A truly christian reminder: Easter is a pagan celebration

However, while Easter may be adapted from pagan symbols, those symbols were never exclusively pagan. The egg is a symbol of new life in many cultures and faiths. Easter is about Christ. No matter how it has become secularized, Easter is still about the resurrection of Christ.

Well, it turns out Easter actually began as a pagan festival celebrating spring in the Northern Hemisphere, long before the advent of Christianity.

"Since pre-historic times, people have celebrated the equinoxes and the solstices as sacred times," University of Sydney Professor Carole Cusack said.

"The spring equinox is a day where the amount of dark and the amount of daylight is exactly identical, so you can tell that you're emerging from winter because the daylight and the dark have come back into balance.

"People mapped their whole life according to the patterns of nature."

Following the advent of Christianity, the Easter period became associated with the resurrection of Christ.

"In the first couple of centuries after Jesus's life, feast days in the new Christian church were attached to old pagan festivals," Professor Cusack said.

"Spring festivals with the theme of new life and relief from the cold of winter became connected explicitly to Jesus having conquered death by being resurrected after the crucifixion."
Easter's changing date

In 325AD the first major church council, the Council of Nicaea, determined that Easter should fall on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.

That is why the date moves and why Easter festivities are often referred to as "moveable feasts".

"There's a defined period between March 25 and April 25 on which Easter Sunday must fall, and that's determined by the movement of the planets and the Sun," Professor Cusack said.

In most countries in Europe, the name for Easter is derived from the Jewish festival of Passover.

"So in Greek the feast is called Pascha, in Italian Pasqua, in Danish it is Paaske, and in French it is Paques," Professor Cusack said.

But in English-speaking countries, and in Germany, Easter takes its name from a pagan goddess from Anglo-Saxon England who was described in a book by the eighth-century English monk Bede.

"Eostre was a goddess of spring or renewal and that's why her feast is attached to the vernal equinox," Professor Cusack said.

"In Germany the festival is called Ostern, and the goddess is called Ostara."