Which came first, the Christian or the egg?

Happy Ishtar. I mean Eostre. No wait, I mean Easter. Or maybe it’s Pesach, or Pascha (isn’t that a club in Ibiza?).

Actually when it comes to this holiday we are currently celebrating, there appears to be some confusion. What’s with the eggs? Why do we commemorate the killing and resurrecting of Christ with egg shaped chocolate? What’s the link? Wouldn’t chocolate nails and thorny crowns be more in keeping with the weekend that’s in it? Chocolate crosses?

They’d be easier to eat as well. You could just snap a bit off, rather than having to crack a chocolate egg open and have splinters of it melting in your lap. And for the horizontally afflicted, chocolate nails would be far less calorific than ostrich sized chocolate eggs full of more chocolate. It’s baffling, this egg thing. Which came first, the Christian or the egg? Is it really all about Ishtar?

There are lots of angry people on the internet shouting at each other that Ishtar is not the Pagan precursor of Easter. There’s been a meme doing the rounds on Facebook with a photo of an stone lady carving of Ishtar — the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of love, sex, war, fate, protection, marriage, childbirth and storms. And multitasking, no doubt. (Oh, and sacred prostitution. A tradition where, if you were broke and needed a blessing , you could go to the temple, have sex with a random, and go home with enough cash to feed your children and not worry about eternal damnation because Ishtar said it was fine).

Anyway, ‘Ishtar’ and ‘Easter’ sound similar, and the plausible idea was that like Christmas, someone in early the Christian administration signed off Easter to coincide with a pagan celebration, so that people would move seamlessly from celebrating the winter solstice / arrival of spring to the birth and death / resurrection of the Christian god. Seems reasonable. This would explain all the eggs — symbols of fertility, across the planet; in Hinduism, the egg symbolises the universe.

The shell is the heavens, the white is the air, the yolk is the earth.

Anyway, the Ishtar / Easter thing is a hoax, apparently. Only Germany has a word for Easter than sounds similar to ours — Ostern. Does this come from Eostre, the Saxon goddess of dawn? (And while we’re here, is any of this connected to oestrogen, without which none of us would exist in the first place? But let’s not let logic get in the way of anything). All across Europe, the etymology of Easter — Paques, Pascua, Pasqua, Pascha — sounds nothing like our word. Although we do have a Pascal Moon.

Confused? At least we Celts can take credit for the Easter Bunny, based on the sacred Celtic hare. Except the bunny might have been Saxon — a German hare. Oh God. Just give me the chocolate.