There is something almost suspiciously tidy about the Autumn Equinox. Light and dark are balanced, the harvest is gathered, baskets of apples appear everywhere, pumpkins glow obligingly in the background, and a few artfully arranged acorns complete the picture. Perhaps there is a cinnamon broom involved if we are feeling particularly festive. Pagans are very good at autumn. Give us a crisp morning, a candle, and something orange and we will absolutely make a religion out of it.
And yet, the older I get, the less I think the Autumn Equinox is really about any of those things. Increasingly, I think it is about reckoning—not the ominous, thunder-on-the-horizon sort of reckoning but reckoning in its older and simpler sense of counting up, taking stock, and looking honestly at what came from what we planted. The harvest does not care what we intended to grow. It shows us what actually grew, and there is something profoundly Pagan about that.
The Trouble With Mabon
We should probably get this out of the way first. Many modern Pagans call the Autumn Equinox Mabon, and if that is the name you use in your practice, I am not coming to confiscate your altar decorations. However, Mabon is not the ancient Celtic name for the Autumn Equinox. The name entered modern Pagan usage in the twentieth century when Aidan Kelly was looking for names to round out the emerging eight-sabbat calendar. Mabon ap Modron belongs to Welsh mythology, certainly, but his mythology has no historical connection to an autumn equinox festival.
There is something delightfully Pagan about the whole situation. We made something, then we used it long enough that people began assuming it was ancient. That does not make the observance meaningless; it makes it ours. One of the peculiar habits of modern Paganism is our occasional desperation to prove that everything we do is secretly three thousand years old. Sometimes it is ancient, sometimes our ancestors did something vaguely similar, and sometimes a twentieth-century Pagan thought, “You know what would work nicely here?” and a few decades later somebody on the internet declared it an ancient Celtic tradition.
Traditions have to begin somewhere, and I would rather have an honest living tradition than an invented ancient pedigree. The Autumn Equinox does not need historical embroidery to make it sacred because the Earth is doing something extraordinary right in front of us, and that is enough.
The Second Harvest
Within the familiar modern Wheel of the Year, the Autumn Equinox sits between Lughnasadh and Samhain and is commonly regarded as the second of three harvest observances. Consequently, we have gathered around it themes of harvest, gratitude, abundance, balance, and preparation for the darker portion of the year. Those are perfectly good themes, but “harvest” has become one of those lovely Pagan words we sometimes polish until we can see our faces in it.
Harvest is abundance and gratitude, and it is receiving the blessings of the Earth, but harvest is also discovering that the tomatoes got hornworms. It is realizing that you planted entirely too much zucchini and nowhere near enough beans. It is finding out that the thing you lovingly watered for four months apparently had no intention whatsoever of producing anything useful. Anyone who has actually grown things knows that harvest is not merely a celebration; it is information. The field tells the truth.
That makes the Autumn Equinox an excellent time to look at our own lives with the same clear eyes. What did we plant this year, and what actually grew? What surprised us? What consumed enormous amounts of energy and produced almost nothing, and what flourished despite our neglect? Perhaps most importantly, what are we still tending simply because we have already invested so much into it? That last question can be a real bastard.
The Sacredness of Enough
Our culture is not particularly comfortable with the concept of enough because there should apparently always be more. We should have more money, more productivity, more followers, more accomplishments, more healing, and more spiritual development. We should read more books, walk more miles, book more clients, organize more closets, eat more vegetables, drink more water, express more gratitude, and somehow optimize our sleep according to an app on our telephone.
Even spirituality can become another damned performance review. Are we meditating enough? Are we doing enough ritual? Why haven’t we finished that course? Why don’t we communicate with our ancestors as clearly as that woman on TikTok apparently communicates with hers? Somewhere along the way, spiritual practice can become yet another area in which we are failing to meet imaginary production quotas.
The harvest offers us another model because there comes a point when the growing season ends and we stop demanding more from the field. We gather what is there. Some years the baskets overflow and some years they don’t, but either way, eventually we bring in the harvest. There is tremendous magic in being able to say, “This is what I have.” Not what I hoped to have, not what somebody else harvested, and not what I might have produced if I had been smarter, younger, healthier, richer, more disciplined, or blessed with better weather. This is what grew in the soil I had, under the conditions I was given, with the choices I made. Now, what can I make from it?
That, to me, is harvest wisdom.
Balance Is Not a Permanent Condition
We also talk endlessly about balance at the Equinox, and I understand why. The word equinox itself comes from the idea of equal night, and around this astronomical threshold, day and night approach a remarkable equilibrium. Consequently, we build rituals around balancing work and rest, light and darkness, giving and receiving, body and spirit, and any number of other complementary forces. All of that can be useful, but there is an important part of the lesson we sometimes leave out: the balance does not last.
That may be the most important teaching of the entire sabbat. The Equinox is not the Earth finally getting herself properly organized; it is a threshold. For one suspended moment, the scales hover near the center and then they move again. In the Northern Hemisphere, darkness begins taking the larger portion, but that does not mean darkness has defeated light. It simply means the Wheel turned.
