The Pagan Origin Of Easter

[The Sushi Bandit]

Found this on-line.. some interesting stuff in the middle, it is done by a preacher but looks like some history lesson stuff too!


The Pagan Origin Of Easter


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Easter is a day that is honered by nearly all of contemporary Christianity and is used to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The holiday often involves a church service at sunrise, a feast which includes an "Easter Ham", decorated eggs and stories about rabbits.

Those who love truth learn to ask questions, and many questions must be asked regarding the holiday of Easter.

Is it truly the day when Jesus arose from the dead? Where did all of the strange customs come from, which have nothing to do with the resurrection of our Saviour?

The purpose of this tract is to help answer those questions, and to help those who seek truth to draw their own conclusions.

The first thing we must understand is that professing Christians were not the only ones who celebrated a festival called "Easter."

"Ishtar", which is pronounced "Easter" was a day that commemorated the resurrection of one of their gods that they called "Tammuz", who was believed to be the only begotten son of the moon-goddess and the sun-god.

In those ancient times, there was a man named Nimrod, who was the grandson of one of Noah's son named Ham.

Ham had a son named Cush who married a woman named Semiramis.Cush and Semiramis then had a son named him "Nimrod."

After the death of his father, Nimrod married his own mother and became a powerful King.

The Bible tells of of this man, Nimrod, in Genesis 10:8-10 as follows: "And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad,and Calneh, in the land of Shinar."

Nimrod became a god-man to the people and Semiramis, his wife and mother, became the powerful Queen of ancient Babylon.

Nimrod was eventually killed by an enemy, and his body was cut in pieces and sent to various parts of his kingdom.

Semiramis had all of the parts gathered, except for one part that could not be found.

That missing part was his reproductive organ. Semiramis claimed that Nimrod could not come back to life without it and told the people of Babylon that Nimrod had ascended to the sun and was now to be called "Baal", the sun god.

Queen Semiramis also proclaimed that Baal would be present on earth in the form of a flame, whether candle or lamp, when used in worship.

Semiramis was creating a mystery religion, and with the help of Satan, she set herself up as a goddess.

Semiramis claimed that she was immaculately conceived.

She taught that the moon was a goddess that went through a 28 day cycle and ovulated when full.

She further claimed that she came down from the moon in a giant moon egg that fell into the Euphrates River.

This was to have happened at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Semiramis became known as "Ishtar" which is pronounced "Easter", and her moon egg became known as "Ishtar's" egg."

Ishtar soon became pregnant and claimed that it was the rays of the sun-god Baal that caused her to conceive.

The son that she brought forth was named Tammuz.

Tammuz was noted to be especially fond of rabbits, and they became sacred in the ancient religion, because Tammuz was believed to be the son of the sun-god, Baal. Tammuz, like his supposed father, became a hunter.

The day came when Tammuz was killed by a wild pig.

Queen Ishtar told the people that Tammuz was now ascended to his father, Baal, and that the two of them would be with the worshippers in the sacred candle or lamp flame as Father, Son and Spirit.

Ishtar, who was now worshipped as the "Mother of God and Queen of Heaven", continued to build her mystery religion.

The queen told the worshippers that when Tammuz was killed by the wild pig, some of his blood fell on the stump of an evergreen tree, and the stump grew into a full new tree overnight. This made the evergreen tree sacred by the blood of Tammuz.

She also proclaimed a forty day period of time of sorrow each year prior to the anniversary of the death of Tammuz.

During this time, no meat was to be eaten.

Worshippers were to meditate upon the sacred mysteries of Baal and Tammuz, and to make the sign of the "T" in front of their hearts as they worshipped.

They also ate sacred cakes with the marking of a "T" or cross on the top.

Every year, on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, a celebration was made.

It was Ishtar's Sunday and was celebrated with rabbits and eggs.

Ishtar also proclaimed that because Tammuz was killed by a pig, that a pig must be eaten on that Sunday.

By now, the readers of this tract should have made the connection that paganism has infiltrated the contemporary "Christian" churches, and further study indicates that this paganism came in by way of the Roman Catholic System.

The truth is that Easter has nothing whatsoever to do with the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We also know that Easter can be as much as three weeks away from the Passover, because the pagan holiday is always set as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.

Some have wondered why the word "Easter" is in the the King James Bible.

