ostara
The Spring Equinox
Name of Sabbat: Ostara (also called Eostar and the Spring Equinox)
Date: On the day of the spring equinox (which occurs on or about March 21 in the Northern Hemisphere)
Pronunciation: “Oh-STAR-uh”
Along with its cousin Mabon, Ostara is a bit of an outlier when it comes to the sabbats. The four cross-quarter (or greater) sabbats, along with the solstices, are all associated with very real holidays that were once celebrated (and in most cases continue to be celebrated) in Europe (and later North America and other places), but the sabbats we celebrate today as Ostara and Mabon lack those links. To put it simply, there was no great ancient pagan (or Witch) celebration of the spring equinox, at least in Europe.
This can be rather frustrating to many Witches because it most certainly feels like there should have been some sort of ancient spring festival, but alas, it just doesn’t exist. Many Witches look to Easter for the ancient spring festival that should have been, and it’s possible that Easter absorbed several pagan elements, but we’ll never know for sure. What’s always most important with a sabbat celebration is that what we’re celebrating makes sense to us today as Witches, and in that sense Ostara is certainly just as real and as valid as any other sabbat. Even without a historical parallel, Ostara has always been one of my favorite sabbats.
This doesn’t mean that the spring equinox has been completely ignored around the world. There are several monuments in the Americas (both North and South) built to align with the spring equinox, including the famous Mayan El Castillo at Chichen Itza. Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, built about nine hundred years ago, also aligns with the sun on the spring equinox.32 The Persian (or Iranian) new year, Nowruz, has been celebrated on the first day of spring for at least three thousand years, which is absolutely amazing. So there are and were some events associated with the spring equinox, but I’m unaware of any traditions from those celebrations becoming a part of Modern Witchcraft.
Ostara has only been used as the name of the Spring Equinox sabbat since 1974. That’s when American Witch Aidan Kelly settled upon the name when designing a Witch calendar (see chapter 3). It was a divinely inspired choice because Ostara certainly sounds like the name of an ancient sabbat celebration. Ostara (or Eostre) is the name of a Germanic fertility goddess who was first written about by the English historian Bede (c. 673–735 CE) in the eighth century. In his The Reckoning of Time, Bede writes that Britain’s Anglo-Saxons named the month we now call April in honor of Eostre, and eventually began using her name to refer to Christendom’s biggest spring holiday, the day we now call Easter.
It’s worth noting that Easter as the name of the day when Jesus allegedly returned from the dead is known as Easter only in Germanic languages (Easter in English and Ostern in German). In the rest of Europe, the holiday is not in any way linked to the goddess Eostre, making the idea that Easter is some sort of corrupted Germanic holiday much less likely. Bede’s pagans who worshiped Eostre did do a lot of feasting during her month, so there’s probably a holiday in there somewhere. It’s just been lost to history.
In Germany, the folklorist Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) worked backward from the holiday of Easter to reconstruct the goddess Ostara. His version of the goddess is the one most of us know today from internet photos and memes. She’s a goddess of eggs, rabbits, and most everything associated with both Easter and the spring. The problem with this is that there’s no physical evidence to support any of his ideas about Ostara.
However, many of the trappings we now associate with Easter play directly into pagan themes that are generally welcome in the circles of Witches. Bunnies, eggs, and plastic grass have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus and everything to do with the natural world in late March and early April. Eggs have been used in a variety of cultures for thousands of years for a myriad of purposes, so it’s impossible to say just why they were inserted into the Easter holiday. But as a symbol of life and its renewal, they are perfect for Ostara.
Rabbits, who are known for fornicating, are another symbol of life’s renewal in the springtime.33 Rabbits generally bear between four and eight litters a year, with the average litter consisting of six baby rabbits. (Did you know that one mama rabbit and her offspring are capable of producing 95 billion rabbits in seven years ? 34 Rabbits are amazing breeders.) Though we’ll never know if the ancient Eostre had a hare as an animal companion, many other pagan goddesses had hares serving them, most notably Hecate and Freya. Many people have long thought that the Easter Bunny is some sort of relic from pagan antiquity, but the first time he shows up in the historical record is in the early 1600s, and he wasn’t alone as Europe’s gifting mammal: the Easter Fox was once nearly as popular.35
For many of us, spring is a time of new beginnings, and in that sense Eostre might be the perfect goddess for the holiday. Eostre contains the root word eos, which translates as “beginnings” and was the word most often used to describe goddesses of the dawn (such as the Greek Eos) among Indo-European groups. A sabbat with such linguistic connections is fine by me.
