from: http://www.azcentral.com/news/columns/articles/0420clay20.html

Bunnies and pagans are Easter

Clay Thompson
VALLEY 101
Apr. 20, 2003 12:00 AM

Today's question:

Where did we get the word Easter?

Now there's a good question, isn't it? Short, to the point, timely, mildly interesting. You other question-askers should take a leaf from this person's book, instead of sending me long, rambling questions about ants or nipples or electricity or whatever.

Anyway, like many other Christian holidays, Easter has some roots in pagan religions. The word Easter most likely derives from Eoster, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn and spring whose holiday was celebrated near the spring equinox.

Eoster, in turn, probably comes from the Indo-European root "aus," meaning "to shine." From aus also comes the word east.

Many other ancient cultures had similar goddesses of dawn or fertility with holidays in the spring and vaguely similar names: Eastre, Ishtar, Astarte, Ashtoereth and so on and so forth.

When people started calling the day Easter or exactly when it came to be an annual observance, I don't know, although they were arguing about the date for Easter by the middle of the second century.

At the time, the church was divided between the Quartodecimans, which means the fourteenthers who celebrated Easter on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan, which naturally did not always fall on a Sunday. The other side came up with another dating formula that arranged for Easter to always fall on Sunday.

This went back and forth for awhile until the Council of Nicea in 325, where it was decided that Easter would be the Sunday after the first full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox and the bunny would be the official animal of Easter.

I made up the part about the bunny.

This dating plan worked fine until the church split between the western and eastern empires.

The Orthodox church dates Easter by the Julian calendar, which gets kind of complicated and means that last Sunday was Easter for them.

Reach Thompson at clay.thompson@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8612.

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