Ostara Greetings Card by Karen Cater

£1.60

A beautiful Ostara card by UK artist Karen Cater. Ostara, a celebration of the beginnings of growth and fertility, is celebrated on the Spring Equinox, 21 March.

Karen's work is immensely detailed and meticulously researched, and the cards include a wealth of information. Here is the text from the back of the Ostara card:

The Spring Equinox is the point of balance of the waxing year when night and day are of equal length and there is tension between the the reflectiveness of the dark winter period and the activity of new growth rushing headlong towards Midsummer.

It is also the festival of Oestre, the Goddess of Light who brings fertility and whose name is the origin of Easter and words like oestrogen, the hormone stimulating ovulation and fertility. It is appropriate that this season is celebrated with eggs.

The illustration shows the sun and moon in balance, hares boxing - perhaps the origin of the Easter bunny. At the bottom are the Men an Tol stones in Cornwall, celebrated for their powers of healing and fertility. Those who crawl through the mid-stone may be relieved from back and gynaecological problems.

This card comes cellophane wrapped and has a dark blue envelope.

It measures 6" x 4" (15cm x 10.5cm).

It's blank inside for you to write your own message.

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.