LADYDAY: The
Vernal Equinox
Now
comes the Vernal Equinox, and the season of Spring reaches it's apex,
halfway through its journey from Candlemas to Beltane.
Once
again, night and day stand in perfect balance, with the powers of light
on the ascendancy. The god of light now wins a victory over his twin,
the god of darkness. In the Mabinogion myth reconstruction which I have
proposed, this is the day on which the restored Llew takes his vengeance
on Goronwy by piercing him with the sunlight spear. For Llew was
restored/reborn at the Winter Solstice and is now well/old enough to vanquish his
rival/twin and mate with his lover/mother. And the great Mother Goddess,
who has returned to her Virgin aspect at Candlemas, welcomes the young
sun god's embraces and conceives a child. The child will be born nine
months from now, at the next Winter Solstice. And so the cycle closes at
last.
We think that the customs
surrounding the celebration of the spring equinox were imported from
Mediterranean lands, although there can be no doubt that the first
inhabitants of the British Isles observed it,
as evidence from megalithic sites shows. But it was certainly more popular to the south,
where people celebrated the holiday as New Year's Day, and claimed it as
the first day of the first sign of the Zodiac, Aries. However you look at it, it is certainly a time of new
beginnings, as a simple glance at Nature will prove.
In the Roman Catholic Church, there
are two holidays which get mixed up with the Vernal Equinox. The first,
occurring on the fixed calendar day of March 25th in the old liturgical
calendar, is called
the
Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or B.V.M., as she
was typically abbreviated in Catholic Missals). 'Annunciation' means an
announcement. This is the day that the angel Gabriel announced to Mary
that she was 'in the family way'. Naturally, this had to be announced
since Mary, being still a virgin, would have no other means of knowing
it. (Quit scoffing, O ye of little faith!)
Why did the Church pick the Vernal
Equinox for the commemoration of this event? Because it was
necessary to have Mary conceive the child Jesus a full nine months
before his birth at the Winter Solstice (i.e., Christmas, celebrated on
the fixed calendar date of December 25). Mary's pregnancy would take the
natural nine months to complete, even if the conception was a bit
unorthodox.
As mentioned before, the older Pagan
equivalent of this scene focuses on the joyous process of natural
conception, when the young virgin Goddess (in this case, 'virgin' in the
original sense of meaning 'unmarried') mates with the young solar God, who has just
displaced his rival. This is probably not their first mating,
however. In the mythical sense, the couple may have been lovers since
Candlemas, when the young God reached puberty. But the young Goddess was
recently a mother (at the Winter Solstice) and is probably still nursing
her new child. Therefore, conception is naturally delayed for six weeks
or so and, despite earlier matings with the God, She does not conceive
until (surprise!) the Vernal Equinox. This may also be their
Hand-fasting, a sacred marriage between God and Goddess called a
Hierogamy, the ultimate Great Rite. Probably the nicest study of this
theme occurs in M. Esther Harding's book, 'Woman's Mysteries'. Probably
the nicest description of it occurs in M. Z. Bradley's 'Mists of
Avalon', in the scene where Morgan and Arthur assume the sacred roles.
(Bradley follows the British custom of transferring the episode to
Beltane, when the climate is more suited to its outdoor celebration.)
The other Christian holiday which
gets mixed up in this is Easter. Easter, too, celebrates the victory of
a god of light (Jesus) over darkness (death), so it makes sense to place
it at this season. 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, honoring 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 here 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 from chthonic regions?
Naturally, 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.
