Ostara

This week many of us carried out our sacred rites in honour of the Germanic Goddess Ostara[Old High German/OHG name] also known as Eostra[Anglo-Saxon/AS].
She is the Goddess of Spring, of renewal and regeneration. As we give thanks to Her for the reappearance of Spring, of life after death we remember also that She is performing a Great Work in the hearts and minds of our Aryo-Germanic Folk in the various lands in which they now reside.
We ask that She bring about a great Awakening, a spiritual and folkish renewal in the body, blood, DNA and soul of our people. Before any great political change there must first be a spiritual renewal of the kind that we witnessed in late 19th century Germany and Austria.
The ancient name of the month of April amongst the Germanic peoples was Esturmonath, Ostermonat and Ostarmonath.
The Goddess must have been an important deity in the Germanic pantheon as the christian clergy were unable to eradicate Her name or the festivities attached to Her season but instead as with the feast of Yule they were forced to incorporate it within their sacred year. The term Easter is even to be found in the Authorised Version[King James Version] of the Bible.
Jacob Grimm in volume 1 of his Teutonic Mythology makes reference to the OHG adverb ostar expressing movement towards the rising sun, likewise with the Old Norse austr, the Gothic austr and the AS eastor.
She is therefore the divinity of the radiant dawn whose meaning has been usurped by the christian priesthood and appropriated to their doctrine of the resurrection.
In times past bonfires were lit at Easter. Grimm also states that "Maidens clothed in white, who at Easter, at the season of returning spring, show themselves in clefts of the rock and on mountains, are suggestive of the ancient goddess."
In the Norse Edda a male spirit of light bears the name Austri. One could conjecture that a female being could have been called Austra.
James Hjuka Coulter in his Germanic Heathenry associates Ostara with the Norse Goddess Idun, the keeper of the apples that grant immortality to the Gods. The apple of course is a mythical symbol of regeneration.

Cultural and Historical Diffusion

I think its important to go over the concept of Cultural/Historical Diffusion one more time. The definition of the term, as we discussed in class, went something like this:

Two or more historical events, environments, situations or ideas, occurring in different geographic places, in which one can clearly be shown to have influenced the other.

The key to understanding cultural diffusion is the concept of interaction. The manner in which people interact inevitably alters the history of anyone who participates in the interaction. In class, this was shown when we looked back to the Environment unit and the Silk Road. Along the Silk Road, traders from all over interacted and exchanged goods. While exchanging goods, they also consistently (and usually unintentionally) exchanged cultural elements-it could be religion or food or clothing-and brought the new cultural elements back home.

When they returned home to their friends and family they (also usually unintentionally) shared those new cultural elements with others. Thus their homes' history would be changed forever. This is really how history happens-the interactions between people that causes them to change, even a little bit. Adding up all those "little bits" equals a huge amount of change for civilization as a whole.

The evidence of this is the documents we've been looking at for the last two days. There were quite a few Israelites who lived in Ancient Egypt for a long time before moving East. Many lived under Akhenaton when he mandated that Egypt move from polytheism to monotheism. Certainly, many were exposed to Akhenaton's "Hymn to Aton".

Over the course of the next hundred years or so, elements of that prayer were probably passed down from generation to generation. When the authors of the Hebrew Bible were putting it together, it is not surprising that they included things that had been passed down through generations. Thus, looking at "Hymn to Aton" and "Psalm 104" today, its pretty obvious that some serious cultural diffusion took place.

So its important, when studying the history of religion, that we look at the role cultural diffusion plays. The "big three" monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam did not come out of nowhere. In each, you'll see elements of previous religions. As we move forward on our timeline, keep that in mind as you look at the movement in the world from polytheism to monotheism.