Blessing Eggs

Blessing eggs are blown-out eggs that are refilled with herbs, oils and whatever else you want to use to symbolize a blessing you wish to receive yourself or you wish to give to someone else. To begin, make two holes, one at each end of the egg. Make one hole a little larger than the other so that you can fill the egg back up. Using the Ostara correspondence below, choose the herbs, flowers, oils and even coloured glitter to represent what it is you are looking for. For example, if you need more money coming in you will use green and oakmoss. If you are making one for a loved one with troubles sleeping you would use blue and lavender.

Fill the egg up as much as you want and use a small piece of masking tape to cover the larger hole. Next you should paint and decorate the egg to also correspond with the blessing you want to receive or give. You can use regular craft paints to paint the eggs. Try adding words, symbols, sigils or runes to the egg to boost its power.

Once the eggs are finished, place them on your altar during your Ostara ritual. Take a moment during your ritual to ask your deities to bless the eggs and yourself (or a loved one) with what it is you are asking for. If you have made the egg for someone else, give it to them after you have completed your ritual. Both you and your loved one may then decide if you want to display your eggs in a location where you will often see them, or “plant” them so the blessings may grow by burying them somewhere. This can be a vegetable or flower garden or even in a planter if you don’t have a garden.

Correspondences:

Colours:

Green – Abundance, calming, fertility, growth, health, new beginnings, prosperity

Light blue – Calmness, patience, tranquillity, understanding

Pink – Affection, contentment, harmony, honour, love, spiritual healing, spring, tenderness, virtue

Silver – The Goddess, intuition, the inner self, night, psychic abilities, spiritual truth

Violet – Healing, intuition, self-improvement, spiritual awareness

White – Childhood, cleansing, divination, healing, innocence, peace, purification, truth

Yellow – Attraction, creativity, communication, joy, planning, psychic ability, the sun, vitality

Herbs:

Lemongrass – Psychic awareness, purification

Irish moss – Luck, money

High John root – Attraction, blessings, divination, happiness, love, luck, peace, prosperity, psychic abilities, strength, support, well-being

Flowers:

Apple Blossom – Celebrating life cycles, friendship, love, peace

Columbine – Courage

Crocus – Attracts love

Daffodil – Fertility, honours the gods and goddesses of spring, love, wishing

Daisy – Attracts love and lust

Honeysuckle – Honesty, psychic awareness, prosperity

Jasmine – Dreams, love, peace, sex, spirituality

Narcissus – Harmony, love, peace

Orange Blossom – Beauty, love, marriage

Primrose – Attracts spring faeries and love

Rose – Beauty, love, luck, peace, protection, psychic powers, sex

Tulip – Dreams, happiness, love, purification

Violets – Healing, love, luck, lust, peace, sleep, spiritual healing, wishes

Trees:

Alder – Clarity, divination, guidance, intuition, rebirth, renewal, transformation, truth, visions

Apple – Attraction, beauty, beginnings, blessings, divination, fertility, innocence, insight, love, renewal, relationships, strength, well-being

Crystals:

Agate – Courage, love, protection, strength

Aquamarine – Courage, peace, psychic awareness, purification, self-expression

Bloodstone – Courage, self-confidence, strength

Scents for oils or incense:

