A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

Spring Equinox, 21st March
The Sabbats
The Sabbats and Rites for Birth, Marriage and Death

“The Sun,” as Robert Graves puts it, “arms himself at the Spring Equinox.” Light and dark are in balance, but the light is mastering the darkness. It is basically a solar festival, and a newcomer to the Old Religion in Celtic and Teutonic Europe. Although Teutonic influence — Margaret Murray’s “solstitial invaders” — added Yule and Midsummer to the four Great Sabbats of the pastoral Celts, the new synthesis still embraced only six Festivals. “The Equinoxes,” says Murray, “were never observed in Britain” (except, as we now know, by the pre-Celtic Megalithic peoples).

Yet the Equinoxes are now unquestionably with us; modern pagans, almost universally, celebrate the eight Festivals, and no one suggests that the two Equinoxes are an innovation thought up by Gerald Gardner or by Druid Revival romantics. They are a genuine part of pagan tradition as it exists today, even if their seeds blew in from the Mediterranean and germinated in the soil of the underground centuries, along with many other fruitful elements. (Wiccan purists who reject anything that stems from classical Greece or Rome, from Ancient Egypt, from the Hebrew Qabala or from the Tuscan Aradia, had better stop celebrating the Equinoxes, too.) The importing of such concepts is always a complex process. Folk-awareness of the Spring Equinox in the British Isles, for example, must have been mainly imported with the Christian Easter. But Easter brought in its luggage, so to speak, the Mediterranean pagan overtones of the Spring Equinox.

The difficulty which faces witches in deciding just how to celebrate the Spring Equinox Sabbat is not that the ’foreign’ associations are in fact alien to the native ones but that they overlap with them, expressing themes that had long ago become attached to the older native Sabbats. For instance, the sacrificial mating theme in Mediterranean lands has strong links with the Spring Equinox. The grim festival of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, at which the self-castration, death and resurrection of her son/lover Attis was marked by worshippers castrating themselves to become her priests, was from 22nd to 25th March. In Rome these rites took place on the spot where St Peter’s now stands in Vatican City. In fact, in places where Attis-worship was widespread, the local Christians used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ at the same date; and pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was the true prototype and which the imitation. On sheer chronology, there should have been no dispute, because Attis came from Phrygia many centuries before Christ; but the Christians had the unanswerable argument that the Devil cunningly placed counterfeits ahead of the true Coming in order to deceive mankind.

Easter — Jesus’s willing death, descent into Hell and resurrection — can be seen as the Christian version of the sacrificial mating theme, for ’Hell’ in this sense is patriarchal monotheism’s view of the collective unconscious, the dreaded feminine aspect, the Goddess, into whom the sacrificed God is plunged as the necessary prelude to rebirth. Christ’s ’Harrowing of Hell’, as described in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, involved his rescuing of the souls of the just from Adam onwards “who had fallen asleep since the beginning of the world” and his raising of them to Heaven. Stripped of theological dogma, this can have a positive meaning — the reintegration of the buried treasures of the unconscious (’the gift of the Goddess’) with the light of analytical consciousness (’the gift of the God’).

Spring, too, was a particular season in classical and pre-classical times for a form of the sacrificial mating which was also kindlier and more positive than the Attis cult — the Hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. In this, woman identified herself with the Goddess, and man sank himself into the Goddess through her, giving of his masculinity but not destroying it, and emerging from the experience spiritually revitalized. The Great Rite, whether symbolic or actual, is obviously the witches’ hieros gamos; and then, as now, it shocked many people who did not understand it.¹ (For a profound Jungian commentary on the hieros gamos, see M. Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries.)

But in the North, where Spring comes later, these aspects really belonged to Bealtaine instead of to the unobserved Equinox; and it is at Bealtaine, as will be seen, that we have placed our corresponding ’Love Chase’ ritual. It is perhaps significant that Easter (owing to the complex lunar method of dating it) reflects this overlap by falling anywhere from just after the Equinox to just before Bealtaine. Easter, by the way, is named after the Teutonic goddess Eostre, whose name is probably yet another variant of Ishtar, Astarte and Aset (the correct Egyptian name ’Isis’ being the Greek form). Eostre’s spring rites bore a family resemblance to those of the Babylonian Ishtar. Another piece of pagan ’luggage’!

But if in the human-fertility aspect the Spring Equinox must bow to Bealtaine, it can properly retain the vegetation-fertility aspect, even if in the North it marks a different stage of it. Round the Mediterranean, the Equinox is the time of sprouting; in the North, it is the time of sowing. As a solar festival, too, it must share with the Greater Sabbats the eternal theme of fire and light, which has survived strongly in Easter folklore. In many parts of Europe, particularly Germany, Easter bonfires are lit with fire obtained from the priest, on traditional hilltop sites often known locally as ’Easter Mountain”. (Relic of earlier, larger-scale customs — see under Bealtaine) As far as the light shines, it is believed, the land will be fruitful and the homes secure. And, as always, people jump the dying embers, and cattle are driven over them.

The Book of Shadows says that for this festival, “the symbol of the Wheel should be placed on the Altar, flanked with burning candles, or fire in some form.” So, assuming this to be one of the genuine traditional elements which Gardner was given, we can take it that British witches, in absorbing the ’non-native’ Equinoxes into their calendar, used the fire-wheel symbol which also features in many midsummer folk-customs throughout Europe.

A hint that the solar fire-wheel is a genuine equinoctial tradition, and not merely a gap-filling choice of Gardner’s, may be found in the custom of wearing shamrock on St Patrick’s Day — which falls on 17th March. According to the usual explanation, the shamrock became Ireland’s national emblem because St Patrick once used its three-leaved shape to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity. But the Oxford English Dictionary says this tradition is ’late’; and in fact the first printed reference to it was in an eighteenth-century botanical work. And Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary, defining seamróg, says its use as a national emblem in Ireland (and, incidentally, in Hanover, in the home territory of the “solstitial invaders”) is possibly “a survival of the trignetra, a Christianized wheel or sun symbol”, and adds that the four-leaved variety is “believed to bring luck, related to an early apotropaic sign enclosed in a circle (sun or wheel symbol)”.

The St Patrick’s Day shamrock has become standardized as the lesser yellow trefoil (Trifolium dubius or minus), but in Shakespeare’s day ’shamrock’ meant wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella; and Dinneen defines seamróg as “a shamrock, trefoil, clover, a bunch of green grass”. Culpeper’s Complete Herbal says “all the Sorrels are under the dominion of Venus.” So the threefold spring-green leaves in the Irishman’s equinox buttonhole bring us back not only to the Sun God but also, through the modern screen of the Trinity, to the Triple Goddess. (Artemis, the Greek Triple Moon Goddess, fed her hinds on trefoil.)

And as for the lucky four-leaved variety — any Jungian psychologist (and the Lords of the Watchtowers!) will tell you that the quartered circle is an archetypal symbol of wholeness and balance. The solar fire-wheel, the Celtic cross, the four-leaved shamrock, the Magic Circle with its four cardinal candles, the Egyptian hieroglyph niewt meaning ’town’, the Easter hot-cross bun, the Byzantine basilica — all deliver the same immemorial message, much older than Christianity.

The Easter egg, too, is pre-Christian. It is the World Egg, laid by the Goddess and split open by the heat of the Sun God; “and the hatching-out of the world was celebrated each year at the Spring festival of the Sun” (Graves, The White Goddess). Originally it was a snake’s egg; the caduceus of Hermes portrays the coupling snakes, Goddess and God, who produced it. But under the influence of the Orphic mysteries, as Graves points out, “since the cock was the Orphic bird of resurrection, sacred to Apollo’s son Aesculapius the healer, hens’ eggs took the place of snakes’ in the later Druidic mysteries and were coloured scarlet in the Sun’s honour; and became Easter eggs.” (Decorated eggs boiled in an infusion of furze blossom were rolled down hillsides in Ireland on Easter Monday.)

Stewart wrote in What Witches Do: “The Spring Equinox is obviously an occasion for decorating the room with daffodils and other spring blossoms, and also for honouring one of the younger women by appointing her the coven’s Spring Queen and sending her home afterwards with an armful of the flowers.” We have kept to this pleasant little custom.

