Easter And Equinoxes

Dawn Bodrogi  ✦  The Inner Wheel  ✦  Spring

Easter has always been a slippery holiday. To the ordinary person without a penchant for the astral, the date for Easter is always a bit of a mystery — maybe a bit of a magical mystery that comes from on high. Early? Late? (It seems to rarely be that little zone that seems just right.) I remember asking, as a child, why Easter moves around the way it does and my folks answering, “Because the Pope says so.” As good an answer as any, I guess, considering my parents didn’t have a clue either.

But did you know that we celebrate Easter according to the Moon? Easter is always the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the vernal equinox. Not so magical any more. Astronomers and astrologers can date Easter for millennia to come.

I’m not sure whether I’m better off knowing this, or remaining in ignorance and leaving the date of Easter to a man in a very large hat. To compensate for the incongruity of chocolate bunnies appearing simultaneously all over the world, I decided that the Easter Bunny was like a secret agent — in cahoots with all the chocolate shops everywhere. He had secret helpers and secret workers, very stealthy and cool, and the opposite of Santa’s vulgar and self-promoting army of elves.

(The odd thing is that I didn’t and still don’t care for sweets. I just liked the idea of him and his chocolate CIA. Sorry, double Virgo.)

So when my Easter Bunny got the pin of reality stuck into him, it took down this whole underground world of secret chocolatiers. This happens as we get older — we get more and more pins popping our bubbles. We move from the Easter Bunny to Santa Claus to our first young heartbreak, to our first betrayal by a friend we trusted, to eventually face, in our later years, the ways we have betrayed ourselves.

And then the question becomes: how do we get the magic back, before it’s too late? So-called reality begins to dominate our thinking, and life can become a downward spiral of duties, obligations, and unspoken fears. In the process, we can lose ourselves entirely.

Some of us get the magic back in a time-honoured way by passing it on to the children in our lives. While this is fine for a time, it isn’t the same as being swept away by the wonders of the world.

Go deeper

The Foundations Book by Dawn Bodrogi

Dawn’s life work — the lunar cycles, the symbolic language of the chart, the question of how we find meaning — is the heart of the Foundations Book.

→ The Foundations Book — all ebook retailers

How do we get the magic back, before it’s too late?