Equinox is Here Again!

Are we there yet? We are indeed - but you wouldn't know it, in Oklahoma. It'll be many more weeks before the leaves begin to turn colour and fall, or before temperatures start to tumble too. Yet, officially we are here...

“But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
― Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot

Here's an autumnal equinox-related oddity I hadn't not come across before - from the ancient Roman world:

Equinox and medical theory

The Aëtius parapegma is an almanac that appears as a chapter in the 6th-century Tetrabiblos of Aëtius of Amida. It treats the rising and setting of constellations, weather forecasting, and medical advice as closely intertwined, and notes of the equinox (placed on September 25) that -

There is the greatest disturbance in the air for three days previous. Thus it is necessary to be careful neither to phlebotomize, nor purge, nor otherwise to change the body violently from the 15th of September through the 24th.

The passage is presented as advice for physicians, based on the principle that "the bodies of healthy people, and especially those of sick people, change with the condition of the air".

So, blood-letting and purging are not recommended. Alrighty then!

Equinox !

At this early stage of autumn - we're barely through the door - the trees have yet to change into their Fall finery. Here's a link to a map of the USA set to indicate autumnal changes in foliage, week by week. So far, even the highest and most northerly regions are showing only "patchy" Fall color foliage, at best.

When we were out doing errands this week temperature was 99 degrees here, in South-west Oklahoma. Not much chance of Fall color here, for quite a while.

Fall Equinox

 David Palladini's Zodiac, Summer thru Fall +

Happy Autumn to all!

Nathaniel Hawthorne, in The American Notebooks in October 1842, wrote:

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."

I'm with Nat. So after today the blog will stand still until Monday. We are to attend husband's High School Reunion (60th) this weekend, up in Salina, Kansas. We shall probably only attend the "mixer" meeting(s), rather than any regimented dinners etc. Not sure how I shall feel about it - I resolutely refused to attend any such affairs relating to my own schooldays, back in the UK. Still, I do like Salina, and there are antique stores to explore, should things become depressingly...erm... elderly.

WELCOMING AUTUMN !

Autumnal Equinox, 2014! To welcome my favourite season, some words from a set of writers
I look on as absolute masters of their craft. They are (in no particular order) American, English, Scottish, Welsh & Northern Irish (because Britons are... better together but can also be appreciated apart - see!).

“But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.”
― Stephen King, "Salem's Lot"


“That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain.”
~ Ray Bradbury


“And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days...”
~ Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

“Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.”
~Sir Walter Scott



Lo! I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold;
Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out
The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men,
Captain in cosmic wars,
Our Titan, even the weeds would show
Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street
Seems any human nod,
Where shift in strange democracy
The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower
Hidden in wood or wold,
But I am come to autumn,
When all the leaves are gold.

~ G.K. Chesterton "Gold Leaves"




Late August, given heavy rain and sun
for a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
we trekked and picked until the cans were full,
until the tinkling bottom had been covered
with green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
with thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
that all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

~Seamus Heaney "Blackberry Picking"



“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."
~ George Eliot [Letter to Miss Eliot, Oct. 1, 1841]


“Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. At last, after September, another weather arrives, an Indian summer that occasionally endures until Christmas.”
~ Truman Capote, "In Cold Blood"


“It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange.”
~ Bill Bryson, "I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away"


“The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.”
~ James Baldwin

Art for Equinox

Five suitably autumnal paintings (below) for the autumnal equinox coming up on Sunday. These are by Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896). He was one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose paintings I've always loved. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, from around 1848 in England, began as a secret, select group of artists: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his brother William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, William Holman Hunt, Frederic George Stephens, James Collinson, and John Everett Millais. They banded together to rebel against the current art establishment, the British Royal Academy and their then formulaic approach to art instruction. More HERE.

Sir John was never my favourite member of the Brotherhood, but I suspect the digital images below do no justice to his paintings. I've seen some of the Pre-Raphaelites' works "in the flesh", and they are breathtaking. There's an old post of mine on those artists and their natal charts here.

It'll be several weeks more before the Oklahoma autumnal scene catches up with the season shown in these paintings; at the moment it still seems like high summer. I wait with increasing impatience!

(For enlarged versions click on the images.)

 Sound of Many Waters

 Autumn Leaves

 Winter Fuel

 A Dream of the Past

 Rosalind in the Forest

Eleusinian Mysteries ~ What did the '60s have in common with Ancient Greece? & Neptune in Pisces.

The short answer is LSD.

Long ago, humans felt a deep need to celebrate and honor times of sowing, reaping and harvest, keenly aware that, should anything untoward negatively affect nature's cycle, many people - perhaps all - would die in the ensuing famine. For instance, this day, 20 September, in ancient Greece, would have marked the 7th day of the Eleusinian Mysteries: revered initiation ceremonies held every 4 or 5 years (sources vary), lasting 9 days, honoring Demeter the Mother Goddess of agriculture and fertility, and Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.

The Mysteries originated in the city of Eleusis, 15 miles west of Athens, possibly as far back as the early Mycenaean period (c.1600 B.C), and continued for almost two thousand years, in a world both alien yet oddly familiar to us, in the twenty-first century. Theirs was a world permeated with anxiety and dread, perhaps not unlike that of the USA after 9/11, or during the Cold War years.....or right now! Famine was, for them, a persistent threat. A single crop failure could spell the difference between life and death. The risk of war, whether from marauding bands or organized armies, was constant. Death or slavery awaited the losers of a conflict. Family provided the only social safety net for most. People lived constantly on the edge of disaster.

The long drawn-out structured rituals of the Mysteries produced a change of consciousness in the participants bringing about a kind of spiritual birth, intended to reunite the person with the divine spirit of the cosmos. The rites, ceremonies, and beliefs were kept strictly secret. Since The Mysteries involved visions of an afterlife, some scholars believe that the power and longevity of the Eleusinian Mysteries came from psychedelic agents. Here's that link to the 1960s.

Before experiencing the final soul-shattering vision of the Greater Mysteries, initiates drank kykeon, an entheogenic potion made from ergot, from which LSD is derived. The initiates then spent the night in a darkened hall, where they beheld a great vision, which was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition.” Most of the initiates were women, but men (including Sophocles, Aristides and Cicero) also took part. Whatever the vision, there is no doubt that the effects were profound. Some hold that a night in the Eleusinian sanctuary may have inspired Plato's “ideas” and world of archetypes. In times much closer to our own, ingesting similar potions inspired the composition of iconic music and song.



I can't help wondering whether, as Neptune, the planet with closest connection to drugs, visions, and mysteries, moves into it's traditional home, Pisces early next year, whether, during its sojourn in that sign, we're going to see a revival or "re-working" of something akin to The Mysteries. During the 1960s, for whole decade Neptune was transiting Scorpio, one of the three Water signs, where it "feels most at home". In Water sign Pisces Neptune will be even more "at home". I'll not be a bit surprised to read of the emergence some new cultish and mysterious goings on, involving an LSD-type substance, in coming years.

Sources ~~

http://www.eleusis.us/eleusis/eleusinian-mysteries.php

http://www.eleusinianmysteries.org/Metanoia.html

http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/eleusis.html