Eostre

Eostre is the name of a putative goddess of the Anglo-Saxons who is also worshipped by some neopagans. The Venerable Bede described her worship as something which had already died out by the time he began writing the first significant history of the Anglo-Saxons. In recent years some historians have suggested that Bede may have made her up because there are no known references to her preceding his work. Others point out that Bede is known as "the Father of English history" precisely because he has long been the source for most of what little we know about pre-Christian English history.

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Modern sources associate her with various aspects related to the renewal of life: spring, fertility and the hare (allegedly for its rapid and prolific reproduction). Modern worshippers and writers describe Eostre as a "goddess of Dawn" based on the etymological relationship between her name and the Anglo-Saxon word for 'dawn'. Some Neo-pagans believe that she was sometimes depicted with a hare's head, though it is not possible to substantiate this belief as no known animal-headed deities appear in Germanic or Celtic cult objects. There are no known Celtic depictions of Eostre whatsoever.

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Goddess: A goddess is a female deity, in contrast with a male deity known as a "god". A great many cultures have goddesses, sometimes alone, but more often as part of a larger that includes both of the conventional genders and in some cases even hermaphroditic (or gender neutral) deities....

Anglo-Saxons: The Anglo-Saxons were originally a collection of differing Germanic tribes from Angeln—a peninsula in the southern part of Schleswig, protruding into the Baltic Sea, and what is now Lower Saxony, in the north-west coast of Germany—who achieved dominance in southern Britain from the mid-5...

Neopagans: REDIRECT Neopaganism...