Wheel
of the Year: Spring Equinox
Emergence
Persephone Awakening
Turning
The Wheel of the Year
We’ve
come through the dark of the year and now emerge into the light as we
celebrate Spring Equinox in the northern hemisphere. Turning the
Wheel of the Year again, we arrive to a moment of stillness
&
silence,
when a balance is stuck between dark and light, before moving forward
into the growing light of Spring and Summer as the Sun rises over the
equator to continue its journey north for the year.
There
are rhythms to life and nature that are more real and enduring than
our modern insistence on continual progress. Ancient cultures knew
this and created ceremonies to help people align with these changing
energies. As we attune to Mother Earth’s rhythms, we learn to go
with Her ebb and flow throughout the cycle. There’s
a time for every purpose under heaven, as
the Psalmist says.
To
live in Mother Earth’s cyclical time, we must step out of our
habitual linear patriarchal time. Cyclical time gives us meaning and
depth. Linear time leaves us racing to some unknown end that we fear
is ‘the
end’.
The truth is there is no
end in cyclical time because the end becomes the beginning.
That’s why we
began the year’s journey around the Wheel of the Year at the death
aspect of the last cycle.
At
each gateway of the Wheel of the Year, we work with the different
archetypal energies of life-death-rebirth. We’ve been working with
the archetypal energies of the divine feminine aspects of this Wheel,
although there are also divine masculine energies that operate
throughout the year. This year we’re working on our feminine
‘being’ nature, our instinctual knowing and wisdom. In
freeing our feminine nature from rigid patriarchal definitions and
rules, both women and men can connect to our soul’s purpose and
step away from the need to constantly achieve the ‘success’ that
patriarchy demands.
So
let’s look at where we’ve come from so we can see where we are
now.
At
Samhain, we journeyed to the ancient Crone goddess Hecate to stand at
the crossroads and decide if we were willing to walk into the
Unknown. What new road did we choose? What part of our lives were
we willing to leave behind?
At
Winter Solstice, we gave birth, along with the Great Mother, to the
divine light of Life that is born in the darkness of Winter and of
the Unconscious. During that season, we lived with the hope and joy
that something new had been born.
At
Imbolc, we searched for a vision of the new life growing in us since
Winter Solstice. The Celtic goddess Brighid attuned us to our
creative imagination. We were asked, how will we work with this new
Light within us? What do we want to create this year? We clarify
this new vision by engaging the imagination and intuition to see
where this Light wants to go and what it has to tell us.
Now,
at Spring Equinox, we begin to emerge from the mysterious dark to
embody our vision. What has been growing within us is now ready to
emerge into the world. Who we are – our character – determines
our actions and our fate. “As
above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the
soul…” Hermes Trismegistus
Spring
Equinox is a time for new life and resurrection—that’s why the
Christian Easter (named after the ancient goddess Ostara) and Jewish
Passover are celebrated at this time of year. The days grow longer,
animals are more active, migrant birds return to make their nests and
birth their young ones and wildflowers awaken from their winter
sleep. Spring is a time of rebirth, growth and change, when we feel
we’ve emerged from the dark and cold of Winter into new life. It’s
a time to assert ourselves and take things to the next step in their
creation. In Spring, the fire of Life grows strong again.
The
feminine energies of Spring Equinox are manifested in a few goddesses
– Ostara, goddess of fertility, Artemis the Huntress and
Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld and Spring Maiden. When
Persephone returns from the Underworld in the Spring, she has
changed, just as we have changed from who we were when we embarked on
our initiation at Samhain. Persephone is now a Queen, a woman of
power who creates her own life because she knows her inner depths.
When we embrace Persephone’s energy and make it our own, we can
embody this new life we’ve birthed. Persephone knows what’s
inside her – she has come through the dark Underworld of Death and
faced herself. Now, like the Tarot card Strength,
she can use her will, courage and determination to bring her
creative vision to life.
Spring
Equinox: Emergence
Spring
is the season to rise up and blossom, not just in our personal lives
but also in our collective life this year. Many Americans feel
betrayed by what the President and his party are doing to our
democracy. After the election, we were shocked into a dark,
hopeless place, just as surely as Kore/Persephone was abducted by
Hades into the Underworld. Like Persephone’s mother Demeter, we
felt betrayed and overwhelmed by loss, fear and rage; over the Winter
months (since Samhain) we’ve had time to mourn, so now it’s time
to rise up with new creative ideas that will make our life fruitful
and our democracy stronger in the long run. Like the goddess
Persephone, we have lost our innocence but gained our power. It
seems we are going through a collective initiation,
a spiritual testing that will require all our courage, determination
and vision. We have to consciously
evolve
now.