It is because Acts, chapter 12, tells us that it was the evil King Herod, who was planning to celebrate Easter, and not the Christians.

The true Passover and pagan Easter sometimes coincide, but in some years, they are a great distance apart.

So much more could be said, and we have much more information for you, if you are a seeker of the truth.

We know that the Bible tells us in John 4:24, "God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

The truth is that the forty days of Lent, eggs, rabbits,hot cross buns and the Easter ham have everything to do with the ancient pagan religion of Mystery Babylon.These are all antichrist activities!

Satan is a master deceiver, and has filled the lives of well-meaning, professing Christians with idolatry.

These things bring the wrath of God upon children of disobedience, who try to make pagan customs of Baal worship Christian.

You must answer for your activities and for what you teach your children.

These customs of Easter honor Baal, who is also Satan, and is still worshipped as the "Rising Sun" and his house is the "House of the Rising Sun."

How many churches have "sunrise services" on Ishtar's day and face the rising sun in the East?

How many will use colored eggs and rabbit stories, as they did in ancient Babylon.

These things are no joke, any more than Judgement day is a joke.

I pray to God that this tract will cause you to search for more truth.

We will be glad to help you by providing more information and by praying for you.

These are the last days, and it is time to repent, come out and be separate.

David J. Meyer

Last Trumpet Ministries International

[msongs]

1. the unvarnished truth and nothing but, no spin or anything ! :-) nt

[Kutjara]

2. And there I was, thinking that it was Christianity...

...that had co-opted and twisted preexisting traditions to its own ends, when all along those ancient religions have been trying to pollute the purity of Christianity.

What a fascinating document: a combination of pop mythology, blockhead linguistics (Ishtar's Egg indeed) and good old fashioned fire and brimstone evangelical insanity. David Meyer has waaaay too much time on his hands.

[silverweb]

3. Wow.

What a convoluted, bullshit mishmash of corrupted mythological bits and pieces.

:eyes:

Can people ever simply study and appreciate ancient tales as they were? -- without trying to warp them into the fabric of their own, newer mythology?

[aquart]

4. What a fabulous feast of misinformation!

I hardly know where to start. Ishtar is pronounced Easter? Who knew? I thought Oestre was Easter. Well, it's all sorta one.

But the first thing we really have to deal with is the "true Passover." Say what? Passover is Pesach. But Pesach isn't exactly Passover. Indoeuropean root for fish: peisk. This is the Fish Festival. Or, the messianic fish meal common in the Mediterrannean region. The thing about ancient festivals is that new religions can't erase them, so they rewrite them. Ancient Hebrews rewrote the well-known festival with a highly nationalistic slant, like most pagan festivals were rewritten as the Jewish faith took form.

I am also fascinated to read that the word "Easter" is in the Bible. If you can find it, let me know. Semiramis isn't in there, either. Read Diodorus for her. Or Josephus? The mother-marrying is the Oedipus story, which is also Greek.

The writer seems to be quoting a misinformed Protestant minister named Alexander Hislop who made a number of great leaps with little evidence and certainly nothing Biblical.

The Bible doesn't say what happened to Nimrod, but Egyptian god Osiris was cut up that way, and Isis found every part of him but the missing penis.

I never heard of a moon egg. There's an Egyptian festival with a goose laying the golden egg of the sun, (yes, that's where the fairy tale came from) but that's a solstice festival. The moon is actually related to the Easter bunny, since it's the moon hare that's depicted. It's kind of amazing to learn which nations believed in the moon hare: the Celts, the people of India, the people of South America. Were they friends? (Yes, lots of Celts in the Holy Land during Biblical times.)

To get back to the "true Passover," the original pagan festival is closer to Easter because the Jews only kept one messianic vestige in our version of the rite: Elijah's cup. We don't bring up Tammuz who is Adonis who died in Aphrodite's lap like the reverent paintings of dying Jesus in Mary's lap. We don't worship a dying and reviving god. Christianity does. The evergreen becoming sacred because of Tammuz is a new one on me. Particularly since evergreens are a bit sparse in the MidEast. The usual story is that Adonis' blood stained the anemone. Adonis=Tammuz=Attis=Dumuzi.

As for eating that ham, there was a fun festival called the Thesmaphoria which involved burying a pig and then digging it up again....which I suspect became Sukkos in Judaism since Sukko is Celtic for pig and, like I said, the Celts were in the neighborhood. If Jews hadn't considered the pig a sacred animal at some point in our history, we wouldn't have a taboo against eating it.

