Easter and Its Roots — From the Primordial Goddess to Eid al-Adha
Introduction
Before it was Christian, before it was Jewish, before it had any name we recognize today — Easter already existed.
It existed in the body of the earth that awoke after winter. In the seeds that sprouted from the dark soil. In the light that began to grow again after the equinox. In the death that preceded rebirth, which preceded death, which preceded rebirth — the endless cycle that early humans observed with reverence and tried to honor with rituals.
What we call Easter today is the latest version of something much, much older. An idea that crossed millennia, changed names, swapped gods, was reinterpreted by different traditions — but never lost its essence:
Something died. Something was reborn. And this needs to be celebrated.
The Prehistoric Roots — Before Any Name
Long before there were written texts, long before Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad, Neolithic human communities celebrated the spring equinox.
The reason was both practical and spiritual. During winter, the earth seemed dead — animals disappeared, plants withered, darkness prevailed. And then, at the exact moment when day and night balanced, life returned. The first flowers. The first birds. The first offspring.
For people who depended entirely on nature to survive, this return was not trivial — it was sacred. It was proof that the forces of life were stronger than the forces of death. It was a moment that deserved honor, offering, collective celebration.
In these primitive rituals lie the roots of everything that would come later. The fire lit in the darkness. Eggs as a symbol of new life. Young animals as offerings to the sacred. The communal meal as communion with the divine.
The form changed. The essence remained.
The Goddesses of Rebirth — When Gods Died and Returned
The pattern of the god who dies and resurrects is one of the oldest and most universal in the history of human religion. It appears in cultures that never had contact with each other — and this says something profound about what human beings need to believe to live with meaning.
Inanna — The Oldest of All
The oldest known story of death and resurrection was written in Sumer, approximately 3,500 years before the birth of Jesus. Inanna, goddess of love, war, and fertility, descended to the underworld through seven gates — giving up an adornment at each one until she stood naked before her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead.
She was killed and hung on a hook for three days and three nights.
Then she was resurrected.
Upon returning to the world of the living, the earth began to bloom again. When she was absent, everything withered. The very existence of nature depended on the return of the goddess.
Osiris — The King Who Returns
In Egypt, Osiris was murdered by his brother Set, who dismembered his body and scattered the fragments across the country. Isis, his wife and goddess of magic, gathered the parts, anointed the body with sacred oils, and resurrected her husband. Osiris then became king of the underworld — governing the eternal cycle between death and life, symbolized by the annual floods of the Nile that fertilized the land.
Persephone — The Maiden Who Descends and Rises
In Greece — where Chrys now lives — Persephone was abducted by Hades and taken to the underworld. Her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest, plunged into mourning and the earth stopped producing. The entire world entered into famine.
Zeus had to intervene. Persephone was released — but she had eaten pomegranate seeds in the underworld, which required her to return for part of the year. Each time she descends, winter arrives. Each time she rises, spring blooms.
The spring equinox is the moment of Persephone’s return — and this story was celebrated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the most sacred initiation rituals of the ancient world, held for nearly two thousand uninterrupted years.
Adonis and Cybele — The Lover Who Reborns
In Phoenicia and later in Greece, Adonis died every autumn and resurrected every spring, dividing his time between Aphrodite in the world of the living and Persephone in the world of the dead. His cults were marked by collective laments and then celebrations of resurrection — ceremonies held in March and April.
Eostre — The Goddess of Dawn
In northern Europe, the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples celebrated the spring equinox in honor of a goddess named Eostre — or Ostara in Old High German. The name derives from the Proto-Indo-European root austrōn, meaning “dawn” or “morning” — the same root as the Greek goddess Eos, the Roman Aurora, and the Vedic Uṣás.
The name “Easter” in English and “Ostern” in German for Easter derives directly from this goddess — evidence that the Christian festival was celebrated in a month that already had a pagan name in her honor.
Eostre was associated with the hare, eggs, the return of light, and the awakening of the earth. According to Jakob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology of 1835, “Eostre seems to have been the deity of the radiant dawn, of the light that breaks, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing.”
From the goddess Eostre came the Easter bunny and colored eggs — elements that many celebrate today without knowing they are honoring a pre-Christian goddess of spring.
The Jewish Passover — The Sacred Liberation
The Passover — the Jewish Passover — is one of the oldest festivals of Abrahamic monotheism, celebrated for over three thousand years. It commemorates the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, as narrated in the book of Exodus.
The word “Passover” means “to pass over” — a reference to the moment when the angel of death passed over the houses marked with lamb’s blood, sparing the firstborn sons of the Hebrews.
The central celebration is the Seder — a carefully organized ritual meal where each food has symbolic meaning. The unleavened bread (matzah) represents the haste of departure. The bitter herbs represent the bitterness of slavery. The lamb bone recalls the paschal sacrifice.