Ways to Celebrate Ostara
One of the things I love most about Ostara is that there are many ways to celebrate it. Because I’m mostly a child at heart, I like to start with the Easter decorations I find at the local grocery store. I’m a big fan of eggs and bunnies at Ostara, despite their use in the Christian Easter. Both eggs and rabbits are steeped in fertility symbolism, and fertility is exactly what’s going on outside my front door in late March. Dyeing, hiding, and burying eggs are all great Ostara ritual ideas. I’ve yet to bring the Ostara Bunny into my circle, but I’m sure it will happen sooner or later.
Celebrating the feelings of childhood has been a part of many of the Ostara rituals I’ve participated in over the years. I remember spending one delightful Ostara evening surrounded by friends, crayons, and coloring books as we all tapped into our inner third grader. Simply trying to approach the world with a renewed sense of awe and wonder is a great Ostara activity. The longer we do Witchcraft, the easier it is to become a bit jaded toward the practice. So actively trying to push past that to reclaim a sense of excitement ties into the themes of springtime renewal and rebirth.
My wife and I have always associated Ostara with the Maiden goddess. We’ve often used our own relationship to tell the story of the Wheel of the Year, and it’s at Ostara that the rather silly (and sometimes smelly) Goatboy (young Horned God, though our name for him is better) finally gets to kiss his beloved, the rather demure but wise-beyond-her-years Maiden. Of course it’s equally fine for the Goatboy to kiss another Goatboy, or no one at all, but it’s hard to resist the opportunity to see our own lives playing out in the Wheel of the Year myths we honor.
If you are someone who has trouble balancing your work life and Craft life, Ostara might not fix the problem, but it’s a good time to start working on it. As much as we might like to totally immerse ourselves in Witchcraft, most of us aren’t given that opportunity. We can use the balance of night and day at Ostara to try and magickally swing our inner pendulum toward finding time for all the things we care about and need to do to pay the bills.
Planting seeds might be the most obvious of all Ostara-related activities, but it’s an effective one. Some spring planting, whether indoors (most likely) or out, is a great activity for the solitary Witch and the coven. I’ve long looked at gardening as a magickal act, and March often finds me laying the groundwork for planting in April and May. (Not all of our rituals need to be in front of an altar.) “Seeds” can be metaphorical too. At Ostara, my coven usually begins planning for the rest of our calendar year and especially the summer. With its focus on new beginnings, Ostara is an especially potent time for magick dealing with money or a new job. Plant a magickal seed and grow some wealth and abundance!
I’ve long associated the spring with initiations, perhaps because it was then that I was first initiated into a specific Witch tradition. Not every coven or Witch needs an initiation ritual, but I believe initiation rites can be powerful tools when executed effectively. They may not be entirely appropriate for Ostara, but the energy around the spring equinox enhances them a great deal.36
Hot cross buns have been eaten for good luck in the spring for several centuries and are a welcome (and often warm) addition to any Ostara rite. And perhaps even more welcome, especially in cold climates, is that first real hint of spring that comes in late March. If there’s anything close to a warm breeze blowing, open a window or go outside to take advantage of it, and if such a thing is still far away in your corner of the world, be sure to melt some of that pesky snow to let it know that it should be on its way.
Even though she has a sabbat named after her, Eostre is not nearly the presence in Ostara circles as Brigid is at Imbolc ones. Much of that is because Eostre lacks the extensive mythology and documented history we often associate with Brigid, but she’s still worth inviting to your festivities. Despite its shortcomings historically, Ostara offers a wide variety of ways to celebrate.
32. Jessie Guy-Ryan, “5 Ancient Sites Built to Align with the Spring Equinox,” Atlas Obscura, March 20, 2016, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/five-ancient-sites-to-celebrate-the-spring-equinox.
33. I use the word rabbit out of laziness, but Europe lacks rabbits. Europe is home to the hare, which is a completely different, though related, species from the American rabbit.
34. Forbes, America’s Favorite Holiday, 100.
35. Cavalorn (Adrian Bott), “Eostre, Ostara and the Easter Fox” (blog), Feb. 27, 2014, https://cavalorn.livejournal.com/587630.html. Bott has written extensively about Ostara on his LiveJournal account. It’s a weird thing to cite, but his history is good.
36. I write about initiations extensively in my 2019 book Transformative Witchcraft, and my coven’s initiation rite is included in my 2016 book The Witch’s Athame. Thank you for reading this footnote.