The Spring Equinox: The Festival of Astarte

On the equinox the Sun rises due east and sets due west for every observer on earth, and the day and the night are of equal length everywhere. The Greeks called it ἰσημερία, the equal day; the Romans aequinoctium, the equal night. It's the only day of the year on which the whole planet shares the same sunrise point, and the Temple fixes the festival on the 21st of March for all Zevists, north and south, because what the Sun does in the sign of Aries it does for everyone at once.

The Sun enters Aries, the Ram, the first sign of the zodiac and the head of the year. The ancients began the year here: Babylon with the Akitu in Nisan, Rome with March, the month of Mars, before Numa's reform, and Athens' astronomers reckoned the solar year from the vernal point (Geminus 1.9 to 10; Ovid, Fasti 3.135 to 150).

From this day the light prevails over the dark in the northern hemisphere, and the earth answers: the seed germinates, the hare runs mad in the fields, the birds sing before dawn. The Spring Equinox is the sowing, as the Autumn Equinox is the reaping, and what is planted now grows with the force of the whole ascending year.

It belongs to Astarte because Astarte is the Queen of Heaven, and this is the day the Queen comes back. Under the name Inanna she descended into the underworld and hung dead on a hook for 3 days, and when she rose the grass stood up where she set her foot. Under the name Aphrodite Ourania she's the Heavenly One, the Morning Star that rises before the Sun on this morning and leads it over the line.

Under the name Isis she searched for the scattered Osiris and raised him. Under the name Eostre she gave her name to the Anglo-Saxon month of the spring and to the Christian feast that still bears it. She is Aphrodite in her oldest, eastern, celestial aspect: the Goddess of fertility and of renewal, of the bull that mounts and the seed that takes and the mind that conceives.

The Temple also fixes on this day the beginning of its greatest working. The Magnum Opus, the Great Work of the soul's transformation, is traditionally begun at 3 o'clock in the morning on the day the Sun enters Aries, the hour of Zeus. The scales of the year are level; the will of the one who begins is what tips them. A working started at the balance point carries the balance with it.

Day equal to night: the scales hang level, and the hand that tips them tips the year.

Astarte (Ἀστάρτη; Phoenician ʿAshtart; Akkadian Ishtar; Sumerian Inanna) is the Great Goddess of the Levant and Mesopotamia, the Queen of Heaven, whom the Greeks recognised as Aphrodite in her heavenly form. Herodotus, who had seen her temples, says that the sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania at Ascalon in Syria was the oldest of all her temples, and that the Cyprians themselves said their temple came from there, and that the Phoenicians founded the one on Kythera (1.105).

The Greek Aphrodite rose from the sea off Cyprus (Hesiod, Theogony 188 to 206), and Cyprus is where the Phoenician Goddess landed. Her temple at Kition, excavated in the 1970s, stood from the 9th century; her stone at Paphos, a black cone without face or limbs, was still there in Tacitus's day, who confessed that “the reason for this is obscure” (Histories 2.3).

She's the Queen of Heaven in the strict sense: the planet Venus, the brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, Morning Star and Evening Star. The Sumerians sang her as the Lady of the Evening and the Lady of the Morning; the Akkadians piled on her the titles bēlet ilī, Lady of the Gods, and šarrat šamê, Queen of the Sky.

The women of Jerusalem baked cakes for the Queen of Heaven and poured her libations, and when the prophet raged at them they answered that while they had worshipped her they had bread enough and saw no evil (Jeremiah 7.18, 44.15 to 19). The first poet in history whose name survives, Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon, wrote her hymns 4,300 years ago: “Lady of all the divine powers, radiant light, true woman clothed in splendour” (Nin-me-šar-ra 1 to 3).

In Egypt she is Isis, Great of Magic, who knew the secret name of Ra and raised Osiris from his scattered limbs, and Hathor the golden, Lady of music and drunkenness, whose sistrum shook the fear out of the world.

In Rome she is Venus Genetrix, and the proem of Lucretius is her spring hymn: through her every kind of living thing is conceived and rises to see the Sun; the birds sing of her first, struck in the heart by her force; the herds leap across the pastures and swim the rivers; the whole earth, pierced by her sweetness, follows wherever she leads (De rerum natura 1.1 to 20). In the North she is Freyja, who taught the Gods the magic of seeing.

