April 21, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
Astarte, The Easter Goddess
Sisters, come with me! Come to the meadow
soft with grass, and there let us weavemagic garlands for ourselves. And as we
weave, let us create happy futures:let us weave for abundant grain,
let us weave for the barley ears,let us eave for the oats and the wheat,
let us weave for thick heads of cabbage.
-- Russian folksong, from The Goddess Companion by Patricia Monaghan, for April 20
Welcome, Eostre!
Springtime sacrificial festival named for the Sacon Goddess Eostre, or Ostara, a northern form of Astarte. Her sacred month was Eastre-monath, the Moon of Eostre.
Astarte, the Lady of Babylong, is one of the oldest forms of the Great Goddess in the Middle East,identified with Egypt's Hathor, Mycenae's Demeter, Cyprus' Aphrodite. she was the same creating-preserving-and-destroying Goddess worshpped by all the Indo-European cultures, and still typified by Kali as the symbol of Nature. Astarte was the "true sovereign of the world," tirelessly creating and destroying, eliminating the old and generating the new. Sidonian kinds could not rule without her permission. Each king styled himself first and foremost "Priest of Astarte."
Saxon poets apparently knew Eostre was the same Goddess as India's Great Mother Kali. Beowulf spoke of "ganger' waters, whose flood waves ride down into an unknown sea near Eostre's far home.
The Easter Bunny was older than Christianity; it was the Moon-hare sacred to the Goddess in both eastern and western nations. Recalling the myths of Hathor-Astarte who laid the Golden Egg of the sun, Germans used to say the heare would lay eggs for good children on Easter Eve.
Like all the church's "movable feasts," Easter shows its pagan origin in a dating system based on the old lunar calendar. It is fixed as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, formerly the "pregnant phase of Eostre passing into the fertile season.
from Women's Dictionary of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker