Easter is coming, and I thought I’d break my recent Soul and Soil silence with some findings on its background and etymology. I was told that Easter – the famous Christian festival of resurrection - shares an etymology with oestrogen – the famous female sex hormone. That the “east” of both comes via Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess.

Unfortunately the OED doesn’t agree. It allows Easter’s link to Eostre, citing the Venerable Bede as its source, but says that oestrogen - for all it’s clear connection through human egg cells, easter eggs and fertility, for all that it shares an ‘e’ sound with an ‘o’ in it - actually derives from the word oestrus meaning “rut”, which comes from the Latin oestrus - meaning frenzy, or gadfly - which in turn derives from Greek oistros, meaning gadfly, breeze, sting or mad impulse.

The only backing for my preferred version was a pagan wicca internet site. This is deeply disappointing and to my mind lends the etymology of oestrogen a contentiousness, akin to that of ‘hysteria’ - from the greek hysterikos “of the womb” - because hysteria was originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Which some women find a bit rich (apparently).

I’ve heard Easter described as a “pagan cake with Christian icing,” and the fact of its being celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox makes it a lunar festival, one of those for which the phrase “moveable feast” was presumably coined.

Those of us raised in predominantly Christian cultures are brought up with Easter eggs and Easter bunnies, mainly chocolate, alongside stories of the resurrection of the crucified Christ, and it’s not surprising the two become confused. And people become touchy…

There was controversy recently over a life-size, anatomically accurate, chocolate sculpture of Jesus  entitled “Oh Sweet Lord” recently pulled from a Manhattan gallery after strong protests. Ironically, far from being a religious iconoclast, the sculptor is best known for his quirky work with food - repainting a hotel room in melted mozzarella, dressing a four-poster bed with ham.

Hmmm. Anyway… I know about the power of speculative etymology and its potential for good and not-so-good - I live in the town of Totnes where men and women secrete the hormone totnesterone.

Although the etymological link between Easter and oestrogen is no more real than that between testosterone and Test Match Special, I think both have more to do with eggs and fertility than with frenzied rutting gadflies - but feel free to disagree, and if you want to make a chocolate effigy of anything, that’s fine by me.

Filed under Consciousness, education.
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