Pastor Michael Brigmond

As spring so faithfully rolls around we are reminded once again of the festival of Easter. Like so many other traditions, Easter, too, has its origin deeply rooted in idolatry. Yet, many churches go the extra mile to promote the pagan worship of Easter without giving it a second thought.

Confused? Let us take a look back through the telescope of time and view the history of Easter. This is most easily done by examining it’s symbols.

Easter is so named after Astarte, one of the titles of Beltis, the queen of heaven, also known as Ishtar. The worship of Bel (sometimes known as Baal or Moloch) and Astarte (Ishtar) was widespread centuries before Jesus Christ was crucified. The celebration of Beltane, May 1^st is in honor of Bel. (Check your Almanac to see what May 1^st is called today.)

When the Christians of the 3^rd and 4^th centuries began to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ it was not called Easter, but Pasch (Passover) and corresponded with the Jewish Passover, the time of Christ’s crucifixion. The Catholic observance today of the 40 days of Lent, comes from the Egyptian Lent, commemorating Adonis or Osiris, the sun-god.

Among the pagans, this Lent (40 days of fasting) was an important part leading up to the annual festival in memory of the death and resurrection of Tammuz. This festival was celebrated in Palestine and Assyria in June (known as the month of Tammuz), in Egypt in mid-May and in Britain during the month of April.

To continue the effort to merge the pagans into Christianity, the alignment of their festivals was considered a must. So the initiative was advanced and through much resistance and bloodshed, by the end of the 6^th century, the two festivals of Easter and Pasch were finally combined and celebrated together.

The festival of the Chaldean goddess won out over that which had been held in honor of Christ.

The hot cross buns of Good Friday and the dyed eggs of Easter Sunday were part of the Chaldean rites just as they are now. The hot cross buns were used as an offering to the queen of heaven, the goddess of Easter, about 1500 years before the birth of Christ.

Today, the hot cross buns are not offered (as a sacrifice), but eaten as part of the Easter festival.

The dyed eggs come to us from the ancient Druids. The egg was a sacred emblem of their order. Out of the mysteries of Babylon comes the belief that a giant egg fell from heaven into the Euphrates river. The fishes rolled the egg onto the bank where doves settled on it to hatch it and out came Venus, who was latter known as the Syrian Goddess, Astarte. So the egg became one of the symbols of Astarte, or Easter, as she was later known. To some the egg also represented the ark during the time of the flood, with the whole human race shut up inside of it.

Next comes the son of Venus (Easter) who is known by many name. One of them being Tammuz:

This Tammuz, as named in Ezekiel 8:14, is also known in Greece or Rome as Bacchus or Adonis, as Osiris in Egypt, and Nimrod in Babylon. Nimrod is also represented by the constellation Orion, the mighty hunter. We will not dwell long at this juncture except to point out the similarities between the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the death and resurrection of Tammuz, the son of Easter. in that Osiris (Tammuz), the son of Isis (Astarte, or Easter) was mourned and it was believed that every spring he would arise to new life, having come back from the dead.

So the joining of the pagan festival of Easter and the Christian remembrance of the passion of Jesus was eventually meshed together into one idolatrous celebration. You can celebrate Easter if you like, but I prefer to remember the victory Jesus won at Calvary without all the paganism of bunny rabbits and colored eggs. But, as always, the choice is yours. [][][][].