The
Greek Goddess Persephone embodies the fiery, creative energy of
Spring, bringing with her the fertility and wealth of the Underworld.
Persephone’s underworld journey through death and rebirth unites
different worlds – the upper and lower, the inner and outer – in
a balance that gives us a unique perspective on life. The
comfortably
numb life
we’ve been living is gone. It’s been raped away.
Persephone
embodies the archetypal truth that we have to undergo a descent into
the unknowns of our inner life through a betrayal or ‘death’ that
initiates us into greater consciousness; then we return to the outer
world with our own personal power to live a purposeful life. She
embodies our ability to stay connected to the inner world so that its
great riches can fertilize our outer world. She is the flower Maiden
and powerful Queen as well as the medial woman who can see the
unseen. As Queen of the Dead she helps us release what is no longer
viable and as Spring Maiden, she brings us back to Life.
Women of Eleusis ~ Jean Deville
Her
mysteries where celebrated for over 2,000 years before Christ in the
Eleusinian
Mysteries,
where her devotees’ initiation assured them of eternal life. The
myth of Persephone and her mother Demeter was an important part of
this initiation into a greater life. While the myth of Demeter and
Persephone can be seen as the story of seasonal changes, there’s
more here than meets the eye.
Before
she was Persephone, Queen of the Dead, this young woman was called
Kore, the Maiden. Her mother Demeter was the goddess of agriculture
and the harvest, of growing grains and the fertility of Nature.
Demeter was the sister of Zeus, the king of Heaven, Poseidon, the
lord of the Oceans and Hades, the king of the Underworld. Hades
asked Zeus for a bride and Zeus promised him his daughter by Demeter,
Kore. Maybe the Aryan invaders had a habit of stealing their brides
because the story is that Hades came up out of the Underworld in his
chariot and ravished the young Maiden away. These gods didn’t
believe in asking, but then again, life’s hardships also
come
upon us unexpectedly and we are forced to deal with a loss, an
illness, a change.
The Rape of Proserpina 1 Bernini 1622
The
story goes that nobody knew what happened to Kore except for Hecate,
the Crone, who helped Demeter discover where her daughter was. This
is the same Hecate who stood with us at her Crossroads at Samhain and
asked us to walk a new path. Demeter then mourned her daughter by
taking away the fertility of the land, of animals and of people. She
was definitely pissed off. As the old ad from the 60s said “It’s
not good
to fool Mother Nature!”
In the end, the gods weren’t getting the worship they felt they
deserved and they made Zeus tell Hades to give her back. And he
did. But only after she had eaten some pomegranate seeds in the
Underworld, so she had to return there for the part of the year we
call Winter.
There
are deep archetypal and psychological truths in these ancient stories
we call myths.
What they reveal about humanity’s growth in consciousness is
becoming clearer, as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Karl Kerenyi and
others have explained. So let’s look at some of the symbolism in
this story and see what it has to tell us about the initiation into
greater consciousness we are going through as a species.
This
story of death and rebirth speaks to the truth that life is cyclical
and that death is not
the end
but rather a transition into another state of being. The myth says
the Kore was out in the fields, dancing and playing with other young
women. There is an innocence about Kore, an innocence that doesn’t
understand the part of life that entails pain and suffering. And so,
while Hades is not an evil presence, he is most certainly an unknown
presence or energy. When we’re young and innocent, we have no
conception of pain, suffering and death. We are still bonded with
the Mother who keeps us safe and secure.
The
old story says that Kore was looking at a narcissus
flower.
Our immediate association might be that it symbolized Narcissus, the
youth who fell in love with his own image—that’s where we get the
term narcissist from (we all know a modern example of this
personality disorder!). The ancient narcissus flower was a type of
lily or iris, both flowers associated with death. The modern
narcissus, which is the daffodil, symbolizes rebirth and new
beginnings, as we all experience in the Spring when daffodils are one
of the first bulbs to bloom.
