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.

Ostara Ritual

Celebration for Ostara, the Vernal Equinox

Opening Poem

Suggested reading: “Persephone Returning” by Alison Stone

The Vernal Equinox and the Meaning of Ostara

Tonight we gather once again to honor the ever-turning wheel of the year. The cycles of the year, like the cycles of our lives, have neither beginning nor end. Their movement is constant, yet not repetitive. No year, no season, no day, no life is exactly like the one that came before or that will come after. Every season is unique, and every life is unique.

Like galaxies spiraling through the universe, the paths of our lives also spiral, forever moving us forward. Although the Earth circles the sun, the sun itself is circling the core of the galaxy, creating a spiral path for our planet. Everything in the galaxy follows a spiral path. Therefore, the Earth’s journey, though constant, also never repeats itself.

Twice a year, the Earth seems to pause in its journey around the sun, as it reaches the balance point between day and night. On these days, the equinoxes, we pause also, to celebrate the life-sustaining cycles of light and dark and reflect on the turning wheel of life and death. We celebrate with flame, whether the flicker of candlelight or the roar of a bonfire, to remind us of the energy of the sun and the creative spark of the cosmos beyond.

When the day and the night are of equal length, we are reminded of the equality of all living things—for they are all aspects of Gaea, our living world. From the smallest microbe to the largest redwood, we are all united in life and stand as equals on this planet. When we pause in this moment, we remember this truth, and renew our commitment to caring for the Earth, for each other, and for ourselves.

On this day, the vernal equinox, light and darkness are in balance. Behind us lies the long, cold winter; before us lies the promise of the spring. As the earth softens and the waters begin to flow, we welcome the return of the light. The winter’s long dark nights have given us the time and the space to turn inward, to reflect, and to renew ourselves. Now, the world around us stirs itself, and our senses rejoice at the fresh blossoms, green grasses, and all varieties of new life that appear around us.

The vernal equinox is a moment for us to pause and reflect upon that which we need to release and that which we need to pull closer. What hopes, fears, habits, beliefs, or relationships are we holding onto even though they no longer inspire our best selves? Can we let go of them in order to make space for new ideas, new people, and new endeavors?

As seeds are germinating all around us, we can ask what seeds have we sown in our own lives? How might our past accomplishments inspire us to seek out new goals and projects? In the coming summer, what do we want to learn, to create, to nurture? This is the wonder of Ostara, to honor all that we have made manifest in our lives, and to look forward to the productive days that are yet to come.

Candle Lighting

I light this candle in the name of the Ancestors, the Guardians, and all the holy ones who walk the world. May its light guide all the kindly spirits to bless this place.

I light this candle in the name of learning. May its flame remind us to look towards the unknown with curiosity and an open mind.

I light this candle in the name of creativity. May its glow inspire us and give us the confidence to share our true selves with the world.

I light this candle in the name of friendship. May its light continue to bring us together, so that we might offer each other joy, comfort, and company.

I light this candle in the name of the sun. May its flame warm our spirit and stay with us in the months to come.

I light this candle in the name of the Earth. May it illuminate our path through the coming year and remind us to walk with peace and compassion for all Gaea’s children.

Closing Poem

Suggested reading: “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

Who Speaks for Earth?

Previously, I mentioned that I think the essence of Scientific Paganism is the idea that the scientist and the Pagan practitioner can be allies, rather than getting bogged down in the animosity and mutual disdain that is often seen in exchanges between certain fundamentalist religious sects and argumentative members of the scientific community. In the two essays I’ve examined so far, Neo-Pagan philosopher Oberon Zell has argued that the Planet Earth should be recognized as a unified living organism and that, as part of that organism, the human race must necessarily change its relationship with the environment in order to preserve our own existence as well as the health and well-being of the living planet. His appreciation for the effect NASA photos of the Earth have had on raising awareness of the planet as a unified whole has been echoed by celebrity scientist Carl Sagan. However, I’m glad to say that Sagan and Zell agree on much more fundamental principles.

In the thirteenth and final episode of Cosmos, entitled “Who Speaks for Earth?” and originally broadcast on December 21, 1980, Carl Sagan ruminates on humanity’s chances of avoiding self-inflicted extinction:

From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task that it faces: preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet. But if we’re willing to live with the growing likelihood of nuclear war, shouldn’t we also be willing to explore vigorously every possible means to prevent nuclear war? Shouldn’t we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things—a fundamental restructuring of economic, political, social, and religious institutions?

