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
mirabilos@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 I’d take her more serious without the two (!) crosses on extra display.
Around 2:40 she loses the plot. Yes, age 8, but there’s still the possibility of having acquired knowledge from the household, and we all are sad that knowledge from those times was not generally preserved in writing (or whatever writing was on hasn’t endured, or was burnt by people like her, etc).
I would be interested in UPG from people-with-some-credibility about these, though.
What she does here is try to approach this with a double-role of christian scholar and evidence-based historian. Everything else does not count in her eyes.
Around 3:40 she completely loses it again.
As for rabbits, mediæval people associated them with the Virgin Mary because mediæval people thought that rabbits experienced virgin birth.
I have been assured by farm-type people, lady, that people living in such a setting (mediæval farm-type) know intimately well where offspring (especially of lifestock) comes from. (Now, people who’ve grown up in cloisters from age 8… might not know well, unless they were assigned to the section (out of sight, out of mind) who cared for theirs, instead of being their scholars and historians.) (This point does of course not prove a connection between rabbits and Ēostre-or-what-have you, but it does sow sufficient doubt in the presentation of a whole and her methods. (And, in fact, the whole rabbits-and-eggs to fertility link never sat well with me anyway, but hips (think of that Venus-of-someplace statue from prehistoric times) and things… are.)
Roughly a thousand years after the conversation to Christianity
She’s not aware of…
- conversation because the higher-ups say so, but we believe anyway
- folk belief
- …
…, is she? She sounds like one of these evangelical narrow-minded ivy tower preachers here. (Again, not arguing in favour of that specific link. But, substrates exist, as does merging of “local traditions” (nice euphemism) and “christian” holidays.)
… I cannot believe I didn’t DNF this.
@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 and then there’s this whole other point (which a double-crossing (literally) christian like her could not conceive):
If, over hundreds of years, enough people associated eggs and hares with Ēostre and/or fertility… it now is an aspect of this pagan goddess. (Even if those people did not self-identify as pagans. In those times, it was safer to do the christian thing (in the flavour the current people-with-the-weapons prescribed, catholic, protestant/evangelical/lutheran, orthodox, …) and call the rest “folk belief”; this has a long tradition, and lots of catholic and orthodox practices stem from it.
It’s not as if paganism were a thing of the past.
@mirabilos @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 She literally writes historical fiction about paganism. It's amazing the assumptions you have made about a woman based on one video that has a conclusion you don't agree with.
@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 she presents an extremely christian standpoint though, so at best historic paganism as she can find in literature, when literature was written by monks and paganism was lived by the then-illiterate people.
@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 oh wait, you’re in the same boat, according to your profile. Look, can you just… not? Peace, and all. And not diminish threads about traditions that aren’t yours. Thanks.
Antonio Patriarca@mirabilos @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 It seems to me you are the one blinded by faith. You are dismissing a person giving a detailed analysis of something, someone who has shown effort in studying the topic, based on her faith. Your only argument is basically "she is Christian and thus surely biased and wrong". You are complaining that she may have ignored the possibility that something existed without being ever put into writing for centuries. While possible, believing it to be necessarily true and exactly as you think it is is basically the definition of faith. And even assuming this Eostre existed, Easter didn't come from England. So, at best, we had two distinct festivities merged into a single one when the (originally Jewish) festivity, later Christian, arrived in England. And before you start saying I am also Christian, I am atheist.
@antopatriarca @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 have you read my analysis of the video and the multiple arguments I brought?
(And calling “there’s un-written-down things as well, keep an open mind, and especially if there’s people carrying this for hundreds of years it’s a pagan thing now” “blinded by faith”… I don’t think it’s justifyable even when not following the argument.)
And even assuming this Eostre existed, Easter didn't come from England.
Yes, of course not.
@mirabilos @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 I did, and it looked extremely biased and angry. As much as the video. To be honest, the entire argument is quite moot. Most festivities have elements borrowed from many sources. The way Easter is celebrated varies widely around the world, for example. The Easter Bunny basically doesn't exist where I grew up (Italy). From what I read, it seems to be a mostly Protestant variation born in Germany in the 1600s. It may or may not come from an originally pagan tradition. It certainly doesn't define Easter, however. Easter existed way before it. Eggs are also celebrated in Italy, and it seems to be a much older tradition. There is no consensus on the origin. It does, however, seem unlikely that both the bunny and the eggs share the same origin and are thus associated with the same Pagan deity. If they were, why was one well documented from the Medieval times and the other has only appeared in more modern times and only in Germany? I would then think that what those German folklorists said was mostly BS. The original Bede text may be, however, true. The etymology of the word Easter may have originated from a previous festivity or a deity's name. It is, in fact, very different from the Hebrew and Latin name.
@antopatriarca @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 that is… not very different from what I wrote, though? The Bede thing may be true, everything else came later. Only you don’t want to allow for modern paganism.
@mirabilos @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 That is not very different from what the video said either.
@antopatriarca @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 she was not even willing to keep eyes open (only historic accounts as written proof).
@mirabilos @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay @Meerkat26 You seem equally unwilling to accept that there is little evidence for your belief.