Spring Equinox + Full Moon (Again): The sacrificial lamb

It's Friday, and the equinox holiday of Ostara has just passed. Hello.

Last year's post for the holiday was for paid readers, but in the year prior I included some thoughts about the etymology of Ostara and the misconceptions linking a Germanic pagan goddess with the development of Easter in Christianity. To review those thoughts here, "Ostara" is a modern invention as a holiday name; the spring equinox was possibly, even probably, observed by some pre-Christian Germanic peoples, but in very unclear ways. In a Nordic context the day is one candidate for the historical Dísablót, yet even this is not confirmed. Whatever the case, as "Ostara" is scholar Jacob Grimm's reconstructed Old High German name for the Old English goddess Ēostre, it's always worth bearing in mind that Ēostre has no documented connection to the spring equinox other than giving her name to the month that follows it on the pre-Christian English calendar. Simultaneously, the modern transfer of Ēostre/Ostara's name to the equinox is not unreasonable; etymologically, her name suggests she was a goddess of the dawn, thus perhaps a symbol of spring's return. And for anyone engaged with English heathenry, as I am, it makes particular sense even if modern ritualists in other traditions may find Ostara anachronistic for their own purposes.

As I also noted in that older post, the name Ēostre has no bearing on "Easter" coming into existence as a Christian holiday. Everything about the major Christian holidays we know today began in places encircling the eastern Mediterranean. The apparent association of Ēostre and springtime is simply the means by which English speakers and a very limited number of other Germanic language speakers, namely German itself, transferred the name of a month (essentially April) to a holiday that often fell within that month. In the course of this transfer, Easter in these cultures may also have inherited some traditions from Ēostre-month, maybe even including lore around hares and eggs, but we do not really know what, or when, or why. Overwhelmingly, worldwide the names for Easter tend to stem from the Latin pascha, itself from the Greek πάσχα (páskha), which in turn is an adaptation of the ancient Hebrew that's usually romanized today as Pesach — the original name of Passover. I'll return to why those holidays are linguistically equated despite belonging to two different religions; but as for the Ēostre-Easter conflation, I find myself thinking about it every year.

And this year, instead of simply feeling pedantic about the grafted-together fertility imagery, I have found myself thinking not so much of Ēostre and hares and eggs, and rather of the Christian fertility myth itself. No, not the Virgin Mary conceiving Jesus — the more primal and complicated story, the one where a man's crucifixion, death, and resurrection heralds an age of abundance. A dying god is sacrificed for the spring planting season. I continue to periodically grapple with my past experience of Catholicism, while also having moved beyond it to oppose Christian institutions and embrace pre-Christian animist or esoteric knowledge bases; in that grappling, I must now reflect on this myth as a myth. Does it have any merit for ritualists outside of Christianity itself?

Why this god dies in spring

The archetype of a dying god, or dying-and-rising god, belongs first and foremost to scholar James Frazer's The Golden Bough. It's a modern concept applied to a trope in the mythology and folklore subject to Frazer's analysis. Because Frazer did not have the best academic rigor, his work is sometimes more appreciated through a mystical lens than through an empirical one, and even among those who still study Frazer's work there's considerable debate about whether to regard the dying god motif as occurring universally vs. being restricted to the Mediterranean cultural sphere, among other questions. Many of the key examples named by Frazer are indeed geographically confined: Osiris, Dionysos, Jesus. But universal or not, I believe the dying god's presence remains potent and evocative wherever it is found; and I agree with Frazer's perspective that this archetype arose in one or more seasonal ritual scenarios where a god-like, king-like figure would be sacrificed and sometimes reborn, to regenerate crops or plant life in general.

Now, telling the tale of a dying god feels most intuitive to me at the autumn equinox. In truth, at each equinox in my practice a god dies — the Oak King in autumn, the Holly King in spring — but in late September, plant life begins to show initial signs of withering, so I walk among the visible trappings of death. Long ago, and sometimes even now, it has felt somewhat strange to witness springtime commemoration of a legendary man's violent suffering and death.