The Preparation

A wheel symbol stands on the altar; it may be anything that feels suitable — a cut-out disc painted yellow or gold and decorated with spring flowers, a circular mirror, a round brass tray; ours is a 14-inch drumkit cymbal, highly polished and with a daffodil or primrose posy in its central hole.

The High Priest’s robe (if any) and accessories should be symbolic of the Sun; any metal he wears should be gold, gilt, brass or bronze.

The altar and room should be decorated with spring flowers — particularly the yellow ones such as daffodils, primroses, gorse or forsythia. One bouquet should be ready for handing to the Spring Queen, and a chaplet of flowers for her crowning.

The cauldron is placed in the centre of the Circle, with an unlit candle inside it. A taper is ready on the altar for the Maiden to carry fire to the High Priest.

A phallic wand is ready on the altar.

Half as many cords as there are people present are ready on the altar, tied together at their centre-point in a single knot. (If there is an odd number of people, add one before dividing by two; e.g., for nine people take five cords.)

If you like, you can have a bowl of hard-boiled eggs, with painted shells (scarlet all over, or decorated as you wish), on the altar — one for each person plus one for the sidhe or earth-offering. These can be handed out during the feasting.

The Ritual

The Opening Ritual proceeds as usual, but without the Witches’ Rune.

The High Priest stand in the East, and the High Priestess in the West, facing each other across the cauldron. The High Priestess carries the phallic wand in her right hand. The rest of the coven distribute themselves around the perimeter of the Circle.

The High Priestess says:²

“We kindle this fire today

In presence of the Holy Ones,

Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,

Without fear of aught beneath the Sun

But the High Gods.

Thee we invoke, O Light of Life,

Be Thou a bright flame before us,

Be Thou a guiding star above us,

Be Thou a smooth path beneath us;

Kindle Thou within our hearts

A flame of love for our neighbours,

To our foes, to our friends, to our kindred all,

To all men on the broad earth.

O merciful Son of Cerridwen,

From the lowliest thing that liveth

To the Name which is highest of all.”

The High Priestess holds the phallic wand on high and walks slowly deosil round the cauldron to stand in front of the High Priest. She says:

“O Sun, be Thou armed to conquer the Dark!”

The High Priestess presents the phallic wand to the High Priest and then steps to one side.

The High Priest holds up the phallic wand in salute and replaces it on the altar.

The Maiden lights the taper from one of the altar candles and presents it to the High Priest. The Maiden then steps to one side.

The High Priest carries the taper to the cauldron and lights the cauldron candle with it. He gives the taper back to the Maiden, who blows it out and replaces it on the altar, picking up the cords instead.

The Maiden gives the cords to the High Priest.

The High Priestess arranges everybody round the cauldron, man facing woman as far as possible. The High Priest hands out the ends of the cords in accordance with her instructions, retaining one end of the final cord himself and handing the other end of it to the High Priestess. (If there is an odd number of people, with more women than men, he retains two cord-ends himself or, with more men than women, hands two cord-ends to the High Priestess; in either case, he must be linked with two women or she with two men.)

When everyone is holding a cord, they all pull the cords taut, with the central knot above the cauldron. They then start circling deosil in the Wheel Dance, to the Witches’ Rune, building up speed, always keeping the cords taut and the knot over the cauldron.

The Wheel Dance continues till the High Priestess cries “Down!”, and the coven all sit in a circle round the cauldron. The High Priest gathers up the cords (being careful not to let them drop on to the candle-flame) and replaces them on the altar.

The cauldron is then moved to beside the East candle, and the Great Rite is enacted.

After the Great Rite, the High Priest names a woman witch as the Spring Queen and stands her in front of the altar. He crowns her with the chaplet of flowers and gives her the Fivefold Kiss.

The High Priest then calls forward each man in turn to give the Spring Queen the Fivefold Kiss. When the last man has done so, the High Priest presents the Spring Queen with her bouquet.

The cauldron is replaced in the centre of the Circle, and, starting with the Spring Queen, everyone jumps the cauldron, singly or in couples — not forgetting to wish.

The cauldron-jumping over, the party begins.