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Autumn Equinox 2017 4:02 PM, September 22 Equinox. The liminal space, when night and day are in equal halves. A festival of bounty and reaping, the veneration of which is older perhaps only to the worship of the sun disc, and rivers. The gods that govern the space, when the year turns towards a final death are known for their harsh and bloody nature. Attis, Crom Cruach, Persephone – all deities of harvest with feet in the underworld. Blood, their own or that of others, was the sublime drizzle to secure bountiful rebirth once winter would passed. The equinox moments are thought to be times when the veil between the physical and the spiritual are particularly thin. And it is no coincidence somber vigils for wandering ancestors, and great revels are associated with these times of suspension. The branches are arranged in a crossroads pattern. Divergent yet joined, as is the night and day which they celebrate. A symbol of exchange – gift given and gift returned. An impromptu altar is made for the time when that which has been planted, will be received. For the sun, which governs the life and death of all. The branches are also a gateway - a portal leading the way into the grains. Into the realm of they dying and reviving god, into the real of the eternal corn that soon will be shorn and taken. To again rise anew. And is repeated as long as offerings are given to the Earth. The photos are taken in blocks starting from just as the sun came above the trees, to the minutes after the Equinox. The site was chosen as a corn field in semi-rural Pennsylvania where there was a history of veneration of folk traditions, attributed especially to the harvest deities of the British Isles. A formal study of light across surface. An historical tribute to some of humanity’s oldest post settlement tradition. An invocation, to let the harvest bring what it may. To give back to those who have what they have planted into the earth. And to let the last rays of the dying year take away all that is unneeded. |