green lady

A while back I saw something in the news about a middle school where the administrators supposedly told the kids to call their Easter dance something else, because Easter is a Christian holiday and the school and religion are spoze to be the twain that never meet, & etc.

I have no idea if it was true or not, and it might have been from one of those stupid emails that get forwarded around u no the ones. Maybe some body got hoaxed by the Onion.

Whatever the case, what I find ironic in all this flapdoodle, plus in the fact that Easter is the ultimate Christian holy day, that it's the only holiday whose name remains an echo of paganism, and our pagan ancestors. In fact, Eostre was a beautiful Teutonic dawn goddess and great mother, the green lady, or in Latin, Primavera.

Furthermore, our method of determining the date of Easter is rooted in paganism, and as you'll recall, uses the full moon as a calendar marker. And since the moon waxes full on various dates, so then does the date of Easter which derives from it.

Eostre's totem animal is the fertile bunny, and her talisman the egg.

By some strange coincidence, there are 52 cards in a playing card pack as well, and four suits of 13 cards each, just as the four seasons are roughly 13 weeks each.

When Eostre was the ruler of springtime instead of Jesus there were 13 months, not 12. This is why, in Walter Scott's version of Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood and his men sang "How many months be there in the year? There be 13 I say..." And it works out, too, because 13 months X 4 weeks = 52 weeks.

But trying to compose a string theory based on cartomancy invariably butts up against the wall of hard numbers, because no matter how you add them up, 52 x 7 always makes 364, not 365.25. Once again, the crystal spheres and elaborate concordances of occultists take a beating. However, it's enough for some of us to know that the structure of a playing card deck is similar and corresponds in several ways to the structure of a calendar year.