The Day of Joy - A Traditional Pagan Spring Equinox Celebration

Cybele and the Seasons, by Hendrick van Balen. Oil on panel, 1618.

The Spring Equinox seems to be a weird subject for modern pagans and polytheists. Wiccans and other neopagans usually celebrate this solar event as one of the "quarter days" or lesser Sabbats, though there is precious little tradition to be found behind it. As Ostara, there are a few tenuous threads connecting the celebration with potentially ancient Northern European traditions centered on the goddess Eostre, who may or may not actually have existed. Even if there was a historical spring/dawn goddess by that name connected to better attested divinities like Eos, the idea that modern Easter symbolism (rabbits, eggs, etc.) specifically derive from her worship is just not true. Nor are the ridiculous memes that seem to still circulate every year claiming that Easter has something to do with the ancient worship of Ishtar. Still, these apocryphal connections feel "right" to some modern pagans, most of whom grew up Christian and, frankly, seem to like the excuse to simply continue celebrating Easter, minus its obvious central theme: the death and resurrection of Christ.

It is truly ironic, then, that the closest parallel to Easter to be found in the surviving records of the ancient pagan world, both in theme and date, is not a spring festival about rabbits and eggs, but rather a feast mourning the death and celebrating the resurrection of a god. This is the Hellenic festival of Hilaria, the "Day of Joy". In Hellenism or Hellenic polytheism, it is a 9-day festival celebrating the coming of spring and the rebirth of Lord Attis after His death, and the mourning of the Great Mother Goddess. You can read a full theological explanation for the meaning of the holiday and the myth of Attis by the Divine Julian here.

I am unable to find many popular sources or pagan blogs discussing this holiday, so I thought I would break down my own celebration of it in this post. This is informed by the few surviving historical sources we have, including writings from Valerius Maximus, Herodian of Antioch, and most importantly, Sallustius and Julian the Philosopher, who discussed its theology. The Day of Joy was celebrated by the Greeks as the feast of the Ascent, which was preceded by a day of mourning known as the Catabasis or Descent. By the Roman Imperial period at least, this took the form of a 9-day period of celebration and fasting culminating in the Day of Joy itself - originally the day after the Vernal Equinox, but later the fixed date of March 25th. As it is easier for most modern pagans to use the Gregorian calendar, I have given those dates below.

Statue of Attis located at His shrine in the Temple complex of the Great Mother in Ostia. CC BY-SA 2.0

The following outlines my personal celebration of the Hilaria adapted for a modern context. Of course, you are encouraged to do your own research and adapt this as you will. Just be sure to share your own ideas and practices in the comments!

Beginning of the Festival: Sunset on March 14th - Sunset on March 23rd

The first day commemorates the birth of Attis and His exposure in the reeds on the banks of the river Sangarius, where He was saved by the Great Goddess. Traditionally, a procession bearing reeds would be held on this day. The template for this day can be extended during the rest of the festival leading up to the day of mourning.

Decoration/altar prep: I use the first day of the festival to remove any previous decorations and make my home relatively bare of seasonal decor. Any decorations that remain should be plain sticks or reeds, with the color white for alter cloths etc. a good choice for symbolizing a period of purification.

Fast: Beginning the evening of the festival's start (evening of March 14th), You should abstain from certain foods until the day of the Hilaria proper. Traditionally, the foods to avoid during these 9 days are: pork, fish, grains, pomegranates, apples, wine, root vegetables, and any other types of food that grow underground. Remember, the feast is a celebration of the resurrection of Attis and His ascension from the cave of the nymph (the Earth or material world) to the embrace of the Great Goddess in the Heavens. For this reason, foods associated with the ground or the underworld are to be avoided.

Offerings: Begin each day and end each night before bed with extra offerings, libations, and hymns to the Mother of the Gods and to Attis. Offering to the Great Goddess should include a mixture of different incenses. The Orphic Hymn to the Mother of the Gods and/or the Ceralian Mother are appropriate here, as is the Divine Julian's hymn, adapted below (Julian closes his hymn with a personal prayer that I have slightly generalized).

