Ostara

Ostara is a spring equinox observance in the modern Pagan and Wiccan Wheel of the Year, and it is worth stating plainly that the festival is modern and the name is borrowed, because the two facts are usually blurred.

The Wheel of the Year, eight festivals at the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days, was assembled in the mid twentieth century, principally through the collaboration of Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols in the 1950s. No ancient culture is known to have kept all eight. The Irish sources give four quarter days without the solstices and equinoxes as festivals; Germanic and Norse sources give solstice observances; combining them into one eightfold scheme is a modern synthesis, and Ronald Hutton has traced the assembly in detail.

The name comes from Jacob Grimm, who in his Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 reconstructed a Continental Germanic goddess Ostara from the Old High German name for Easter and from Bede's Eostre. Grimm's reconstruction is a philological inference, offered as one; it is not a testimony. The goddess Ostara appears in no source.

None of this makes the modern festival illegitimate. A twentieth-century tradition that celebrates the equinox and calls it by a reconstructed name is doing what religious traditions do, and its practitioners are generally well aware of its recent origin, the scholarship on the subject was largely written by people sympathetic to it.

What is not defensible is the version circulated online in which Ostara is an ancient pan-European festival with an unbroken history.

The entire ancient evidence for the goddess behind the name is a single sentence, and it is short enough to give in full.

Bede, in De Temporum Ratione in 725, explaining the old English month names, writes that Eosturmonath has a name now translated as the paschal month, and was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. He also names Hretha for the month before, and says nothing further about her either.

That is all. Bede gives no description of the festival, no rites, no attributes, no myth, no animal, no egg, no hare.

Whether the goddess existed was disputed for a long period, with some scholars holding that Bede inferred her from the month name, a reasonable suspicion, since he was reconstructing pre-Christian material at a remove. The position shifted in 1958 with the discovery near Morken-Harff in Germany of over a hundred and fifty Romano-Germanic votive inscriptions to the matronae Austriahenae, whose name shares the root. The inscriptions do not name Bede's goddess, but they establish that divine names of that formation existed in Germanic-speaking areas, which makes invention much less likely. Most specialists now accept Bede was reporting a real tradition. Philip Shaw has argued she was local, a goddess of a specific Kentish or regional group, rather than pan-Germanic.

The hare and the eggs are attached to her by no source at all. The Easter hare is first attested in German writing in the seventeenth century; the connection to a goddess is Grimm's conjecture and later embroidery on it.