Around the twenty-second or twenty-third of September, day and night stand level for the second time. The harvest is home, the swallows are leaving, and from here the dark has the better of it.
At the autumn equinox the sun again rises due east and sets due west, and day and night are equal. It is the mirror of the spring festival. Then the days were lengthening at their fastest. Now they are shortening at their fastest, and in the Welsh Marches each evening is noticeably earlier than the last.
History and folklore
As with the spring equinox, there is no clear record of an ancient pagan festival on this day in Britain. What there was, everywhere, was the end of the harvest, which fell at about this time and was kept with all the relief and thanksgiving that a year's bread safely gathered could inspire.
The celebration was the harvest home. When the last load came in from the fields, decked with green boughs, the farmer gave a supper for everyone who had worked on it, with as much beef and beer as they could hold, and there was singing until the small hours. The harvest festival held in churches, with its displays of vegetables and sheaves, is a much more recent thing. It dates from the 1840s.
The season had its other markers. Michaelmas, on the twenty-ninth of September, was a quarter day, when rents were paid, servants were hired and a goose was eaten. It was also the last day on which blackberries could safely be picked, for after it the Devil was said to have spoiled them. The full moon nearest the equinox is the Harvest Moon, which rises close to sunset for several evenings together and gave light to finish the work by.
The Autumn Equinox in the Craft
This is the second festival of balance, and its mood is the opposite of the first. In spring the scales tipped towards the light. Now they tip towards the dark, and the rite acknowledges it without regret.
In the story of the year, the God who fell with the corn at Lammas now takes his leave and goes down into the dark, to reign there until he is born again at Yule. The Goddess remains, and grows old with the year.
It is the witches' thanksgiving. The corn is in, the fruit is ripe, and what the year was going to give, it has given. It is a time to give thanks, to share what there is, and to set one's affairs in order before the winter.
A note on the name Mabon
Many pagans call this festival Mabon. The name was given to it by an American writer in the 1970s, who wanted the equinox to have a name as resonant as Samhain or Beltane. Mabon son of Modron is a figure in medieval Welsh legend, a divine youth stolen from his mother when three nights old. He has no connection with the equinox or with the harvest. The name has never been used by our coven, which works within a short drive of the Welsh border and has members who speak the language. We mean no criticism of those who use it.
How our coven keeps it
- Everything on the supper table is grown, gathered, baked or brewed by a member of the coven. Nothing is bought ready made.
- The altar is dressed with apples, hazelnuts, blackberries and the last of the garden flowers.
- A black candle and a white are lit together, as in spring.
- The Saturday nearest the equinox is our cider day, when the windfalls from the orchard are pressed. The first of the juice is poured back on the roots of the oldest tree.
- Each of us gives thanks for something by name, and a share of the supper is taken next day to someone who needs it.
Keeping it yourself
- Go blackberrying, and do it before Michaelmas.
- Watch the Harvest Moon rise.
- Cook a meal from what is in season where you live, and ask someone to share it.
- Say thank you, aloud, to someone to whom you owe it.
- Finish something that you have left half done.