Hymn to the Mother of the Gods

From Oration V of Julian the Philosopher (362 C.E.)
Adapted by J. Verdant

O Mother of gods and men, thou that art the assessor of Jove and sharest his throne, 
O source of the intellectual gods, that pursuest thy course with the stainless substance of the intelligible gods; 
That dost receive from them all the common cause of things and dost thyself bestow it on the intellectual gods; 
O life-giving goddess that art the counsel and the providence and the creator of our souls; 
O thou that lovest great Bacchus, and didst save Attis when exposed at birth, and didst lead him back when he had descended into the cave of the nymph; 
O thou that givest all good things to the intellectual gods and fillest with all things this sensible world, and with all the rest givest us all things good! 
Do thou grant to all men happiness, and that highest happiness of all, the knowledge of the gods; 
And grant to the people that they may cleanse themselves of the stain of impiety; 
Grant them a blessed lot;
And for myself, grant me as fruit of my worship of thee that I may have true knowledge in the doctrines about the gods. 
Make me perfect in theurgy and in all that I undertake.
Grant me virtue and good fortune, and that the close of my life may be painless and glorious, in the good hope that it is to you, the gods, that I journey!

Entrance of the Tree: Spring Equinox (date varies)

One of the most unique aspect of indoor decoration is the tradition of the Attis tree, a pine tree which is cut at the height of the equinox. The tree traditionally was set up in the temple, then decked in fleeces of wool and wreaths of flowers. As all temples of the Great Goddess were destroyed and vandalized in antiquity and, to my knowledge, no new ones have yet been set up, you might choose to forgo this step or, if you have a designated sacred space in your home, set up an Attis tree there.

Day of Blood: Sunset on March 23rd - Sunset on March 24th

The 10th day of the festival is the day of mourning for the death of Attis. Priests of Attis would traditionally beat themselves, wail, scourge themselves, etc. on this day, lending it its name. However, since the Mysteries and the Priesthood were destroyed in late Antiquity, we regular folk can continue to simply observe the day of fasting. I typically refrain from all food from sunset to sunset on this day, with the exception of milk, which is permitted as it symbolizes the nourishment of the Great Mother.

Day of Joy: Sunset on March 24th - Sunset on March 25th

The 11th day of the festival is the Hilaria proper, a joyous day of celebrations when the fast is broken. Celebrations include playing pranks, dressing in costume, games, and other assorted revelry.

Diana and Lucifer, the Gods of the Witches

"Satan bless us, every one!"

"Allegory of Summer" by Royer.

The Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has been mostly embraced by the pagan community as campy fun, usually spoken of as 'nothing to get offended by' - people are referring, of course, to the old-school depiction of witchcraft as overtly Satanic. The line quoted above, from the show's Winter Solstice episode that aired last week, demonstrates this nicely; obviously, nobody is supposed to take this stuff seriously.

But, I wonder if the reaction to Sabrina would be different if the producers had made one slight change to the show. What if all the "Hail Satans" were replaced with "Hail Lucifer?" It would be hard for any historically-minded pagan to argue with this in a depiction of a coven which is portrayed as having been around since at least the era of the early modern witch trials. After all, Lucifer (in an aspect somewhat distinct from the Christian idea of the Devil, but see below), was one of the original gods of the modern pagan revival.



The Society of Diana

Throughout history, witchcraft has been depicted as the "dark side" of spirituality. Witches use magic to manipulate the natural order of the universe, making them seem unnatural and contrary to the will of the gods. Despite this, even early on, they were depicted as enlisting certain magic-friendly gods to their aid, gods associated with the night, or with the underworld, or with the liminal spaces, the thresholds between natural states of being. In classical depictions of magic, sorceresses like Circe and Medea called on Diana Trivia (Greek Hekate) in their spells. This aspect of Diana was associated with the crossroads, the passages to the underworld, and other thresholds. Combined with her role as a goddess of the moon and therefore the night, she was a natural fit as an ally to those who wished to bend the cosmos to their will.

"Diana as Personification of the Night", by Mengs.

