Re: List limits, and Passover/Easter

On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Nik Taylor wrote:

> James Campbell wrote:
> > Um... always wondered this, but never had anyone to ask till now: is the
> > name Astarte related?
>
> I doubt it.  Astarte was a Canaanite (?) deity, part of the Afro-Asiatic
> family, while Eastre was an Anglo-Saxon deity, a name derived from the
> Indo-European family.  Astarte/Eastre isn't even all that similar.  Mere
> coincidence, I'm sure.
Nevertheless, the claim is made annually by ultra-radical Fundamentalist
Reformed sorts that "Easter" is from "Ishtar" and that all "Easter"
celebrations are actually Ishtar worship.  Mind you, they can't figure out
how the name got from Mesopotamia to England without touching any of the
countries in between.  What is truly strange is that some neopagans have
taken up exactly the same daft refrain in an attempt to claim that Easter
was "theirs first".  I guess Jews don't exist, anymore...