Monday 1 April 2019

Easter and May day are pagan





Now begins Eastermonth! This is an entire month which the Anglo-Saxons devoted to the goddess Ēastre. Her name is not, as some erroneously claim, related to the Semitic goddess Ishtar, nor to the hormone estrogen, but is in fact Germanic. Ēastre, or as she is known in modern English, "Easter" was equivalent to the continental German goddess Ostara and both names are derived from that of the ancient Indo-European goddess of dawn *H₂ewsṓs (→ *Ausṓs), from whom the Vedic goddess of dawn, Ushas, is also derived. One of the holy names of Ushas was Bṛhatī (बृहती) "high" which is cognate with Proto-Celtic *Brigantī meaning "The High One", and the name of a British goddess Brigantia (Brigid). The Greek goddess Ēōs, Baltic goddess Aušrinė and Roman goddess Aurora are all etymologically derived from the same IE word and likely from the same PIE goddess. The month is attested by Anglo-Saxon monk Bede, who said feasts of the goddess were celebrated in April, but when we can only guess. There is no reason to believe it was on the exact day Christians now celebrate Easter. Some aspects of Christian Easter resemble paganism because the symbolism of eternal life and rebirth are important for both. The Roman pagans had a flower festival called Floralia on 27th April which may well have had equivalents in Britain, but surely the largest celebration for the dawn goddess was at the end of the Easter month on the eve of May day which heralds the dawn of summer. I consider May day, or specifically the night before it, to be the climax of Eastermonth and a holy celebration to this sacred goddess. I have covered the diverse celebration of May day around the world in a video already (see link below). The photo above is shows the May queen in Devon in 1955, a young girl who symbolises the dawn goddess Easter who heralds the start of Summer, and the May pole which is a phallic fertility symbol.

I would also speculate that since, in Celtic and Germanic countries, the folk culture around May eve has focused heavily on sexuality, even in recent times, usually of an unbridled sort normally prohibited by Christian morality, and since the cult of Aurora was often invoked in sexual poetry, we might well assume that the cult of Easter had a heavy emphasis on the sexuality and fertility of young people, especially women. The Greek Eos was cursed by Aphrodite with unsatisfiable sexual desire causing her to abduct handsome young men - a promiscuity very reminiscent of an account of May eve among the English in the early modern era by a puritan who wrote that on that night "Scarcely a third of maidens going to the woods returned home undefiled", similar account are recorded in Ireland. The fecundity of the earth is tied explicitly to that of the wombs of nubile girls of the community. For this reason a sort of transgressive sexuality becomes temporarily permissible due to the divine associations of sex on this night.

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