Prayer and Offering for Eostre

by Norbert Nagel, Creative Commons License

Hail Eostre, the rising dawn and the coming spring!
As Your golden rays gleam above the horizon,
the buds begin to bloom and open,
heralding the return of light and life!

Beautiful Goddess framed in flowers,
the beginnings of apples, peppers,
all fruit that flourishes on branch and vine,
bring brilliance and bounty to me and mine.

My favorite offering for Her this time of year is dyed eggshells.  First poke two holes at either end of an egg, and blow the contents out into a little dish to save for omelettes or whatever you like.  Then the eggshell can be dyed in natural dyes, and it will color both the inside and outside of the egg.  I have had a good time crushing several eggs together until they form a colorful sort of eggshell gravel, but they can certainly be offered whole as well depending on what you’d like!

Another Post About Eostre

Okay, they've been everywhere this past week - posts about Ostara the holiday, about Eostre, debating Her claim to historical fame, Her attributes, Her associations.  She has been paired with foxes, described as young and perhaps childish.  So as we head into the Anglo-Saxon month of Eosturmonath (rougly equivalent with our modern April), I'd like to write about some of my own impressions of Her.

For me, She is not just a Goddess of the spring.  It is one of Her domains, yes, and a very important one.  But primarily for me, She is the Goddess of the dawn.  The linguistics of Her name supports this - Eostre is etymologically linked to *austrōn, a Proto-Germanic reconstruction meaning 'dawn'.  Through this, She is linked to a fair number of Indo-European dawn deities, including the Vedic Ushas, the Roman Aurora, and Greek Eos.

This time of year, I am still rising just a bit before dawn.  As I wake to dark windows and a silent home, I remember a bit of a poem by Rumi that I loved as a teen: "The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.  Don't go back to sleep!".  I come before my east-facing patio door, a large window that looks out over my backyard, and say my prayers to the deities of the sun and the morning that I honor: to the morning star, to the sun, to the opener of the gates of dawn. 

It is Eostre who holds that honor for me, afire in a blaze of golden and red and pink glory.  She throws open the gates, Her face shining with the holy light of the sun as Sunne passes by.  Her arms are raised, drinking in the glory, Her gown whipping against Her with the wind raised by the force of the sun.  She looks to the heavens above the earth in acknowledgement, but also with a sense of triumph: the stars will be put out, and She will be responsible for bringing real light to the world.  She is fire and glory and too bright to comprehend, a deity who will not tone down Her shining, holy light for my sake.  This is my Eostre, how She appears to me each morning as I implore Her to please open the gates.

E is for Eostre, the Holiday

This is not a post about the NeoPagan holiday of Ostara, but rather about the word from which early Wiccans borrowed the name of their holiday.  Ostara is a reconstructed Old High German word, reconstructed based on the Anglo-Saxon word Eostre.  The origin of Eostre itself is somewhat questionable.   The venerable Bede, writing De temporum ratione in the 700s, gives Ēosturmōnaþ as a name for a month in the Anglo-Saxon calendar that corresponds roughly with April (for more about the Anglo-Saxon calendar, Wednesbury Shire's website has some fantastic info).  He also notes that the month is named after the Goddess Eostre, whom the Pagans would honor with feasts during this month.  She is not attested in any other works, but her name can be linguistically linked with several other Indo-European dawn goddesses.

As an Anglo-Saxon Heathen, I think that celebrating the month of Ēosturmōnaþ is vitally important to my religion - in his writing, Bede references very few beings worshiped by his ancestors, which leads me to believe that the customs he does mention were very important that that time.  I choose to celebrate this holiday as a one or two-day affair rather than the entire month, though I do give honor to Eostre through all of the spring (which is considerably longer than a month here in the midwest).  Given that the Anglo-Saxons had a lunar-based calendar, I have chosen to celebrate Eostre's holiday on the day following the Full Moon - which usually ends up falling quite close to Easter, given that Easter is calculated as the first Sunday after the Full Moon after the spring equinox.  This year I'll be celebrating on April 15th, almost a full week before Easter.

In De temporum ratione, Bede specifically references feasts being given in honor of Eostre.  The feasting at least is very much practiced in our culture today - every Easter, my family and many like mine get together and enjoy a ham or turkey.  In our culture, which is becoming more secular, good times and good food with family are the markers of many holidays (which works out great for a Heathen!).  According to the Wednesbury Shire, many of the English-speaking world's Easter customs, such as egg decorating and the celebration of hares, go back almost to Anglo-Saxon times.  Alaric Albertsson in his book Travels through Middle Earth talks about the effects of light on the egg production of hens: by Eostremonath, the hen's eggs would have been an abundant food source, making them both an important symbol of the season and an object worthy of reverence.

So much like my Christian childhood, my children and I will be decorating eggs, cutting out bunnies from paper, and cooking up a delicious feast this mid-April - only instead of hauling them off to church that Tuesday morning, I'll be taking my children outside to explore all the changes happening around us: what flowers are sprouting, which trees have nests in them, what birds have brought their song back to our prairie now that the winter is over.  We'll rise with the dawn to give honor and thanks to Eostre for the return of the light and the warmth.  And that night, we'll all sit down and enjoy a feast together, leaving Eostre Her due on the altar.  For us, this is how Eostre's holy day is celebrated.