Ostara Greetings Card by Elaine Sheldrake

Ostara is the solar festival that marks the transition from the dark to the light half of the year: day and night are of equal length. By Ostara, life is returning to the land in noticeable ways, and so nature demonstrates the festival's associations with revival and the ascendancy of light.

Appropriate herbs are celandine, cinquefoil, jasmine, rue, tansy, and violets. Acorns, crocuses, daffodils, dogwood, honeysuckle, irises and lilies can be used as decorations.

Ostara is a celebration of conception, regeneration and the triumph of light over darkness. In terms of the Goddess cycle, it is the time when the Maiden of Imbolc conceives the child that will be born at Yule. The Christian Church celebrates both aspects of Ostara as the day of the Annunciation (when Mary conceives Christ) and the day of the Resurrection (when Christ returns triumphant from the darkness of death).

Ostara is a Germanic goddess of spring and fertility, and the name of her Anglo-Saxon equivalent, Eostre, was used to derive the term Easter by the Venerable Bede in the 8th century. Eostre is a lunar goddess, and her symbols include the egg and the rabbit, both of which are obvious fertility symbols. Just as Ostara is a time to sow the seed that will be harvested later in the year, it is also a time to act on new ideas and begin new ventures that will grow as the year proceeds.