No, Easter Isn't Pagan

And the story of why folks think it is

There’s a certain kind of person who takes delight in revealing that everything you thought you knew about something is wrong. Christmas is just a pagan winter solstice festival with tinsel. The Founders were secretly all Deists. And, of course, Easter is really about ancient fertility rites and pagan goddess worship. Bunnies, eggs, and Jesus? That’s just a Babylonian sex cult with a cross stapled to it.

Well, I’m here to reclaim the holiday and let you know everything these people think about Easter is wrong. So the next time they try to flip the script, you can flip it back.

For years, I’ve heard the standard litany. The name “Easter” comes from some Germanic spring goddess. The bunny is a symbol of copulation. The eggs are fertility talismans. The whole thing, in fact, is just a pagan ritual to celebrate surviving another harsh winter by getting mighty drunk and “acting” like rabbits.

Except none of this is true.

The sole ancient source that links the word “Easter” to a pagan goddess is the 8th-century monk Bede, who wrote a book called De Temporum Ratione, or The Reckoning of Time. In it, Bede says that the Anglo-Saxons called April Ēosturmōnaþ, named after a goddess Ēostre, and that a festival was once held in her honor.

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month,” and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honor feasts were celebrated in that month.

That’s it. One line. No hymns, no temples, no surviving prayers or statues. Just Bede. And even that line may have been a back-formation — Bede seeing a word and inferring a goddess. Indeed, no other contemporary sources corroborate the existence of such a festival, or even the goddess herself. Other linguistic theories suggest the name “Easter” comes from the Proto-Germanic austrōn meaning “dawn” or “east.”

But the fact is, we simply do not know.

So where did this idea come from? Enter Alexander Hislop, a 19th-century Presbyterian minister with a vivid imagination and a deep hatred of the Catholic Church. In his 1853 book The Two Babylons, Hislop argued that Catholicism was essentially paganism in drag, and among his more imaginative claims was that Easter came from the worship of the Babylonian goddess of war and fertility Ishtar, who he falsely linked to Nimrod’s wife and every fertility cult in history.

This is the kind of thing you expect from a conspiracy YouTuber, not a theologian, but the myth stuck and became widely repeated, especially in anti-Catholic circles.

The actual holiday of Easter — and the word for it in most languages — in fact comes from Pascha, a Latinization of the Hebrew Pesach, or Passover. In other words, Easter is not a spring fertility festival hijacked by Christians, but a resurrection festival that grows directly out of the Jewish story of deliverance. Here is Exodus 12:13:

The blood shall be a sign for you, on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.

So while we aren’t entirely sure where the name comes from, we are entirely sure that the holiday comes from the Jewish celebration of the story of how Israelites in ancient Egypt saved their firstborn children from the final plague by marking their doorposts with lamb’s blood, as instructed by Moses. Jesus, understood in Christian theology as the new Passover lamb, becomes the center of a celebration not of seasonal lust, but of redemptive sacrifice. That’s what Easter is actually about.

Except then there’s the Easter Bunny. Surely that’s a pagan fertility symbol, right?

Nope. The first references to the “Osterhase” — a rabbit who lays colored eggs for well-behaved children — come from 17th-century Germany, and the tradition was brought to America by German immigrants in the 1700s. Rabbits had long been associated with fertility, but in a Christian context, they have long represented Mary because early Christians, such as Pliny the Elder, misunderstood the hare’s ability to conceive a second litter while pregnant with the first. In his Natural History, he writes:

The hare, which is preyed upon by all other animals, is the only one, except the dasypus, which is capable of superfetation; while the mother is suckling one of her young, she has another in the womb covered with hair, another without any covering at all, and another which is just beginning to be formed.

This phenomenon is known as superfetation, but early Christians mistook it for parthenogenesis, or virgin birth. As such, the hare became a companion symbol of Mary. In Titian’s 1530 painting Madonna of the Rabbit, for example, Mary is portrayed holding a white rabbit, symbolizing her purity and the mystery of the Incarnation.

Madonna of the Rabbit, Titian, 1530

Finally, we have the Easter egg, and that’s not pagan either. During Lent, eggs were one of the many foods traditionally forbidden. Come Easter, people had lots of eggs lying around, so they decorated them as part of the celebration feast. The egg, round and hollow, also became a symbol of Christ’s tomb, cracked open on Easter morning.

So no, Easter is not pagan. Its name might be a linguistic mystery, and its trappings might include bunnies and eggs, but its roots are profoundly Jewish and its meaning its entirely Christian. Not sex and spring, but death defeated and life renewed.

Happy Easter.