Ostara

Old English Eosturmonath, the month of April

See it on the Wheel of the Sky

When it comes round

North of the equator: the March equinox, when the Sun reaches 0° Aries, on .

South of the equator, where the seasons are reversed, the Wheel of the Sky keeps Ostara in the same season, half a year later or earlier: the September equinox, when the Sun reaches 0° Libra, on .

The solstices and equinoxes are the Sun at 0° of a cardinal sign, so the festival is that moment itself. Worked out with the same Sun calculation as the calendar and the Wheel of the Sky.

The spring equinox, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator going north; its modern name comes from the goddess Bede said April was named for.

In history

At the March equinox the Sun crosses the celestial equator going north: the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere and of autumn in the Southern (Britannica). Bede wrote that the English month of April, Eosturmonath, “was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month” (Bede, The Reckoning of Time), and he held that Easter took its name from it (Britannica).

Modern scholars are more cautious. The link between Eostre, spring and the hare has been disputed, and she may have been a local protective goddess; and despite the likeness, Eostre and Easter do not share a root: there is now wide agreement that Easter comes from in albis, the Christian Latin name for Easter week, which became eostarum in Old High German (Britannica). The form Ostara goes back to Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835), which argued that the Germans too had a spring goddess of that name (D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh).

German records of the 17th century describe children hunting for eggs hidden by the Easter hare, the Osterhase, and German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the 18th century are credited with bringing the custom to America (Britannica).

In modern practice

As the name of the spring equinox, Ostara is modern: Aidan Kelly chose it in 1974 for a “Pagan-Craft” calendar, taking it from Bede’s goddess (Kelly, 2017). It is the sabbat of March 19 or 20 (Britannica, “Wicca”). The eight-festival Wheel of the Year itself is modern: Wicca, which emerged in England in the 1950s, typically keeps eight seasonal festivals, called sabbats, based on traditional celebrations drawn from different periods of British and Irish history, and many Wiccans in the Southern Hemisphere move them to fit their own seasons (Britannica, “Wicca”).

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