[THREAD]
1/19
Long, long ago there was a people that lived someplace in the steppes of Eurasia who spoke a language linguists call, quite unimaginatively, the Proto-Indo-European tongue or PIE. Here, we're talking at least 8,300 years before the First Council of Nicea.
2/19
Not much is known of these people, but linguistic reconstruction and other etymological tools have opened up some tiny windows into their world. Peeping through them, we've learned a little about their language, religion, and mythologies. Only a little.
3/19
These people were pagans. They worshipped nature, much like the Hindus of today. From trees to mountains to rivers to the sky, everything was a deity in the PIE pantheon. One of these was the goddess of dawn, Hausōs. A mighty important deity, mind you.
4/19
Although not much is known of how Hausōs was worshipped and what rituals were involved, if any, the deity herself has stood the test of time and exists in almost every mythology in currency today. By 1800 BC, some PIE folks had moved into the Indus basin as Indo-Aryans.
5/19
By 1500 BC, the first Veda had been written. This was the first written record of a civilization's practices, both religious and otherwise. Here we find references to plenty of deities that form part of the Hindu pantheon even today.
6/19
One of these deities is the goddess of dawn. Her name? Uṣas. Rings a bell? No? How about Usha? With time, Hausōs also came to be associated with the direction of sunrise:
Haéwsōs > ušatara (Avestan) > oster (Germanic) > east (English).
7/19
Via multiple contrived chains of contact, Hausōs entered several theologies around the world, retaining her solar connection in each of them. In Vedic pantheon, Uṣas is the daughter of Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́ (sky daddy) and Prithvi Mata (mother Earth).
8/19
Avesta speaks of an Ušå who is honoured as the personification of dawn, just as the PIE Hausōs. Influenced by the Vedic religion via China, this deity even reached Japan at some point. There, she exists as the Shinto goddess Uzume. But am not gonna discuss that here.
9/19
The Greek Mythology adopted Hausōs as a Titaness named Eōs (Ἠώς), just as the counterpart of Dyáuṣ became Zeus. At various points in time, the deity infiltrated almost every Indo-European culture from Slavic to Roman and from Norse to even Arab!
10/19
In Germanic mythologies, the deity entered as Austrōn, a personification of spring. And when these tribes settled the British Isle, Austrōn evolved into the Anglo Saxon Ēastre. Today we recognize it as Easter. Spring is an important part of the year, and for good reason.
11/19
After a long spell of unforgiving cold, spring brings warmth, light, and renewed vitality. Today, every civilization has some kind of spring festival to celebrate harvest and worship a goddess of fertility. 10,000 years ago, that goddess was Hausōs, today there's many.
12/19
Even Arabia has a pre-Islamic pagan past that draws directly from the PIE peoples discussed above. In that tradition, the pre-Muslim Arabs had a goddess called Ishtar. Ishtar goes back to the Babylonians and was the patron goddess of the Eanna temple at Uruk.
13/19
Ishtar was called the Queen of Heaven and shows up on many Assyrian and Akkadian artefacts today. The following Akkadian seal, for instance, comes from 2300 BC. That's at least 800 years before the first Veda was penned!
14/19
By the time Christ was crucified, the Europeans were already celebrating some kind of spring festival in their own way involving trees, harvest, rabbits, and eggs (fertility?). All these festivals were named some variant of Easter etymologically linked with the PIE Hausōs.
15/19
In 325 AD, the First Council of Nicea was called. This is where in the official framing of Christianity and its ecclesiastical features, easter was first discussed. The idea was to use a common religion as a unifying political force when Rome was falling apart.
16/19
Now floating a brand new religion is not an easy task. Nobody is readily willing to give up on a belief system they've held on to for generations. So the key is to repurpose that existing system into some kind of a bridge with the new one. This reduces any hostility.
17/19
That's what Constantine did with Easter. He took a piece of mythology already popular with his people, and repurposed it with the resurrection story into a brand new celebration. Christianity suddenly became less alien and more adoption-friendly.
18/19
But the official date wasn't established until 725 AD when St. Bede the Venerable, a Benedictine monk, standardized it as "the Sunday following the full moon which falls on or after the equinox." This date went further updates over the centuries though.
19/19
So that's the story of Easter, a festival that commemorates Jesus and yet predates him by at least 8,000 years, if not more. Nevertheless, its spirit remains unchanged: LIFE.

Here's wishing the world a happy resurrection from this pandemic. May we emerge stronger, tougher.
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