Iolo's fabrication was based on the belief, current in his time, that the Druids had built Stonehenge; its alignment with the midsummer sunrise was therefore taken to mean that the Solstices and Equinoxes must have been sacred to the Druids
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By the time people figured out that there was a gap of about three thousand years between Stonehenge and any Druids that would have been knocking about, the idea was already established
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(I'm paraphrasing the magnificent Professor Hutton here - read him for yourselves https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00155870802352178 … )
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When the Wiccan calendar was being developed in the middle of the last century, the Equinoxes were NOT a part of it; Margaret Murray had stated outright that witches didn't celebrate the Equinoxes
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However, in 1958 Gerald Gardner's main coven insisted that they wanted to celebrate the Equinoxes and Solstices as well as the other four festivals, and so they were incorporated.
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This led to the now extremely familiar 'wheel of the year' with its 8 festivals - though the Wiccan Spring Equinox celebration was NOT at that point identified with Easter, nor was it named Ostara
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That development occurs in 1974, when American Wiccan Aidan Kelly gave the festivals new names of his own devising, including naming the Spring Equinox 'Ostara'.
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Fortunately for historians, this isn't some dim and distant event requiring painstaking reconstruction. Mr Kelly is very much alive and here he is explaining how and why he dunnit.https://www.patheos.com/blogs/aidankelly/2017/05/naming-ostara-litha-mabon/ …
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... all of which takes us neatly through to the present day, when the likes of 'Iolo' are all but forgotten, and people who do not know any better insist that the 'pagan Spring Equinox festival of Ostara' was the forerunner of the Christian Easter What a world, what a world
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Replying to @Cavalorn
Great thread, very educational. I still want to celebrate the Spring Equinox, call it whatever you will, because it is a celebration of the beginning of new life. Is that so wrong?
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I don’t think he’s saying you can’t celebrate it, only that it doesn’t have any connection to the “Celts” etc and its celebration is a recent invention.
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