born. The death of Attis was commemorated on a Friday and the resurrection was celebrated three days later on Sunday.
There are other Easter traditions that are pagan in origin. The Easter sunrise service is derived from the ancient pagan practice of welcoming the sun on the morning of the spring equinox, marking the beginning of spring. What we now call Easter lilies were revered by the ancients as symbols of fertility and representative of the male genitalia. The ancient Babylonian religions had rituals involving dyed eggs as did the ancient Egyptians.
The Christian version of Easter is celebrated after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Modern day neo-pagans usually have their spring celebrations on the day of the equinox. Either way, these celebrations have gone on every year continuously for over 2500 years. So, next Sunday, if you go to an Easter sunrise service, hunt for colored eggs or eat marshmallow bunnies, remember you are indulging in pagan rituals that celebrate fertility and the advent of springtime!
The Origins of Easter
So why is Easter called 'Easter' and not something like 'Resurrection Day' or 'Christmas Part II:The Rebirth'. The answer lies in the Easter's Pagan roots, which go back much farther than the Christian version of the holiday. The word Easter comes from the name of the ancient Babylonian Goddess Ishtar, which was pronounced like Easter. She was the Goddess of fertility whom the Babylonians believed had given birth to the world.
There's an interesting legend of Ishtar in which she goes down to the Underworld to find her brother/lover/son Tammuz who had died in the summer. There Ishtar meets her sister, Ereshkigal the Queen of the Underworld. Ereshkigal imprisoned Ishtar and released diseases on her. While Ishtar was imprisoned all procreation on Earth ceased. To save life on Earth, the God Ea sent a messenger to the Underworld to ask Ereshkigal to give Ishtar the water of life. Ereshkigal sprinkled the water of life on Ishtar which allowed her to live for six months, after which she had to return to the Underworld again for six months, after which they could receive the water of life again and get six more months of life before repeating the process all over. This legend explained the seasonal cycles, and every year around the spring equinox the people celebrated Ishtar's resurrection. The hare and the egg were ancient symbols of fertility and often played a part in these celebrations.
The legends and names of Ishtar spread and mutated over time. The Assyrian variation of Ishtar was the Goddess Astarte, who was said to have laid the Golden Egg that made the sun. The Anglo-Saxon variant was called Eostre. She was the Goddess of Spring and had a sacred hare companion. One legend said that Eostre had saved a wounded bird by transforming it into a hare, but after the transformation the hare still layed eggs like a bird. It was in Germany that parents began telling their children that if they were good, on Easter Eve the Easter Bunny would hide decorated eggs for them to find.
Another telling sign of Easter's pagan origins is that it's celebration is not on a specific date, but rather on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Sundays(dedicated to the Sun God), full moons, and the equinoxes/solstices were all very important to Pagan religions.
For the first few centuries of Christianity, its followers celebrated Christ's resurrection not on Easter but on the traditional Jewish Passover. When the Romans started forcing everyone to convert to Christianity, the people resisted because they did not want to give up their traditional celebrations. In a cunning move, the Catholic Church began celebrating the resurrection on Easter. Other changes included switching the holy day from the Sabbath(Saturday) to Sunday, and celebrating Christ's birth on December 25th, a day Pagans celebrated the birth of the Sun God. This strategy was a compromise that gave the Christian religion a kind of backwards compatibility, making it easier for the people to convert.
Because of the pagan origins of the holiday, some Christians consider it's celebration to be a blasphemous abomination. It's interesting to me that even though humanity seems completely different than a few thousand years ago, some remnants of our ancient ancestor's practices are still hidden in our society's traditions.
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