Alban Elfed (The Light of the Water)
The Autumn Equinox for three days from the sunset around September 23rd, a festival of abundance and of balancing gain and loss.
Tree White poplar and Hazel.
Herbs and incenses Ferns, geranium, myrrh, pines and Solomon’s seal.
Candle colours Blue for autumn rain and green for Earth Mother
Crystals Soft blue crystals, such as blue lace agate, blue beryl and azurite.
Symbols Chooses coppery, yellow or orange leaves, willow boughs. harvest fruits such as apples, nuts, root vegetables, and pottery or china geese. Also use as a focus knots of corn, wheat or barley from the early harvest, and copper or bronze coins to ensure enough money and happy family relationships.
Autumn Equinox rituals are for mending quarrels, for the fruition of long-term goals, for reaping the benefits of earlier input, for love and relationships, especially concerning the family, adult children, brothers and sisters, for friendship and for issues of material security for the months ahead.
Work by the sea at sunset and cast as pebbles into the dying light of the water all regrets, resentments, sorrows, failures and unfinished business from previous months that you do not wish to carry forward into winter. (If you can’t go to the sea, perhaps using a bowl or cauldron to represent the sea, standing in your garden or balcony or by a window at sunset cast the pebbles into your vessel of water. Then dispose of the water and it’s contents off your property)
Take a bowl containing equal numbers of nuts and seeds and work outdoors. Name a success or achievement that has materialised by the Autumn Equinox and eat the nut (use something else if you can’t eat nuts like berries for example, whatever works for you); then name a failure or loss and cast a seed into the ground. Continue until you have eaten and shed the same number and can think of no more; bury the rest beneath a fruit- or nut-bearing tree.
Sweep up autumn leaves into a pile; jump up and down in it as you did when you were a child, expressing joy at the promise of the coming days, and naming opportunities and all you can achieve in the winter. Finally scatter the leaves and let the good and the bad, the gains and the losses, be carries equally on the wind.
Prepare a feast of fruits and vegetables, of bread, cider and barley wine, or fruit cup, and warming soups, and hold an equinox party. Make an offering to the land of barley wine, ale or mead, and bread, as you pass around a communal cup, send individual blessings to people and places where there is dearth.
Donate old clothes and food to homeless shelters. Give away possession you no longer need to friends or thrifts shops.
Contact anyone from whom you are estranged, sending autumn flowers or a plant you have nurtured, or a basket of produce as a peace offering if your reconciliatory gestures are rejected, at least you can move forward knowing you tried. Alternatively, help an organisation concerned with peace.
Source: The Modern-Day Druidess by Cassandra Eason
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