The Last Word On Nothing

On Easter Sunday, between watching videos of puppies frolicking with bunnies and helping neighbor kids hunt for backyard eggs, I spent some time puzzling over the crypto-pagan religious festivals of the first month of spring. The connection, for instance, between chocolate eggs and the resurrection of Jesus Christ; fertility rituals and Virginia ham. And how a triangular cookie — spilling forth fruit, no less — came to symbolize the shriveled ears of a Persian villain named Haman.

I started with Easter, a word used only among English speakers*, mentioned only once in the King James Bible. This is because William Tyndale, when he rebelliously translated the Bible into English during the early 16^th Century, used the word ester in one instance, instead of the Hebrew pesach. That wasn’t what got him burned at the stake, specifically, but it sure didn’t help. Eostre, as we already knew from the Venerable Bede in the 8^th century, was the Germanic name of a pagan goddess associated with the month we now call April.

That Tyndale’s mistake not only never got edited out, but became, in some countries, the accepted name for the Christians’ most significant spring festival, brought about one of the more bizarre heortological mashups in all of history: A fertility rite organized around a newly dead man emerging from his tomb.

Eostre is also known, to the modern Wiccans I know, as Ostara, the actual pagan fertility rite itself. They (the Wiccan they in this case), say you can make an egg stand on end if you find a surface flat enough and do it at the right time of the day, although this practice so far remains unverified. No one seems to know very much more about Ostara, except that mead, ham and chocolate bunnies are all appropriate festival fare. It’s a good time to practice magic, and then of course to have sex.

Finally, I looked into the Jewish festival that falls on the first full moon of spring, Purim. Not Passover, oddly enough; that comes a month later. (By rights, Easter should, too, but the early Roman Christians who decided these things wanted a Sunday, so they picked one.) The heroine of Purim is Esther, the beautiful queen who pleads with the Persian King Ahasuerus to revoke the evil vizier Haman’s order to slaughter all the Jews. On Purim, we bake cookies, folded triangles of dough stuffed with a sweet jam, typically made from poppy seeds. They’re said to represent the ears of Haman, which were supposedly cut off before he was executed for his treachery. Except they don’t really look like ears. Or even, in another translation, pockets.

Long ago — I believe I was still in high school — I was given a book by my free-thinking mother, who considered any avenue of spiritual exploration worthy so long as you were curious about it. The book’s title, as I remember it, was “The Pagan Origins of Jewish Festivals,” although I might have a word or two wrong: Origins might have been roots; festivals may have been holidays, or traditions. The author, whose credentials I didn’t think to check at the time, traced everything back to the Sumerian goddess Inanna’s now famous holy cry: “Who will plow my vulva?” And then she drew a straight line from Ostara to Esther to Easter. She claimed, in a logical process I didn’t quite retain, that all of them owed everything to the Babylonian goddess of love, war and just about everything else that matters: Inanna’s counterpart, Ishtar.

Ishtar, Esther, Eostre, Easter. It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

I walked around believing this linguistic evolution for a long time. I even went around telling other people it was true. Until one day I came across a blog post on the topic, where an anonymous scholar in the comments made the single persuasive point: Just because two goddess names sound alike, it doesn’t mean they share the same root. The etymological road from Eostre to Ishtar is indeed a long one: It would have to stretch from ancient Babylonia to Northern Europe. Which isn’t impossible — there are, after all, linguistic connections between Korean and Finnish. It’s just remote.

But can we trace a line from Ishtar to Esther? Many historians do, noting a distinct resemblance between the names of the characters in the Purim story, Esther and her cousin Mordecai, and the Babylonian legend of Ishtar and Marduk (both stories also involve the throwing of lots — in different circumstances, but still). Also, it’s Esther’s beauty that sways the king, and gives her away as Ishtar’s descendent: A creature, in this instance a mortal one, who derives her power in part from her skill at seduction. And take another look at those cookies: A dead man’s ears they are not. Rabbi Susan Schur, in the pages of the “frankly feminist” magazine Lilith, calls them “sacred vulva cakes.”

“The cosmic womb,” Shur elaborates, “a triangle with dots and seeds inside!”

Once I discovered Rabbi Shur, I have never been able to look at hamantaschen any other way.

There’s a certain feminist despair that sets in when you contemplate just how far Judeo-Christian tradition has gone to rout out that cosmic womb from modern spiritual traditions. There’s also a certain glee that takes over when you come to understand that it didn’t completely succeed.

The late historian Tikva Frymer-Kensky, in her 1992 book In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth, observed how next-to-impossible it was for religious leaders throughout the ages to rout out ancient fertility rituals. No matter which female deity became male as society organized around men, or which puritanical streak ran through which strain of religion, somehow fragments of Inanna always leak through. As Frymer-Kensky wrote, “When the divine has no vagina, how can the world be renewed?”

Esther and Easter may not share a linguistic root, but they’re still both vestigial reminders of an ancient truth: When it comes right down to it, they’re all fertility rites. I just hope none of those puppies eats a bunny.

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*As Albin Blaschka points out in the comments, the Germans use “Ostern.”

Photo of hamantaschen by Michelle Nijhuis. Used with permission.