The spring equinox is one of the two days during the year where day and night are exactly even, exactly balanced. It's names are many: the Germanic Ostara, the Saxon Eostre, the Greek Eos, after the Goddess of Dawn. The words are all cognate to "east", referring to the sunrise. Ostara is the dawn of the year after the long night of winter. The modern Christian holiday of Easter is named for this ancient celebration.

Ostara is a goddess-name as well as a holiday name. She is the Maiden Goddess in every culture - Kore returning from the underworld every year, green rising from her footsteps; Lada the Hungarian birch maiden, who is paraded through the village as a young birch sapling  dressed in skirts and ribbons; Flora with her flowers scattered behind her. Ostara is the fresh young virgin who represents the new green virgin earth; she dances with the Green Boy in an innocent romp, not yet partaking of the fertile copulation of later Beltane.

Most pagans today live in the city or suburbs, eating food wrapped in plastic and grown in other parts of the country, or in other countries. Generally, every kind of food is available all year round. If there's a local shortage of something, the grocery store can bring it in from thousands of miles away, and as long as you have the money to buy it, it's there.

So we decorate eggs and make paper rabbits as the spring equinox approaches, and we say it's because they are "fertility symbols", or symbols of new growth. However, when you take the perspective of the northen European ancestors whose faith was the inspiration for modern neo-pagan religion into account, this is rather like saying that Santa Claus is the symbol of Christmas presents. Well, yes, he is shown toting them around and handing them out, but the archetype goes much deeper than that.

What most modern neo-pagans don't realize is that the Wheel of the Year and all its traditional holidays are based around an agricultural calendar, and celebrate the different parts of the cycle of food farming. That's right, food. Those holidays are about food. We modern First World people tend to forget who devastatingly important food production was to our ancestors; if even one of the links in the yearly food chain went bad, everyone in the clan or

tribe or village was going to feel the pinch; if there simply wasn't enough gathered due to drought or flood or early frost, some people were not going to live through the winter. It was that simple an equation.

We have a lot of trouble imagining the actuality of a famine today, but thousands of years ago it was an annual spectre to be driven off only with a whole lot of work, divine help, and propitiatory sacrifices. The line between plenty and starvation was thinner than you might imagine; thus the emphasis on fertility, fertility, fertility in all those rituals. We tend to shrug that off today, to put that aspect of paganism aside, but once it was about life and death. If the goats and cows didn't get pregnant, there would be no milk the following spring. If the sheep remained barren, there would be no sheep milk at Imbolc - whose Saxon name, imelc, means "ewe's milk" - and no spring lambs at Ostara, right when you needed them.

Let's peer back in time, as well as we know how, and check out our pre-Christian agricultural ancestors. The last holiday, Imbolc/Oimelc, was a time of cold and snow and endurance; the Saxons called February Kalemonath, or Kale-month, because kale and cabbage was about all they had left to eat around then. It was a hard time of year. The feasts of Yule, the last time of plenty before spring, was well behind them, and the larders were getting bare. The milk cows and goats had nearly dried up, as they were big with unborn young (the Celtic word Imbolc means "in the belly") and their milk would dry up in the last month or two of gestation to give more nourishment to the fetus.

The new lambs - and yes, lambs really are born right around Oimelc, mine certainly are - were still not big enough to be worth eating. Better to let them get larger on their mother's milk - of which you could take some in order to make such fine cheeses as Romano - and eat them at Ostara. Then, just as your supply of dried and pickled and sausaged meat (carefully butchered and preserved at Samhain) was running low, here comes a much-needed source of protein: the hens had finally started to lay again.

On modern chicken farms, where laying hens are kept in small boxes under electric lights that simulate spring days, they will lay at the same high rate all year - and burn out after about a year or two, and need to be culled. Left under natural light and allowed sunshine, their laying pattern will follow the yearly day length....slacking off in the fall, quitting entirely at Yule when the days are darkest, and then starting up again in late February or early March. And they start up with a vengeance! By the equinox the egg production is in full swing, and by April we are drowning in them (and desperately making quiche, custard, and angel food cakes). When hens are allowed to follow this pattern, they will lay for five years or more.

