Breakfast eggs

Happy (almost) Easter everybody! Every Easter, I wake up late and start searching for my eggs (I usually find them in my refrigerator). When making breakfast, I hear the church bells ringing in the background. For me, Easter hasn’t a special meaning. I am not religious or spiritual, so when the Easter bunny sticks out his ears, I am only happy that spring will continue to blossom into summer.
Recently I watched a news program, one of the topics that were mentioned was the cancellation of

The St Matthew Passion all over the country. Apparently, in the Netherlands we have one of the most, maybe even the most performances of this piece worldwide. Religious or not, when Easter comes, people will sit almost 3 hours on hard church benches to listen to the final moments of Christ in music performance. I listened to music last year but from the comfort of my own bed. So with this news, I decided to dig a bit deeper into the tradition we call Easter. I consider my knowledge about Easter enough to not get ‘it’s common knowledge’ thrown at me. For Christians, Easter means the resurrection of Christ. Combined with that, the Jewish holiday Pesach is celebrated as well. Pesach is the liberation of Jewish slavery in Egypt and the exodus from Egypt. I even know that the term ‘Easter’ is derived from a Germanic ‘Start of spring’ tradition, but how similar or different the traditions are, I have to look this up.

After doing some research, I found out that the Goddess of ‘the start of spring’ tradition is Ostara. She is the Goddess spring and dawn and stands for renewal and fertility. There are not a lot of known scriptures about her, but she was mentioned in scholarly writing. Bede, a monk states that during Eostremonath (Old Anglo-Saxon name of April), the Anglo-Saxons had a festival in her honour. Her name is related to the name Eos, the Greek Goddess of dawn, who has a connection to the Proto-Indo European Goddess of dawn.

Another writing about Ostara was found in Teutonic Mythology by Jakob Grim. He stated that she was the Goddess of the growing light and spring. So, not a lot is sure about her existence and her origin. Still, she is often portraited with rabbits (and hares) as they symbolize fertility and eggs which symbolize renewal. With Europe converting to Christianity, the tradition started to die out. The calendar changed and as the resurrection of Christ was around the same time, people still revered to that time as Easter.

Phew… that was a lot of information. Easter is tomorrow, and when I’m eating my eggs I will enjoy my breakfast even more!