Ostara

For this years Ostara ritual, I adopted the theme of "new" and combined it with a bit of Celtic influence. I started off by making a wonderful ritual oil called New beginnings that I happened upon on the internet. The recipe calls for seven different oils with the end result being incredible. The numbers are the drops. The oils used were grapefruit7, lemon4, tangerine4,,lavender4, spearmint2, juniper3, cedarwood4 and cypress3. It calls for 12 drops of the blend to add to 1 ounce of oil. The next new Item was the inclusion of an orange scented almond muffin to use as the cake. I got the recipe from the food network website. I always include tarot cards as part of my rituals. For this ritual I used some cards from a new tarot deck I have called Joie de Vie by Paulina. They happened to have a nice springy look to them as well. My new tool was a white aspen wand gifted to me by a friend which I used to cast my circle. Also new to the altar was my triple green man candle holder, my spring green man plaque, a small set of green moss agate altar beads with an owl charm, my zen chime (which sounds like a singing bowl) and my Celtic Circlestarot/altar cloth. I always include music in my rituals and this time the music was new as well. I put together a special Ostara music list. From Vivaldi's Four Season's I chose "Spring". Following that was two pieces from David Arkenstone's CD Celtic Book of Days, one called "Heart of Spring" and the other "Turning of the Year". To round it all off, two songs by Adrian Von Zieglar, "Celtic Lore" and "A Celtic Tale" from his CD Requiem.

Also included on the altar, but not new, were a rabbit and one of my dyed eggs for Ostara. I used mead as my wine which was fitting as Brigid is the Celtic goddess of the season and she is known as the honey goddess and mead is made out of honey. My altar wand of crystal and moldavite, my frog prince and woman holding a crystal ball and my amethyst cup. I used the four aces from my Llewellyn deck to mark the directions. My animals were the Owl, the dolphin, the cat and the salamander. With every ritual, I like to use something I've made in order to personalize the experience.

My" Serenity" tarot cloth and "Celtic Knots" tarot cloth would make nice altar cloths to use for any Spring rituals. For spring I also have two knitted bags, an Ostara Tarot bag and Spring tarot bag. Check them out at my store on Etsy