Ostara ~ The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

THE SWAN that lays THE GOLDEN EGGS

The Swan that lays the Golden Eggs

By analogy we can ascertain that goden eggs are also laid during the same time of the Galactic Year

and perhaps the truer origin of the festival and egg.

Ancient Easter

Easter-time and the Spring Sun have long been celebrated in ancient societies as far apart as those in Scandinavia,

Greece, Egypt, Babylon and India. H. P. Blavatsky writes that the word 'Easter' comes from

the pre-Christian Scandinavian goddess of spring,
Ostara:

“She was the symbol of the resurrection of all nature and was worshipped in early spring.

It was a custom with the pagan Norsemen at that time to exchange coloured eggs called the eggs of Ostara.

These have now become Easter-Eggs.”

Christianity took this venerable old celebration and expanded its meaning by connecting it

with the "Resurrection of their Saviour", Jesus. Just as the life inside of the egg is hidden,

so also was Jesus said to sleep "in the grave for three days before he awakened to new life."

HPB commented this was a natural association since Jesus was identified with the

“same Spring Sun which awakens in all his glory, after the dreary and long death of winter”,

something the old Freemasons had long taught.

According to Thomas Paine, Christianity put Jesus in place of the Sun, a symbol

which ancient Masonry had previously venerated as the giver of man's spiritual life

and the origin of their beliefs (ULT Newsletter Nov 2019, 9:28).

~

The "Egg" has always been a powerful natural symbol from the earliest of times in mankind's imaginative

- and actual - appreciation of and respect for natural processes.

It taught them facts about the workings of nature and was embedded in their sacred mythos:

* Brahmâ (primeval & creative force) gestated in the cosmic “Egg” or Hiranya-Gharba of the Hindus;

* the Egg of the Egyptians was said to "proceed from the mouth of Kneph," the "eternal deity"

and potent emblem of generative power.

* the Egg of Babylon "fell from heaven" into the “River Euphrates” out of which hatched Ishtar,

the Babylonian “goddess," the subtle essence that produces fertility, love and war.

~

All these metaphors are highly symbolic: the creative force (Brahmâ) is contained in the Egg;

the generative power of nature comes from the

mouth of the "eternal deity"; it enters into the steam of existence (the River),

out of which a powerful “goddess” (symbolising the awakened life-energy from on high)

begins working in the material world producing "love and war"

which is only natural after the sleep of winter and simply

signifies the renewal of the evolutionary tension between spiritual and material nature.

~

Children today are still taught to make coloured eggs, a practice perhaps tens of thousands

of years old when eggs were "traditional during spring

in almost every country." In Egypt they were "exchanged as sacred symbols

in the spring-time,” being the eternal emblem of birth or rebirth, both

of human life and nature in her great cycles. The attached sketch shows Easter

is on the upward arc of the Sun's passage, it is around the time

when the Sun crosses the meridian and is at its greatest northward velocity

towards the peak of mid-summer three months later.
~

HPB writes that Spring Eggs “were hung up in Egyptian temples and are so suspended to this day

in Mahometan mosques” and that the “pagan”

Easter fell on March 15th or on the vernal equinox of March 21st.

In the myth of Ausonius-Bacchus he was slain and rose again “in three days”

just as Jesus was supposed to have done, all pointing to the principle of cyclic gestation

bringing forth new glories following apparent death.

~

But whatever the accuracy of the timing of modern Easter

(whether it was always on the first lunar festival after the vernal equinox), that it is an

old occult celebration is not in doubt. So this weekend as the Easter celebration

carries on we can recall the original symbology of this venerable

old Spring festival and the rejuvenation and rebirth that it was universally respected and celebrated for.

~

Moreover, it is at the spring equinox with its magnetic tide of rising Nature that our corresponding "resolutions"

(made in the New Year when the

astral life of the year was young and impressionable to positive intentions)

may hatch and come to fruition after the incubating sleep of winter.

So there is every reason to make it a celebration for those who work with natural cycles

and who have planted seeds with the wish for brighter, more

brotherly and equal times.

~

[quotes on “Bacchus,” “Easter” & "Eggs" from The Theosophical Glossary by H. P. Blavatsky and her article ”1888”.]
Will Windham