Her symbols are the dove, the egg, the myrtle, the rose, the apple, the lion she rides and the 8-pointed star she wears, and the hare that runs for her in the March fields.

The Temple honours her on this day under her Greek name and under all of them. The Aphrodite [Astarte, Venus, Isis] Power Ritual of the Temple invokes her as Kyprogeneia, Belet Ili, Weret Hekau, Sharrat Shame, Ourania, Philommeideia, Pandemos, Queen of Heaven and Earth, and restores her from the slander that made her name a plural curse. A Zevist of any nation may call her by the name his ancestors used; the essence is one.

Before Greece sang of her, the East had knelt. The Queen of Heaven is the oldest Goddess whose hymns survive to be read.

Babylon: The Akitu, the New Year of Marduk and Ishtar

The Akitu was the New Year festival of Babylon, held in the first 12 days of Nisan, the month of the spring equinox. The ritual tablets survive.

On the 2nd day the high priest rose 2 hours before dawn, washed in the Euphrates, and prayed alone before Marduk; on the 4th day the whole Enuma Elish, the epic of creation, was recited before the God's statue, so that the world was made new by telling again how it was made; on the 5th the temple was purified with a sheep's carcass that was then thrown in the river, and the king was brought before Marduk, stripped of his insignia, struck on the cheek by the priest, and made to declare on his knees that he hadn't sinned against the city; if his tears flowed, the omen was good.

On the 8th the Gods of all the cities, carried in from Borsippa, Kish and Cutha, assembled to determine the destinies, and the great procession went out along the Processional Way through the Ishtar Gate to the Bit Akitu outside the walls; on the 11th the destinies were fixed; on the 12th the Gods went home (Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens, 1921, 127 to 154; Linssen, The Cults of Uruk and Babylon, 2004, 71 to 86). The Ishtar Gate, through which the procession passed, is in Berlin; its lions are hers.

The Levant: Astarte and the Adonia

At Byblos the great temple of Aphrodite of Byblos, that is Astarte, kept the Adonia every year.

Lucian, a Syrian himself, describes them: the people mourn Adonis as dead, beat their breasts, and lament; the river Adonis runs red from the mountain to the sea, which they say is his blood; then on the next day they declare that he lives and send him into the air, shave their heads as the Egyptians do for Apis, and the women who refuse to shave must stand for a day in the market for the strangers (De Dea Syria 6 to 8).

At Athens the women kept the Adonia on the rooftops with the gardens of Adonis, pots of lettuce and fennel forced in 8 days and left to wither, a quick green that is the sign of the God who comes quickly and goes (Plato, Phaedrus 276b; Theocritus, Idyll 15; Plutarch, Alcibiades 18.3). The dead consort and the living Goddess are the pattern of every spring.

Paphos kept a Mystery of Aphrodite. Clement of Alexandria, hostile but informed, says that initiates into the Cyprian rite brought a coin to the Goddess “as a lover to a courtesan” and received in return a lump of salt and a phallus: the salt for the sea she rose from, the phallus for the generation she rules (Protrepticus 2.14).

The priest-kings of Paphos, the Kinyradai, held the office by descent from Kinyras, and the altar was never wet with rain though it stood in the open (Tacitus, Histories 2.3; Pliny, Natural History 2.210). The Temple notes the Mystery and keeps its outline.

Egypt: Isis, the Navigium and the Festival of Drunkenness

The Egyptian spring opened the sea. On the 5th of March the Navigium Isidis, the Ship of Isis, was launched: Apuleius describes the procession at Cenchreae, women in white scattering flowers, men with mirrors, the priests with the sistrum and the lamp and the golden vessel, Anubis masked with the jackal's head, the cow of Hathor, the chest of the Mysteries, and the ship painted with hieroglyphs and loaded with offerings pushed out to sea for the Goddess who had opened navigation (Metamorphoses 11.8 to 17).

