September 20th - 23rd (Southern Hemisphere)
March 20th - 23rd (Northern Hemisphere)
Other
names for this holiday: Lady Day, sometimes
called Eostara
Magick
associated with Vernal Equinox: abundance,
assertion, awakening, balance, communication,
expressiveness, fertility magick, growth, new
beginnings, passion, phallic magick, renewal,
sacrifice, seed planting, transformation, union,
willfulness, and worldly activities.
Altar decorations: bells,
butterflies, Celtic cross, chicken symbols. colored
eggs, feathers, new moon symbols, rabbit symbols,
rod, seed cake, spear, spring flowers, and staff.
Colours: blue, green, lemon yellow,
pale pink, pastel colours, and yellow.
Foods: biscuits, cheese, dairy
products, eggs, fresh fruits, ham, honey cakes, milk,
nuts, seed cakes, seeds, spring greens, sprouts, and
waffles.
Herbs/Incense/Oils: blue flag,
crocus, daffodil, ginger, gorse, honeysuckle, iris,
jonquils, jasmine, lily, lotus, magnolia, narcissus,
olive, orange, peony, rose, sage, strawberry, tansy,
violet, woodruff.
Stones: amethyst, aquamarine,
jasper, moonstone, and rose quartz.
HISTORY
OF VERNAL EQUiNOX
The Christian holiday which gets mixed up in this
is Easter. Easter, celebrates the victory of a god of
light (Jesus) over darkness (death). Ironically, the
name 'Easter' was taken from the name of a Teutonic
lunar Goddess, Eostre (from whence we also get the
name of the female hormone, estrogen). Her chief
symbols were the bunny (both for fertility and
because her worshipers saw a hare in the full moon)
and the egg (symbolic of the cosmic egg of creation),
images which Christians have been hard pressed to
explain. Her holiday, the Eostara, was held on the
Vernal Equinox Full Moon. Of course, the Church
doesn't celebrate full moons, even if they do
calculate by them, so they planted their Easter on
the following Sunday. Thus, Easter is always the
first Sunday, after the first Full Moon, after the
Vernal Equinox. If you've ever wondered why Easter
moved all around the calendar, now you know. (By the
way, the Catholic Church was so adamant about not
incorporating lunar Goddess symbolism that they added
a further calculation: if Easter Sunday were to fall
on the Full Moon itself, then Easter was postponed to
the following Sunday instead.)
Incidentally, this raises another point: recently,
some Pagan traditions began referring to the Vernal
Equinox as Eostara. Historically, this is incorrect.
Eostara is a lunar holiday, honouring a lunar
Goddess, at the Vernal Full Moon. Hence, the name
'Eostara' is best reserved to the nearest Esbat,
rather than the Sabbat itself. How this happened is
difficult to say. However, it is notable that some of
the same groups misappropriated the term 'Lady Day'
for Beltane, which left no good folk name for the
Equinox. Thus, Eostara was misappropriated for it,
completing a chain-reaction of displacement. Needless
to say, the old and accepted folk name for the Vernal
Equinox is 'Lady Day'. Christians sometimes insist
that the title is in honor of Mary and her
Annunciation, but Pagans will smile knowingly.
Another mythological motif which must surely arrest
our attention at this time of year is that of the
descent of the God or Goddess into the Underworld.
Perhaps we see this most clearly in the Christian
tradition. Beginning with his death on the cross on
Good Friday, it is said that Jesus 'descended into
hell' for the three days that his body lay entombed.
But on the third day (that is, Easter Sunday), his
body and soul rejoined, he arose from the dead and
ascended into heaven. By a strange 'coincidence',
most ancient Pagan religions speak of the Goddess
descending into the Underworld, also for a period of
three days.
Why three days? If we remember that we are dealing
with the lunar aspect of the Goddess, the reason
should be obvious. As the text of one Book of Shadows
gives it, '...as the moon waxes and wanes, and walks
three nights in darkness, so the Goddess once spent
three nights in the Kingdom of Death.' In our modern
world, alienated as it is from nature, we tend to
mark the time of the New Moon (when no moon is
visible) as a single date on a calendar. We tend to
forget that the moon is also hidden from our view on
the day before and the day after our calendar date.
But this did not go unnoticed by our ancestors, who
always speak of the Goddess's sojourn into the land
of Death as lasting for three days. Is it any wonder
then, that we celebrate the next Full Moon (the
Eostara) as the return of the Goddess?
This is the season to celebrate the victory of life
over death, as any nature-lover will affirm. And the
Christian religion was not misguided by celebrating
Christ's victory over death at this same season. Nor
is Christ the only solar hero to journey into the
underworld. King Arthur, for example, does the same
thing when he sets sail in his magical ship, Prydwen,
to bring back precious gifts (i.e. the gifts of life)
from the Land of the Dead, as we are told in the
'Mabinogi'. Welsh triads allude to Gwydion and
Amaethon doing much the same thing. In fact, this
theme is so universal that mythologists refer to it
by a common phrase, 'the harrowing of hell'.
However, one might conjecture that the descent into
hell, or the land of the dead, was originally
accomplished, not by a solar male deity, but by a
lunar female deity. It is Nature Herself who, in
Spring, returns from the Underworld with her gift of
abundant life. Solar heroes may have laid claim to
this theme much later. The very fact that we are
dealing with a three-day period of absence should
tell us we are dealing with a lunar, not solar, theme.
At any rate, one of the nicest modern renditions of
the harrowing of hell appears in many Books of
Shadows as 'The Descent of the Goddess'. Lady Day may
be especially appropriate for the celebration of this
theme, whether by storytelling, reading, or dramatic
re-enactment.
(This contains adaptions form Mike Nichols' articles, as well as my own contributions)
