Ostara _ rituals, recipes, & lore for the spring equinox ( PDFDrive )

1976: Christina Hole states that “The hare was the sacred beast of Eastre (or
Eostre) a Saxon goddess of Spring and of the dawn.” (Bott)
It was Gerald Gardner, while creating Wicca, who pulled together customs from
different traditions and came up with seven sabbats and then added in the Vernal
Equinox, bringing the total sabbats to eight and putting them approximately six
weeks apart.
According to HecatesCauldron.org:
One must realize that nowhere in recorded history did any one group of
pagans practice the entire 8 Sabbats. Also, there is no record of pagans
celebrating the Spring Equinox. In fact, the Spring Equinox which Gardner
calls Ostara is the Germanic name for their spring Goddess. Ostara was
celebrated in the fourth month of the year, meaning April, according to the
British scribe Bede the Venerable, writing in the seventh century CE. Over a
thousand years later, she was still honored in Germanic lands, where her
name was used for the month in which she ruled, April. She did not represent
March with its Spring Equinox.
The fact that people tend to believe that Ostara is an ancient holiday with an
ancient goddess at its core, may not be the truth, but it has somehow become
thought of as law in very recent history.
Philip Shaw tells us in Pagan Goddesses in the Early Germanic World:
The interpretation of Eostre as a spring goddess has been strangely
influential, given the lack of really clear evidence to support it. Both skeptics
and believers often refer to her as a spring goddess, and this leads to some
preposterous situations, as when Knobloch (1959: 31–4) argues against the
existence of Eostre on the grounds that there is a lack of strong etymological
evidence for her connection with the spring. This is clearly no argument
against the goddess at all—Knobloch ably demonstrates the weakness of the
supposed connection with spring, but this connection is, after all, only one
scholarly interpretation of Eostre’s name. (55)