There is one dawn in the turning year when light and dark weigh exactly the same, and neither one leans.
Morning comes up grey over cold ground, hesitates at the edge of the fields, and then holds — the hours of sun set level against the hours of night, still as water in a bowl.
That day is Ostara.
The sun crosses the celestial equator and the whole year tips forward, the way a scale tips when one more grain is laid on it.
Night stops growing. Morning begins to win.
Ostara is the sabbat of the spring equinox, kept between Imbolc and Beltane in the Wiccan wheel. It marks the hour when the returning light finally matches the dark, and the cold begins to loosen its hand.
What Ostara Is
Ostara is a festival of beginning.
The seed has lain in the ground all winter, sealed in its own darkness beneath frost that never once asked its name.
At the equinox the soil warms enough for the seed to answer.
Where Imbolc knelt close to the bare earth and listened for the first stirring, Ostara greets what has already pushed a green thread up through the crust.
The sabbat is kept with eggs, seeds, new shoots and the first flowers of the year — small, pale, stubborn things that came up anyway.
It is a bright and uncomplicated rite. Nothing about it is heavy. Nothing in it asks you to grieve.
When Ostara Falls
Ostara falls on the spring equinox itself. In the northern hemisphere that is usually the twentieth or twenty-first of March.
The exact hour drifts a little from one year to the next, because the sky keeps its own reckoning and never consults the calendar hanging in the kitchen.
Many witches keep the sabbat on the nearest evening rather than chase the precise minute across the afternoon.
Either is correct. The equinox is a threshold and not an appointment — a door standing open, not a bell.
Why the Equinox Is Called a Balance
The word comes down from Latin: aequus, equal, and nox, night.
On this day the daylight and the darkness stand almost even across the whole turning world, from one cold shore to the other.
Afterward the light takes the larger share, and goes on taking it until midsummer. That balance, held for a single breath before it slips, is the heart of the sabbat.
Ostara is not a celebration of light defeating dark. It is a celebration of the two standing level, shoulder to shoulder, before the year moves on without them.
The equinox is a favored moment for work concerned with fairness or with decision. It suits the settling of something that has been uneven a long time.
Balance is also the reason the sabbat is so often given over to reconciliation.
Something owed, something withheld, something left unsaid through all the shut months of winter can be brought level here, on the one day when the year itself is level.
Where the Name Comes From
The name carries a scholarly history worth knowing, and it is a shorter history than most expect.
The English monk Bede wrote that the Anglo-Saxon month answering to April was called Eosturmonath. He tied that name to a goddess called Eostre.
Centuries later the German scholar Jacob Grimm proposed Ostara as the equivalent Germanic form.
Modern Wicca took Ostara as the title of the spring equinox sabbat, and the word settled onto the day as though it had been waiting for it.
Very little else about the goddess survives. The record holds a line or two and no more, and most of what is said of her belongs to modern practice rather than ancient testimony.
That does not weaken the sabbat. It only means the festival is honest about being young — a new fire laid in an old hearth.
What the Sabbat Celebrates
Ostara celebrates growth that has become visible.
What was set turning in the dark of the year is now expected to show something above the soil, however thin and pale that something looks.
It is a good season to go back through the winter months. What was written by candlelight in a book of shadows can be read again in daylight, which is a harder light to have written under.
Some of it will have taken root. Some of it will not, and can be let go without regret and without argument.
The equinox is also a natural place to look over the moon work of the winter and choose which cycles to carry into spring.
The sabbat celebrates fertility in its widest sense. Gardens, projects, apprenticeships, friendships — anything still at the stage of the first leaf.
The Colors of Ostara
Ostara is dressed in pale, thin color, the way the sky is dressed at six in the morning.
Green for the new shoot, still folded and wet.
Yellow for the strengthening sun.
Pale pink and lilac for the first blossom breaking open on bare black wood, and white for the balance of the day.
Candles in these colors carry the season forward into workings done all through the spring, long after the blossom has browned and blown away.
These are not the deep colors of harvest. They are washed colors, watered colors, the colors of a season that has only just opened its eyes.
The Egg
The egg is the center of the sabbat. It is a sealed white room holding everything a life requires, and that life has not yet appeared.
Nothing can be added to an egg. Nothing needs to be. All of it is already inside the shell, folded and quiet in the dark.
That makes the egg a natural vessel for intention.
Eggs are decorated, set on the altar, buried in the cold ground, floated, or eaten as part of the feast.
An egg may be blown empty and kept light as paper, or boiled and eaten warm in the hand, or buried whole.
The habit of tying decorated eggs to this precise sabbat is a modern one. Eggs themselves have belonged to spring, in many places, for a very long time.
The Hare
The hare belongs to Ostara by its own behavior, and not by anyone’s decree.
Hares come out into the open at this season, boxing in bare fields at first light where the winter had kept them hidden and low to the ground.
They breed early and abundantly, which made them a plain and obvious emblem of returning fertility.
A hare figure, drawing or carving is often set beside the eggs, ears laid back, watching the room.
Standing at the edge of a field at dusk in the weeks around the equinox, waiting for the grass to move, is itself an observance.
The link between the hare and the goddess Eostre is repeated often and warmly, but the early sources do not record it.
Seeds and the First Sowing
Seeds are the working material of Ostara. Dry, dark, unpromising, rattling faintly in the palm.
