This is totally without any period evidence. In fact almost nothing is known about the worship of Eostre other than a one line mention by the Venerable Bede. Rabbit bones are commonly found in European middens.
a site to celebrate, to nurture,
and to share understandings of the goddess in every woman.
I am sure they are lovely people with good hearts, but their site has absolutely no ethnographic or historical value.
from wiki:
Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Eostre’s honor, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus…Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance."[4].*
Here’s a interesting cite that has a old English custom that makes eating of rabbit a requirement around Easter:
*Some authorities drawn reference to the hare aspect and of course hare hunting was often undertaken at the time. This may be because this usual corpuscular creature is very often seen frolicking in the fields at March and so became easy game. Folklorists would prefer to believe that it was a sacrifice to the Saxon Goddess Eostre. *
OK, so to follow this down the rabbit-hole - the wikipedia Eostre article references “The Hare in Myth and Reality” by John Andrew Boyle in Folklore for Bede as the sole attestation to Eostre the ‘goddess’ - also has much to say about the taboo against eating hare:
So there’s a prohibition on eating hares in some British/Welsh/Irish traditions, a goddess named Oestre about whom little is known, and Barbara Mikkelson may have conflated the two? That’s the whole of it?
Looks like she got it from some New-Age type site such as Clothahump found.
There is some scant evidence about the Welsh and not eating hare or rabbit (hence the occasional joke about Welsh Rabbit which may be totally wrong in any case). But the Welsh were not Germanic and had nothing to do with Oestre .
The thing is, every year there’s a UL about Oestre and she being the root of all our easter traditions- bunnies, eggs, etc. :rolleyes::dubious: However, the Bede is our only source for Oestre, with one mention, and a few think he made it up anyway.
While oft repeated that the hare was associated with the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, and that pagan symbols were appropriated into the Christian tradition as the Easter Bunny, no primary sources support this myth. It seems to be a modern invention.[21]
wiki also lists many ways hares were prepared as a traditional European dish.
- the wikipedia Eostre article references “The Hare in Myth and Reality” by John Andrew Boyle in Folklore for Bede as the sole attestation to Eostre the ‘goddess’ - also has much to say about the taboo against eating hare: