The Pagan Origins of Easter

So, what’s the real story behind Easter and what on earth do Easter Eggs and Easter Bunnies have to do with the resurrection of Jesus?🥚🐰 ✝️

Well, nothing, as it turns out..

The Goddess called Easter

According to the Venerable Bede (673 – 735 AD), Easter isn’t a Christian word at all.. In his eighth-century treatise, The Reckoning of Time, he maintains that the name “Easter” actually derives from the name of a pagan spring goddess called Ēostre (pronounced “oos-ta-ra”), who was widely venerated in England before the arrival of Christianity.

The Easter Hare

The worship of Ēostre is also a probable source of our modern day Easter bunny, since her sacred animal was said to be the hare, itself symbolic of the coming of spring. This makes a lot of sense, given that there is no tenable link between Christian tradition and rabbits and the latter did not arrive in Britain until after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Easter Eggs

Like rabbits, eggs also seem to play no part in Jesus tradition and their association is difficult to assess. Christian sources claim that Easter eggs originated in Mesopotamia, where eggs were painted red to commemorate the blood of Christ. Modern paganism, meanwhile, maintains that Easter eggs derive from a myth wherein Ēostre saves the life of a dying bird by transforming it into a hare. Having once been a bird, the hare retained its ability to lay eggs, which it dutifully laid at her feet every spring equinox thereafter.

Historically, neither explanation has much to commend it and the latter is most likely a neo-pagan invention from the 19th century, perhaps based on an earlier myth about the equivalent German goddess, Ostara.

There is, however, an alternative, more rational explanation for Easter eggs and even egg-laying hares that may not stretch credulity..

Quail Eggs and Hare Nests

Hares are commonly found in large, open grasslands and fields. Unlike rabbits, they do not burrow but dig out depressions in the ground where they sleep and have their young. These hare nests (known as forms) can be very attractive to ground-nesting birds such as lapwings, which share the same environment and are known to sometimes borrow abandoned hare nests to lay their eggs in.

Before being protected in 1921, lapwing eggs (then known as quail eggs) were an important supplement to the British rural diet and collecting them was a seasonal event that is remembered in the Easter egg hunt still enjoyed by children today. Could it be that egg collectors of yore (most likely children), stumbling upon hare nests, occasionally containing lapwing eggs, are another probable source for the origin of the Easter egg/bunny tradition?

We may never know for sure.. but a pagan spring goddess called Ēostre (“oos-ta-ra”) who was believed to take the form of a hare, combined with a bygone annual hunt for quail eggs (occasionally found in hare nests) seems a far better explanation for the origins of Easter than the alleged resurrection of a crucified man, whose story has no resonance whatever with either hares, eggs or even the name Easter..

By the time of the Venerable Bede, all pagan festivals in England had been abolished or rebranded as overtly Christian feast days. Ironically, these festivals are now being reclaimed by neo-pagan faiths, such as Wicca, while Christianity, the religion that appropriated these festivals for its own dogmatic ends, is now, itself, in sharp decline, a fact that must now have the Venerable Bede turning in his grave..

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