Hi banshee, I know you've talked about it before but after 2 hrs searching your Tumblr and blog I can't find it. The ishtar/Easter post is circulating amongst some people I know and I wanted to be able to post the factual comment you made about it. Hope all is well.
Ah…that’s my bad. My blog has fallen into disarray through my lack of tagging.
Let’s see how quickly I can break down the whole Ishtar is not Eostre thing:
So, some traditions connected with Easter are Babylonian, such as egg dying. But Easter does not etymologically derive from the name Ishtar. (read more here)
Esther (a common Hebrew name) does derive from Ishtar, but has nothing to do with Easter. The Jewish feast celebrating Esther is called Purim, and Purim occurs about four weeks before Passover, and Easter always happens after or on Passover. The date of Passover itself always lands on the full moon after the spring equinox, Easter must always land on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox. So while Easter has some similarities to Nowruz (the Babylonian spring equinox) and Passover, liturgically there is no connection between Esther and Easter.
The word Easter comes from the Old English Ēostre. The roots for this come from Proto-Indo-European *Hewsos or *Hausos from *hwes, “to shine.” From whence we get words like Eos (”dawn” in Greek) and Aurora (Latin). The PIE root stems from *Hews-tro- to become Proto-Germanic *Austron, and that’s where the Old English word Ēostre comes from. (Credit goes to @korrigu for this etymological breakdown.)
Ostara shares this etymology, as it is derived from “Ostarmanod,” an old name of the month of April. Is Ēostre/Ostara a historical goddess? Maybe. Is she Ishtar? No. Ishtar is associated with the planet Venus the “morning star,” and does have dawn associations, but the name Ēostre, while it does mean “first light” or “dawn,” is not synonymous with Ishtar because they don’t share any linguistic roots just a superficial phonetic similarity.
I hope this is what you were looking for.
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