Easter, Hares, Eggs, and Modern Heathenry

From Eosturmonath the English and German languages took the name of the Christian feast of the Resurrection, Easter (German Ostern), even though most European languages instead call it by a form of Pascha. This linguistic accident has fed a popular belief that Easter's eggs and hares descend from Eostre's pagan rites, but there is no ancient evidence for such a link.

The Easter hare first appears in German sources in the late seventeenth century (Georg Franck von Franckenau, 1682) as a folk-custom of no attested pagan pedigree, and decorated eggs have their own independent springtime and Christian associations; the confident claim that a hare was Eostre's sacred animal is a modern embellishment. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, adherents of modern Heathenry and the reconstructed English tradition known as Fyrnsidu have chosen to honour Eostre in spring, understanding this, at their most careful, as a contemporary revival built upon a single ancient sentence rather than an unbroken inheritance.