I looked up the etymology of ‘Easter’. According to Bede it was named for a pagan Germanic goddess, Ēostre. So as with Christmas, a Christian festival may be piggybacking a previous pagan celebration, and so cashing in on the extra depth, the layers of associations, that this would have provided for recent converts from paganism.
Ēostre is thought by historical linguists to be traceable to a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *H₂éwsōs, and to be cognate with ‘East’, that being where the sun rises. Apparently, in Indo-European myths, the *H₂éwsōs figure is often a daughter of the sky-god, who brings light to the world only reluctantly and is punished for doing so. In which case a daughter of the supreme god who is punished for bringing light has been supplanted by a son of the supreme god who is also punished for bringing a kind of light.
There’s lot of guesswork in all this whose plausibility I am certainly not qualified to evaluate on the basis of reading a couple of Wikipedia articles, but I love the depth of words, the endless chains of associations from which they derive their meaning, stretching back until they disappear into the mists of the past. There’s more more richness in this, I feel, than in rigid theological systems which, like language pedants, seek to set in stone something which is by nature always in a state of flux.
