By the Gods!
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Eostre and Easter
The Easter weekend isn’t over yet, folks. Time to get your learnin’ on. Ever wonder where the name “Easter” came from? The Germanic goddess Eostre gets the credit on that one. She was a goddess of fertility and plenty, and the Anglo-Saxons had a month named after her. For all of us on the Gregorian calendar, that’d match up with April. Anglo-Saxon and Northern European festivals for the Easter-month (the “Eostre-monath”) involved eggs and hares, and these came to be attached to Eostre herself. What with it being a spring festival and all, located on or around the Equinox, themes of birth and fertility were only natural. Hard to beat rabbits when it comes to fertility, I suppose.
Now, how did Eostre get attached to the Christian celebration of the resurrection? Well, the Church was a big fan of re-appropriating pagan holidays. They took Lupercalia and made it a Saint’s celebration day, took the festival of Sol Invictus and made it Christmas; they were pros when it came to this stuff.
The Catholic Church determined that they would bring the Jewish festival of Passover and the Christian observance of the resurrection together. This was done under the vigil of the Roman Emperor Constantine (the first Christian Emperor), at the first Council of Nicaea. The title of “Easter month” was taken from the pagans, as the Church observed its use in Northern Europe, and sought to both marginalize the pagan celebration and indoctrinate/accommodate new pagan subjects.
And there you have it. Sorry, Eostre, but they took your month. Somehow the rabbits and eggs stuck around, though.
A friend recently asked what the deal was with the whole “Saturn-eating-his-kids” thing. Saturn, henceforth referred to as Cronus (his original name from Greek antiquity) was told a prophesy that his son would destroy and usurp him. To prevent this, as soon as Rhea, his wife, birthed a child, he swallowed it. Zeus, the last child of Cronus and Rhea, was secretly given to Gaia for safekeeping, while Rhea dressed up a rock in baby clothes and fed that to the inattentive Cronus.
Zeus grows up, frees his brothers and sisters, and would wage a war on Cronus and the Titans ending in Zeus’ ascension to the throne of Olympus, and the casting of the Titans into the pits of Tartarus.
The above pictures are both titled Saturn Devouring His Son.
The Triumph of Venus, Francis Boucher, 1740
The most common myth surrounding the birth of Aphrodite is that of her being born from the discarded genitals of Uranus (the sky). Uranus’s son, Cronus, was asked by his mother Gaia (the earth) to castrate his father after he imprisoned some of her children. After castrating and overthrowing him as supreme leader, he tossed his father’s genitals in the ocean, and thus Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, was born.
The castration of Uranus (or Ouranos) was also how the Furies came into being. Aphrodite was born from the seafoam that sprung from the genitals-at-sea, and the drops of blood gave birth to the Furies! Yes indeed, this means that both Aphrodite and the Furies are powers much older than Zeus and the other Olympians! At least, according to Hesiod…
Pluto (Hades’ Roman designation) by Agostino Carracci
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