We’ve reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases. Nuclear arms threaten every person on the earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical or contrary to human nature—as if nuclear war were practical or as if there were only one human nature.

But fundamental changes can clearly be made. We’re surrounded by them. In the last two centuries, abject slavery, which was with us for thousands of years, has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia, are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them. And some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work.

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.

This clearly shows that Gaean Spirituality and scientific rationalism can find common ground. And unlike most religious traditions, Scientific Paganism actively seeks it.

Who on Earth is the Goddess?

Mother, not maker,
Born, and not made;
Though her children forsake her,
Allured or afraid,
Praying prayers to the God of their fashion, she stirs not for all that have prayed.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1871

A couple decades after writing “Theagenesis: The Birth of the Goddess,” Oberon Zell and his life-partner, Morning Glory Zell, expanded on the concept of Gaean Spirituality in the essay “Who on Earth is the Goddess?” which combines academic discourse, poetry, and spiritual evangelism to make the case for a new ecofeminist religious movement distilled from the disparate elements of Neo-Paganism. The Zells open their essay by asserting the existence of a near-universal prehistoric religion dedicated to a single Great Goddess, an idea promoted by the Goddess Movement of the time. They locate this basic goddess worship in Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, suggesting that it was an expression of an intrinsic human understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Like the Gaea character in Marvel Comics (discussed previously), this Great Goddess was known in many manifestations and by many names, such as Ishtar, Isis, Yemanja, Kwan Yin, and Changing Woman. They go further, indeed, to agree with the British occultist Dion Fortune that all the diverse goddesses of the world’s pantheons are but manifestations of a universal feminine deity that operates on a cosmic scale.

The Zells describe this über-goddess in a poetic digression as Great Mother Nature: “Her womb is the quasar, the white hole through which all energy pours into creation, and Her all-devouring mouth is the black hole itself through which all matter is consumed to be reborn once again as between Her thighs the universe is squeezed from spirit.” They then play with the similarities between the words matter, mater, and mother and create an image of the Milky Way in the night sky flowing from the “galactic breast” of the “Star Goddess Nuit” but quickly return to more earthbound musings. The Earth Mother, Gaea, (our living world, as described in “Theagenesis”) is the offspring of this universal Mother Nature and has, as the essay illustrates, been traditionally envisioned as having three interrelated aspects. Foremost among these is the fertility-themed trinity of Maiden, Mother, and Crone—which they suggest may be personified by the Greek goddesses Aphrodite, Demeter (as mother of Persephone), and Hecate. Another prominent triad is the three Fates (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) of Greek myth and their Norse counterparts, the three Norns (Urd, Skuld, and Verdanda), who were said to administer the destinies of mortals. The nine Muses (of Greek mythology and later the roller-skating musical fantasy film Xanadu) are included as a trio of trios. The Zells even posit that such a triplication of the divine feminine survives in Christian theology as the much-lauded virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity.

However, despite this multiplicity and diversity and despite enjoying global dominance for nearly 30,000 years, worship of the Great Goddess (whether in the form of the Earth Mother or her cosmic matron) was suppressed with the rise of patriarchal monotheism in the Iron Age, which survives to the present in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This idea is not unique to Oberon and Morning Glory Zell but can be traced back to the early 20th-century writings of the British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, who was in turn inspired by European intellectuals of the Romantic tradition throughout the previous century. Historian Ronald Hutton traces this philosophical lineage in his book Pagan Britain, where he suggests it arose as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Actual archaeological evidence for such a global Neolithic matriarchal monotheism, he points out, is lacking. However, Hutton does not seek to discredit the Goddess Movement as a modern religion, only to show that their interpretation of the evidence for Neolithic practices is one of many possible readings. Therefore, while the academic / scientific underpinnings of the Zells’ justification for Gaean Spirituality are debatable, their call for a more feminist and ecological conceptualization of the divine remains compelling.