So the Ostara egg is more than just a symbol of new life; it is a symbol of the next stage of survival. Those eggs were a goddess-send to our winter-starved ancestors; their golden yolks were like the promise of the coming sun. The lambs, too, were several weeks old, probably weaned, and ready to butcher for spring lamb dishes. The first spring greens were poking up through the earth - no vegetables yet, but a few perennial herbs such as salad burnet, which the grateful early Germans called the god's little bird" in thanks.

That other ubiquitous symbol of Eostre/Ostara - the rabbit - descends from the March hares whose very name connotes the time of year when they had bred and were rampant. Actual breeding and keeping of tame rabbits didn't start until the early middle ages; to our ancestor, the hare was the most common of hunted game animals, and their sacred time of excess and harvest was March through May, depending on area and climate.

In many mythologies, the Goddess as some kind of a sacred fowl - hen, duck or goose - lays an enormous egg that hatches out the world. Our ancestors were quite impressed with the ability of female fowl to hatch an almost-daily piece of protein that, if nurtured with the warmth of her body, would one day burst to become another member of her species. It is a small miracle; certainly everyone who has watched eggs hatch in an incubator can attest to that.

We paint eggs at Ostara like everyone else (seeing as we have so many at that point), but some of our eggs are a little different. We use the traditional symbols of rabbits, chicks, lambs, and so forth, but at least one egg is painted like the Earth, in honor of the World Egg. Another egg is painted half black with stars and half golden or sky blue to symbolize the Equinox, the day when night and day are equal. Some eggs we paint, like the Druids, scarlet or gold in honor of the waxing Sun. One I paint black with an arrow running clockwise around it, a copy of an ancient stone egg that symbolized the turning year. Still other eggs have symbols of wishes for the following year. We choose one shrub as our Ostara tree and hang all but the wish eggs on it; the wish eggs are given to other members of the family who hide them in the woods. They are left there to ferment and bring their message to the Maiden Earth, who will bring them to fruition as she comes to fruit herself.

Another traditional Ostara decoration is cock feathers. The male chicken is even more famed than the female in ancient mythology. Cocks are phallic birds, or so it is said; having butchered them, I can tell you that each of their testicles happens to be larger than their brain. The strutting roosters not only gave their name to the male organ, they were quite often a substitute sacrifice for a man. They are also greeters of the Sun with every morning crow, and thus the Sun's lovers, appropriate for a solar sacrifice. Their crow supposedly announced the rebirth of the dead Sun, and thus became associated with human dead - black cocks especially were said to crow when someone was about to die. Black cocks, like crows and ravens and other black birds, were the property of the Death God; similarly black hens could be manifestations of the Death Goddess and Cerridwen's many forms include a black hen. One form of divination required a black fowl and several scattered piles of grain; the chicken was released and its first choice of grain piles had prophetic meanings.

Chickens were the livestock animal of choice when it came to getting rid of plague and disease. On every continent that had them, chickens were set free in order to take plague away from a village or household, or tied to a sick person and then released in order to transfer the illness from them to the bird. All over the world, especially in Africa and the Mideast, chickens were and continue to be the most common "scapegoats".

When you eat an egg of any kind, you eat the placenta of an animal that could have supported a child. If you're eating fertile eggs, you're probably eating the microscopic fetus as well and not even noticing it. This is not said in order to disgust people, but to make them understand that we are greatly indebted to our birds. They sacrifice their children, and potential children, for our protein needs, and sometimes they sacrifice their lives as well. Hail to the Hen Goddess, and her beautiful little suns-in-a- shell

Ostara And The Sacred Egg

by  Raven Kaldera

cauldronfarm@hotmail.com