Equinoctial greetings earthlings!
The equinox represents the biannual moment at which everywhere on Earth is experiencing days and nights of the same length. A moment of global unity therefore.
In Europe it represents the beginning of spring and the feast of Ostara which became Easter. Perhaps you did not know it, but Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first full moon which follows the spring equinox – a very strange formula to celebrate the anniversary of a supposedly historical event. The symbolism of going into the tomb, dying and rising again is an ancient one in Euro-Mediterranean mythology, explored at length in Frazer’s Golden Bough.
Ostara was Eos/Aurora, Ushas in the Vedas, Zora in Old Slavonic, the Indo-European goddess of the dawn, worshipped still as Aušrinė in Lithuanian folk religion. Her name is cognate with “east”, the direction of the rising sun, as found in the names of the Ostrogoths and of Austria, as well as with aurum, the Latin word for “gold”. In fact her origins are certainly pre-Indo-European. She is “consistently identified with dawn, revealing herself with the daily coming of light to the world, driving away oppressive darkness, chasing away evil demons, rousing all life, setting all things in motion, sending everyone off to do their duties“.[1] She is “the life of all living creatures, the impeller of action and breath, the foe of chaos and confusion, the auspicious arouser of cosmic and moral order called the Ṛta in Hinduism”[2] better known to us as Tao or Dao and quite possibly linked to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Rheda, also attested by Bede and derived from the Indo-European word for “to flow” which gives Latvian rīts (“morning”) and in English, to rise. The rising is followed by the dawn and ushers in the sun in his fiery chariots. Even in Christian mythology, Christ is seen as the way and the light, symbolized by the widespread use of gold in Orthodox church design.
These facts of nature and its inherent, unchangeable characteristics inspire us in this season to celebrate life and new beginnings.