The Festival of Drunkenness for Hathor, kept in the month of Thoth but in the same spirit, is attested at Karnak in the Mut temple and in Herodotus's account of Bubastis, where 700,000 came by boat with flutes and clappers and more wine was drunk than in the whole rest of the year (2.60). The Egyptians knew that joy is a condition of fertility.

Rome: The Hilaria

The Roman festival of the Mother of the Gods ran from the 15th to the 27th of March: the reed-bearers, the pine tree carried into the temple on the 22nd (arbor intrat), the day of blood on the 24th when the Galli gashed themselves, and on the 25th the Hilaria, the day of joy, when the dead Attis was alive again. Macrobius explains the date: the Hilaria fall on the 8th day before the Kalends of April, “the day on which the Sun first makes the day longer than the night” (Saturnalia 1.21.10).

Julian the Emperor, a philosopher of this rite, wrote that the Hilaria celebrate the Sun's ascent and the soul's (Oration 5, 168c to d). The pine tree carried into the temple and the day of joy after the day of death are the same pattern the Temple keeps.

The North: Eostre, the Egg and the Hare

Bede, writing in 725, records that the Anglo-Saxons called April Eosturmonath, after a Goddess of theirs named Eostre, for whom feasts were kept in that month, and that the Christians kept the name for their own paschal season (De temporum ratione 15). Her name is the name of the Dawn: Greek Eos, Vedic Ushas, Latin Aurora, the same Indo-European Goddess in every tongue.

The egg is older than Christianity by millennia: Hyginus tells that an egg of wondrous size fell from heaven into the Euphrates, that the fishes rolled it to the bank and the doves hatched it, and that from it came the Syrian Goddess, Astarte (Fabulae 197); the Orphics taught that the world itself hatched from an egg, and that Phanes the firstborn broke out of it shining (Orphic fr. 54 to 60 Kern; Aristophanes, Birds 693 to 697). The hare belongs to the same Goddess, mad in March and fertile beyond every beast of the field.

The Lamb of God was taken from the Ram of the sky, which the Sun enters on this day. Every symbol of the Christian feast was here first, and belonged to the Queen.

The egg fell from heaven into the Euphrates, and the doves hatched it, and from it came the Queen. The symbol is 3,000 years older than the claim laid upon it.

The outer festival is the return of the Queen. The inner festival is the road she took to come back.

The oldest poem of descent in the world is hers. Inanna set her mind toward the Great Below, went down through 7 gates, and at each the gatekeeper stripped her of 1 of her powers, the crown, the rod, the necklace, the breastplate, the ring, the measuring line, the robe, until she entered naked and bowed before her sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Dead, who turned on her the eye of death. Her corpse hung on a hook for 3 days and 3 nights.

Then the water of life and the food of life were sprinkled on her, and she rose, and climbed, and took back her 7 powers gate by gate (Inanna's Descent, ETCSL 1.4.1). The Akkadian version adds that while Ishtar was below, the bull didn't mount the cow and the man didn't go in to the woman, and the whole earth stood barren (Ishtar's Descent 76 to 80). The world is the body of the Goddess, and it dies when she dies.

The Zevist reads the 7 gates inward. Whoever would rise with the Goddess must first go down with her, and leave at every gate a thing he took for himself. The 7 gates are within, and the gatekeeper is the self. The Mystery of the equinox is the Mystery of the second climb: naked the soul stands before the Queen of the Dead and lives, and clothed again in its 7 powers it climbs, and the grass stands up behind it.

That is why the Great Work begins on this day. The Magnum Opus is a descent before it's an ascent, and the equinox, which is the Sun's own crossing of the line from below to above, is the hour when the crossing is easiest.

The second teaching is the balance. For 1 day the light and the dark are brother and sister. Balance isn't rest; it's the moment before the choice: the arrow on the string, the foot on the threshold, the egg before the crack. The Egyptians weighed the heart against the feather of Ma'at (Book of the Dead 125); on the equinox the sky itself is weighed and found true. The Zevist stands in the balance for 1 day and then chooses the light, and makes the heart as level as the day, so that it'll pass.

