Ostara Intro

The celebration of the Vernal Equinox, the border between winter and spring, is known by a variety of names; we chose “Ostara,” an easy-to-pronounce variant of the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess said to lie behind an ancient seasonal festival. Historian Ronald Hutton examines the evidence for such a festival in his 1996 book The Stations of the Sun. He notes that the 8th-century English monk known as the Venerable Bede was curious as to why Germanic-speaking areas of Europe did not derive their name for this celebration from the Passover, a Jewish holiday translated into Christian observance, as was common in most other areas. Bede speculated that the Germanic name (which derives from an Indo-European root meaning “dawn” and survives in the modern terms Ostern and Easter) came from a pagan goddess called Eostre who presided over this time of year. However, Bede admits that this is entirely his own idea and is not based on any real research. Hutton writes, “It is therefore quite possible to argue that Bede’s Eostre was a Germanic dawn-deity who was venerated, appropriately, at this season of opening and new beginnings. It is equally valid, however, to suggest that the Anglo-Saxon ‘Estor-monath’ simply meant ‘the month of opening’ or ‘the month of beginnings,’ and that Bede mistakenly connected it with a goddess who either never existed at all, or was never associated with a particular season but merely, like Eos and Aurora, with the dawn itself” (p. 180).

Regardless, the Vernal Equinox does mark a time of new beginnings as we step back into the light half of the year. In constructing my graphic of the Wheel of the Year, seen above, I searched for an appropriate dichotomy to mark this axis and settled on Hello/Goodbye. In this sense, “hello” encompasses not just a greeting between friendly folks but also a sense of emergence—new life, new growth, new ideas. We’re on that boundary between “cold” and “life” and can let ourselves be open to the feelings that come with the imminent blossoming of spring. “Hello” can serve as a theme for Ostara celebrations; as we get ready to shake off our winter blues and embrace the return of the green—to come out of our refuge, rejoin the wider community, and start a new day. It makes sense, then, to name our celebration after a personification of the dawn.