Side note: rabbits and eggs are fertility symbols. When you wonder what really went on in ancient times in the garden of Gethsemane with all that temptation, keep in mind that Easter is nine months from Christmas, and any child conceived in a fertility rite at Easter would likely have a winter solstice or Christmas birthday. What did I say about rewriting festivals it was too hard to kill? Christians did it, too. A new faith always gives new meaning to the old rites. It doesn't mean that a purist would or should abandon those rites. It means you look at them with new eyes instead of old ones.

[Igel]

10. Clever.

Seriously.

But the KJV, IIRC, does include the word 'Easter'. Paskha, in Gk ... one of the many errors in translation. But an understandable one, since so many European languages borrowed the word 'pesach' (in some form) for "Easter".

[aquart]

12. Where? I tried a search and it didn't come up.

Wrong translation?

And I wouldn't be so quick to assume that an indoeuropean language borrowed pesach from the Hebrew. They may simply have been calling it the Fish Holiday, which is what it always was.

As an oddity, most Jewish Holidays seem to have indoeuropean roots in their names which were given a Hebrew translation. And Yahweh may well have a cozy relationship with yewo, the indoeuropean root for Law.

[Hekate]

5. Oy.The "dying and reviving god" is very, very ancient.This guy's made a hash of it though.

Inanna and Dumuzi aka Ishtar and Tammuz are one such pair. Dumuzi was a mortal beloved of the goddess; displeasing her, he was condemned to death and later was redeemed by the clever intervention of his sister Geshtinanna. Initially it was Inanna who spent 3 days in the Underworld though. There's a passage in Ezekiel where one of the prophets rails against the women who persist in baking moon cakes and weeping for Tammuz during his passage into death and then life again.

Ishtar is cognate with Esther, another name that appears in the Old Testament as the queen who saved the Jewish people from extermination.

Easter is a word derived from the European goddess Ostara/Eostre, a fertility goddess with a Spring Equinox festival. After the "death" of Winter the world revives again. Eggs, rabbits, lambs, are all symbols of new life and sacred to this time. Decorated eggs are part of this holiday, an offering to Ostara.

The boar and sow are sacred animals in much of the ancient world, including Europe. It would take too much time to go into all of the mythology surrounding them, but suffice it to say that the Goddess, Hero, and Boar are a recurring triad; the hero beloved of the goddess is often slain or castrated by a wild boar, although Odysseus managed to survive with only a deep scar on his thigh.

Satan is a late Christian construct that has nothing to do with these vivid pagan religions, except that Christian missionaries were only too happy to incorporate the symbols and characters of existing religions into the developing Christian mythology.

Nice try, Reverend.

And thanks for bringing it up, Sushi. :hi:

Hekate

[villager]

6. Happy "Eostar" to all!

n/t

[ClintonTyree]

7. "These are the last days"....

:eyes: people have been saying that since religion was invented. There have been a lot of disappointed people who've bet their lives on that statement. It seems it's always, "the last days", and that one statement has done more to keep people from examining the nuts and bolts of religion than any other. "Hurry up and wait, these are the last days". :eyes: Of course religions are predicated upon the return of some sort of savior to make everything better. That's why Jesus was picked from a multitude of candidates for the position of savior, they needed someone and they needed someone quickly, they were sick and tired of waiting. So now christians patiently await the second coming of the savior but there's one catch: a second coming in infinitely more difficult to pull off than the original. It's like "virgin birth": after you use that excuse once it's pretty well shot for everyone else.

I believe I'll watch, "The Life of Brian", today. I haven't seen it in a long time and it always brings a smile to my face. :) People's front of Judea! Splitters! :grr:

[xchrom]

8. the resurecting concepts come more from egypt than babylon.

and the current way we celebrate easter has more to do with co-opting celtic celebrations than mideastern.

i'm all for finding pagan roots to christian festivals -- but they should be the right pagan festivals thank you.

and that guy is all over the map with his babylon story.

[cosmik debris]

9. Why don't they ever talk about virgin sacrifice

To me that has always been the most important part of Easter. Killing a virgin and then eating the flesh and drinking the blood is the best part. After that is sex under the full moon. Forget chocolate bunnies. That's kid's stuff.

[Igel]

11. Very Two-Babylonish.

In other words, YUCK.