Diana's association with magic, the night, and with female magicians in particular, combined with the fact that she was the only goddess mentioned by name in the Christian Bible (Artemis of Ephesus usually became "Diana of Ephesus" in early Latin translations), led to a curious medieval legend. Beginning in the late 9th century, Church officials across south-central Europe wrote down stories of a company of spirits who would travel around the countryside at night, singing, dancing, and visiting homes. If the home was in good order and they were given hospitality, the spirits would dispense advice and good fortune. If not, the family would be cursed. The Church became concerned when members of their congregation began reporting that they had joined in this procession, leaving their homes (and, often, their bodies via some kind of astral projection) to follow the spirits and their leader, who was variously described as Frau Holda or the Biblically-attested figures of Herodias or Diana. Naturally, this phenomenon, which came to be known as "The Society of Diana", deeply troubled the various Church fathers who recorded it, as any spiritual activity outside that sanctioned by the Church was deemed demonic in nature.

An association between Diana and witches would emerge again in the late 19th century, when Charles Leland published his highly influential book of supposed Italian folklore Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. Leland portrayed witches as using malevolent magic to exact revenge on the upper classes who oppressed them and their people, turning witches into revolutionary figures if not totally benevolent ones as Margaret Murray would eventually do. Central to Leland's conception of rural Italian witchcraft was the central role of Diana and Herodias (Aradia, portrayed not as an alternate name but as Diana's daughter).

Interestingly, Leland was also the first to flip the tradition of witches worshiping Satan on its head. He did portray the witches' primary god as Lucifer, but seemed to depict Lucifer not completely as the Christian-era devil but rather as the classical figure, a personification of the planet Venus. Throughout history, divinities associated with Venus have included stories of their attempts to attain a throne or higher position only to be cast down by more powerful beings. This is of course in reference to the apparent motion of Venus through its cynodic cycle, where the sun blinds the planet from view before it can ever reach the apex of the sky. The story of Lucifer as a proud angel cast down from heaven for attempting to attain its throne is simply the latest variant on the myths of Inanna and Attar, among others.


The God of the Witches

While sorcerers and seekers who utilized the gods' aid in using magic (good or bad) had been practicing since the dawn of history, the modern idea of the witch had always been one of a sorcerer who used magic for evil. Within a Christian context, this of course meant that the witch was not only a magician (magic itself being condemned by the Bible) but also in league with the Devil.

Photo by Steven Meisel for W Magazine

The concept of a "Devil" emerged early in the development of Christianity. Satan, of course, figured into several Old Testament stories, in Jewish tradition he is seen either as a non-entity (merely a metaphor for the evil inclination) or a sort of prosecuting attorney who tests mankind's devotion on behalf of Yahweh (an employee of sorts to Yahweh, not his enemy). The early Church, influenced in large part by the Book of Revelation and not a little synthesis of Zoroastrian ideas, re-interpreted Satan as a spiritual enemy of Yahweh, a sort of ultimate evil to match his ultimate good, and they re-interpreted several passages of the Old Testament in order to make Satan seem more prominent throughout the Bible. This included making the "great serpent" of Revelation (originally a reference to the Chaos dragon Leviathan, an early Hebrew parallel to the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat) refer instead to the snake who tempts Eve in Genesis. Early critics of Christianity scoffed at these developments, with some like the philosopher Celsus noting how theologically bankrupt it was to imagine the highest god (who he would have equated with the Platonic idea of the One) having an adversary, or having created a universe that included other divine beings in open rebellion against him.

Once the figure of a singular Devil had developed, it was not surprising that people would begin to attribute all evil things to him as they attributed all good things to God, and this included not only witchcraft and other forms of black magic, but any forms of good magic as well. Basically anything that did not fall within Church-sanctioned tradition was ascribed to diabolism.

The witch trials of the early modern period were the result of an early "satanic panic", in which people who practiced unusual folk customs or were simply innocent outsiders were accused of Satanism, and often confessed to various acts of witchcraft and Devil-worship under threat of torture, a form of testimony we now know is worthless. Most of the accused probably just made up stories based on what their culture taught them "Devil-worship" was like.

A common theme that emerged from the trials was that the Devil himself was physically present at witch meetings, and described as a chimera of different animals. Early depictions of the Devil gave him the head of a bull, the wings of a bat, a tail, and bird-like clawed feet (the familiar image of the Devil as goat-like, as in Goya's famous painting, was a later development influenced in part by rustic poetry involving Pan and satyrs, especially during the Romantic movement).

