elmagicochrisg wrote:The Saxon equivalent of Ashteroth/Ishtar/Astarte was the goddess Eostre, from which we get the word "oestrus," which refers to an animal in heat.
And this...
By way of linguistic reconstruction, the matter of a Proto-Germanic goddess called *Austrō has been examined in detail since the foundation of Germanic philology in the 19th century by scholar Jacob Grimm and others. As the Germanic languages descend from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), linguists have traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs (→ *Ausṓs), from which descends the common Germanic goddess that Ēostre and Ostara are held to descend.
Which shows Ishtar, Eostre, Ostara, Ostera, Astarte, Austro, oestrus, oestrogen, and probably a lot of other words all have common grounds. So saying the word Easter is not related to Ishtar would mean it is not related to Austro either. Which contradicts what you said here...
Only problem is, it's
wrong. It's not just factually wrong, it's fundamentally wrong.
Let's go little by little.
The Saxon equivalent of Ashteroth/Ishtar/Astarte was the goddess Eostre, from which we get the word "oestrus," which refers to an animal in heat.
This is impossible. First, oestrus doesn't come from Ashteroth/Ishtar/Astarte, but from the Greek oistrus, which doesn't mean an animal in heat, but rather a gadfly, and likely the frenzy an animal gets from being stung by a gadfly. Oistros itself is divided into its root ois- and suffix -tros, which denotes an autonomous agent and parallels the "-tor" in things like scriptor (writer) or iatros (doctor, which has the suffix, too). It has to do with frenzied movement, but
not "an animal in heat". You have that exactly backwards.
Second, it's impossible to say that X god is Y god when those gods are separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles unless you can trace a line of descent. The Anglo-Saxons were an Indo-European people, while the Babylonians were Afro-Asiatic. There wouldn't be anything of Ishtar for the Anglo-Saxons to borrow, since the two peoples are unrelated. So that takes out direct descent. You're only left to trace out a trajectory for the goddess whose people had been subjugated and whose cults had long since vanished by the time the
first mention of Easter is made.
By way of linguistic reconstruction, the matter of a Proto-Germanic goddess called *Austrō has been examined in detail since the foundation of Germanic philology in the 19th century by scholar Jacob Grimm and others. As the Germanic languages descend from Proto-Indo-European (PIE), linguists have traced the name to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn *H₂ewsṓs (→ *Ausṓs), from which descends the common Germanic goddess that Ēostre and Ostara are held to descend.
Yes, Grimm did indeed look at *aust, but as you noticed he only mentions Eostre (Easter) and a
hypothetical Ostara. Unfortunately, this root actually goes into Latin as aur- (with intervocalic rhotacism), thus aura, and in English and Greek as eos, one becoming "dawn" and the other becoming "east", which is where dawn happens (sun rises from the east, after all). But there's still no relation to Ishtar!
Check out a solid Etymological dictionary. If you cannot get a hold of Beeke's Greek Etymological Dictionary,
Chantraine's Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Grecque is a bit out-dated but freely available online. You'll see from there that oistros has no relation to east.
So saying the word Easter is not related to Ishtar would mean it is not related to Austro either. Which contradicts what you said here...
You seem to buy easily into statements found online. They're bullshit, you know.
Cush, Ham, Nimrod... But all those names and who their parents and kids are -according to history and legend- can be verified.
No.
As for the incest part, it is not that unlikely. One only has to look at the Egyptians to know incest was not that uncommon. So no, to answer your question, that part did not make me stop and say "wtf?"...
Actually, the situation in Egypt was unique and uncommon. Most societies have a strict taboo against incest, and the unique position of royalty often allows for circumventing that taboo. But even then, it cannot be said that it was common, nor can it be applied everywhere, and mother-son relationships were the rarest of them all. To put into perspective the kind of logical leaps you're making, Muslims in Saudi Arabia can have four wives, so obviously it's not uncommon for people in Belgium to have four wives.