Be that as it may, I also know there are reasons why the timing is what it is. For those not so familiar with Judaism (or for that matter Christianity), Easter is calculated in a distinct but related manner to Pesach, which itself occurs on the first or second Full Moon after the spring equinox.[1] This calculation came about because in the story of Jesus' final week of mortal life, the Last Supper is a Passover feast; the bread that he breaks, saying, "Take this and eat of it, for it is my body," is the unleavened matzah for that holiday. Whatever originally happened with the plausibly-real figure who inspired the Gospels, either it took place in this fashion or the people who wrote stories about it took a fitting liberty as Pesach itself is concerned with surviving the Angel of Death; and early Christians decided Easter and its preceding Christian holidays should be observed accordingly.

There is also a core symbol of spring linked scripturally to Jesus, and again to Pesach: the lamb. And Jesus is spoken of as the "lamb of god" not because a lamb is a sweet, innocent animal, and not even just because lambs were sacrificed to produce a warding blood for Hebrew homes in Egypt — but because of a wider animist tradition around killing a lamb in spring to bring an abundant summer for the crops. No one can say whether such rites were first practiced as a means of sacralizing the culling of lambs that already won't survive the season[2], or because blood is a genuinely effective fertilizer; it is enough just to know that among plenty of peoples who keep sheep at all, it's a very old event. And it's thus relevant that Jesus is cast in a similar role.

When I think about such things, it's very hard for me not to think of Jesus as a fertility god at his roots, albeit a fertility god I do not worship. And as his earliest worshipers positioned his death and rebirth as a springtime myth, I've noticed this produced an interesting result with the fasting period of Lent that precedes it: people eat less during the leanest time of year, when winter food stores are nearly exhausted and few new things are growing. It's a magnificent example of seasonal relation in a religion that officially purports to be above earth worship.

Confessions of an ex-convert

When an adult converts to Catholicism, it's not a guarantee but it's highly common for them to be baptized and confirmed on Easter. That was exactly my approach in 2006. In the preceding autumn when I started university, I knew fairly soon that I wanted to convert, so my school's priest — gay, left-wing, and quietly excommunicated — directed me to a copy of the catechism and I studied it for months as well as meeting with him periodically. Although Catholicism openly proselytizes in theory, it's still an initiatory sect at its core. You can nominally accept Christ into your heart, but it's preferred that you truly understand what you're getting into. This is why Catholic families baptize newborn infants to at least send them heavenward if they die; but the sacrament of confirmation is a different, relatively intellectual activity reserved for people who are at least seven years old and quite commonly in their early teen years. If a full-grown adult converts, confirmation tends to follow their baptism immediately because they have thought the whole thing through enough.

In retrospect, I probably hadn't thought the whole thing through as well as I imagined, but so it goes. I was sponsored by my "godmother," which is to say a childhood friend who was already Catholic, and represented in the campus chapel by my actual mother as a proxy. I can't remember if it happened before or after the actual Easter Mass, but at the font, with many words spoken I had water poured on my forehead three times, and then for the confirmation process I was anointed with the chrism (a scented olive oil) while adopting the name of my chosen saint. Because of the priest's dubious position within the Roman Catholic Church proper, I doubt that my full name, saint included, is listed anywhere on that church's registry; but I am probably still listed with whatever fringe group he did belong to. Unless they excommunicate me, I still "am" Catholic, just a very lapsed and extraordinarily heretical one.

And somehow, during my first year of university I engaged in all of this while simultaneously exploring what at the time I simply called "paganism"[3]. When I explain this, I often get laughs. But these are not at the incongruity; many people, especially those who walk similar paths as I walk today, recognize the rich animist overlap between lingering pagan traditions and folk Catholicism outside the Church's governance. There is also such sensuous ceremony in both cases.

All the same, I wasn't consciously making these considerations. Instead, I thought of my pagan interests as one compartmentalized thing, and then where Catholicism came up I was interested for two reasons. First, I had previously encountered the radical compassion of anarcho-Catholics and writers of a similar mindset; I was seeking a moral code where love was the highest and only law, even if I would eventually find more nuance and complexity by throwing off Christian morality altogether. And secondly, I saw drawn innately to the dying god myth at Eastertime, and the weekly renewal of that myth when receiving the Eucharist; I was seeking to commune, with not only the dead god's flesh and blood but also with other humans in the web of relation created by that god's sacrifice. It took me more time before I realized I could pursue communion in other ways.

