A Brief Meaning of Easter

There are several meanings about the origin of Easter, but the most persuasive argument appears to come from an English Monk, the Venerable Bede.   In his De Temporum Ratione, (the Reckoning of Time), completed in the 8th century it is the first written reference to the spring goddess Eostre.  Bede says the Pagan Anglo-Saxons called April ‘Eosturmonath’ after the goddess ‘Eostre’  and they celebrated feasts in her honour.

Bede isn’t the only theory.  In 1835 Jacob Grimm, one half of the Brother’s Grimm, relates his belief that Easter was linked with Ostara,  a Germanic goddess of the dawn.

Nearly every culture has it’s own way of celebrating the end of Winter and beginning of Spring.  The Christians were a clever lot though, they knew they had a better chance of converting people if they could give them annual festivals that mimicked old traditions.  They simply turned the ancient spring festival into the Christian Easter, marking Jesus’ return from the dead, which is taken from the symbolic death and rebirth of Osiris.  Today, the Pagan celebration is a major event once more.  Usually called Ostara, it’s one of the eight main annual festivals of the Wiccan year.

Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover by much of its symbolism, as well as by its position in the calendar.  In most European languages the feast called Easter, in English, is termed by the words for Passover in those languages and in the older English versions of the Bible the term Easter was the term used to translate Passover.

The idea of giving chocolate eggs first took place in the US during WW2.  The Easter bunny comes from different stories one being about Eostre being late arriving one spring and was very upset to find a poor bird had almost frozen to death because of the longer than normal winter.  The goddess resurrected the bird and in the shape of a hare named Lepus and mindful of his ornithological origins, gave him the power to lay eggs once a year at the spring equinox which is where the Easter Bunny and finding eggs comes from as children believed that Lepus.   The Romans believed that "All life comes from an egg." Christians consider eggs to be "the seed of life" and so they are symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Another story is from the fact that a hare’s fertility cycle is roughly 28 days, the same as the Lunar cycle.  The Lunar cycle helps to determine when Easter should fall - typically it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.
The ancient Egyptian heiroglyph for the verb ‘to exist’ is a hare, whilst the Romans believed that eating the animal’s flesh would boost your attractiveness to the opposite sex for nine days.

So there we go a VERY brief view of the origins of Easter.