#hey does anyone know what the deal was with the claims that Friday the 13th and Easter are actually pagan feminist fertility holidays #that were appropriated by the patriarchy/Catholic church? #because I feel like I'm going crazy seeing cnn quote that tumblr post from years ago #like which one came first (bc I can't find that post) and how true are those claims
@assclarinet Wh... what do you mean CNN is quoting tumblr posts. What.
Anyway. These claims go around constantly and they are just as sourceless as anything else in that post.
And as it is Easter Season, let's address them:
Short answer: No.
Long answer:
Easter is the theological core of Christianity. There is no Christianity without Easter. Easter is the holiest day of the Christian calendar, because it is the theological crux of the entire religion: that Jesus died, and then three days later he rose from the dead, his sacrifice having redeemed the world of sin and his resurrection ushering in a new age. Easter is a very Christian thing.
That's not typically what people who say this mean, though. They don't mean the Christian holy day of Jesus's resurrection Easter Sunday, they mean the hegemonic spring holiday in the culturally-Christian world that is pseudo-secularized Easter.
Was placing the central element of Christianity in the spring a way of co-opting pagan spring fertility festivals? No. It's fairly central to the Last Supper-crucifixion-resurrection narrative that it happened at Passover. The Gospels pretty well agree on this part, though there's conflict in the scholarship of whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal proper or happened a day before. (The seder as it is understood today wasn’t performed the same way back then, so it wasn’t properly a seder, either.) In early Christianity, the association of Easter with Passover was theologically significant--Jesus was (and is) called the Paschal lamb, equating Jesus's sacrifice with the sacrifice/slaughter of a lamb for the deliverance of the people from death. The timing of Easter is one of the few Christian holy days calculated based on the logic of the Jewish luni-solar calendar. It's not the same exact calendar, and they don't always directly coincide, but it's the same basis.
Early Christianity grew out of Judaism, and its relationship to Judaism, its self-view as the culmination of Judaism, remained significant to figures like Paul who have defined Christian thought and Church organization ever since. (Here’s a standard view on this presented from a Jewish perspective.) (This is a super interesting perspective from a Congregationalist Christian theologian with a keen interest on the Jewish roots of early Christianity.) (Here’s also a really interesting interview with provocative Jewish philosopher Daniel Boyarin about it.) Christianity and Judaism probably started really developing in different directions sometime after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, with the next few centuries seeing the rise of Rabbinic Judaism as well as the influx of pagan gentiles adopting Christianity and bringing their theological and philosophical backgrounds into it.
The upshot is: Easter is in the spring because Passover is in the spring.
Does the name "Easter" come from Ostara or Ishtar? No. These are the etymologies I see proposed to say, see! "Easter" steals the name of a pagan fertility goddess! And that's a super English-centric way of looking at the world. In most European languages (and let's be real, when people talk about Christianity stealing pagan holidays, they usually are thinking about, like, Celts), the name of Easter comes from the Latin "Pascha" which was adopted from the Greek "Pascha" which, wow, sounds an awful lot like Pesach, the Hebrew name of Passover. Because Easter was associated with Passover. Even in English, the formal, liturgical word for "pertaining to Easter" is "Paschal". So only in Germanic languages like German and English does the name of Easter come from non-Paschal origins.
Also there is no connection to Ishtar.
The etymology of "Easter" is super obscure, though.
Well, there was an Eostre, right? And the Easter bunny tradition was stolen from the pre-Christian Germanic pagan festivals for Eostre or Ostara? Ehhhhh. Dubious. This Library of Congress folklore blog post by a folklorist who has studied Middle English has a lot of well-cited information suggesting that most "received wisdom" about the pagan festivals or Eostre/Ostara that featured a hare derive from the Brothers Grimm in the 1800s. Jakob Grimm cites a single source for the evidence of a goddess Eostre, an 8th century Christian monk's writing.
Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated "Paschal month", and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her/its name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.
Definitely possible, even likely, there was some syncretism in the celebration activities there, but it's hard to prove what, and to what extent.
Grimm is the one who postulates the existence of Ostara based on this, using the methods of historical linguistics to derive a cognate with the old German oster-month. Note that the Grimms were 1) linguists as well as folklorists, and the idea of Ostara appears to come from linguistic hypothesis moreso than actual gathered folklore, and 2) very invested in nation-building through their folklore project. No other sources for Eostre or Ostara exist, though modern linguists have hypothesized a connection to the Vedic Ushas and Greek Eos as Indo-European dawn-goddesses. (Also hence the word "east.") So Eostre and Ostara may certainly have existed as Germanic goddesses/personifications of the dawn, but probably not fertility. And the month around April, as the return of spring, was associated with the dawn goddess. If so, Eostre gave her name to Eosturmonath ("Eostre-month"), which is when Easter fell (see above re: the timing of Passover), and so Eoastremonath became Easter-month became Easter. "Easter" then likely derives from the name of the month, not the goddess directly.
The story of Ostara and a hare was, as best I can tell, invented in the 1800s during a time of renewed interest in European paganism as, again, nation-building projects.
Hares, eggs/chicks, and flowers are all perennial symbols of spring and new life in Europe, so it wouldn't be surprising if older celebrations in springtime used them, and those got transferred onto Easter celebrations because, hey, spring, dawn, sunrise out of the night, new birth, resurrection, new life, it all kinda goes together. But it wasn't a holiday that was "appropriated by the patriarchy/Catholic Church,"; at most it was traditional spring festivities transferred onto the new spring festivity. This happened a lot.
As for the second question...
Short answer: No.
Long answer:
No one really agrees on why Friday the 13th is unlucky, but it probably also comes from Christianity. Friday is the unlucky day because it's the day that Jesus was crucified. 13 is the unlucky number because that's the number of people at the Last Supper. I've also seen several people online reference that Loki was the 13th guest at the feast where he caused the death of Baldr, but I can't find an actual source for that, and it feels very Christianity-influenced. The most influential records of old Norse/Icelandic mythology were written down in the 1200s, well after Christianity was the primary religion of the region, and Christian influences on Norse mythology as we know it now cannot be wholly discounted. So I'm somewhat skeptical Loki is the origin, either.
But also, and this is where I get more into personal hypothesizing, 12 is a very strong and auspicious number in a lot of cultures. There are (typically, approximately) 12 full moons in a year, so lots and lots of calendars split the year into 12 months. 12 is a good number for timekeeping and subdividing: Ancient Egyptians were the ones to develop 12-hour days/nights, and Mesopotamians the ones to split time into units of 60. There were twelve tribes of Israel, twelve disciples, twelve Olympians, twelve labors of Hercules, twelve constellations in the Greek zodiac and twelve years in the Chinese zodiac cycle. English has unique number-names up to twelve before we start going three-ten, four-ten, etc. We like twelves! Particularly in cultures influenced by the Mediterranean sphere. So I can imagine prime thirteen is ungainly, awkward... unlucky.
(Also, the idea of splitting the week into a cycle of 7 days originates from Judaism in the Biblical book of Genesis, continuing into Christianity and Islam from the same origin. The whole concept of "Friday" is inextricable from Abrahamic religions.)
There's no evidence it was ever a sacred pagan day for sex or anything like that. It just wasn't.