Happy Spring Equinox

Spring Equinox, one of the four great cardinal festivals of the solar year. The spring season begins as the Sun enters Aries, and as James Joyce put it, the Ram has power. The festival period that begins now, and lasts for nearly a week, marks the return of Light, and of Mother Earth's vitality, from winter's long darkness and cold. From this point on the solar wheel, the days grow longer until the Summer Solstice and the "white nights" of late June. Spiritual traditions all over the planet celebrate this festival with hunts for eggs, rabbits and other symbols of birth. The Spring Equinox and the New Moon in Aries are both doubly charged this year (2004), coming as they do within only a few hours of each other.

The ancient Celtic and other central European peoples called the Spring Equinox Alban Eilir, or Ostara (source of "Easter"). It marks the day when the Earth goddess Bride, who had married the sky god at Imbolc time in early February, conceives the Sun Child who will be born nine months later at the Winter Solstice.

Like the Winter Solstice festival cycle that runs from Dec. 21 - 25, the Spring Equinox festival cycle extends over a few days, March 21 to 25. The reason for this is simply that in very ancient times, millennia before the rise of Ur and Egypt, the Spring Equinox fell on March 25 and thus was celebrated on that day. It has since moved back, from the Precession of the Equinoxes, to March 21. Thus the closer the equinox festival is to March 21, the newer it is; the closer it is to March 25, the more ancient; or, as in the case of Christian festivals, superseded an older "pagan" festival.

In Japan this day is Shubun, the Buddhist day of contemplation on hakanai, the impermanence of things. This day is ideally placed, not long before the start of one of natures's most glorious spectacles of impermanence, the Japanese cherry blossom season.

In India, this is the great annual Hindu Spring festival of Navaratri, also called Gangaur because it celebrates the Great Mother (Maha Devi) in her aspect as Gauri, the nurturer, the source of all vitality, fruition and increase. Each of the festival's nine days -- the number symbolizing the months in a human gestation cycle -- venerates a different emanation of the goddess.

~ from the Universal Festival Calendar by Dan Furst at www.hermes3.net