The Zells then turn their attention to re-stating many of the basic concepts regarding the Earth as a single living organism first presented in “Theagenesis,” connecting them with Native American animist beliefs and similar ideas in the work of 19th-century economic historian Arnold Toynbee, who warned of the threat to the environment resulting from the tendency to view the riches of the earth as “natural resources” to be exploited by mankind—a view unfortunately supported by the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Toynbee specifically cites the rise of patriarchal monotheism as the driving force behind the “recklessly extravagant consumption of nature’s irreplaceable treasures” and the pollution that results from their industrialized extraction. The Zells then attempt to describe the process by which patriarchal monotheism supplanted worship of the Great Goddess (matriarchal monotheism) by causing it to break down into polytheism. These individualized—and therefore weakened—goddesses could then be “married off” to gods and thereby be relegated to a subordinate position. They cite the case of the Hindu “Great Mother” Mahadevi, who they say was subdivided into the triple-goddess figures of Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Kali in order to be made the consorts of the dominant male deities Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, respectively. Also Rhea, goddess of Crete, was eventually split into various goddesses of the Greek pantheon. In this way, the Zells argue, the formerly revered figure of the Great Goddess came to be associated with the second-class status women were afforded in the rigidly patriarchal societies that arose in the Bronze Age, and the human race has drifted further from the sustainable way of the Earth Mother ever since.

This is of vital importance to Gaean Spirituality, the Zells explain, as Gaea is an immanent divinity in the pantheistic tradition and not a transcendent divinity as is the god of patriarchal monotheism. Whereas “God” is held to exist above or apart from the created universe (the very definition of “supernatural”), Gaea has a physical, temporal existence as the Planet Earth. “She is not an atavistic abstraction,” the authors make clear, “not a mystical metaphor, not a construct of consciousness.” Rather, she is a living being, of which we are a part—as our blood cells, rushing about with their daily chores oblivious to the greater whole, are a part of our human bodies. As such, Gaea is neither omnipotent nor indestructible but vulnerable to the ravages of environmental degradation. Should all life on Earth become extinct—say, if a runaway greenhouse effect creates conditions analogous to those on the planet Venus—then Gaea, too, will die. In the face of myriad environmental crises and the fierce resistance to taking effective measures to remedy them, the Zells see humanity’s only hope in a “total and electrifying change in consciousness,” which, they admit, would “take a miracle.” Nevertheless, they believe that the Neo-Pagan movement offers a path out of the darkness.

The Zells take a moment to express their frustration that this trail is not more well-blazed, despite the efforts since the 1960s of a variety of Pagan communities (by which they mean essentially any modern nature religion), including their own Heinlein-inspired Church of All Worlds. These groups seem to languish in obscurity, they complain, even though various feminist academics, such as Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, Mary Daly, Riane Eisler, and Elizabeth Gould Davis—and even noted male authors such as Joseph Campbell, James Lovelock, and René Dubos—continually clamor for a new approach to religion and/or spirituality. They are heartened, at least, by the rise in popularity of Wicca, which they equate with European Shamanism, as a feminist alternative to mainstream religion. The Zells see an opportunity for a conjunction of Neo-Paganism, Goddess Spirituality, and the Deep Ecology movement to develop into something greater than the sum of its parts. They write, “What is struggling to be born from this blending of pathways is a truly planetary religious metaphor that will transcend all the tradition-specific patterns in the same way the idea of Neo-Paganism absorbed and united a multiplicity of wildly differing but basically polytheistic religious groups in the 1970s. Perhaps what we are looking for could be called Gaean religion.”

In closing, the Zells attribute the emergence of this Gaean awareness in part to the release of photographs of the Earth from space in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly NASA’s famous 1972 Blue Marble image of our planet nearly fully illuminated by the sun’s light. Through such images, they suggest, “we have been impelled towards planetary identification,” a necessary first step to understanding that all life on Earth comprises a single organism and thus to despoil the environment is to destroy ourselves. The culmination of this outer-space consciousness-raising is perhaps the 1990 Pale Blue Dot photo taken from the Voyager 1 space probe as it headed into the outskirts of the solar system. The image shows the Earth as a tiny speck suspended in a sunbeam against the empty blackness of deep space. Carl Sagan, who pushed for the photograph to be taken (as it had little scientific value), later observed, “To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Sagan’s comments show that the scientist and the Pagan practitioner can be allies at the very least, which is the essence of what I think of as Scientific Paganism. And just as Sagan was noted for popularizing his love of science through the television series Cosmos, the novel Contact, and various non-fiction writings, the Zells assert that the success of their Gaean movement is dependent on communication and education rather than the secrecy often associated with nature-based folk religions and the mystery cults of the ancient world. And so, despite the relatively small, unheralded, and disorganized nature of the Neo-Pagan movement in general and their Gaean Spirituality in particular, Oberon and Morning Glory Zell look to the coming millennium with optimism.

Now, a couple decades into the 21st century, the journey continues.


A version of the Zells’ essay can be found on the Church of All Worlds website.