In the 1920s, Margaret Murray argued that rather than being innocent of the accusations against them, the people accused of witchcraft during the trials were actually practicing a non-Christian religion in secret. Murray did not believe people would make up stories to placate their accusers and avoid torture, and she did not believe in the supernatural. Therefore, her only option was that the accused witches were telling the truth, but that the trial officials deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreted their descriptions of pagan religious rites as Devil worship (apparently, Murray also didn't think the accused witches could actually have been earnest Satanists). This prompted Murray to seek naturalistic explanations for any and all fantastical claims made during witch trial testimony. Flying on broomsticks? No, they must have been using brooms to apply hallucinogenic ointments. Cursing crops? A misinterpretation of fertility customs. Cavorting with the Devil? Actually a high priest wearing horns and animals skins. The Devil vanishing in a flash of fire? Human sacrifice of the priest in the manner of James Frazer's dying god motif.

"Witches' Sabbath", by Goya.

Murray invented almost all of modern witchcraft lore in her attempts to think up non-supernatural justifications for the events described witch trial records. Murray came up with 13 as a standard for the number of witches in a coven, based on a single confession, and the concept of witches using flying ointment to arrive at the belief that they could fly to coven meetings originated with her.

Most importantly, Murray invented the idea of the benevolent witch. While there have been many real practitioners of folk and ceremonial magic throughout the ages, none of them would have described themselves as "witches" - witches were always a fantasy, an opponent for these magicians to fight against (and to sell protections against). Murray declared that witches had always been real, and had originally been benevolent. The modern witch was born.

Part of birthing modern religious witchcraft was identifying who the witches had worshiped. Murray of course was relying on depictions of a high priest dressed in a devilish costume, but since she believed this could not have been Satan (or even Lucifer, as Leland claimed), she imagined it must have been a pre-Christian horned god. Looking once again to Frazer for help, she identified this god as Janus, the god he believed had been worshiped with Diana in her sanctuary at Nemi under the name Virbius, but who (by way of a somewhat contested etymology) Frazer thought must have originally been named Dianus. Given Diana Trivia's liminal nature and association with crossroads, it is not surprising that the identification of her masculine counterpart should be given to Janus, the god of thresholds often depicted with two faces looking in different directions.


Goddess and God United

While Margaret Murray spent a lot of effort to elucidate the supposed religious beliefs of her supposed early modern witch-cult, one aspect she conspicuously left out was any talk of a goddess. By the early modern period, legends of the Society of Diana seem to have died out. The cultural expectation was not that witches would follow female spirits, but the one master of all evil spirits, the Devil. None of the witch trial records described any goddesses, and though some claimed a female officer known as "the Maiden" was present at coven gatherings, she was not thought by Murray to embody a goddess the way the priest embodied the god Dianus.

Janus

Gerald Gardner, a contemporary of Murray and fellow member of the British Folklore Society, took her ideas and ran with them, soon claiming that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of Murray's witch-cult (Murray, for her part, firmly believed the cult was long extinct). It is well known that Gardner ended up founding Wicca based largely on Murray's writings. What seems to be somewhat less well known is that Gardner's witchcraft started out, like Murray's, basically patriarchal. Though Gardner did originally include a priest and priestess at equal rank in his coven, his early work did little to emphasize the Goddess within his tradition, instead focusing almost exclusively on the Horned God, Cernunnos (a Gaulish deity associated with the underworld and the hunt who, like Janus, was often depicted multiple faces looking in different directions). Gardner also referred to his witch god as Janicot, which Murray believed was a Basque horned god, and which Gardner believed was a variant of the name Janus, but which in the original witch trial sources state was a local appellation of Christ.

