Why do we call this holiday Easter? What is the meaning of the term Easter itself? It is not a Christian name? It bears its Chaldean origin on its very forehead. Easter is nothing else than Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, whose name, as pronounced by the people of Nineveh, was evidently identical with that now in common use in this country and around the world.
That name, as found by Layard on the Assyrian monuments, is Ishtar. The worship of Bel and Astarte was very early introduced into Britain, along with the Druids, "the priests of the groves." Some have imagined that the Druidical worship was first introduced by the Phoenicians, who, centuries before the Christian era, traded to the tin mines of Cornwall. But the unequivocal traces of that worship are found in regions of the British islands where the Phoenicians never penetrated, and it has everywhere left indelible marks of the stronghold which it must have had on the early British mind.
From Bel, May 1 is still called Beltane in the Almanac, and we have customs still lingering to this day among us, which prove how exactly the worship of Bel or Moloch (for both titles belonged to the same god) had been observed. Today, we have festivals which, in fact, are a part of the ancient worship of Baal, and where in the past the person on whom the lot fell was previously burnt as a sacrifice, today they burn an effigy (think Burning Man). If Baal was thus worshipped in days gone by, will it be difficult to believe that our ancestors also adored his consort Astarte? And that from Astarte, whose name in Nineveh was Ishtar, the religious solemnities of April, as now practiced, are called by the name of Easter -- that month, among our Pagan ancestors, having been called Easter-monath.
The festival of which we read in Church history, under the name of Easter, in the third or fourth centuries, was quite a different festival from that now observed in the Church and, at that time, was not known by any such name as Easter. It was called Pasch, or the Passover, and though not of the Apostolic institution, was very early observed by many professing Christians in commemoration of the death and Resurrection of Christ.
Socrates, the ancient ecclesiastical historian, after a lengthened account of the different ways in which Easter was observed in different countries in his time--i.e., the fifth century--sums up in these words: "Thus much already laid down may seem a sufficient treatise to prove that the celebration of the feast of Easter began everywhere more of custom than by any commandment either of Christ or any Apostle." (Hist. Ecclesiast.)
Everyone knows that the name "Easter," used in our translation of Acts 12:4, refers not to any Christian festival but to the Jewish Passover. This is one of the few places in our version where the translators show an undue bias.
That festival agreed originally with the time of the Jewish Passover, when Christ was crucified, a period which, in the days of Tertullian, at the end of the second century, was believed to have been March 23. That festival was not idolatrous, and no Lent preceded it. "It ought to be known," said Cassianus, the monk of Marseilles, writing in the fifth century and contrasting the primitive Church with the Church in his day, "that the observance of the forty days had no existence, so long as the perfection of that primitive Church remained inviolate." Whence, then, comes this observance? The forty-day abstinence of Lent was directly borrowed from the worshippers of the Babylonian goddess. Such a Lent of forty days, "in the spring of the year," is still observed by the Yezidis or Pagan Devil-worshippers of Koordistan, who have inherited it from their early masters, the Babylonians.
Such a Lent of forty days was held in spring by the Pagan Mexicans, for thus we read in Humboldt, where he gives an account of Mexican observances: "Three days after the vernal equinox...began a solemn fast of forty days in honor of the sun." Such a Lent of forty days was observed in Egypt, as may be seen in consulting Wilkinson's Egyptians. This Egyptian Lent of forty days, we are informed by Landseer, in his Sabean Researches, was held expressly in commemoration of Adonis or Osiris, the great mediatorial god. At the same time, the rape of Proserpine seems to have been commemorated, and in a similar manner; for Julius Firmicus informs us that, for "forty nights," the "wailing for Proserpine" continued; and from Arnobius, we learn that the fast which the Pagans observed, called "Castus" or the "sacred" fast, was, by the Christians in his time, believed to have been primarily in imitation of the long fast of Ceres, when for many days she determinedly refused to eat on account of her "excess of sorrow," that is, on account of the loss of her daughter Proserpine, when carried away by Pluto, the god of hell.
As the stories of Bacchus, or Adonis and Proserpine, though originally distinct, were made to join on and fit into one another, so that Bacchus was called Liber, and his wife Ariadne, Libera (which was one of the names of Proserpine), it is highly probable that the forty days fast of Lent was made in later times to have reference to both. Among the Pagans, this Lent seems to have been an indispensable preliminary to the great annual festival in commemoration of the death and resurrection of Tammuz, which was celebrated by alternate weeping and rejoicing and which, in many countries, was considerably later than the Christian festival, being observed in Palestine and Assyria in June, therefore called the "month of Tammuz"; in Egypt, about the middle of May, and in Britain, sometime in April.
To conciliate the Pagans to nominal Christianity, Rome, pursuing its usual policy, took measures to get the Christian and Pagan festivals amalgamated, and, by a complicated but skillful adjustment of the calendar, it was found no difficult matter, in general, to get Paganism and Christianity--now far sunk in idolatry--in this as in so many other things, to shake hands. The instrument in accomplishing this amalgamation was the abbot Dionysius the Little, to whom also we owe it, as modern chronologers have demonstrated, that the date of the Christian era, or of the birth of Christ Himself, was moved FOUR YEARS from the true time. Whether this was done through ignorance or design may be a matter of question, but there seems to be no doubt of the fact that the birth of the Lord Jesus was made a full four years later than when our Savior was born. This change of the calendar in regard to Easter was attended with momentous consequences. It brought into the Church the grossest corruption and the rankest superstition in connection with the abstinence of Lent.