The third teaching is the egg. The egg is the world before it opens and the spring before it shows; it's the Orphic egg of Phanes and the egg of the Euphrates; it's the conical stone of Paphos, which is the egg that didn't hatch because it's the whole. Every egg dyed and hidden and found by a child on this day is the Goddess hidden in the Great Below and found by the spring, the whole feast compressed into a game. The Temple keeps the game, and keeps it with the knowledge of what it is.

The names in this table are the same essence under the tongues of different peoples. A Zevist of any nation may address the Queen of Heaven under the name that the ancestors of that nation used, provided the essence of the God is understood as one. The Temple sets the Greek name first because the Greek sources preserve the fullest theology; it doesn't set it as the only name.

The ancients themselves did the same: Herodotus wrote Greek names for Egyptian Gods without hesitation, and the Romans wrote Jupiter over every altar of Zeus they found (Herodotus 2.42 to 2.50; Caesar, Gallic War 6.17; Tacitus, Germania 9, 43).

The equinox is a festival of the hour. Alone, the Zevist decides first which hour: the full night Rite with its height at 3 am for those beginning the Great Work or able to keep the vigil, or the evening Rite with the sunrise greeting for everyone else. Both are correct. The Great Work, for those undertaking it, has its own instructions in the Temple's teachings on meditation, and the equinox Rite is its frame, not its content: the Rite brings the celebrant to 3 am in the right condition, and the work begins.

Prepare the altar in the day: the dyed egg, the seeds, the cakes, the flowers, the balance. Write the paper of the work during the day, not at night, and write it as a decision: 1 work, what it is, when it begins, what it costs. Bathe with salt. Perform the Rite in the order above. The Astarte Ritual takes about 25 minutes; with the Psalm and the weighing, the evening Rite fills 2 hours, and the night Rite fills the night.

The weighing is the private heart of the festival. Hold the balance, or the feather in one hand and the stone in the other, and name aloud what weighs and what lifts, in plain words, with no one listening. Then set the heart level. This is the Egyptian weighing done by the living, before the fact, and it's the reason the equinox keeps rather than burns: a heart made level at the balance point of the year stays level longer than one cleaned by fire in February.

The paper of the work goes in the Black Book, under the sealed Imbolc resolution, to be read at the Autumn Equinox.

At dawn go out and face due east, and greet the Sun as it clears the horizon on the one morning of the year when it rises exactly there. Sow the seeds after sunrise: in the ground if there's ground, in a pot if there isn't, 1 seed at least with the hands, in the name of the Goddess.

Eat the cakes. Hide the eggs for the children, or for the friends, or for oneself, and find them. The day of the equinox is a day of joy by ancient precedent, and the Zevist alone keeps the Hilaria by taking the day for pleasure, for the body, for the outdoors and the first warmth.

The gathering for the Spring Equinox is a day festival with a night Rite before it, as Babylon kept the Akitu in the open and the Mother's feast ended in the public Hilaria. The Rite of the night belongs to the assembly; the day belongs to the whole community and its children and guests. The ancient model of the day is the Navigium Isidis: a procession in white, flowers scattered, music, the sacred objects carried, and something launched into the world.

The Offices of the Day

The Order of the Gathering

1. The Public Call, by the Herald, at the threshold, after sunset on the 20th.
2. The Rite of the Night, in the order above, led by the Presiding Priestess. The Weighing is done by each celebrant in silence with a feather and a stone handed to each; the words are spoken by the Priestess for all. At 3 am the Herald calls the hour of Zeus, and those beginning the Great Work withdraw to begin it; the rest keep the vigil with the Psalm, the cakes and quiet talk.
3. The Dawn Procession. Before first light the assembly goes out, in white, led by the Bearer of the Star with the white lamp, and walks to a place with an open eastern horizon. Flowers are scattered. The Chorus sings Movement I of the Psalm as the march.
4. The Sunrise. The Presiding Priestess speaks the Sunrise Salutation as the Sun's rim appears, the assembly repeating it. The lamp of the Morning Star is put out when the Sun is fully risen: the Star has done its work.
5. The Sowing. The Sowers lead the assembly to the field or garden and the seeds are sown by every hand. Each celebrant receives seed to take home.
6. The Blessing of Couples and of Beginnings. Those who have married since the last equinox, those who have begun a work, a house, a child, come forward and are blessed by the Priestess in the name of the Goddess of generation. The sacred marriage of the ancient New Year isn't performed in the hall; its outer form is this blessing.
7. The Finding of the Eggs. The Keeper of the Eggs has hidden them; the children find them. The red egg and the gold egg found first are brought to the altar.
8. The Feast of the Queen of Heaven. The cakes with the 8-pointed star, eggs, spring greens, lamb for those who eat meat, honey, wine. The Hilaria: music, dance, games of balance (the egg stood on its end, the beam walked), laughter required.
9. The Launching. Where there's water, a small boat with flowers and a candle is set on it and pushed out, as the Ship of Isis was launched: the year's navigation is open.

