Following
on from the Imbolc festival,
in February, is the Spring Equinox or Ostara on the 20th of
March this year. This is the time of Spring and, as the cycle
of the year continues to turn, a wonderful regeneration becomes
apparent around us. The land is beginning to live again!
Pagans appreciate the important gift of simply being able
to look beyond our front doors to see our 'spiritual belief
system', as others call it, in full effect. We might sometimes
need to 'flush out' the modern synthetic world, for a while,
but we need nothing more than our senses to get into the swing.
We just look into the skies observing the Sun's effect on
the greenery around us.
By Late March the first shoots are beginning to emerge and
some have even begun to flower. The skies are getting brighter
by the day and there are even days when, rather than being
cold and biting, the breeze suddenly has a touch of warmth
to it. These are the signs that a change is on its way. The
Sun, the main source of our energy, is beginning to grow in
strength.
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| John's
Ostara altar |
The
festival of Ostara (or Eostra as it can also be called) falls
on the Spring or 'Vernal' Equinox. This is the time when both
the Sun and the Moon share the skies on equal terms…the
equinox. If you go out at a certain time of the afternoon
around this time you might just catch the rising Moon in the
sky at exactly the same time the Sun is about to set. Early
in the morning you can also see the Moon setting just as the
Sun is rising. In between these two events is a period of
complete balance between day and night, Sun and Moon, male
and female, God and Goddess.
If you watch the weather report on BBC
Look North you will see the sunrise and sunset times
are shown at the end. Right now, both the Sun and Moon are
on opposite sides of the planet and appear in the sky together.
To Pagans this is a very important event. It symbolises to
us the universal balancing act between the opposite polarities.
From the tiniest micron spinning around to the way our solar
system works, this balance between positive and negative is
seen keeping things in perfect balance. It's like a sea-saw,
everything moving back and forth with a pivot in the middle.
At Ostara everything balances.
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| Ostara
'marks the return of the Sun God to the skies' |
Spiritually
this time also has significance to us as it marks the return
of the Sun God to the skies and that brings the land alive
again. Of course, in the past, it would have also meant that
we could leave our homes to work the land and begin the yearly
task of hunting or working the fields. In that sense it was
associated with male energy, although it is also very much
a time of femininity too.
The symbolism of the egg and its fertilisation is strong just
now. This is a time for the Earth Goddess Ostara to become
fat with life. The words oestrogen and Easter can be traced
back to this time of female fertility and the egg is seen
here as a particularly strong symbol of that fertility. We
still paint eggs and play games with them at this time of
year and these routes can be traced back to the rituals Pagans
devised to celebrate the maturity of their Spring Goddess.
When we say the Goddess is timeless, eternal, unchanging,
it is this we are talking about. No matter what changes may
occur in our society, industry, social and political environments,
there is one absolute we cannot ignore. And here, in the egg,
that life-giving ability is most evident.
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Ostara
painting and altar photo © MOTNA. Used with permission.
