Re-Storying the World: The Sun and Spring Equinox

 

Re-Storying the World: Spring Equinox

The Sun’s Powerful Presence

“Here comes the sun do, do, do

Here comes the sun

And I say it's all right

Here comes the sun

And I say it's all right

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter

Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here.”

Spring Equinox is right around the corner. The sunlight grows everyday and after the March 20^th Equinox (at least here in the north) the days will continue to grow lighter and longer. While our friends in the southern hemisphere will be dropping into Autumn and Winter, we will expand into Spring and Summer.

Spring Equinox begins here in the northern hemisphere when the Sun rises above the Equator on its journey back North. In some ways, it is the birthday of the Sun. Spring Equinox is when the length of our days and nights become equal once again.

The Spring Equinox begins the astrological New Year and we say that the Sun is exalted (its most powerful) in Aries. Because it brings back Nature’s life force. 

 

 

I have a new appreciation of the Sun rising over the horizon/Equator. My older brother recently died from Covid related issues. He was born just at sunrise and if you look at his birth chart, you see the Sun just rising above his ascendant. And this image fits exactly who he was. He’d walk into a room and shine. He was warm, kind, funny and charismatic. He could charm you with a story and leave you laughing from a joke.

This is what the Sun feels like when it’s newly risen, both at sunrise and at Spring Equinox. Everything has the potential for new life. It’s light spreads joy!

Re-Storying the Sun at Spring Equinox

“The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas

A thermo-nuclear explosion.”

 

 

I can still sing that little ditty from 45 years ago when my daughter came home from kindergarten with that scientific fact! And yet it is so much more.

The Sun gives us light and warmth – the source of Life itself. Without it, Mother Earth wouldn’t have been able to create this beautiful garden planet.

You can read about the Sun, it’s history and composition at Space.com

The Sun is Earth’s star. Even at a distance of 150 million kilometers (93 million miles), its gravitational pull holds all the planets in our solar system in orbit. It radiates light and heat, or solar energy, making life possible on Earth.

Plants need sunlight to grow. Animals, including humans, need plants for food and the oxygen they produce. Without heat from the sun, Earth would freeze. There would be no winds, ocean currents, or clouds to transport water.

The Spring Sun coaxes life out of the ‘dead’ winter ground. As its light warms Mother Earth, trees and plants awaken and grow. It is the most dramatic instance of the power of the Sun to change our lives.

Every Spring we can see how the Sun is the source of Life developing here on Earth.

The Spring Equinox 2021 Chart

Spring Equinox occurs on March 20, 2021 at 1:40 am Alaska time/ 2:40 am PDT/ 7:40 EDT/ 11:40 am GMT.

 

Spring Equinox Chart 2021

This is a time of Balance, when the Light and the Dark hold equal sway.  It's a great time to re-balance yourself as well. 

This year, as the Sun enters Aries, the Moon is in Gemini, the sign of the Twins. This year, with the Moon in the sign of the Mind, it will get help from Mars in Gemini.  Mars will energize our search for information and new ways to communicate. This in turn will energize the new Aries fire with ideas and possibilities that the Aquarian planets are sending its way. It is an especially open Moon since it’s close to the North Node in Gemini. So our assignment for the New Year is to continue to search for knowledge that will help us prosper and grow, individually and collectively.

Symbolic Meaning of the Sun

 

In the Tarot, the Sun card is a big YES to life. Under this Sun card, everything becomes joyful and simple, a feeling state we lived in as children. We become children of the Sun, full of joy and Light. It’s as if we see Life again as pure and whole, blissful and full of wonder and delight.

 

 

The Sun, as it travels across the sky everyday, sees everything, and so it symbolizes knowledge and consciousness. The Sun sparks enlightenment, which is an experience that happens to us, that we awaken to. We suddenly know that life is full of Spirit and grace and that we are meant to feel fulfillment.

Psychologically, the Sun symbolizes the masculine left brain consciousness of rational thought. It symbolizes our modern ego consciousness, which is so dependent on the rational side of life. The left hemisphere is predominantly involved with analytical, logical thinking, whose method of operation is primarily linear and sequential. We associate clarity, light, day, time, action, will, focus and the masculine with solar consciousness.

It’s interesting that the god Apollo became the Sun god after Helios and his father Hyperion, the Titan Sun god. The two older gods symbolized the power of the Sun to bring light and warmth and life to the world.

 

Helios

Apollo was different from these earlier Sun gods because he was also the god of music, of healing/disease and of prophecy. As the god of Light, he brought light to many dark or unconscious aspects of life. When he killed the Python at the oracle of Delphi, he took over the guardianship of the role of prophecy in Greek life.

You can see that the ancient Greeks, just like our modern society, wanted to do away with the dark mysteries of the Feminine, of the Unconscious, of intuitive prophetic wisdom. They wanted to control the Feminine energies rather than listen to them and work with them for greater clarity.

Sometimes the Sun brings death and plague, especially at the height of summer, when its heat overwhelms us. It happens too when we use our rational thinking to negate what our heart is telling us. It take the sword of reason and cuts out our heart.

 But if we balance the light of consciousness with the mysteries of the unconscious, we discover the Wisdom of life.

Spring Equinox: The Return of Persephone

 

 Persephone Awakening

On of the myths associated with the Spring Equinox is the return of Persephone from the Underworld.

In ancient Greece, Demeter was a Mother Goddess, specifically the goddess of the harvest, grains and the fertility of the earth. She had a daughter whose name was Kore – which meant The Maiden. One day as Kore was out in the fields, gathering flowers with her friends, the god Hades, Lord of the Underworld, came up through the Earth and ravished her away. You see, he had her father Zeus’ permission to take her without her Mother’s knowledge.

Demeter was devastated by her loss. Nobody except for the goddess Hecate saw Kore taken, and when Demeter found out that Zeus had allowed Hades to abduct her daughter, she was furious. In her mourning, everything stopped growing. No births occurred. The land became a wasteland. And so the gods agreed that Kore must be returned to her mother.

But while she was in the Underworld, Kore ate the seeds of a pomegranate and discovered her name – Persephone. And since she had eaten those seeds, she had to return there part of the year.

So in the Spring, Persephone returned to her mother and all of Nature blossomed again. The Spring Maiden had returned. But in the Autumn, Persephone returned to her husband and once again became Queen of the Underworld, helping her husband welcome and gather in the dead.

 

This myth of the Mother and Daughter who bring Life to Nature describes not only the seasonal changes but also became the central focus of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a 2000 year old secret mystery cult which promised its initiates a passage to a blessed afterlife.

 It's also a psychological story about the development of the feminine. Mothers and daughters share a history, a biology and connection that is really a blossoming of a new form of being out of the old.  A new birth.  When Persephone comes back from the underworld, she is New. She has her own name. She cannot just be a replica of her mother.  She is the next incarnation of her mother -- old and new all at once.  As we all emerge out of the underworld of 2020, we are also called to be the next stage, the next incarnation of ourselves.  The same but different.  Changed by our underworld journey.

This mythic story of the soul’s eternal life is also important to us now, just as it was in ancient Greece. As we face so much death in our world with COVID and environmental deterioration, it helps us to understand that our souls are eternal, that this lifetime is not our only chance to live in the human state. That when we die, we will be reborn.

Just as the Sun is reborn every morning. Just as the Sun is birthed every Spring Equinox!

Once we truly know that death holds no fear for us, we become free to live our soul’s purpose. Which is to live a meaningful life here on Earth.

And so we can rejoice at Spring Equinox, knowing that Persephone is returning to bring life back to us after the darkness of Winter.

May we all rediscover and embrace the joy of Life this Spring.