In 725 CE, the monk Bede wrote that the Anglo-Saxons had once named April after a goddess called Eostre and held feasts in her honour. It is the only ancient statement about her that survives. Almost everything else now said about her came later: a German goddess called Ostara, a sacred hare, a claim on the Easter egg, a festival on the Pagan Wheel of the Year, and a meme insisting that Easter belongs to Ishtar.
Was Eostre a goddess the Anglo-Saxons truly worshipped, or a monk's best guess at an old month name? The trail runs through more than 150 Roman-era altars in the Rhineland, the German writer who first made the hare her sacred animal, and an occult magazine that carried her name into the racial fantasies behind Nazism.
Drawing on archaeology, language, and the original sources, Eostre: The Goddess Behind Easter traces each layer of her story to the person who added it.
