This is the season of Lent, and it leads towards Easter, which refers, as Vox notes, to a German word for resurrection. There are no pagan Goddesses — the date he refers to is an allusion from the Venerable Bede, whose history is like Holinshed. Half myth.
One of the earliest appearances of “Easter” in English is in the Tyndale Bible, which actually refers to Ester. Remember, the conventional accusation about Easter being a pagan holiday concerned Ishtar, an Akkadian goddess of love and war, but that was never a viable explanation because none of the other European languages have any possible etymological link to a pagan holiday. Their Paschae, Pasqua, Pâques, Pascua, etc. all trace back to Passover.
So, the usual suspects dug around the history books and came up with Eostre, who was not a German goddess and for whom there is no evidence in the German linguistic record. But they did posit – or to put more clearly, made up – a nonexistent precursor goddess to a probably-invented goddess, whose nonexistent holiday could theoretically have been coopted by English and German Christians in the Sixteenth Century while celebrating the Erstehen on Paschae.
Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense to anyone who is capable of understanding the conventional ordering of cause and effect. Note in particular that the first and only known reference to Eostre is in 725 AD, and the first known references to Ester and Passover, both of which are English neologisms popularized, if not necessarily coined by Tyndale, were in 1526 AD, centuries after Paskha (πάσχα) was first celebrated by Christians.
Vox Day, Vox Popoli
The main reason to note this is that the Victorian High Church Atheists and neopagans (yes, the Venn diagram overlapped) had to make it up. Including removing Christ and God. They were the Antichrists of their age, claiming that they controlled their life,
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
William Ernest Henley
Henley wrote that after radical surgery to cure tubercular arthritis: but Stoicism does not save. His life has ended: like the Victorians, he is now scorned. No man is a sure and firm foundation. But Christ is.
For I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ.
Paul is at his more cryptic here. The Israelite’s did not turn back to Egypt: they were chased out by the chariots of Pharaoh. But they stood before the mountain, and heard a law they could not keep. The lives of that generation remained a warning, for they were saved but could not enter the land of promise: for they feared and believed man not God.
There are generations which are like this, and mine is one of them. What does one then do? You look for the faithful opposition within that generation. For the generation that died in the desert had two faithful spies: both Joshua and Caleb stood in the land of promise, and gained their inheritance. In the time of Elisha there were men who did not bow to the Ba’al: the new state religion.
Neopagans always use sweet words when they lie. Shun them. Cling to Christ.