The origins of Easter

The Daily Telegraph reports this, concerning a booklet on Easter produced by English Heritage:

Under the heading The Origins of Easter, it states: “Did you know Easter started as a celebration of spring? Long ago, people welcomed warmer days and new life by honouring the goddess Eostre, who gave Easter its name!”

It adds: “Fun Fact: Some traditions for Eostre included dancing around bonfires and decorating homes with flowers.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/12/english-heritage-claims-easter-isnt-originally-christian/

With C S Lewis' Professor Digby, I find myself shaking my head, and wondering what they do teach them in schools these days.

The above could go straight into a textbook of lexical fallacies, confusing completely the lexical origins of a word, and the actual referent of the word as used. i.e. it slides over between and confuses where the word came from, and what people are talking about when they deploy it.

When people say "Easter", they're almost always referring to the time of the year when Christians observe the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and that celebration itself. That's what they're talking about; thus, that's what the word means.

Along similar lines, when someone says to me "Monday", they're referring to the first day of the working week. It's generally the day on which they go back to work or school, or begin whatever their regular activities again after the weekend. They're not implicitly informing me that they worship the Moon or any other heavenly bodies. The fact that long, long ago people named these day in reference to the Moon can tell us something about those people; it doesn't tell us anything about anything that is being talked about if someone today says "I don't like Mondays!".

English Heritage, thus, have confused what "Easter" is with the possible long-distant origins of the word in the English language. In French, it is called "Pâcques", a word whose origins go back to the Hebrew Passover. Does this mean that "Easter" in England and France are fundamentally two different things? Once you cross the Channel, Easter "is" something else entirely?

So, the thing is what the word is used to refer to. Where the word came from is something else, and no doubt interesting. People all other the world re-deploy existing words, after swapping out the content. Sometimes they do this deliberately (because they want to supplant, replace and ultimately eradicate the memory of the former content; for example, the swapping-out of the meaning of words like "tolerance" and "diversity" during my life-time); sometimes it is done without any particular intent. It may be done quickly, or gradually. You could say that on our current trajectory, for a lot of people, "Easter" is "that time when the kids get a break from school because of the traditional Christian calendar, we give and eat Easter Eggs, and generally feel thankful that winter is gone and spring is here". Yes: in practice, quite not too dissimilar to what English Heritage says the festival that 8th-century Bede refers to was about ... though, it seems English Heritage there also may be projecting back their own beliefs. What Bede actually said is less secular: the Anglo-Saxon pagans of a period before his held religious feasts in the honour of the goddess Eostre. Bede is the only source we have that makes any reference to this; we do not know what sources he himself was drawing upon, and what other information there is about these feasts that would impact our understanding.

There is, of course, no real connection between pagan festivals to West Germanic gods observed by Anglo Saxons, and the festival of Easter as observed traditionally by Christians; there is no sense in which the events of an empty tomb in the near east and the preaching of a risen Messiah by disciples of Jesus in the first century and following, and the traditional beliefs about gods of parts of Western Europe, have anything to do with eachother, except in that the people of Europe in general decided to stop paying any respect to the latter, and instead give all respect to the former. i.e. The only connection is a decision to consciously carry out an entire replacement with something obviously different. So, "Easter" has no more to do with Germanic pagan gods than a Protestant family giving eachother "Christmas" presents means that they have decided that their salvation requires participation in the Catholic Mass after all.

All in all, we learn a few things about English Heritage from this, but essentially nothing about the origins of the thing that people call "Easter", as it's been present in our country's traditions and culture for the last millennium and a half or so.