As a modern witch I'm always tickled when I find witchy supplies in unlikely places. For instance, Pottery Barn is selling Easter Egg Candles. What could be better on the Ostara altar than egg-shaped colored candles?

Our focus at Ostara is on the return of Spring and the abundance it brings. This is the time when the great Mother Goddess welcomes the young Sun God and conceives the child who will be born again at Yule, the Winter Solstice. The Great Rite, symbolic of the sexual union between God and Goddess, became a tradition to be enacted on Ostara. The positive effect of this rite, a form of sympathetic magic, helped to bring fertility to the land and people and the animals.

Pottery Barn's Easter Egg Candles

Easily recognized as symbols of fertility, eggs are rich with significance for the celebration of Spring. In ancient times the return of the birds meant an important protein source had returned. The ability to find eggs in the fields and forest often meant the difference between health and hunger in the lean days before the harvest.

Eggs were an important part of the festival of the Thesmophoria - sometimes called the Eleusinian Mysteries - which honored Demeter and Persephone and focused on manifesting the return of Persephone, the return of Spring. A highlight of the festival was a procession of children carrying sacred objects, including colored eggs. Celebrants ate Ostara eggs in an attempt to assimilate the spirit of the goddess. The idea was to produce an incarnated blessing of fertility, both of the crops and of children.

The most common colors associated with Ostara - and therefore for colored eggs - are lemon yellow, pale green and pale pink. Other appropriate colors include grass green, all pastels, Robin's egg blue, violet, and white. Pottery Barn's egg candles come in a set of four - one each of sage green, periwinkle blue, ivory and white. Besides being delightfully egg-shaped, the candles handily have the following correspondences:

Green: Promotes prosperity, abundance, and success; stimulates rituals for good luck, money, harmony, rejuvenation and fertility.

Blue: Primary spiritual color; for rituals to obtain wisdom, harmony, inner light, or peace; confers truth and guidance; helps with dream interpretation - using your dreams in a magickal way to solve problems, find answers, etc.

White: A balance of all colors, effective for spiritual enlightenment, purification, protection, cleansing, clairvoyance, healing, truth seeking; rituals involving lunar energy; may be substituted for any other candle color

Ivory: While I haven't found a specific correspondence to the color ivory, we could, by its similarities to yellow, gold and silver, consider the correspondences for those colors. Yellow is about activity, creativity, drawing, pulling, compelling, and unity. Yellow brings the power of concentration and imagination to a successful ritual: used in rituals when you wish to gain another's confidence or persuade someone or in rituals that require solar energy. Gold fosters understanding and attracts the power of cosmic forces; beneficial in rituals intended to bring about fast money or riches. And silver removes negativity and encourages stability; helps develop psychic abilities; attracts the influence of the Mother Goddess.

All correspondences with particular usefulness at Ostara and for our work to manifest abundance in our lives, whatever form we need that abundance to take.

Pagan News has a nice overview of Ostara, which provided some of the information for this post, and has a great discussion of colored eggs and how to incorporate them into Ostara rituals and other celebrations of Spring.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 6:32 PM