It
seems young Kore was ready to
die so
she could have a larger life. It was time to break away from Mom.
Just as it is time for all of us to leave humanity’s childhood
behind us and grow into mature, responsible stewards of the Earth.
This is the initiation Persephone went through. We need to go
through it as well.
The
story says Hades ravished Kore away. The word ravish comes from the
Vulgar Latin *rapire, from Latin rapere "to seize and carry off,
carry away suddenly, hurry away". So Hades, or Death, seizes
her and poof, she’s gone.
Demeter & Persephone
Now
it’s Demeter who feels betrayed when she finds out what has
happened to her daughter. She is the part of us who is devastated by
what is going on in the world now. Our hopeful, innocent belief that
we
are the change we’ve been waiting for
didn’t take into account the need for a collective
initiation
before that change can manifest in the world. Demeter is also the
part of us who mourns as our personal life goes through crisis.
So
here we are, along with Demeter, mourning our lost hopes and future.
But once again, all is not lost because in the Goddess’ cyclical
time, while all
things must pass,
as George Harrison so sweetly sang to us, rebirth is just around the
corner.
So
while Demeter raged
against the machine
of her own time and held back life and warmth and love from humanity
and the gods, things were going on below the surface. Hades, The
Unseen One,
is a mysterious god: while there’s a sense of danger and darkness
about him, he was also the god of the riches of the Underworld – or
the Unconscious. Hades took to himself the bright promise of Life
and wed it to Death. It seems we have to accept that, just as don
Juan told Carlos Castaneda to take death
as your advisor.
In
the Underworld, Hades offered Kore a pomegranate and she ate some of
its seeds. Once she did, she became Persephone, Queen of the Dead.
So what was it about those seeds that gave Kore her name and her
identity?
Hades offers Persephone the Seeds
Pomegranates
are basically a nursery for seeds, don’t you think? In ancient
times they symbolized both immortality and fertility. Pomegranates
are very juicy. Persephone eats the seeds – and she learns to look
at the ‘seeds’, the beginnings, of things: complexes, habits,
issues. When we know where things began, we can break habits and
change things.
There
was something waiting for Persephone in the Underworld that not only
woke her up to her identity by giving her the wisdom of the seeds,
but also gave her the fertility that used to belong to her mother. So
if this myth holds true, which these archetypal patterns do, then
what seeds have you eaten from your Unconscious this Winter? Can you
see the patterns of your life?
If
we are following this mythic journey, then we have to integrate the
wisdom of the Underworld—that we
are spiritual beings having a human experience, rather
than just good little worker bees whose only purpose is to work, make
money to pay taxes and then die. When we look at life from this
deeper, spiritual perspective, we intuitively know ‘all will be
well’ even when we still have lots of work to do. That’s what we
have to remember to get us through the dark times: this life is an
initiation into greater consciousness and we chose to incarnate at
this time to help evolve humanity out of ‘us vs. them’ and into a
‘we at all one’ attitude. ‘What
you do to the least of my brethren, you do to me’.
When
Persephone emerges from the Underworld in the Spring, she comes back
as a Queen, a woman of power and purpose. She comes back in men too,
as their Anima. So with the return of the Light at Spring Equinox,
we can let our own Persephone emerge and arise to bring back Life to
a dark world. We bring with us a connection to the inner world, the
inborn Wisdom of Life that is our heritage, so we can see the unseen
and intuitively know what needs to be done.
Now
more than ever, we have to remember who we are—not helpless victims
of patriarchy, but luminous beings of Light and Life. Let
Persephone’s power of renewal fill you with her own strength and
purpose. That purpose is LIFE.
1.
Principle of Mentalism: “All is Mind”
2.
Principle of Correspondence: “As is above, so is below. As is
below, so is above.”
3.
Principle of Vibration: “Nothing rests; everything moves;
everything vibrates.”
4.
Principle of Polarity: “Everything is dual; everything has an
opposite, and opposites are identical in nature but different in
degree.”
5.
Principle of Rhythm: “Everything flows, out and in; the
pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to
the right is the measure of the swing to the left- rhythm
compensates.”
6.
Principle of Cause and Effect: “Every cause has its effect; every
effect has its cause.”
7.
Principle of Gender: “Everything has its masculine and feminine
principles.”
Cathy Pagano
