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Originally Posted by anobsitar
I see - this means there's something wrong with the dictionaries you are using.
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Or it has, indeed, fallen out of use?
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Originally Posted by anobsitar
I don't know anyone who thinks about Donar, Wodan or Thor - except some fans of fantasy stories or Nazis.
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First, Donar = Thor. That being said, there is quite an active study of these Gods and the religion that surrounded them by archeologists, historians, and anthropologists.
Quote:
Originally Posted by anobsitar
Normally I would say that it is not so important - but once I had a problem with the expresisoin "Ostara" (Easter) and I had to take a look. Since this time I know for sure that the godess "Ostara" never existed. It is just a form of propagandism against Christians in the kind "Christian stole Easter" and a reason for some people to disturb relgious celebrations.
In later times I found out, that "Ostara" was also the name of a newpaper in 1905 from a man who called himsel "Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels" (his real name was 'Adolf Joseph Lanz'). There's is existing an article also in the enlgish Wikepedia - but I don't know how good it is (In the german Wikipedia there's a very good articlae). This dishonarable monk, traitorously priest and extremly stupid dreamer produced a lot of ideas the Nazis were using in a kind of German myth that never really existed.
It's nothing else than a kind of fantasy. Most Germans don't have really any idea about. Every year someone is telling something about some gods that hypothetically were existing since centuries - and in most cases it are nothing else than fantasy stories. No one in the USA for example would say "The Terminator" is a god - it's nothing else than a fantasie story. Normally everyone knows what's a dream, fiction, fantasy and what's reality.
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For the record, I think Wiccans simply use the modern festival as an excuse to get together and get drunk. And any who disturb Christian celebrations are just simply people who didn't get enough attention as kids. I, like you, loathe them.
However, the first person to speculate about a connection between a goddess and Easter was Jacob Grimm in
Deutsche Mythologie. He primarily cites the works of Bede's
De temporum ratione, in which there is mention of a Anglo-Saxon (and, by extention, Germanic) goddess Eostre. To quote Grimm:
This Ostarâ, like the AS Eástre, must in the heathen religion have denoted a higher being, whose worship was so firmly rooted, that the Christian teachers tolerated the name, and applied it to one of their own grandest anniversaries.
Anyways, the fact of the matter remains that there were indeed pagan festivals that occured at the same time as the Christian holiday of Easter. Furthermore, there is speculation that these festivals revolved around the Goddess Eostre. And the fact remains that there was indeed a very real, and deep rooted religion in Germany (and the Germanic world as a whole), along with its rituals, festivals, and other rites, before the arrival of Christianity. The deny this, and write it off as pure fantasy, is the height of ignorance. A willfull ignorance at that.