What I love most about this time of year are the birds. They start their springtime symphony early in the morning as the sun begins to peer over the the surrounding apartments. The trees are budding and tulips and other flowers are showing up in all the stores. This is the time of year when Ostara is honored and thanked as she resumes her "throne" and presides over the season of spring with her familiar, the rabbit.
Ostara
Goddess of Renewal
Colors - all of the pastel colors, green
Symbols - rabbit, egg, feather
Aspects - personal renewal, new beginnings, rebirth, fertility
Suggested Offerings - eggs, rice, incense, feathers, flowers
Long ago, the Germanic goddess, Ostara, was honored in the month of April each year with festivals honoring re-birth and renewal. Nowadays we recognize her festival as "Easter". The name Easter evolved from the Goddess's name, Ostara, which means "movement towards the rising sun" or "East". Ostara is the living symbol for air and the life force of spring. East is representative of the element of air and our mental powers. Air is about new beginnings and allowing your spirit to soar. Ostara is still one of the most powerful Goddesses today. So much so that she has made herself right at home within Christianity and modern medicine, and egg decorating is still a fine art in Germany!
Easter, like most Pagan festivals, evolved into a Christian holiday focusing, not on the Goddess, but on the Biblical Jesus and his "rebirth" or "resurrection". Even so, Easter somehow managed to retain the fertility symbols and the Easter Basket. (I always wondered what the Easter Basket had to do with Christ's resurrection. Didn't you?) Ostara, goddess of fertility, has managed to infiltrate our society with the well known "Rabbit Test" to find out if a woman is pregnant and also the hormone estrogen, both said to be named for her. Ostara is the perfect goddess to call on when dealing with women's health issues, especially when related to the reproductive system.
Ostara is Goddess of joy, new beginnings and fertility. That is where Easter Eggs and Easter Bunnies (rabbits) come in. Eggs are an obvious symbol for fertility and the rabbit (Ostara's power animal) has a rather well known propensity for reproducing. Ostara presides over our personal renewal and fertility issues. She is goddess of the dawn (new beginnings).
Eggs were (and still are!) dyed or painted bright colors as an offering to Ostara. Dawn is the best time to invoke her. In days of old, fires were lit at dawn in her honor. It always amazes me how traditions like this survive over the millennia. (I am also thinking of the “sunrise service” many churches have on Easter Sunday).
Right now is the perfect time to build an altar to Ostara so that you can begin to bring in the energy and vibration for new beginnings and fertility. This is the time of year when we symbolically wake up from our winter slumber and become more alert and active. Ostara's altar will help our minds become fertile once again with ideas, making it very easy to take advantage of the vibrations this time of year offers us. This is a good time for starting new projects of all kinds. Let's build an altar honoring Ostara and the changing of the seasons.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment