The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

... another thing that Easter originated from a Teutonic goddes (Ester i think it was?) and just put the ,,Jesus Christ ressurected that day so yeah''

The name Easter: One common complaint here is “But Easter is from the name of an Anglo-Saxon Goddess! It must have been stolen from the Pagans!” The reality is that this is a very English-language-centric view of the world. In most languages, the name for Easter as a festival is derived from the word Pascha, or the Hebrew for lamb. (Which makes perfect sense for a festival in which the blood of lambs is smeared on the doors to protect your first born child.) Beyond that, it’s not clear from the sources we have whether Eostre in the way that Bede took the word for the English term Easter was actually a goddess, or Bede misunderstanding a more general term for the season, or what. (Hutton goes into this.)

I think that "stole" is rather a strong word; it suggests malice aforethought. You must remember that nearly every early Christian was a pagan convert

Hello, as you can see i'm a Norse Pagan/Asatru.

I growed up in a Orthodox Christian family and as you can see i was Christian,until..

Lets get to the point.

I started listening to Wardruna (Norse Folk Music, most of the members are Norse Pagan i think) and basically i was sitting in a park where i saw a raven landed right before me staring at me for maybe 5 seconds until it took off.

I searched and searched and find out that Odin (The Main god in Norse religion) has two ravens,Huggin and Munnin that he sends to Midgard (our Planet) to check out on people.

I became so interested in Norse Pagan religion that i just had to ,,convert'' (as somebody said, if you want to conver to Paganism just go to the woods!).

I just abandoed Christianity, i saw that i don't want to worship a god that i need to kneel to and gets all the credits while in this religion we are all equal.

Example: Hel (Helvegen) is a normal meading hall, while Christians stole it, putted another L (Hell) and put some fire and pain in it, i don't want that kind of religion, another thing that Easter originated from a Teutonic goddes (Ester i think it was?) and just put the ,,Jesus Christ ressurected that day so yeah'', in my case easter is named Ostara after the godess!

Whilst listening to Wardruna's music i just got all the goosebumps that you can get and felt that i can do anything whilst listening to their music.

And of course your ancestral roots are almost certainly 100% Pagan, that's my story, sorry for some grammar errors but hel, we do make mistakes don't we?

Except that English and German (and a very few other Germanic and some Slavic languages, but not all or even most) are the only ones that refer to it as Easter/Ostern or similar words; the overwhelming majority of languages call it by some variant of the Greek 'Pascha'/Hebrew 'Pesach', Passover (and a few use terms not related to either 'Pascha' or 'Easter'). What the Christian holiday - by whatever name - originated from, is Passover, and Pascha/Resurrection Sunday was celebrated long before the conversion of any Germanic-language-speaking peoples or the application of the word 'Easter' to the day.

See under 'Easter' in this article:


See also the Wikipedia article on Names of Easter, and vast amounts of further info can be found here.

That doesn't mean you can't call your own springtime celebration 'Easter' and associate it with Ostara - you definitely can! But you don't need to justify doing so by adopting counterfactual claims about it; it's entirely reasonable, and much more accurate, to think of the Germanic word(s) as meaning 'spring festival', and their use in Christian contexts in those particular languages to be an extension of that (because Pascha was a spring celebration).

Sunflower