The inner rite of the gates, where it is held, is held apart from the hall by those who hold it, in the hours before the Rite of the night, and the assembly isn't told its hour.

A procession in white at dawn, a lamp put out when the Sun is up, a seed in every hand: that is the equinox kept in common.

The Psalm is sung in 2 halves at the 2 points marked in the Rite: Movements I to III after the Ritual of the Goddess, Movements IV to VI after the Weighing. Each passage stands in 3 columns, Ancient Greek, transliteration and English. 72 passages to the Queen of Heaven.

The full Psalm stands on its own page: Psalm III: The Psalm of the Spring Equinox. The first 24 of its 72 passages are shown here; the drawdown below unfolds the remaining 48.

1. Herodotus 1.105, 2.60; Hesiod, Theogony 188 to 206; Homer, Iliad 5.370 to 371; Pausanias 1.14.7; Tacitus, Histories 2.3; Pliny, Natural History 2.210; Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 2.14; Geminus 1.9 to 10.
2. Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld (ETCSL 1.4.1); Ishtar's Descent (Foster, Before the Muses, 3rd ed., 2005, 498 to 505); Enheduanna, Nin-me-šar-ra (Hallo and van Dijk, The Exaltation of Inanna, 1968); the Iddin-Dagan hymn A (ETCSL 2.5.3.1); Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (1969).
3. The Akitu ritual tablets: Thureau-Dangin, Rituels accadiens (1921) 127 to 154; M. Linssen, The Cults of Uruk and Babylon (2004) 71 to 86; J. Bidmead, The Akītu Festival (2002).
4. Jeremiah 7.18, 44.15 to 19; Judges 2.13; 1 Samuel 7.3 to 4, 31.10; the Eshmunazar inscription (KAI 14); the Ugaritic Baal Cycle KTU 1.3; V. Karageorghis, Kition: Mycenaean and Phoenician Discoveries in Cyprus (1976).
5. Lucian, De Dea Syria 6 to 8, 45 to 47; Theocritus, Idyll 15; Plato, Phaedrus 276b; Plutarch, Alcibiades 18.3; Theophrastus, Historia plantarum 6.7.3; M. Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis (1977).
6. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.8 to 17, 11.23; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 14 to 19; Diodorus Siculus 1.14, 1.27; the Isis aretalogy of Kyme (IG XII Suppl. 14); Papyrus Turin 1993.
7. Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.21.10; Julian, Oration 5, 168c to d; Sallustius, De diis et mundo 4; the Calendar of Philocalus for 15 to 27 March; Lucretius, De rerum natura 1.1 to 20; Ovid, Fasti 3.135 to 150.
8. Bede, De temporum ratione 15; Hyginus, Fabulae 197; Orphic fr. 54 to 60 Kern; Aristophanes, Birds 693 to 697; Mallory and Adams, The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European (2006) 409, 432.
9. The Book of the Dead, spell 125; Hesiod, Theogony 120 to 122; Parmenides B 13; Empedocles B 17, B 26, B 35; Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos 1.10, 1.17.
10. W. Burkert, Greek Religion (1985) 152 to 156; Ancient Mystery Cults (1987); S. Budin, The Origin of Aphrodite (2003); M. West, The East Face of Helicon (1997) 56 to 59; the Temple's pages on the Zevist Calendar, the Summer Solstice (the Magnum Opus at 3 am) and the Aphrodite [Astarte] Power Ritual.