Doreen Valiente joined Gardner's coven in 1953, and soon became one of modern witchcraft's most influential founders. Gardner was reportedly taken aback when Valiente recognized the major influence of Alistair Crowley's work on his supposed archaic witch-cult. Gardner claimed he had supplemented the witch-cult's somewhat bare bones rituals with Crowley's Themelic rituals - nevertheless, he asked Valiente, a talented writer, to re-work his Book of Shadows in order to make it a less obvious adaptation of Crowley's work. While she was at it, Valiente took it upon herself to bring in more emphasis on the Goddess, and she did so by incorporating a good deal of material inspired by or adapted from Charles Leland's work on the subject, including the "Charge of the Goddess" from Aradia and a larger focus on honoring Aradia herself as a goddess of the witches. Valiente later addressed the topic of the witches' god, and why, despite Aradia being a major early source, Gardner opted to honor the Horned God as Cernunnos or Janicot instead of Lucifer. Despite the only semi-Christian nature of Lucifer in Aradia and his strong mythological/celestial character, Gardner wanted to make sure his religion had nothing to do with "Satan". Valiente suspected that modern witches tended to keep Leland's work at a safe distance, feeling that its inclusion of Lucifer in any capacity was "too strong meat" for Wiccans.


Legacy

Despite being, in some sense, the "original" witch-goddess of the medieval and modern eras, in my own experience few witches focus much attention on Diana today. The notable exceptions to this are the various Dianic traditions, which might hold some negative, exclusionary connotations for mainstream witches that create an effect of shying away from Diana entirely. Of course, worship of Diana in her aspect as Trivia is more popular then ever, just under her Greek name, Hekate. Several organizations have emerged in recent years devoted to exploring this aspect of the goddess, like the Covenant of Hekate, which holds the annual, international Rite of Her Sacred Fires. The CoH focuses its study of Hekate on her late-antique Neoplatonic role as the World Soul rather than simply as an underworld aspect of Diana or goddess of magic and crossroads, but much of her original worship remains in their rituals.

Raven Grimassi's tradition of Stregheria, a specifically Italian-centered form of Wicca based more heavily than others on Leland's work obviously includes a special focus on Diana as its primary goddess (though it pairs her with Janus/Dianus as in Murray's work rather than Lucifer as in Leland's... strong meat and all that). The "traditional witchcraft" movement has more thoroughly embraced Leland's work and the early, pre-Wicca roots of modern witchcraft traditions, and therefore have become a bit more "Luciferian" in character. Diana has featured as a goddess specific to witches in a handful of popular media representations (including a somewhat infamous sequence involving a coven of Diana-worshiping witches in the movie Four Rooms), but the day when she is again recognized as a quintessential deity of modern witchcraft might still be a ways off.

As for her male counterpart, whether Janus or Lucifer, it could be a while before that particular deity of the old-time witch-cult makes a return to prominence. Despite campy portrayals of Devil-worshiping witches being back in vogue thanks to shows like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I don't see many witches who are willing to untangle the long history of "the Devil" as an artificial conglomeration of various distinct Christian and pre-Christian entities, the kind of work that would be required to make that meat a little less pungent.

 

The Goddess Diana is summoned - from Four Rooms, via GIPHY

About That OTHER Horned God

"The Old Horned God of the witches is not the Satan of Christianity, and no amount of theological argument will make him so. He is, in fact, the oldest deity known to man, and is depicted in the oldest representation of a divinity which has yet been found, namely the Stone Age painting in the innermost recess of the Caverne des Trois Freres at Ariege. He is the old phallic god of fertility who has come forth from the morning of the world, and who was already of immeasurable antiquity before Egypt and Babylon, let alone before the Christian era. Nor did he perish at the cry that Great Pan was dead. Secretly through the centuries, hidden deeper and deeper as time went on, his worship and that of the naked Moon Goddess, his bride, the Lady of Mystery and Magic and the forbidden joys, continued sometimes among the great ones of the land, sometimes in humble cottages, or on lonely heaths and in the depths of darkling woods, on summer nights when the moon rode high. It does so still.” -- [Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft, pp. 21-22]

Though Gardner and many other pagans throughout modern history have joined together in insistance that the Horned God is not Satan, it is hard to defend their point. The Horned God has mastered the art of seamless syncretism, and if He is not one and the same as Pan, or Cernunnos, or even Helios, Dionysus, and Hades, he has certainly added at least a sprinkle of himself into those deities over the years. After all, what does the Horned God stand for if not the hunt, and the dual fear and revelry of the pristine forest glade. He is both the unconquerable life of the sun and its children and the ruler of their death and rebirth from the underworld. These gods are often discrete, but often subsumed into one another. In his book on the Mysteries of Eleusis, artist Bruce Rimell details how Hades can be viewed as the underworld alter-ego of Dionysus - a lord of life and growth above, a lord of life’s inevitable decay below, who enlists the aid of the similarly dual-natured goddess Persephone to ensure life’s continual rebirth. Dionysus and Helios are similarly linked by the relationship between the waxing and waning of the life-giving sun and the cyclical growth of vegetation. Orpheus himself revealed this mystery:

“Jove, Pluto, Phœbus, Bacchus, all are One.”

