Celebrating spring
Musings on the equinox, spring festivals and seasonal renewal
Spring is here at last! We made it. Through the dark, claustrophobic depths. Long nights, short gloomy days where it hardly seems to get light; the mud and murk, death and decay. Biting cold and freezing snow. Endless, monotonous grey.
Although I have worked hard to appreciate the joy in winter - evenings reading or knitting by the dancing flames of an open fire, early nights and a slower pace - I always struggle to keep seasonal depression at bay, especially as winter drags on through the long drizzly months of January and February.
But now, bright, lemon-yellow daffodils cover the village and the spring green hawthorn leaves are emerging slowly, like nervous children. The sky is azure blue, wide as the ocean and the feeling of new life is everywhere. I have a spring in my step as I walk and my mood is lifted by the returning sun. I feel the energy of the earth enter my body and, almost physically, pull me upwards. My friend’s chickens have started laying again, lambs are bleating and frogspawn has appeared in the pond. There’s soft pink blossom on the cherry trees, fleeting as the dawn. Here in Derbyshire, it’s too early to plant vegetable seeds, so I hold myself back - but I want to be everywhere, do everything, harness this wild energy that fills the world.
While the weather - of course - works to its own timeline, today, the 20th of the third month brings the vernal equinox, the official start of spring. Equinox is ‘equal night’ in Latin; after months of longer nights than days, day and night are exactly the same length. The earth’s axis is neither towards nor away from the sun, so the sun sits exactly above the equator. The days will continue getting longer now until we reach the summer solstice in June.
Marking the new year in January never seems to make much sense to me; there’s not much to celebrate in the depths of winter, with no life to be seen. Springtime feels like the true start of the year, when the earth comes out of hibernation and begins to sing.
Until the 1750s, the new year was actually marked in March, on the 25th, according to the old ‘Julian’ calendar, named for Julius Caesar. This is why September is named as the seventh month and October the eighth. Some farmers still pay their yearly rent from this date, known as Lady Day. It was only in 1752 that an act of Parliament said England should follow Pope Gregory’s ‘Gregorian’ calendar.
While it doesn’t always fall in Spring, today is Eid al-Fitr, when Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan, a month of fasting during daylight hours. Eid, and the new month of Shawwal, begin with the first sighting of the crescent moon. The Islamic calendar follows lunar cycles, and since a lunar month is 28 days, the Islamic year is 10-11 days shorter than the Gregorian year, and the date of Eid moves back annually. On the other hand, Easter, the Christian festival celebrating Jesus’ resurrection, is always celebrated in Spring. Interestingly it is also lunar dependent, falling on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox.
As a Pagan-leaning atheist, my daughter and I mark Ostara on the equinox, the festival of spring and rebirth. This is one of the eight festivals in the Pagan Wheel of the Year, falling on the equinoxes, solstices, and the cross quarter days in between. While this gives us a clear structure to the year, and helps me feel more connected to the seasons outside, the Wheel of the Year is a synthesis of various traditions and cultures, some with more historical evidence than others! It definitely doesn’t represent one unified pre-Christian pagan religion.
Historical evidence for the festival of Ostara is pretty scant: the main source is from Bede, an English monk, author and scholar from the 8th century. In his 725AD writing ‘The Reckoning of Time’ (through which, interestingly, he was trying to calculate the ‘true’ date for Easter) he discussed the pre-Christian Anglo Saxons in England celebrating ‘Eosturmonath’ in April. According to Bede, during this time they held feasts for Eostre, the goddess of the dawn. In the 19th century - based purely on this brief mention - Jacob Grimm (one of the Brothers Grimm), expanded the idea of Ostara/Eostre as a Germanic Spring Goddess in his ‘Deutsche Mythologie’.
However it does seem possible that Easter is named for Ostara - outside the languages of English and German, Easter is mostly called some version of ‘Pascha’, which has its linguistic roots in the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach in Hebrew), also celebrated around this time.
I wonder about eggs and bunnies, are they rooted in ancient pre-Christian fertility rites perhaps? While Jacob Grimm in the 1800s did postulate that eggs were linked to the Goddess Ostara, sadly there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for it. Easter Eggs were a Christian tradition, although an old one. In the later Middle Ages, since Christians weren’t allowed to eat eggs during the Lenten fast, they would be given as a gift at Easter. In the late 1800s, eggs began being made from chocolate by makers Frys and Cadburys, with the hollow middle supposedly representing Christ’s empty tomb. What about the Easter bunny? There doesn’t seem to be any specific evidence linking rabbits or hares to the Goddess Ostara, but there is an old German folktale, mentioned in writing from 1682, about ‘der Oster-Hase’ hiding the eggs to be found by children.
Atheist or not, soon my daughter and I will be stuffing our faces with chocolate, cracking open the brittle shells of Easter eggs, scoffing sticky brown goodness until we feel sick. We’ll harvest wild garlic in the woods, crushing it between our fingers and inhaling the chive-like, allium scent that fills the air, bringing with it layer upon layer of olfactory memories. Later we’ll make pesto and garlic butter. We’ll have picnics in the sunshine and she’ll run around with her friends. Spring is here!