Vernal Equinox Guidebook
We are travelling through the cycle of the year, traversing the quarter arc, the Vernal (Spring) Equinox, a time when day and night are in equal measure, an auspicious moment in the calendars of many cultures across the ancient world. This marker of time, this nod to the celestial orbit of the sun, was a moment to pause, to create rituals and traditions where stories of identify, ethnicity, religious and cultural roots could be told, weaving cohesive bonds through global evolving societies.With origins in Zoroastrianism, the Persian Spring equinox marks the New Year (NowRúz or NawRúz), meaning ‘New Day’, commencing the first day of the first month in the Iranian Calendar (Farvardin), a moment symbolically carved into the rock of the ancient site of Persepolis, where the bull (earth) and lion (sun) are duelling with equal strength. For members of the Bahá’í Faith, NawRúz arrives after an extended period of fasting, a deep inner spring clean, marked as a holy day- a commemorative shabbat- to honour the crossing of the calendrical threshold. The celebrations for the Vernal new year span as far as Kurdish lands in Turkey, across the Black sea and into the Balkans, across Iraq and on into Tajikistan and to Uzbekistan, where ‘Pisanka’ or decorative eggs are hand-painted, echoing the Easter orthodox tradition of decorating the ‘egg’ of fertility, a tradition which, in turn, can be traced down to Greece. We can travel West too, as far as Mexico, to the ancient Mayan pyramidal tombs of Chichén Itzá and witness the vernal sun lighting the side of the tomb dedicated to the snake god Quetzalcoatl; the light revealing a serpentinecreature descending to the earth; the mythic return of the God to bless the forthcoming harvest.So it may not be surprising then that this quarter cycle of the year was marked in Celtic lands, this time with a turning towards the Anglo-Saxon Goddess Eoster, Ostara, to which ‘Easter’ can trace it’s etymological as well as pagan origins. In Ireland we can find alignment of the equinox sun most notably at Cairn T at Loughcrew, part of the Knowth Megalithic Cairns, when the dawn rising sun, lights up the Sliabh na Caillí, the backstone of the passage tomb, highlighting engraved and decorative sun symbols.
In the ancient celtic calendar, the Vernal Equinox was one of eight points on the annual wheel of the year, mid-way between the festival of Imbolc (Celtic Spring) and Bealtaine (Celtic summer). While not one of the main festivals in the year, it is a time of celebration of the re-birth of life, a resurrection of visible growth, as the budding of leaves and spring greens arrived in ever increasing abundance as the season turns. It is a time of equal exchange between the light and the day, the ying and the yang, the masculine and the feminine, and it is a time of planting and getting back out into the land to do the work which will be harvested at the end of the Celtic year, at Samhain, six months down the line.So, as we move through this arc of time, let’s take some pause, to tune into our light, to re-calibrate our intentions, consider our relationship to equanimity and to actively plant what we want to harvest, with intention and with hope.I have designed a planner to help you do just that. It incorporates meditative and journalling practices alongside some powerful questions to tune you into your intentions for the season ahead.
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