We spend an astonishing amount of energy trying to achieve permanent balance in lives that were never designed to remain still. Sometimes work needs more of us and sometimes family does. Sometimes grief demands our attention, sometimes healing does, and sometimes joy bursts through the door, puts its feet on the furniture, and demands our complete attention. Balance is not necessarily dividing ourselves into perfect portions. Sometimes balance means recognizing what season we are actually in and responding accordingly.
The Descent Into Darkness
This is one of the places where Paganism offers something I find increasingly precious: we do not require the darkness to be evil. Pagan traditions differ wildly, of course, and there is no single Pagan theology of darkness, but the seasonal Wheel gives many of us a spiritual vocabulary in which darkness can represent rest, mystery, gestation, ancestors, dreaming, introspection, and the unseen.
After the Autumn Equinox, we know where we are headed. Samhain waits ahead, followed by the long descent toward the Winter Solstice. The trees will release what they can no longer sustain, seeds will disappear beneath the soil, animals will retreat into dens and burrows, and the visible world will become quieter. None of this is failure. The tree does not have low self-esteem because its leaves fell off, and the field does not enroll in a productivity seminar because it has gone dormant.
Nature understands something human beings resist with every fiber of our caffeinated little souls: not everything valuable is happening where we can see it. There are seasons when the magic is underground.
Gratitude Without the Glitter
I believe gratitude belongs at the Autumn Equinox, but it does not require pretending everything is wonderful. Some years, my harvest has included things I never wanted: loss, disappointment, illness, financial strain, broken plans, relationships reshaping themselves, and doors I was sure would open but remained firmly closed. Most people who have lived long enough have harvested a few things they would gladly return without a receipt.
Gratitude does not require us to call those things blessings. Sometimes something awful is simply awful, and we do not have to slap a spiritual lesson onto it before we are allowed to acknowledge that it hurt. What gratitude can do is help us notice that the unwanted thing was not necessarily the only thing in the basket. There may also have been laughter, someone who stayed, a bill somehow paid, a new friendship, a good meal, a moment when the pain stopped, a ridiculous joke at exactly the right time, a dog asleep against your leg, a stranger who was unexpectedly kind, or simply enough strength to get through Tuesday.
We do not have to turn suffering into spiritual enlightenment before we are permitted to be grateful for what survived alongside it. That is a much more useful kind of gratitude to me.
An Equinox Practice
This Autumn Equinox, I invite you to dispense with the elaborate ritual unless elaborate ritual genuinely delights you. You do not need twelve candles, seventeen herbs, an invocation translated from questionable Gaelic, and a chalice you bought at Renaissance Faire in 1998. You certainly can have those things. I am a witch. I enjoy stuff. I simply don’t believe the sacredness of the moment depends upon them.
Instead, sit somewhere quiet. Light a candle if you like, put an apple on the table, hold an acorn, pour yourself something warm, and take a piece of paper. Consider three things: what you planted, what you harvested, and what you will not plant again. That third category matters because we talk frequently about setting intentions and not nearly enough about deciding which intentions have proven themselves unworthy of another season.
Some crops exhaust the soil, and so do some dreams. Some dreams belonged to younger versions of ourselves and some obligations were never ours in the first place. Some relationships survive only because we keep supplying all of the life force. Some goals have quietly transformed into punishments, and some identities that once fit us beautifully simply do not anymore. We are allowed to recognize that. We can thank them if they deserve thanks, compost them if they can become something useful, and then let the field rest.
The Wheel Does Not Ask Permission
One of the great comforts of an Earth-centered spiritual practice is that the Wheel turns whether we are ready or not, although I admit that can also be infuriating. Autumn does not wait until we have properly resolved summer. Samhain does not check whether we completed our Autumn Equinox journaling. Winter will not be postponed because we are emotionally behind schedule. The Earth keeps moving, and so do we.
Perhaps that is why these seasonal observances matter so much. It is not because our ancestors necessarily celebrated precisely this festival, on precisely this date, in precisely the way we do now. They probably didn’t. We celebrate because human beings need markers. We need moments when somebody metaphorically rings a bell and tells us to look around because something has changed. The light is different, the air is different, the field is different, and if we have been paying attention, we are different as well.
The Autumn Equinox stands at that beautiful and fleeting threshold between abundance and release. It asks us to gather what grew, count what remains, share what we can, preserve what will sustain us, and return what is finished to the Earth. Perhaps most importantly, after we have done all of that, it asks us to resist the temptation to immediately plant another crop. There will be another spring, another beginning, another season for reaching toward the light.
For now, perhaps the holiest thing we can do is acknowledge the harvest we actually have rather than mourning the one we imagined. The scales balance briefly, the Sun crosses the threshold, the darkness comes a little earlier, and the Wheel, utterly unconcerned with whether we have finished our to-do lists, turns.
May we have the wisdom to turn with it.
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As Editor of the Green Egg Blog, Katrina Rasbold weaves ancient wisdom into the complexities of modern life, fostering a space for deep inquiry and magical growth. Katrina is the editor of Green Egg Magazine, a priestess, author, and co-creator of the CUSP path, working from the crossroads of tradition and transformation. She owns and operates Crossroads Occult with her husband, Eric, offering a sanctuary for those seeking mentorship, quality handmade magical items, and authentic craft. Discover her full body of work at www.katrinarasbold.com.