Whilst I was musing about rabbits and eggs and old easter fertility patterns, I found myself looking at one of my circular calendars, where (someone else) had written "Ostara" for Spring Equinox. Which sent me down a bit of a "rabbit hole", so to speak.
Ostara is one of several variations of the name for The Goddess of the Dawn, known in many parts of Olde Englande as "Eostre". Which - yes - is quite likely the origin of the name for Christian holiday, Easter.
And how do we know about the goddess Eostre?
From a monk.
Who was writing in the early 700s at an abbey in the Kingdom of Northumbria, in what we now refer to as England. The abbey is now in ruins (though the congregation lasted for quite a long time), but we still read and reference (and medieval scholars have a lot of fun debating) the immense work of Bede, sometimes known as the Venerable Bede.
He was quite influential, this Bede. Many call him the "father of history".
And he mentions this pre-Christian Goddess (our earliest and only written source of information about her) in a book about...time. Specifically about the use of a particular kind of calendar. Which his community really needed in order to ... predict the date of Easter.
Wait, there's a link between a goddess, a (circular and linear) calendar, the holiday of Easter, and the theological work of thinking about both the beginning and the end of time? Oooooh, I thought to myself.
As you may know if you've been following this newsletter for a while, I've been in a slow, multi-year process of understanding calendars, history, and time itself as part of what it means to develop eco-spiritual practices, rituals, tools, and cosmovisions that can help us navigate a changing climate. That's an inherently decolonial endeavor... and can take a lot of unraveling and re-weaving. I've looked pretty deeply into different aspects of this, including the role of calendars in shaping our relationship to our ecology, our community, and our sense of purpose; the turning of the year, Thanksgiving, and 4th of July.
This is my first deep exploration into Easter. As always when I embark on a 'new' moment in time, I feel that combination of, "oh, ok, I've really got something here," and, "wow, there's a lot I still don't understand, and I don't think I'm really explaining this is well as I want to." I'm pretty sure there is enough there to be worth engaging with... and in time my capacity to articulate what I'm sensing around this particular moment in time will continue to grow.
Many many hours (and a certain amount of theological angst, much to my partner's amusement) later.... I've a new article on these ecclesiastical-temporal-pagan intersections. And a podcast.
The podcast and the article are quite similar. The article is a bit more succinct and might be a stronger and even easier to follow argument - I finished it after I finished the podcast. Some people prefer listening and some people prefer reading, so....
The article/podcast explores both the Goddess of the Dawn and this very Christian book about the computation of Easter - and the resulting calendar that formed the template of the calendar we still use today. So there is a fair amount of Church history and Christian theology in it, as well as some of the folk tales and traditions of this remarkable Goddess, and some contemplations on the nature of time in our modern age. While not particularly academic, it is a deeper dive into the medieval Christian worldview than what I often write.
So - if you like intersections, especially in this case, folklore, Christian theology, history, science, philosophy, Indo-European paganism, and thinking about big cultural shifts... you might well like this one.
It is not as light as the rabbit stories. Just so you know what you are hopping into. (I couldn't resist that joke.)
I hope you enjoy at least some of these Easter offerings!