Apple blossom

Clean crisp air

Columbine

Crocus

Daffodil

Daisy

Honey

Honeysuckle

Jasmine

Lilac

Narcissus

Orange blossom

Primrose

Rose

Rain

Any spring floral scent

Ostara Blessing

Ostara Blessings to all. Today is the Spring Equinox when night and day are both at equal length. If you go out late afternoon you might just catch the rising Moon in the sky at exactly the same time the Sun is about to set. Early in the next morning you can also see the Moon in daylight just as the Sun is rising. In between these two events is a period of complete balance between day and night, Sun and Moon, male and female, light and dark, God and Goddess. This is a special point of balance, on this day light and dark are equal, but the light is now surpassing the dark as days will grow longer and nights shorter, warmth is taking over cold, life is taking over death, today we truly say goodbye to winter. This is a time of major transformation for the earth. The great wheel has turned as we pass into a new season. We notice new buds forming on branches, the birds will start returning and animals will come out of hibernation, flowers will start to shoot up and fields and grass will become lush and green. The young horned God is growing stronger and the Goddess is in her maiden form. The young Sun God takes notice of the Maiden Goddess and the stirrings within them seem to be felt in all living creatures. All the world seems renewed, refreshed and bursting with possibilities. Ostara is an Anglo Saxon and Celtic fertility festival worshipping the Goddess Ostara or Eostre as she is also known. Eggs and rabbits are her fertility symbols. The egg resembles new life and birth and the rabbit signifies fertility. The Horned Sun God also known as The Oak King or the Lord of Light, the Gods Pan, Cernunnos and the Sun Gods such as Sol, Apollo, Attis, Ra and Horus are also worshipped on this day. Eostre, the Saxon version of the Goddess Ostara. Her feast day was held on the first Full Moon following the Spring equinox, the identical time as the Christian Easter when Jesus was said to be resurrected from death. The Sun God Attis who was born via a virgin birth is resurrected each year during the time on the Spring Equinox. The Goddesses Ishtar and Persephone were also both resurrected from death on Ostara. Ostara is a time of newness and rebirth, it is a time to clean up and clear out all our old junk, this is where we get the term spring clean from. But it isn’t just clearing out our homes it is also clearing out the junk and negative energy that we carry around with us. Let the new energies of the Sun and the Spring rejuvenate us. Welcome in the new, breath new life into you and look to the future with hope and optimism. On your alter add anything to represent and to honor the season such as budding flowers like crocuses, daffodils, lilies, daisies, acorns and seeds. Ostara is a time of balance between light and dark, so symbols of this polarity can be used. Use a God and Goddess statue, a white candle and a black one, a sun and moon etc.. This is the time of year when animals are bringing forth new life too so put a basket of eggs on your altar, it is customary and fun to paint them bright colours before adding them, add figures or pictures of new lambs, chicks, rabbits, calves etc. Add a chalice of milk or honey, milk represents the lactating animals who have just given birth and honey is long known as a symbol of abundance and ever lasting life as honey never spoils or goes off, also bees will start to come out now, offer these as a libation to the God and Goddess.. The Spring Equinox is a time of balance of both light and dark, it is a time to look within ourselves and balance our thoughts and emotions and to find balance in our lives. To embrace our dark and our light equally as one cannot exist without the other. This is a time to stop, relax and enjoy our personal achievements, whether they be from toiling in our gardens, working at our jobs, raising our families, or just coping with the hustle and bustle of everyday life. What we put into life we will get out, what we plant now can grow into something amazing. May your Ostara be memorable and your hearts and spirits be filled to overflowing.

The Spring Equinox / Ostara, Explained

The Time of The Spring Equinox is From sunset on or about 20th March for three days

Its Focus is  The triumph of light over darkness, resurrection, new beginnings and opportunities; spring cleaning and casting out what is no longer of worth; fertility and conception, the winds of change.

At the spring equinox, the Sun rises precisely in the East and sets precisely in the West, giving exactly twelve hours of daylight and so heralds the longer days and shorter nights.

As is so often the case, myth and folklore are intertwined in the sources of their festivals that share the same dates.

In the old Celtic tradition, Lugh, the god of light overcame his twin, the god of darkness, and at Easter, the Christian spring festival most closely associated with the spring equinox, the resurrection of Christ is associated with the restoration of light to the world.

The first eggs of spring were painted and offered on the shrine of Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the spring.

Her Norse counterpart was Ostara, the maiden aspect of Frigg, the Mother Goddess, to whom the hare was sacred (this is the origin of the Easter rabbit).

At the spring equinox, bonfires were lit and the corn dolly of the previous harvest (or in Christian times a Judas figure) was burned on the
Easter fires.

The ashes were scattered on the field for fertility.

Wake at dawn on Equinox morn or Easter Sunday and, it is said, you can see the Sun or in the Christian tradition, angels, dancing in a stream or river.

The Green Man is another central figure that features in rituals at this time in southern and eastern Europe and especially among Romany
communities.

The Green Man, or Green George, as he is sometimes known, was the spirit of plants, trees and vegetables, fruit and vegetation, the male spring deity, consort of the Earth Mother and an early forerunner of both Robin Hood and St George.

The Mother Goddess in her maiden aspect mated with the ascended Sun God or, in popular folk tradition the Green Man, so that the conceived infant would be reborn as the new Sun at the next winter solstice, thus ensuring the Wheel of the Year continued to turn.

In the Christian church, 25 March is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary when Gabriel told her she was with child.

The energies of this festival are good for cleansing the seas and air of pollution, for new peace-making initiatives of all kinds, for beginning reforestation and regeneration projects, the reclamation of wildlife habitats and work to restore the indigenous trees and wildlife to an area.

They will also support major attitude changes towards international, national and local issues.

On a personal level, this is the time for clearing emotional and spiritual clutter and wiping the slate clean; for life changes, new beginnings, sowing the seeds for new projects that will bear fruit in the future, for herb gardening, for all matters of fertility and for putting new ideas into practice.

Matters concerning children and young people and new flowering love are especially favoured.

Associations

Candle colours: Yellow and green for the clear light from the East and the budding vegetation.

Symbols: Eggs, any spring flowers or leaves in bud, a pot of sprouting seeds, pottery or china rabbits, feathers.

Crystals: Aquamarine, jade, tourmaline, fluorite.

Flowers, herbs, oils and incenses: Celandine, cinquefoil, crocus, daffodil, honeysuckle, primroses, sage, tansy, thyme and violets