Because the more you know.....
I am actually sharing this from my friend Ian Corrigan, who's blog Into the Mound you can link to at the right there. I highly encourage you to check this out. In the meantime...
Attention Pagans - repeating this bullshit makes us look stupid. This stuff comes from half-wit anti-Catholic literature of the 19th century - it is worthless in light of modern scholarship.
Let's do this in detail:
1: Ishtar is not pronounced 'eester' - silly.
2: Ishtar was a goddess of fertility and sex, also war and sovereignty. While the Spring equinox season was important, it was not her particular feast.
3: There are no depictions of her with eggs or rabbits.
4: Constantine did not Christianize the Roman empire, he only made Christianity legal.I can't say whether Ishtar was still in business during Constantine's time.
Most specifically, "Ishtar" has nothing to do with 'Easter'
Easter was said by the early medieval scholar, Bede (and only by him) to be derived from the English goddess-name Eoster. That name is hard to trace, though a bit of progress has been made. IT occurs nowhere else in literature. A germanic goddess-name of that sort would be connected with goddesses of dawn - Io in Greece, etc. The most likely meaning for the name 'easter' for the Christian feast is "the feast we keep at dawn". Of course only english speakers call it "easter" - nobody in Rome ever called it that. Constantine surely never heard the word "Easter".
Attention Pagans - repeating this bullshit makes us look stupid. This stuff comes from half-wit anti-Catholic literature of the 19th century - it is worthless in light of modern scholarship.
Let's do this in detail:
1: Ishtar is not pronounced 'eester' - silly.
2: Ishtar was a goddess of fertility and sex, also war and sovereignty. While the Spring equinox season was important, it was not her particular feast.
3: There are no depictions of her with eggs or rabbits.
4: Constantine did not Christianize the Roman empire, he only made Christianity legal.I can't say whether Ishtar was still in business during Constantine's time.
Most specifically, "Ishtar" has nothing to do with 'Easter'
Easter was said by the early medieval scholar, Bede (and only by him) to be derived from the English goddess-name Eoster. That name is hard to trace, though a bit of progress has been made. IT occurs nowhere else in literature. A germanic goddess-name of that sort would be connected with goddesses of dawn - Io in Greece, etc. The most likely meaning for the name 'easter' for the Christian feast is "the feast we keep at dawn". Of course only english speakers call it "easter" - nobody in Rome ever called it that. Constantine surely never heard the word "Easter".
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