Natasha 🇮🇪🇪🇺🏳️🌈The true meaning of Easter, by Stephen Collins (who writes his own amazing #AltText)
"PAGAN GODDESS: Aisle four is full of products, with no hint of the true meaning of the festival!
BECKY: You mean … Jesus …?
PAGAN GODDESS: I mean shagging, Vicky."
Scott Williams 🐧@Natasha_Jay For what it's worth, I very recently saw that this might not actually be true. I thought it was for decades though, because it does make a lot of sense.
Easter is NOT pagan
Pozorvlak@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay the name "Easter" may derive from that of an Anglo-Saxon goddess, but we have almost no evidence for that - literally two lines in a history written by a medieval monk who had no first-hand knowledge of paganism. The festival (which in every non-Germanic European language is called some variant of "Pesach") is certainly not derived from Eostre's rites, if they even existed. See the series of posts starting at https://cavalorn.livejournal.com/502368.html
(I enjoyed the comic, though!)
@pozorvlak @Natasha_Jay And "paschal" which comes from pesach, which is the Hebrew word for Passover, which overlaps with Holy Week. That is not a coincidence.
Sveinn í Felli@pozorvlak @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay In Icelandic we have "Páskar" which is the same word, but until recently (meaning a couple of centuries) it was often preceded with something related to "spring" because there was another period of festivities celebrating the rise of the sun - that one was called "Vetrarpáskar" or the "winter-easter". Christmas was just one of the masses occurring at the winter-easter period, more commonly called "Jól", and plenty of other saints had their mass in that period.
mirabilos@pozorvlak @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay eh, Pesach is hebrew and Pascha is Aramaic (there was a map on this recently on Fedi). Neither are used in German-speaking regions.
goedelchen@goedelchen oh, interesting! I think the map @mirabilos is talking about is the one at https://brilliantmaps.com/easter-name-europe/ - it's not quite as simple as "all non-Germanic languages call it some variant of Pesach" (for instance, cz/sk/pl call it "Velikonoce", meaning "Great Night"), but Eostre/Ostara is confined to Germanic languages. So, it's interesting that not all varieties of German use Ostara-variants!
