Today is the day we know as Easter.
I suspect if you’re following me here; it isn’t news to you that most of the collective symbols of Easter and possibly even the resurrection story itself, stem from pre-monotheistic religion or pagan rituals and iconography.
The Easter egg? A pagan sign of fertility and rebirth.
The Easter bunny? A pagan sign of prolific fertility, similar to that of rabbits.
Eating lamb? Flowers? Baskets? Wool? All also related to the ancient pagan celebration of Ostara, which took place over the spring equinox.
It seems a little too synchronistic to me that Christianity’s Jesus resurrection also falls within just a few days of Ostara, the festival of fertility, new life, and growth.
Similar to Christmas and the pagan solstice celebrations of Yule.
There is just too much obvious overlap for these pieces of Christianity and paganism not to be related. In fact, blending Christianity’s holidays with that of pagan rituals and celebrations made it much smoother for ancient people to say they were Christian without really changing much about their day to day life and traditions.
I fully and completely take all stories and parables coming from religious and spiritual text as metaphorical and rich with symbolism.
The Soul speaks in metaphor. The Soul speaks through art. Literalism is of and for the mind.
One of the gravest mistakes of organized religion is taking the stories in the Bible or other religious texts as literal.
They are and never were meant to be taken literally. Plus, they have all been translated so many times by so many people with very human agendas and intentions, not to mention the humans that originally wrote down the stories were also writing it down from their own human memory (which has been proven wildly faulty again and again) with their own agendas and lenses.
My intention with writing this isn’t to dog on organized religion, but it is to point to what is underneath and what came before.
The thing about religion and spirituality is that it all has the same inception point. That’s what I’m most interested in.
What would Jesus dying and being reborn be metaphor for? And how is that metaphor related to the symbolism of the egg, the rabbit, and the season change into spring included in the pagan celebration of Ostara? And ultimately why am I, a spiritually inclined nutritionist in service to the mature feminine frequency I refer to as The Mother, interested in any of this?
Because all of these themes point to the paradoxical truth that birth and death are related.
Birth and death are two sides of the same coin. You cannot live if you are not willing to die. You don’t get life without death.
Jesus died and was reborn anew.
Spring bursts forth from the silent stillness of winter. The grounds are fertile once again after the freezing cold.
The Mother knows that the birth of a child is indeed the death of herself as a maiden, or as a mother of one, and that the birth of a family of four is the death of the family of three. Any mother understands how much loss is involved with each new birth.
The Mother knows that we must die to birth the next iteration of ourselves.
The Mother knows about cycles, seasons, circles, rhythms and spirals.
I am no theologian, although a part of me would love that job, and I do not claim to be a scholar of the Bible or an expert on paganism or on anything except what I teach about feminine physiology, but in my life and my practice, I have learned to die well.
I have attuned myself to that feminine frequency that lives within the feminine physiology and let it lead it my life, and She has taught me that to ascend, you must first descend.
If you would like to truly live, in this body and this lifetime, you must be willing to come down and into the depths of yourself, into the flesh and the blood, and be willing to come into close contact and relationship with your mortality, so that you may meet the eternal part of you.
This is the wisdom that She has always taught. This is the wisdom subtly weaved into the narratives still told on this Sunday morning around the world.
She is not dead. She is alive and well if you know how to listen and see. She is in every single cell in your body and atom in the cosmos.
You must allow what is not true to slough away so that you may rise into the next iteration of yourself. And then do it all again. Until your body dies and you realize you’re part of an even broader cycle of life and death.
You must die to live, my love.
Happy Easter.
An Easter Message