The fertility of the fertility myth

Oddly enough, when I originally renounced Catholicism I didn't see it as a matter of liberation. After just a couple of years in active practice, I was forced to stop because my abuser felt threatened by it.[4] But as I began to understand the ways this relationship was destroying me, I didn't resume my experiment with a religion of 1.3 billion people. Atheistic existentialism was my incidental rescuer. Now I am not an atheist, but since I'm a satanist it feels antithetical to celebrate anything earnestly within the Church or its splinter factions.

Antithesis and paradox do not mean, however, that there is no value in looking back at what I used to get from that old experiment. I keep feeling as if there is marginal work to do here, boundary work, liminal work. Trickster work, just as the Devil would like. And Jesus as dying fertility god endures in my mind.

For indeed, there's the sheer principle of the folk Catholic animism that I know more about than I used to, but that I could also stand to learn better. And beyond this, I have a gut sense in my rites that fertility relies on sacrifice. We cannot get things from the Earth for free; for one thing, we must give back, and for another thing, anything extracted carries a cost within it. And we forget this at our peril. So maybe Jesus is just one of many names for the sacrificial lamb and king who must be cut down, his blood poured into the soil to bless it with nitrogen. Lastly, where Jesus the historical figure is concerned, I still tend to enshrine him as a political revolutionary and decolonial liberator, so his martyrdom at Rome's hands has anti-imperialist implications behind it. What a shame that Rome assimilated his cult and spat out a religion of the status quo within a couple of centuries. That version of Jesus is the Christ which Satan opposes, but in another timeline maybe Satan and Jesus could have become one and the same.

Easter is not this weekend, but it approaches. I wonder if I am past due to better ritualize the dying god myth at the equinoxes in my own practices — to heighten the fertility energies on those days, and also to satisfy a silent yearning that remains after leaving Catholicism behind. I need reconciliation that is more complex than merely "returning" — reconciliation in the margins, indeed. Like so many other ex-Catholics, I am no longer in a given church, but I am still oddly in communion.

What sense can I make of that? If any fellow ritualists have already figured this out for themselves, do let me know.

[1] So in this case Pesach will fall on April 12th. The intricacies of Easter calculation (which also differ between Western and Eastern Christianity) mean that sometimes there will be direct synchronization with Pesach and sometimes not; this year Easter is on April 20th. But as detailed above, there is a basic scheduling connection, and it isn't coincidental.

[2] If this sounds unpleasant and immoral, I would at least agree about the unpleasantness, but the situation is part of how very few animist societies avoid killing and eating animals altogether. I at least think a properly conducted animal sacrifice is more ethical than all types of factory farming.

[3] A term I still use, but I increasingly find it misleading, hence why you will see it in Salt for the Eclipse but depending on context I have a much greater preference for talking about animism, witchcraft, and/or pre-Christian ritual traditions.

[4] She was Jewish, and I feel like it's taken me until just now to consider that my slowness to invite Jewish observances into my ritual life could have something to do with how even though it would honor my ancestors I may have some embodied trepidation around how my abuser coerced me into occasional Jewish observances while we lived together. I would like to undo that feeling.

This piece was challenging for me to write, and its focus is perhaps not for everyone. A postscript I should add to all of the above is that I remain intent on not making this newsletter "Christian," no matter where my personal explorations go, especially because even as a Catholic I always identified more as a Catholic than as a Christian; but also I am most averse to the risk of accidentally matching stride with the proliferation of reactionary tradcath "return to the mother church" material out there, the online undercurrent that's given us the likes of JD Vance. If I continue to write occasional posts like this where Jesus is mentioned so many times, they will be just that — occasional. At the end of the day, hegemonic Christianity is enough of a social threat within these artificial national borders that I will probably be my own greatest critic and limiting factor in sorting out my Catholic past.

In any case, next week I will have a post for paid subscribers that I have been particularly eager to write, concerning the notion of "finding your people" in the accelerating apocalypse. The following week I will then be inaugurating a series of twelve posts dispersed through the next twelve months, still breaking down thematically by lunar phase but also connecting with the twelve signs of the tropical zodiac and their ruling planets — beginning of course with Aries and its ruling planet Mars.