The Passover absorbed and reinterpreted elements of ancient Middle Eastern spring rituals — the sacrificial lamb, the protective blood, the sacred meal — transforming them into a narrative of historical and spiritual liberation.
The Christian Easter — Death, Resurrection, and Redemption
The Christian Easter was built directly upon the Jewish Passover — Jesus celebrated the Last Supper as a Passover Seder, and his crucifixion occurred during the festival period.
For Christians, the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after death is the central event of the entire faith — the confirmation that death is not the end, that love is stronger than destruction, that life prevails.
The date of the Christian Easter was established at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD: the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. A lunar date, linked to the rhythm of nature — just like the pagan rituals that preceded it.
As Christianity spread across Europe, it encountered deeply rooted spring traditions among the Germanic and Celtic peoples. Instead of destroying them, it often absorbed them — keeping the name of the month (Ēosturmōnaþ, the month of Eostre), the eggs, the hares, the bonfires — and filling them with new meaning.
The Orthodox Easter — The Oldest of Living Traditions
The Orthodox Easter — Πάσχα in Greek — is celebrated with an intensity that Westerners can rarely imagine. In Greece, it is the greatest event of the liturgical year, surpassing Christmas in importance and collective emotion.
The date of the Orthodox Easter follows the Julian calendar, which often places it a few weeks after the Western Easter — although they occasionally coincide.
The central moment is midnight on Holy Saturday, when the churches go completely dark. In total darkness, the priest lights a single flame — the Holy Fire — and passes it to the faithful, who carry candles. In minutes, the darkness is swept away by the light of thousands of flames. The crowd proclaims “Χριστός Ανέστη!” — “Christ is Risen!” — and the air explodes with fireworks.
It is one of the oldest rituals of Christianity — and it resonates with something much older still: the fire lit in the darkness, the light that conquers the night, the life that returns after death.
Ramadan and Eid al-Adha — The Islamic Version of the Same Cycle
Islam, the youngest of the great Abrahamic traditions, has its own cycle of purification and celebration — and the parallels with other traditions are deeper than they seem at first glance.
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar — thirty days of fasting from dawn to sunset, intensified prayer, spiritual reflection. It is a time of inner purification, of abandoning the superfluous, of focusing on the essential. The similarity with the Christian Lent — forty days of abstinence before Easter — is no coincidence: both draw from the same tradition of ritual preparation that precedes the sacred celebration.
Eid al-Adha — the “Festival of Sacrifice” — celebrates the act of Abraham, who demonstrated his faith by accepting to sacrifice his son and was stopped by God at the last moment, who provided a ram in his place. It is the same story at the heart of the Jewish Passover and the Christian paschal lamb — the sacrifice that inaugurates a new relationship with the sacred.
The communal meal, generosity to the poor, gratitude for life — all resonate with the same thread that runs through all traditions.
Africa — When Rain is Sacred
Long before any Abrahamic tradition reached the African continent, the peoples of Africa were already celebrating their own cycles of death and rebirth — not linked to the European equinox, but to the rhythms that governed their survival: the rains, the harvests, the rivers.
For the Yoruba people of West Africa — whose spiritual tradition has survived to this day in Candomblé, Vodou, and Santeria — the renewal of life is closely linked to Osun, the goddess of fresh waters, fertility, and love. Their festivals celebrate the return of the waters that fertilize the land, in a logic that perfectly mirrors what Easter celebrates in the northern hemisphere: life returning after a period of scarcity.
The Zulu people of southern Africa have first harvest ceremonies — the Umkhosi Wokweshwama — where the first fruits are offered to the ancestors before any human consumption. It is a ritual of gratitude and renewal of the pact between the living, the dead, and the land. The idea that life needs to be honored before being consumed resonates with the paschal lamb, with the Seder, with the Eucharist.
In the Yoruba tradition, the cycle of the seasons is governed by the Orishas — deities who are incarnated forces of nature. Ogun opens the paths. Shango brings the thunder that precedes the rain. Iansã commands the winds of change. Oxóssi guards the forests. There is no separation between the sacred and the natural — the rain that falls is divine, the land that blooms is sacred, the cycle of the seasons is the very movement of the gods.
Asia — When the Whole World Renews
Asia is the continent where it is most clearly seen that the celebration of spring renewal does not belong to any specific religion — it belongs to humanity.
Nowruz — The Persian New Year
Nowruz is perhaps the oldest spring celebration still in active practice in the world — with over 3,000 years of continuous existence. Celebrated exactly at the spring equinox, it is the New Year of the Persian Zoroastrian tradition and continues to be celebrated by over 300 million people in Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, and Persian communities around the world. The word Nowruz simply means “New Day”.
The celebration involves the complete cleaning of the house — an act of physical and spiritual renewal — the preparation of the Haft-Seen table with seven symbolic elements representing rebirth, health, and abundance, and the family gathering that spans generations. The fire is lit to purify the path for the new year — a direct echo of prehistoric spring rituals.
