Spring Equinox
Ostara, the Spring Equinox, is one of the Lesser Sabbats and marks the halfway point between the winter and summer Solstices. It is a solar festival, celebrating the sun gaining in strength; bringing light back to the land and at this time the hours of daylight and darkness are seen as being in balance.
In the past, before the days of autumn sown wheat, this festival would have marked the beginning of the sowing season, with the earth warmed by the strengthening rays of the sun and watered by the soft showers of springtime rain, giving perfect growing conditions and would have been a time of celebration for all who had survived the trials of the winter past.
The shops of today will be full of chocolate eggs, being symbols of new life and fertility and hot cross buns depicting an equal armed cross, symbolic of the four seasons, the four cardinal points of the compass and the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, necessary for life.
As a maturing young maiden our Goddess holds all the promise of new life, but it will be the next festival of Beltane before she and her consort the young God actually bring that promise to fulfilment.