My Ostara Ritual

I typically use John Beckett's solitary Sabbat rituals. He's a Druid, Unitarian Universalist, and hard polytheist who has a truly fantastic blog called Under the Ancient Oaks over on Patheos' Pagan channel. I've used his solitary ritual for Ostara before and loved it, but our long-term plans are so up-in-the-air right now that I didn't feel good starting a seed or a plant as the ritual called for given that I might harm it by having to move it. That particular ritual is also written around Danu, and I'm not as familiar with Her as I'd like to be. (I'm planning on hitting up Morgan Daimler's material on Her at some point though.) I do, however, have a special draw towards Aset, so I reconfigured where my ritual went around those two facts.

Since Ostara is a good time to think about what you're going to "plant" to grow in your upcoming year, I thought about the intentions and goals I wanted to plant. Right now, we are underemployed, and I'd also like to move my family to my hometown. Therefore, my ritual focused on pieces of those desires/goals--jobs for us totaling a specified combined salary in the specific location and within a certain timeframe. My experience has been that magic is most effective when the focus is narrow (I link to Beckett a couple more times here because his writing is that valuable a resource,) so I want to be specific about these things and also to help myself visualize them richly and fully to manifest them more effectively. My ritual ended up being mostly prayer (I'd encourage you to read this article on prayer as a conscious part of your spiritual practice) just pouring out of me because these are desires that matter to me very deeply.

Here's a birdseye view of my Ostara ritual. I used most of the usual pieces from my altar-trunk (which I'll breakdown elsewhere sometime soon) and added a few Ostara-specific elements.

The Ostara elements that I added include some small bunny figures, a spring colored baby blanket, and the egg tree you see behind the candles.

You can see the bunnies a bit better here. They are right behind the skull candles.

I ended up not doing the In Your Head spells during my ritual. My husband wanted a ballpark end-time, so I trimmed some elements out of my ideal main ritual--the In Your Head spells and the cartomancy/divination I'd originally planned. I didn't want to be interrupted because I was taking "too long." Instead, I asked the Guests I invited to the ritual to bless and charge the candles for their later use and specified what I intended to do with them and how that tied in with my idea of Ostara and my Ostara goals/foci.

I burned the white candle you see in the above photos as my offering to the Guests. It's my favorite scent and has been out of production for a few years, so it's special.

I burned some kyphi (a traditional Kemetic/ancient Egyptian offering,) a blend of herbs dedicated to Aset, a bit of mummy-style linen, and three bay leaves representing what I needed/wanted/burned for. I don't usually have requests, but this time I did. The linen was a mistake. It made massive billows of seriously acrid smoke.

I really like burning things in my cauldron and photos of same (so peaceful! so pretty! so wild! all at the same time!), so I included some below.

:)

The smoke stung my eyes and lungs too much, so I put the lid on a "simmer" sort of position.