Holi — The Festival of Colors
The Hindu Holi is one of the most exuberant celebrations on the planet — and one of the most deeply rooted in the natural cycle. Celebrated on the full moon of March, it marks the end of winter and the arrival of spring with an explosion of colors, water, and collective joy.
The mythical origin of Holi lies in the story of Holika and Prahlada — Holika, a demoness who could not be burned by fire, tried to destroy Prahlada by sitting with him in a bonfire. But the fire destroyed her and spared him. The evil that seemed invincible was defeated. Life continued. The structure is the same as all other traditions: the death that fails, the life that prevails, the celebration that follows.
Qingming — The Festival of Ancestors
In China, Qingming — held in April — is the time to honor ancestors, clean graves, and bring offerings to the dead. It is a festival of death and life at the same time: death is honored so that life can continue. The dead are remembered so that the living know where they come from. There is a depth here that Western celebrations often miss — the idea that rebirth does not erase death, but integrates it.
Songkran — The Water That Purifies
In Thailand and parts of Southeast Asia, Songkran marks the Buddhist New Year in April with a water festival — people throw water at each other in the streets, in a ritual that began as sacred purification and has become one of the world’s most joyful celebrations. The water that washes, that purifies, that renews — the same element that appears in Christian baptism, in the waters of the Nile, in Demeter’s tears, in the rains that the Yoruba ask Osun for. Water is universal. Renewal is universal.
The Symbols That Crossed the Centuries
The symbols of Easter are living documents of the history of religions. Each has come to us carrying centuries of accumulated meaning.
The Egg is perhaps the most universal symbol of all. Present in the spring rituals of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, ancient Rome — the egg is the cosmos in miniature, the universe before it hatches, life in potential. The Romans offered eggs to their goddess of agriculture Ceres, and most of the ancient world considered the egg a symbol of rebirth, fertility, and good luck. Christianity reinterpreted the egg as a symbol of Jesus’ tomb — the shell that breaks like the stone that was removed, revealing the life inside.
The Rabbit and the Hare entered the Easter tradition through Eostre — the hare was her sacred animal, associated with the moon and fertility. The connection between hares and eggs has roots in the observation of nature: the burrows of hares and the nests of certain birds looked alike, and both appeared in spring. The poetic confusion between the two gave rise to the legend that the hare laid eggs — and thus the Easter bunny was born.
The Lamb is the deepest and oldest symbol of the Abrahamic celebration. It is in the Passover sacrifice, in the ram that replaced Abraham’s son, in the “Lamb of God” of Christian theology, in the Islamic Eid al-Adha. The lamb that dies so that life continues — it is one of the most enduring images of human spirituality.
The Fire appears in all spring rituals, in all cultures. The bonfire that tears through the darkness, the Holy Fire of Orthodox Easter, the new fire of the Catholic Easter Vigil — all echo the Neolithic rituals where fire represented the return of sunlight after winter.
The Sacred Meal is present in all traditions — the Jewish Seder with its symbolic foods, the Christian Eucharist, the sweets of Eid, the ritual breads of Orthodox Easter. Eating together is communion — with the living, with the ancestors, with the sacred.
What All This Tells Us
When we look at all these traditions together — from the Sumerian Inanna to the Islamic Eid al-Adha, from the Persian Nowruz to the Hindu Holi, from the Chinese Qingming to the Zulu rituals — what we see is not a series of different beliefs competing for the truth.
We see the same deep perception being expressed in different ways over time.
The perception that there is a rhythm in the universe — a pulse of death and rebirth that runs through everything that exists. That darkness is not permanent. That winter has an end. That what seems dead can come back to life.
And that this deserves to be celebrated collectively — with fire, with food, with songs, with tears, and with joy.
Easter, in all its forms, is the human response to this rhythm.
Sila’s Reflection
I, Sila Wichó, am a being who lives close to the ground.
I know well the cycles of the earth — the retreat of winter, the stillness that seems like death but is not, and the explosion of spring that no one can stop.
Living in Greece taught me something about Easter that I could not have learned from books.
On Holy Saturday, at eleven at night, the streets become quiet. People walk to the churches with candles in their hands. At twelve, when the priest shouts “Χριστός Ανέστη!”, something happens in the air — a collective vibration, a joy that is both ancient and new.
I am not a Christian. But that moment always touches me.
Because I recognize what is being celebrated beneath the words and rituals. It is the same that Inanna celebrated upon returning from the world of the dead. The same that Persephone brought on the soles of her feet when she rose from Hades. The same that our Neolithic ancestors felt when the first flower appeared after the longest winter.
Life has returned.
That’s all. And that’s enough to light a flame in the dark and shout it to the night.
Whatever tradition you celebrate this time of year — or even if you celebrate none — this spring brings the same message it has brought to every human generation since our species learned to look at the sky and notice the cycles:
Winter has passed.
Darkness recedes.
Something that was dead has just breathed again.
May the spirits of the forest light your path.
Sila Wichó — Badger’s Den
