 Hello people, I'm Ginny Metherill and I'm a fourth generation witch who practices traditional magic. Today I want to look at the incredibly pagan festival of Easter and why you should be celebrating it. Easter is one of the mainstream festivals throughout the current year that nobody can actually claim is Christian. It's just not. The name Easter comes from the goddess Easter. If this was truly a Christian festival it would have been called the Pasc or Pascal festival which is what the Christians used to call it. The Easter festivals that we celebrate were in honour of the spring goddess. Now spring goddesses abound a plenty at this time and each particular area of the UK and Europe had their own version of the spring goddesses and ours was mainly called Easter. The Germans called her Ostara and this is considered fact. The venerable bead in the veritable dark ages which is I think 600-700 in the common era wrote about the goddess Easter and how we as a nation would celebrate the festival of her at this time. Therefore Easter is pagan. The name has literally just been lifted by the Christian faith and they applied it to their own resurrection rebirth story which is exactly what Easter is about. So first of all when is Easter? Well it is a moon-based festival so it will be normally the first full moon after the equinox and that is a very traditional date for Easter and this year of course it falls upon the 6th of April the first full moon after the vernal equinox. However often this festival was also celebrated at the beginning of the new moon and the first new moon after the vernal equinox which in this case is on the 21st of April so it's you know six of one half a dozen of the other depending on how and when and where you want to celebrate. Easter itself is therefore a festival of rebirth and what is the most rebirth renewal thing that you can possibly find? Well of course it's an egg and eggs at this time are prolific there's hundreds of them that's why there's lots of games involving eggs you know rolling eggs down the hill decorating eggs giving them to your friends and as a practicing which I would definitely charm some eggs to give away to my friends and family on Easter simply boil some eggs coloring them appropriately and as you're stirring the eggs bless them with your charm for rebirth renewal, fecundity, abundance and wealth what more could you want? When the eggs are eaten because these are hard boiled eggs and make sure they are eaten waste not want not after all this will be the management of the spell. Having established very quickly the Easter is a festival about a spring goddess we're going to look quickly at what that festival means and how they would be celebrated. Well of course there is a very old tradition especially in the southern part of the UK and this is something that I definitely like to do on Easter which is to wake up extraordinarily early on Easter morning and before dawn you climb to the top of the highest hill it has to be the highest hill in your area because otherwise the sun will be obscured by the other hills luckily the highest hill for me is literally just around the corner so I've only got to go up the road a bit you know I probably could run there with the docks but I probably won't. When you're standing on the hill you are then able to see the Easter sun dance and watch the sunrise slowly come up and you should see the sun dancing in honour of this Easter morn. This is a very old tradition and the spring goddess was always just a generalised version of the rebirth of spring and it is her marriage to the green man that brings about this celebration of Easter and the rebirth and renewal of the land and traditionally it was celebrated as a flower festival so you would pick all the primroses and daffodils that are out there and put them on your altar in celebration of Easter which today is something that I still do. So where do we have the Easter bunny from? Well this is an old myth and there's several different versions of them. The goddess Easter's favourite form was as a hare and one day the goddess Easter was running in her hair form through the fields. The wild hunt is also out at this time because they mean to capture Easter in her hair form to prevent the spring coming. The wild hunt chases Easter in her hair form and therefore she changes into a bird in order to escape those slavering hounds. Whilst in her bird form of course she lays eggs but as her favourite form is as a hare she will change back to the hare but keep that egg laying capability. Hence why we have the Easter bunny laying her eggs and bring them to the children of the time. Beautiful willow trees as the first trees amongst us to green up at this time of year and therefore were ascribed as special status during Easter. The weeping willow was such not just because its branches hang down and its head weeping down towards the ground but because it was considered a tree of death and bereavement. Widows would wear wands of willow in their clothing or in their hats to signify their status at this time and in fact it is the time for witches to go out and cut their willow wands and what could be better than to go out on an Easter morn watch the sun dance then go to your local willow stand asking the trees permission and cut your willow wands for the year. Willow wands are very good for using with spells for rebirth and abundance and you don't need to do anything apart from ask the trees permission and dedicate that wand to your craft. But for the rest of us willows are at this time the perfect place to go and look for the fey. The Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Graham you remember that book with Badger and Mole and Ratty the Wind and the Willows is actually an old phrase meaning that this is where you heard the fey talking to you that wind in those trees is them speaking with us. So let us turn our attention now to what you might eat on your Easter morn and there's nothing quite as pagan as a hot cross bun. Now the hot cross bun everyone says oh well look it's going to cross with it so that's Christian. No no no no. Now if you haven't seen my video on the square cross I'll put it up here for you because the square cross is a huge symbol of paganism and witchcraft and that's exactly what the cross is on the hot cross bun. Bakers when they baked their bread and risen buns would put a cross in the top of them to give them protection also to help the rise in the bake but it was mostly to ward off evil spirits add protection and to ensure a good batch and the current day hot cross buns that we know and love are an amalgamation of previous pagan square cross buns now marked with the white flower paste which is quite revolting in my opinion by the Christians news as part of their celebrations however literally taken from us. Us traditional witches were eating hot cross buns before Christianity had even been invented. Northern England was also particularly keen on doing something called holly bussing. Now this is simply cutting down holly and taking it and decorating sacred stones with it on Easter morning in honor of the goddess and so for your altar I recommend a little bit of holly definitely a load of flowers and some eggs and this is a perfect way to celebrate your pagan Easter. If you've ever been to a church on Easter Sunday you'll notice that the altar that they have is decorated with lots of eggs flowers hot cross buns potentially and this is pretty much just a rip-off of what we would have been doing previously so us witches would have been having an altar to Easter incorporating all of these elements themselves. So my cover meeting is coming up in a couple of weeks do you go to www.patreon.com forward slash a Ginny mother all for all the details I'm not sure what we're doing I haven't written it yet but they are going from strength to strength and I really recommend if you're interested in learning witchcraft and joining with others it's great I love them otherwise I hope you enjoyed this video if you did give me a like and subscribe because I really need this to help this channel and keep doing these videos and I will see you in a few days