I want to tell you about what happened yesterday (and is still very much going).
I posted a carousel about Easter. The history of it from the name, the eggs, the rabbit, the lunar timing, tracing origins back to Eostre, a Germanic goddess of spring and dawn documented in the 8th century. I've shared versions of this before. I sent a version of it to you in the At the Altar newsletter recently. But something about the timing, the algorithm, the collective post-Easter energy landed very differently this time.
Over 25,000 views. 100 new followers. And counting. Plus a comment section that is becoming one of the most interesting conversations I've had in a public space in a long time.
Here's what I noticed: people respond to historical truth in almost exactly the way they respond to anything that gently disrupts what they thought they knew. Some people are delighted. Some are defensive. Some are genuinely curious and want to go deeper. And some show up with their own sources and their own stakes in the story.
Several commented that billions of people celebrate Easter for the resurrection of Jesus, not for a pagan goddess. And they weren't wrong. That's true. My caption had overgeneralized because it was geared more towards a Pagan/Witchcraft base, and I acknowledged it. What I didn't do was apologize for the content itself, because the history is the history regardless of what any individual brings to the holiday personally.
Someone else pushed back on the scholarship, pointing out that Bede is the primary source for Eostre and that Grimm built on that speculatively in the 19th century. Also not wrong. I said so. And then I said that the broader pattern of the church absorbing existing seasonal festivals, the egg as a pre-Christian symbol of rebirth across Persian, Egyptian, and Jewish traditions, and the lunar calculation that has nothing to do with a fixed historical event is documented well beyond any single goddess or scholar. Both things were true. I held both.
Someone noted there is an egg on the Passover Seder plate. There is. And it predates Easter, and the Persian decorated eggs predate Passover, and the Egyptian burial eggs predate those. The egg as a symbol of life returning has been carried forward by so many hands across so many thousands of years that no single tradition owns it. It belongs to all of them because it was always about something older than any of them: the earth doing what the earth does every spring.
That's what I kept coming back to in that comment section. Not winning. Not defending. Just zooming out until the argument dissolved into something more interesting than the argument.
Here is what I want to offer you from all of it, because I think it applies well beyond Easter history and comment sections: you do not have to choose between holding your truth and leaving room for someone else's. These are not opposing forces. The person who celebrates the resurrection of Christ and the person who honors Eostre at the equinox are both responding to the same thing: the return of light after darkness, the insistence of life after what felt like death. The story is older than both of them. It belongs to the earth first.
Where it gets complicated, and where I think a lot of us are still learning, is when someone else's truth is being used to crowd out yours. When the comment isn't curiosity but conversion. When the correction isn't about accuracy but about authority. That's a different conversation than disagreement, and it requires a different kind of response…which is usually a shorter one.
You are allowed to put a truth into the world and let it be received in all the ways it gets received. You are allowed to hold your ground with warmth. You are allowed to zoom out when the argument gets small.
And sometimes tens of thousands of strangers on the internet will find you because of it.
With love,
Cerissa