Spring & Equinox Altar

I think I do the Equinox a bit differently from many Neo-Pagans as I don’t incorporate rabbits, hens and eggs. Neo-Pagans now regard these as fertility symbols, and I think that’s a very valid perspective, but their association with Easter had more to do with which food were restricted during Lent – meat was forbidden, as were eggs and dairy (Thomas Aquinas wrote against consuming these), and so of course once the fast was broken on Easter, people wanted to consume them. Lambs are very much an important Christian symbol, with Jesus as the Lamb of God, and I can’t help but think of the rather beautiful Pre-Raphaelite inspired mural that graced a church I used to go to of the adoration of the lamb when I see lambs in a religious context. My rejection of these symbols because of their Christian (and particularly Catholic) associations is not a protestation against Christianity or an act of my disliking Christianity, more that I wish to separate my current faith from my old faith, and I feel awkward doing things that remind me too much of Christianity; I feel like I’m misappropriating, or somehow trying to Paganise things, which may or may not be a valid concern or just a manifestation of my anxiety and over-thinking.Instead of these animal symbols, I prefer floral ones – picking what is in bloom in my garden at the time. I don’t rear chickens, rabbits or sheep, so it seems a bit disconnected for me to celebrate lambing (which is often quite a bit before Easter in the UK, anyway), or their lifecycle in relation to the agricultural year. The birds nesting in my garden are more seasonally appropriate to me than chickens. [Interestingly, chickens need about 12 hours of daylight to signal the summer period for laying eggs – so the Equinox is actually directly relevant to chickens. Some will lay in winter even without an appropriate light source, but egg production goes up with daylight hours. I do, however, grow flowers (and vegetables, herbs, etc.) so I feel more personally connected to flowers.  

You can see on my altar a bunch of hyacinths and daffodils in the centre. I changed my altar set-up from its Imbolc set up to this pre-Equinox set up at the start of March, and it is definitely geared more to a visual celebration of the changing seasons and the greenery and flowers of spring. Daffodils and hyacinths are both poisonous to cats, but this set-up was before Archimedes arrived, and was dismantled before Archimedes left his acclimatisation period in the spare room, with any pollen hoovered up.I have two altar cloths again, layered over each other. The bottom altar cloth is a printed light green one with a leafless tree, an image that makes me think of a tree about to spring into life, rather than a dead tree. The upper altar cloth is actually a vintage table-runner I bought on eBay because it reminded me of my grandmother’s handicrafts. She used to make things very similar to this, and as the item seems entirely handmade, I can picture someone else’s grandmother making this the same way. I wish I had inherited some of my grandmother’s embroidery, but I was a child when she passed, and did not end up with anything like that. I found some daffodil doilies secondhand that I tend to use for tea-parties, but I put one under each of the candle-holders to protect the altar cloth from any wax drips that ran off the candle-holders, because it is an old and fragile embroidery, sold to me as being from the ’50s, and I don’t want to damage it. The embroidered flowers are somewhat stylised, but they remind me of marigolds, which are currently flowering in my garden.

Pink candle, daffodils, wreath, Goddess censer

The left side of the altar is used primarily for the symbols traditionally associated with the Goddess in Wicca once again as with my ::Imbolc altar::, but this isn’t a strict attribution. Incense is used to symbolise the element of Air (and to be burnt as an offering, and to create a ritualistic atmosphere through scent), and many traditions see Air as a masculine element, associated with ‘masculine’ attributes, but I don’t see the point in gendering an element, or even more so of gendering characteristics like logic, clarity of thought, communication, etc. I have an incense holder with a Neo-Pagan style Goddess figure holding up the incense censer, but that does not mean I see the element of air as feminine, either; I just like the figure as a sculpture representing the divine feminine, and it happens to also be a perfectly good censer at the same time – I have another incense burner that is a pentacle (visible in the photographs of the full altar). I think it’s probably a bit cliché to attribute pink to the divine feminine – especially as a girl that hated the colour pink growing up – but I chose it to represent Bloduweudd, who was made of flowers, specifically oak, broom and meadowsweet.. Now, I somehow thought oak flowers were light pink, which I am quite wrong about; they’re a greenish yellow. Broom flowers are yellow, and meadowsweet flowers are white, so I would have probably done better with a pale yellow candle, in retrospect!The daffodil picture is not a Goddess symbol at all, it is actually a card I gave Raven for St. David’s Day – the saint day for the welsh patron saint, who is St. Dewi in Welsh. St. David’s Day is seen more as a national celebration than as a Celtic Saint’s day by many, including Raven. I have mentioned before that he is Welsh-Irish. Daffodils are Wales’ national flower; the national plant symbol is a leek, and daffodils are ‘cennin Pedr’ or Peter’s leeks in Welsh, which is presumably where the connection comes in between the two plants. Anyway, the card was placed on the altar as another mark of the passing seasons, and a nod to Raven’s Welshness. I have a light green candle to represent the Green Man, a vegetative spirit (or even deity to some) that I associate with the changing seasons as visible through plant life. New spring leaves are slowly emerging, light and vibrant, not yet darkened to the richness of summer. I light the pink candle when invoking the divine feminine, and light the green candle when invoking the divine masculine. The central, multicolour candle is represented of the divine as simultaneously transcendent of material existence and immanent within it. I am a pantheist that sees individual deities as spiritual aspects or manifestations of the greater divine that is in all things, and that candle made of all colours seems like a good representation of that. It is a lovely hand-made textured candle, but I can’t remember where I bought it. I think it might be from ‘The Maker’s Mark’ in Newcastle Emlyn, but it could be even older – a souvenir from a lovely witchy shop I found behind a record shop in Henley on Thames over a decade ago. I have kept it safe in my wicker basket store of candles for a long time, but felt like this is the right time to burn some of it. I must admit I’m sort of clingy about candles, and don’t like burning the prettiest ones, especially all in one go  – I want to stretch it out so I can appreciate them for longer! Quite silly when candles are intrinsically transient, made to be burnt. Perhaps I’m a sentimental fool.Ceramic cauldron over tealight.

I have a carved stone dish for salt, to represent the element of Earth. It is interesting that salt is what we use when ‘salting the earth’ is something done to make it infertile. Salt is sometimes used for drawing a circle on the floor, but I think that’s a waste of good salt. I am thinking of replacing the salt-as-Earth-representation with sand, fine gravel or soil. Salt as ritual ingredient is still useful, but I associate it more with sea-salt (I know rock-salt exists) and the ocean, and I want to change things around that I no longer connect with. Neo-Paganism is -in general – quite a flexible path, and while we practice similar things, there is room to alter things in accordance with what works best for us. We’re a non-dogmatic religion, with each Pagan being their own Priest or Priestess. We tend to be closer to orthopraxic (‘right practice’) than orthodoxic (‘right doctrine’) in that we are more connected by ritual practice than theology or cosmology, but even within ritual practice there is plenty of scope for variation.