Ostara vs Easter: A Different Place in Time

Around this time every year someone asks me, “Why is Easter on a different date every year?” I feel honored to be known as the kind of nerd to go to. This is how Easter is calculated: it is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. 🌕 

Easter, being a lunar based holiday, changes its dates on the solar based Gregorian calendar but the pagan holiday known as Ostara is associated with the Spring equinox happening annually on March 21st except for leap years when it occurs on March 20th.

Easter is said to be a Christianization of the pagan holiday of Ostara, an ancient Northern European goddess of spring. There is only very scant evidence of Ostara in historical text sources. The sole ancient citation comes from a single sentence written by colonizing British clergy historian Bede in the 8th century who documented what little of folk customs he could find out from wary locals whose traditions, passed down orally, were being eradicated. 

It was The Brothers Grimm, famous fairy tale historians, who wrote broader theories of Bede’s brief mention of Ostara, popularizing her/it as “the real Easter” in the early 19th century.

In striving to reconnect with ancient pagan roots long suppressed, syncretism of Ostara with various seasonal goddesses of different mythologies is popular among pagans today. Such as Persephone of the Greek pantheon and Freya of the Norse. This practice seems rather full circle if you consider Mary to be a goddess figure (accepting Christianity as mythos) also syncretized with the season via Easter. In turn, reverence including imagery of the Virgin Mary has preserved ancient pagan/indigenous practices as much as forces of power attempted to use her to obscure those same practices. In this spirit I share this post with my iconic Maria Rosa art. I’m also pleased to let you know that altar sized vulva goddess prints are back, now at misspjsuperior.etsy.com

This is an edited version of a longer piece of writing with more historical details that you can access by supporting my Star Gazer level on Patreon. If you find these kinds of musings of mind especially interesting or educational, they get sent directly to you via email as a Star Gazer at Patreon.com/pjsuperior