The Equinox is upon us.
Light dances with dark in balanced reverence. Poised on the threshold of the lengthening night, the sun releases — preparing to die, preparing to dream, preparing to become again, the same yet new, along the spiraling round.
At 8:05 p.m. Eastern on the 22nd of September, the sun crosses the celestial equator heading south. For a moment day and night stand level. Then the balance tips, and from here until the winter solstice, the dark gains a little ground every day.
Astrologically, this is the Sun’s ingress into Libra — 0° of the sign of the scales, where the zodiac turns from the six signs that build the self to the six that meet the other. The equinox chart has long been cast to read the season ahead; whatever it holds, it colors the months until the solstice.
Almost every tradition I know of marks this moment. And they tend to mark it in one of two ways.
The first is gathering.
Sukkot begins this week, the Jewish festival of the harvest, when families build temporary shelters open to the sky and eat beneath the stars. The Torah calls it the feast “at the turning of the year” — tekufat ha-shanah — tying the harvest to the season’s turn in so many words.
Samhain follows at the end of October, the midway point between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice, long honored as the Gaelic new year. The cattle come down from the summer pastures, the last of the harvest is brought in, and the year turns over in the dark.
By November, Diwali will be setting its lamps burning against the new-moon dark — the festival of lights, the victory of light over darkness — and Thanksgiving will be gathering families to the table. It is no wonder that as we turn toward the long nights and the cold, silent stillness of winter, so many peoples mark this season as a beginning rather than an end. Each of these, in its own way, keeps the ember of the sun alive in the hearts of humanity.
The second way is harder, and I think it’s the more important.
But first come the rites of darkness: the rituals of death, and the purification of the heart.
For nearly two thousand years, the most sacred rite in the Greek world was held at exactly this time of year. The Greater Mysteries at Eleusis took place in the month of Boedromion — September into October — and at their heart was Persephone, who descends into the underworld while the earth goes barren in her mother’s grief. Initiates were sworn to secrecy and kept the secret so well that we still don’t know precisely what they saw. What we do know is what they were promised: that what goes down into the earth comes back.
Día de los Muertos, on the first and second of November, keeps the same door open in a brighter key — the dead are invited home, and the living set places for them.
The balanced pageantry and poise of Libra season readies us for this descent into the shamanic abyss of Scorpio, where all things must die in order to be reborn. Like Persephone, we return to the subterranean womb of the earth and dwell in the underground rivers of consciousness, delving into our ever-unfurling being to grab hold of that glint of golden wisdom — to light our path, and allow a new dream to be born.
There is one more tradition, and I only learned of it recently.
In Japan, the week centered on each equinox is Higan (彼岸), a Buddhist observance when families visit the graves of their ancestors. Higan means “the other shore” — the far bank of the river of suffering, the shore of awakening — as against shigan, “this shore,” the world we live in.
At the equinox, the sun rises due east and sets due west. In Pure Land Buddhism the western paradise lies in that direction, and so at Higan the two shores are said to be closest. There’s a Japanese saying that heat and cold both last only until Higan.
If you’re reading this on the day, step outside at sunset. The sun goes down due west — on the line toward the other shore. I named my practice From Yonder Shore years before I knew any of this. It was strange, and quietly moving, to find that the phrase I’d reached for already had a festival — and that it falls on this night.
The equinox is a hinge. The harvest is gathered on one side of it; on the other, the long descent begins.
I’ve written more about what comes next — the purification that precedes the new dream — in Purification Rites of the Heart, in the Liminal Loom.
Read Purification Rites of the Heart →
May the dark be kind to you, and may you find something worth bringing back.