They can be blessed at the altar and then pressed into soil, which turns one evening’s rite into something that goes on quietly for months.
Any seed will do. Beans, sunflowers, herbs, or the seeds of a plant that already grows well for you.
Planting is the part of the sabbat that refuses to stay symbolic.
Something is buried in the cold dark, and then something is watered every morning afterward, whether or not the mood is on you.
Seeds that never come up are not an omen. They are seeds.
Flowers and Herbs for the Altar
The altar is filled with whatever is truly in flower within walking distance of your door.
Daffodil, crocus, primrose and violet are common choices in temperate places. The first blossom cut from a fruit tree belongs there as well, still cold from the branch.
Local is better than correct. A weed in flower, pulled from a roadside verge with its roots and its grit still on it, belongs on the altar more truly than a hothouse bloom flown across the world in the dark of a cargo hold.
Dried herbs kept from the previous year may be burned or scattered — brittle, faded, smelling faintly of a summer that is finished — to make room for the harvest to come.
Guidance on gathering and keeping plants is set out in the field guide for the green witch.
Setting the Ostara Altar
Keep the altar light. A green cloth, or a white one if green is not to be had.
Two candles stand for the balance of the day: one white and one black, or one yellow and one blue as deep evening water.
A bowl of seeds, a bowl of eggs, and flowers standing in water where the stems show pale and bent through the glass.
A small dish of soil is set beside them, dark and damp, and it waits there to be used later in the rite.
Add the tools already in use, arranged as usual with the elements in their quarters.
Leave one space on the altar empty. Something will be picked up outdoors before the day is over, and it will want somewhere to sit.
A Simple Ostara Ritual
This ritual is used when you wish to mark the equinox and set something growing for the season ahead.
Perform it at sunrise if the morning can be spared and the cold can be borne, or at dusk on the day of the equinox when the light turns blue at the windows.
Begin by casting the magic circle in the way already familiar to you.
Then stand still a moment before speaking. The day is doing something exact out there beyond the walls, and it is worth the silence.
Light the two candles together, one in each hand if that can be managed, and say:
Day and night stand equal. Neither one commands the other. Let the year go forward in balance.
Set the candles down on either side of the altar and let them lean their light toward one another across it.
Blessing the Seeds
Take the bowl of seeds in both hands and notice how little it weighs.
Hold it a little above the altar, inside the reach of the candlelight, and think clearly about one thing you intend to grow this season.
Not a wish. A thing that will ask work of you, week after week, in weather you did not choose.
Speak over the seeds:
Small and dark, you hold a whole field inside you. Wake now. What is planted here is planted in earnest.
Press one seed into the dish of soil until the dark closes over it.
Keep the rest for the garden, the window box, or the pot on the step.
The Painted Egg of Intention
Choose one egg from the bowl and turn it once in the light.
Mark it with a single symbol rather than a sentence. A sigil, a rune, a shape of your own making.
If runes are used, the meaning of each mark is set out in the article on runes.
Hold the marked egg against the center of your chest, where it will take the warmth out of you, and say:
What is written on the shell is held in the shell. When the shell is given back to the earth, let the thing inside it begin.
The egg is buried in the garden after the rite, or left in a bowl on the altar until the flowers beside it have browned and bowed their heads.
The Ostara Table
Food closes the sabbat.
Eggs in any form, with bread, honey, seeds, sprouted greens and young leaves still pale from the dark they grew in.
Add the earliest thing the garden or the market has managed to produce.
Milk, light beer, apple juice or spring water are poured, and the glass beads with cold in the cool air.
Before eating, say:
The first green of the year is on this table. It was earned by the dark as much as by the sun. Let it be eaten with thanks.
Eat outdoors if the weather allows it — coats on, plates balanced on the knee — even if the meal must be brief.
A portion is set aside and left outside for the birds, who are working harder than anyone at this season.
Ostara Kept Alone
This sabbat is often kept alone, and solitude suits it well.
One candle, one egg and a handful of seeds are enough. A sabbat kept quietly is not a lesser sabbat.
The rite may also be kept entirely outdoors, with no altar and no roof over it.
A walk taken at the exact hour of the equinox, with attention paid to every bud that has swollen since the last walk, is a complete observance.
Standing in the open, with the wind finding every gap in your coat, say:
Light returns to the middle of the year. It is met here, in the open, with nothing between.
If the mind is restless and will not settle before beginning, a short grounding meditation quiets it.
Ostara Below the Equator
The wheel turns by the sky, not by the page. South of the equator the March equinox is the autumn one, the year closing rather than opening, and the spring equinox arrives in September.
Witches in the southern hemisphere commonly keep Ostara in September and Samhain in April, following the season standing outside the window rather than the one printed in a book.
Others hold to the northern dates for the sake of working alongside covens far away.
Both practices are established, and the choice belongs to the practitioner.
After the Rite
Close the circle. Put the candles out and watch the two threads of smoke rise together and lean toward each other before they go.
Say the closing words:
The rite is ended. The season is not.
Plant the seeds within a day, while the intention is still warm in the hands.
Water them. This is the unglamorous half of the sabbat, done in old shoes at the back door in a grey morning, and it is the half that matters.
Note in the book of shadows what was planted, in soil and otherwise.
Read it again at the harvest sabbats, when the year has had a whole summer in which to answer.
The wheel does not pause to be admired.
Ostara asks very little. It asks only that something be started while the light is still fair and the ground is still soft.