The origin of the Pasch eggs is just as clear. The ancient Druids bore an egg as the sacred emblem of their order. In the Dionysiaca, or mysteries of Bacchus, as celebrated in Athens, one part of the nocturnal ceremony consisted of the consecration of an egg. The Hindoo fables celebrate their mundane egg as a golden color. The people of Japan make their sacred egg to have been brazen. In China, at this hour, dyed or painted eggs are used on sacred festivals, even as in this country. In ancient times, eggs were used in the religious rites of the Egyptians and the Greeks and were hung up for mystic purposes in their temples. From Egypt, these sacred eggs can be distinctly traced to the banks of the Euphrates. The classic poets are full of the fable of the mystic egg of the Babylonians, and thus its tale is told by Hyginus, the Egyptian, the learned keeper of the Palatine library at Rome, in the time of Augustus, who was skilled in all the wisdom of his native country: "An egg of wondrous size is said to have fallen from heaven into the river Euphrates. The fishes rolled it to the bank, where the doves, having settled upon it and hatched it, out came Venus, who afterward was called the Syrian Goddess"--that is, Astarte. Hence, the egg became one of the symbols of Astarte or Easter, and accordingly, in Cyprus, one of the chosen seats of the worship of Venus, or Astarte, the egg of wondrous size was represented on a grand scale.
The Meaning of the Name Astarte:
That Semiramis, under the name of Astarte, was worshipped not only as an incarnation of the Spirit of God but as the mother of mankind, we have very clear and satisfactory evidence.
1. The name Astarte, as applied to her, has reference to her as being Rhea or Cybele, the tower-bearing goddess, the first, as Ovid says (Opera), that "made (towers) in cities"; for we find from Layard that in the Syrian temple of Hierapolis, "she (Dea Syria or Astarte) was represented standing on a lion crowned with towers." Now, no name could more exactly picture forth the character of Semiramis, as the queen of Babylon, than the name of "Ash-tart," for that just means "The woman that made towers." Ash-turit, then, which is obviously the same as the Hebrew "Ashtoreth," is just "The woman that made the encompassing wall." In confirmation of this interpretation of the meaning of the name Astarte, I may adduce an epithet applied to the Greek Diana, who at Ephesus bore a turreted crown on her head and was identified with Semiramis, which is not a little striking.
Semiramis, being deified as Astarte, came to be raised to the highest honors, and her change into a dove was evidently intended, when the distinction of sex had been blasphemously attributed to the Godhead, to identify her, under the name of the Mother of the gods, with that Divine Spirit, without whose agency no one can be born a child of God, and whose emblem, in the symbolical language of Scripture, was the Dove, as that of the Messiah was the Lamb.
Since the Spirit of God is the source of all wisdom, natural as well as spiritual, arts and inventions, and skill of every kind being attributed to Him (Exo. 31:3; Exo. 35:31), so the Mother of the gods, in whom that Spirit was feigned to be incarnate, was celebrated as the originator of some of the useful arts and sciences (Diodorus Siculus). Hence, the character attributed to the Grecian Minerva, whose name Athena, as we have seen reason to conclude, is only a synonym for Beltis, the well-known name of the Assyrian goddess. Athena, the Minerva of Athens, is universally known as the "goddess of wisdom," the inventress of arts and sciences.
2. The name Astarte also signifies the "Maker of investigations" and, in this respect, was applicable to Cybele or Semiramis, as symbolized by the Dove. This is one of the meanings of the name Astarte may be seen by comparing it with the cognate names Asterie and Astraea (in Greek Astraia), which are formed by taking the last member of the compound word in the masculine instead of the feminine, Teri, or Tri (the latter being pronounced Trai or Trae), being the same in sense as Tart. Now, Asterie was the wife of Perseus, the Assyrian (Herodotus), and who was the founder of Mysteries (Bryant). As Asterie was further represented as the daughter of Bel, this implies a position similar to that of Semiramis. Astraea, again, was the goddess of justice, who is identified with the heavenly virgin Themis, the name Themis signifying "the perfect one," who gave oracles (Ovid, Metam.), and who, having lived on earth before the Flood, forsook it just before that catastrophe came on. Themis and Astraea are sometimes distinguished and sometimes identified, but both have the same character as goddesses of justice. The explanation of the discrepancy obviously is that the Spirit has sometimes been viewed as incarnate and sometimes not.
When incarnate, Astraea is the daughter of Themis. What name could more exactly agree with the character of a goddess of justice than Ash-trai-a, "The maker of investigations," and what name could more appropriately shadow forth one of the characters of that Divine Spirit, who "searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God"? As Astraea, or Themis, was "Fatidica Themis," "Themis the prophetic," this also was another characteristic of the Spirit; for whence can any true oracle, or prophetic inspiration, come, but from the inspiring Spirit of God? Then, lastly, what can more exactly agree with the Divine statement in Genesis in regard to the Spirit of God than the statement of Ovid, that Astraea was the last of the celestials who remained on earth and that her forsaking it was the signal for the downpouring of the destroying deluge?
The announcement of the coming Flood is in Scripture ushered in with these words (Gen 6:3): "And the Lord said, My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." All these 120 years, the Spirit was striving; when they came to an end, the Spirit strove no longer, forsook the earth, and left the world to its fate. But though the Spirit of God forsook the earth, it did not forsake the family of righteous Noah. It entered with the patriarch into the ark, and when that patriarch came forth from his long imprisonment, it came forth along with him. Thus, the Pagans had a historical foundation for their myth of the dove resting on the symbol of the ark in the Babylonian waters and the Syrian goddess, or Astarte--the same as Astraea--coming forth from it. Semiramis, then, as Astarte, worshipped as the dove, was regarded as the incarnation of the Spirit of God.
Why Christians would call a day remembering the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ by the Pagan Easter is unforgivable.