Jupiter Ammon

Far from monotheism, this syncretism reveals the deep and fundamental contentedness of the gods who embody life (Bacchus), the gods who sustain life (Jove as the rain-giving sky, Phoebus as the light-giving sun), and Pluto, the god of both death and the richness of the soil. The Horned God is all of them, the god of life, death, and rebirth, and the god of the knowledge needed to recognize him. His horns are the antlers of the rutting stag and the rays of the invincible sun.

In the ancient world, for many cultures, rebirth was often represented by the skin-shedding snake. So was knowledge, and this especially included the knowledge of healing, which is itself a kind of rebirth within life. The snake was thought to be wise and close to the earth, a hallmark of underworld deities and mystery religions. In Orphism, Bacchus is believed to be born of Proserpine in the underworld after she laid with Jove, who had come to her in the form of a serpent. Jove carried Bacchus into the heavens, only for him to be cast down by the Titans. In other words, the god of the sky and the goddess of the earth bore the god of life, who rose to the position of the sun, only to be slain and returned to the underworld, and who was then reborn, just as both the vegetation and the sun are each year. The role of the snake denotes not only the underworld setting of the myth, but the clue that wisdom is required to connect myth to truth. The snake goddess of Crete herself may be linked to Proserpine in the same role. The Gaulish antlered god Cernunnos is often depicted holding (horned) snakes, and in the case of one of the few relics on which he is named (the Pillar of the Boatmen), he is depicted in the underworld, holding up the treasures of the Earth. His antlers are often implied to be a part of a ceremonial headdress or at least ephemeral, perhaps falling and regrowing with the seasons (at least one statue of Cernunnos seems to have had room for removable antlers). It is interesting to note that the antlered headdress, with its many prongs, in some ways resembles the many-rayed crowns given to sun gods and even depiction of the horned Moses, his horns representing rays of light emerging from his head - Moses himself may have originally been an Egyptian solar deity, his name, like Ramses, the shortened form of Ra-Moses.

Moses

The Horned God of modern paganism has therefore become a syncretic figure, even if he wasn’t one originally. He is both a god of the shining sky, of life, of the underworld, and of secret knowledge. He is associated with the snake as a giver of knowledge and a representative of rebirth. He is adorned by the rays of the sun, either as horns, antlers, or a many-pointed crown. Is it any wonder that Christians mistake him for Satan? Satan, with his horns and dominion over the underworld? Who was, early on, conflated with the shining sky god Lucifer? Who came to the first man and woman with an offer of secret wisdom and the key to eternal life, if only they would eat of the sacred fruit in a lush garden?

The Yazidis still worship an equivalent being to the Christian Satan in the form of Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, who fell from heaven in primordial times, then rose and was redeemed. Are they "devil worshippers" as their extremist oppressors claim? For them he is not a figure of evil, but a symbol of redemption and rebirth. Why not for modern pagans? According to Yazzidi religion, Melek Taus went on to become the demiurge who created the world from the Cosmic Egg, exactly as in the Hellenic myth of Ophion, the serpent.

For the Gnostics, while the roles of the demiurge and the serpent were reversed, the serpent was also the hero of the creation myth, freeing humankind from ignorance only for them to be punished for it by a more jealous god, who did not want to see them become divine themselves. Had Adam and Eve eaten from both the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, they themselves would have become like the gods - or, from a different perspective, come to comprehend their own potential for divinity via Henosis. Mainstream Christian theology opposed the Gnostics, declaring Gnosticism a heresy and Eve’s act a sin, but isn’t it a central tenant of pagan theology? That we all have the divine within us? That while we are reborn, at our core we are already one with the divine, if only we had the wisdom to understand? Perhaps modern pagans shouldn’t be so quick to distance themselves from the figure of Satan: he has a lot more in common with the Horned God than we may care to admit.