(Autumnal Equinox occurs around the 21st of March on the Southern Hemisphere. For information on the Southern Wheel of the Year, click the label at end of post.)
Conflict and Confusion
In the Northern Hemispohere, Easter falls in the Spring. In the Southern Hemisphere it falls in the Autumn (Fall).
As with Summer Solstice and Christmas, I put my Autumnal Equinox and Easter decorations and symbols on opposite sides of the room to avoid confusion.
For Easter in 2008 I was given the usual eggs and bunnies of Easter.
But I also bought myself a chocolate bilby. The bilby is a native Australian animal with long ears and a twitchy nose, something like the Easter bunny. I got the bilby because it is an Australian native animal and the other secular Easter symbols are very much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Bilby
Autumnal Equinox is also known as Second Harvest Festival, Feast of Avalon, Cornucopia, Wine Harvest, Harvest Home, Winter Finding (Teutonic).
It comes in the middle of the harvest season and in Britain and many parts of Europe corn dollies and sheaves are part of it. Wheat, a staple Australian grain, is very suitable for making into dollies.
The full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox is called the Harvest Moon. In 2008 the Harvest Moon was on the 22nd of March, Easter Saturday.
Sydney's Royal Easter Show has an agriculture section. Farm animals and fruit and vegetable crops are brought in and displayed and judged.
The fruit and vegetable part of the agriculture section is a secular harvest festival. The crops are displayed in their full ripe glory and seeing them that way we understand, consciously or otherwise, that the harvest season is the season of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth. As well as being a harvest festival it happens at the right time on the Australian calendar, in the Southern Hemisphere's Autumn (Fall). It fits the Southern Wheel, unlike many of the Christian and secular holidays that came from the Northern Hemisphere.
The Equinox fell on Thursday the 20th of March this year. The Equinox is an astronomical event. The word equinox means 'equal night', that is, the day and the night are of equal lengths. This only happens twice a year, the other time being Vernal Equinox (Spring Equinox).
Druids Down Under, run by Julie Mills, held an open circle at Manly Dam on the 22nd. It rained in the morning and only two people came. I was one of them. Julie had scripted the ritual well and ran us through it first. Very helpful to newcomers. I had read a tiny bit about druidry and knew of the existence of the three lots of ancestors, the awen, and the earth, sky and sea parts.
Other than song and the quiet chanting of some of the ritual words, I had not previously come across the use of the human voice as sound (sound as opposed to song or chant) in a Neopagan ritual. I had read about the awen in the Restall Orr text and knew it was sound but had not tried it. It and the humming were powerful and really made me aware of my own body as part of the ritual.
There were gestures that puzzled me at the time but I have since seen them used as part of several Neopagan rituals and now use many of them in my solitary practice.
In the earth, sky and sea part, Julie talked about the native animals in and around Manly dam and I found that really connected me to the physical place of the ritual. At the entrance to the park there were information boards about the local flora and fauna and as I thought, in the ritual, about those animals moving about the shores of the dam eating the native flora, I felt as though I knew the place.
This was my first Druidic circle. I didn't know then and I don't know yet what my path will be. However, I'm not in any hurry and DDU's focus on learning Australian lore very much resonates with me.
Flowering around Autumnal Equinox are golden flowers such as:
Pine-leafed Geebung (Persoonia Pinifolia)
Silver Banksia (Banksia marginata)
Yellow Rush Lilly (Tricoryne simplex)
