Exploring the occult in everyday life.

LOL, SPRING.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the English term “Easter” relates to Estre, a Teutonic goddess of the rising light of day (a.k.a. the female counterpart to Lucifer, the light-bringer). The pagans celebrated Ēosturmōnaþ, or “Easter-month” in what is now April.

Early Christians celebrated a week of Paschal feasts under the Latin names pascha staurosimon, (Good Friday), and pascha anastasimon, (Easter Sunday). “Paschal” comes from a transliteration of a Greek transliteration of an Aramaic version of the Hebrew word “Pesach”, or “He passed over.”

Now seriously, sit still while I kill your first-born.

The Hebrew Passover celebration is fixed around the Spring Equinox (OMG ASTROLOGY). Known as Pesach, it is a commemoration of God raining down nine plagues upon the Egyptians who, at the time, held the Jews as slaves. The Pharaoh needed more convincing than just frog rain, so for the tenth, God sent a deathsquad of avenging angels to conduct a door-to-door sweep to kill all first-born sons. To mark the Jewish houses as ‘off-limits’ so that God’s Goon Squad would literally ‘pass over’ them, they sacrificed a lamb and marked their doorway with the blood of the lamb.

Yup.

Jesus’ crucifixion is most frequently suggested as Friday, April 3, AD 33, which was on or near that year’s Passover celebration. Some Christians claim that this is no mere synchronicity; that Jesus was the human sacrifice, the Paschal Lamb for all humanity. (One then wonders who is left for the angels to avenge, but let’s put a pin in that one for now.)

Was the Last Supper a Pesach dinner? Jesus is said to have served unleavened bread at the Last Supper; the Passover consumption of unleavened bread was to commemorate the speed in which the Jews fled from Egypt after Pharaoh relented (they didn’t even have time to let the bread rise). I’m guessing there wasn’t a ham.

Nope, no ham.

So we have early Christians celebrating their uber-Passover at the same time that the pagans were celebrating a month-long fertility rite to Austra (or Ostara, Eostre, Astarte, Ashtaroth, Ishtar, or any other dawn-goddess of similar name. The ‘aus’ means ‘shining’ in PIE, which also relates to ‘east’ as in the rising sun). I’m unable to find an exact date that the adoption of the name ‘Easter’ overtook ‘Passover’, but Eusebius, an early Church historian, claims it was an issue as early as A.D. 190.  As is rapidly becoming a theme here at Krypte Kamara, overlapping holidays blend into a confusing mish-mash. Easter is clearly no different.

Holiday not related.

Why else would such obvious fertility symbols as eggs and rabbits be part of the celebration of the Resurrection? Even hot cross buns, staple treat of Lent-fast-breakers around the globe, find their recipes go back to Eostre. In modern western traditions these are referred to as ‘cakes of light’ and the frosting is composed of the intermingled essences of “both the sun and the moon”, if you catch my distinctly “PG” description. Even the forty days of Lent fast is taken directly from ancient Babylonian worship. The word ‘Lent’ is even derived from the Old English word lencten, for “long times”, referring to the lengthening days of Spring, not to anything remotely Christian, yet the traditions persist.

Is this what was being referenced when the bible authors penned the line about “the Whore of Babylon”? Could the church authorities have ever expected that their attempt to cover over the old holidays would backfire by keeping alive the very traditions they sought to usurp? I doubt it, but you’d think at some point they’d just stop calling it Easter and go back to the proper name of Pascha. Old habits die hard, I guess.