Ostara
Ostara is the spring-equinox station of the modern eightfold year. It has three distinct layers, separated by 725, 1835 and 1974, and nearly all of the confusion around it comes from running them together. Taken apart, each layer is more interesting than the composite.
Layer one: Bede, 725
Chapter 15 of Bede’s work on time-reckoning is the only surviving account of the pre-Christian English calendar. It lists the Old English month names and glosses several of them. Of Eosturmonath, roughly April, Bede says that the English called it after a goddess Eostre, in whose honour feasts were held in that month 1 ch. 15.
That is one sentence in one text, written by a Christian monk about a century and a half after the conversion of his own people. It is nevertheless real testimony from an insider writing about his own tradition, and it is the whole of the direct evidence for Eostre.
What Bede does not say is also part of the record. He does not describe an equinox observance, he does not describe any rite, and he does not connect Eosturmonath to eggs, hares or anything else that later became attached to the name.
Layer two: Grimm, 1835
Jacob Grimm reasoned from Bede’s Eostre, and from the attested Old High German month name ostarmanoth, to a Continental Germanic goddess he called *Ostara, and then described her 2.
The asterisk matters. *Ostara is a philological reconstruction, marked as one in Grimm’s own practice, and no text names her. What Grimm produced was an inference from a month name, presented with the confidence of a description.
The current scholarly reading of Bede’s Eostre runs in a different direction. She was more probably a local goddess of a particular group or place, on the model of the Matronae attested in Romano-Germanic inscriptions, than a pan-Germanic deity of dawn or spring 3. That reading replaces the nineteenth-century picture with something better evidenced: a local cult in a real place, of the kind the inscriptional record attests.
Layer three: Kelly, 1974
Aidan A. Kelly, an American writer, was assembling a Pagan calendar in 1974. It offended him aesthetically that the solstices and equinoxes had no Pagan-sounding names to match Yule and Beltane, so he supplied some, taking Ostara from Grimm, Litha from a month name in Bede, and coining Mabon from a figure of medieval Welsh literature. Kelly has written about this himself, repeatedly and publicly, and has described sending the calendar to the editor of a widely read Pagan magazine, from which the names passed into general use 45.
Correction
Commonly saidEaster is a Christianised version of the pagan festival of Ostara, and eggs and the hare are surviving pagan symbols.
Several separate claims are stacked in that sentence and they are in different conditions.
That the English name of the Christian festival derives from the Old English month name is Bede’s own explanation, and it is the only explanation the sources offer 1 ch. 15. A name is inherited there.
That there was a pagan festival at the spring equinox is not attested anywhere. Bede describes a month, not an equinox, and no Germanic or Celtic source describes an equinox observance at all 6.
The eggs and the hare are not evidence for Eostre. The earliest secure attestation of the Easter hare is a German academic disputation of 1682, a date occasionally given as 1678, describing the custom in Alsace and south-west Germany as a local peculiarity. A seventeenth-century regional custom is a real and well-located thing, and it is more interesting with its actual date attached than it is as an unsourced survival.
And the goddess in the claim is usually Grimm’s *Ostara rather than Bede’s Eostre, which means the argument is standing on a nineteenth-century reconstruction rather than on the eighth-century sentence 23.
What this leaves
A modern practice whose author can be named, whose reasoning can be quoted, and whose date is fixed to a single year is better documented than most of the medieval material on this page. That reframes the whole question. The 1974 coinage is the one point in the tradition where the historical record is complete.
The spring equinox is also a real astronomical instant, computable exactly for any year, and marking it requires no warrant from the eighth century. What the sources will not support is the claim that marking it is what the eighth century did.
For the wider scheme this station belongs to see The Wheel of the Year, and for the two other names supplied alongside it, Midsummer and St John's Eve and Mabon. For the chapter Bede’s month name comes from, see Bede and the Old English Months; for the instant itself, see Solstices and Equinoxes.
Gap in the evidence
Whether Bede had direct knowledge of a cult of Eostre, or inferred the goddess from the month name in much the way Grimm later inferred *Ostara from Bede, is not settled and probably cannot be. He is the sole witness, so there is nothing to check him against.
How widely Eostre was venerated, over what area, and by whom, cannot be recovered from one sentence. The absence here is a limit of the record.
References
- Aidan A. Kelly. About Naming Ostara, Litha, and Mabon: Patheos, 2017. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/aidankelly/2017/05/naming-ostara-litha-mabon/ record Accessed 2026-07-29.primary source
Kelly's own account of supplying the three names for a Pagan-Craft calendar, and of their transmission through Green Egg magazine. Cited as a primary document by a named participant, not as scholarship. The post carries a revision date of 21 September 2017.
- Bede, trans. Faith Wallis. The Reckoning of Time. Translated Texts for Historians 29: Liverpool University Press, 1999 (composed 725). ch. 15. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
Chapter 15, De mensibus Anglorum, is the sole source for the Old English month names, including Eosturmonath and the doubled Litha.
- Jacob Grimm. Deutsche Mythologie. Göttingen, 1835. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
Cited as a historical object, not as current scholarship. English as Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Steven Stallybrass, 4 vols, London, 1882-1888. The founding text of comparative Germanic religion, and the source of the inferred goddess Ostara.
- Philip A. Shaw. Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World: Eostre, Hreda and the Cult of Matrons. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
Argues that Eostre was probably a local goddess of a particular group or place, on the Matronae model, rather than a pan-Germanic dawn or spring deity.
- Ronald Hutton. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain: Oxford University Press, 1996, xx + 542 pp.. ISBN 0198205708 recordpeer reviewed
The indispensable single book on the British ritual year and its documented customs.
- Ronald Hutton. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft: Oxford University Press, 1999. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
Second edition 2019. The archival study of record for the assembly of the eightfold Wheel of the Year, based in part on the testimony of participants.