Around the twentieth of March, day and night stand level. From here until the autumn the light has the better of it, and the year tips forward into growth.
An equinox is the moment at which the sun crosses the celestial equator. On that day it rises due east and sets due west everywhere on earth, and day and night are very nearly the same length. There are two in the year, and at this one the days are lengthening faster than at any other time.
History and folklore
It has to be said that there is little sign of a great pagan festival at the spring equinox in these islands. The equinox mattered to astronomers and to the keepers of the calendar. For farming people the turning points of the season were earlier and later.
There is one tantalising scrap. Bede, in the eighth century, wrote that the English had called the month that corresponds to April Eosturmonath, after a goddess named Eostre whose feast was kept in it, and that the name had been carried over to the Christian festival of the resurrection. That is why the feast is called Easter in English and not by some form of the word Pasch as in most other languages. Nothing more is known of her. The name Ostara, by which many modern pagans call this Sabbat, is a German form of her name reconstructed by a scholar in the nineteenth century, and was attached to the equinox in America in the 1970s.
The eggs and hares of the season are sometimes claimed as relics of her worship. There is no evidence for that, though no one could deny that they suit her. What can be said is that the egg has stood for new life for as long as there have been hens, and that in England hard-boiled eggs were dyed with onion skins and rolled down hills at Easter for centuries.
The Spring Equinox in the Craft
This is one of the four festivals that were given their full standing in 1958, and its rite is correspondingly simple. Its theme is balance, and the tipping of the balance. For six months the dark has had the upper hand. Today the two stand level, and from tomorrow the light is in front.
In the story of the year, the young God and the maiden Goddess are growing up together, and the land is waking around them. It is the season of sowing, in the ground and in oneself. What was decided at Imbolc is now set going in earnest.
How our coven keeps it
- Each of us brings seed for the year's garden, and it is laid on the pentacle and blessed before it is sown.
- We dye eggs with onion skins the night before, binding leaves against the shells to mark a pattern, and eat them at the supper.
- A black candle and a white stand on the altar, and are lit together.
- Our outer court begins its season of air on this day, the first of its four seasons of the elements.
- If the weather is kind, we walk the lower slopes of the hill in the afternoon to see what is up.
Keeping it yourself
- Watch the sun rise or set, and note the place on your horizon. It marks due east or due west.
- Sow something, in a garden or a pot.
- Dye some eggs.
- Ask yourself what in your life is out of balance, and do one thing about it.
- Walk somewhere you walked at midwinter, and count the differences.