The history, the practice, the ritual with journal, cards & the Virgo/Libra archetypes to guide you
This one is about Mabon, the Autumn Equinox, and the specific psychological gear-shift of crossing from Virgo season into Libra.
It's also about what the wheel of the year is actually for when you strip the aesthetics away, why the harvest festival is the most politically loaded thing on the pagan calendar and nobody talks about it that way, and what Persephone's descent has to do with your nervous system right now.
There's a Mabon ritual workshop for solo practice (no cauldron needed, no one is watching, you can do this in your kitchen in just your pyjama tops, no bottoms required), and a seven-card tarot spread designed as an equinox threshold reading, with journaling prompts to unfold the cards story further.
Come in, weirdo!
"Of course, fall isn't just about preparing for winter. It's also about sitting on the patio in a worn wool sweater and warming your hands over the swirl of steam rising from a coffee cup.
It's about walking across a darkened yard and seeing a flight of geese cross the face of a full moon. It's about settling in, relishing sights and sensations of a world slowing down."
— Brent Olson
Twice a year, the Earth holds her breath.
She arrives at the exact point of equilibrium, the whole planet held in perfect balance between light and dark, day and night identical, both hemispheres getting the same amount of Sun for the first and last time until it happens again in six months..and then, in the same motion, she tips away from it.
The balance and the leaving are simultaneous. You cannot have one without the other starting.
This is the equinox. On September 23rd, 2026 the Sun crosses the celestial equator heading southward and the scales sit level for exactly as long as they can before physics takes over. After that, the dark gains one minute per day in the northern hemisphere, quietly, patiently, all the way to December, like a cat that has decided it’s moving in and is doing so one paw at a time so you don’t notice until it’s already on the bed.
This crossing sits between Virgo and Libra, and I’d argue it’s the most emotionally weird passage in the whole wheel of the year, not because the seasons themselves are extreme, but because the shift between them is so architecturally specific.
You’re being asked to move from one entire mode of being human into a completely different one. The mechanism of that crossing (and some ways to honor it by an embodied practice) is what this post is about.
What Virgo Season Was Really Asking For (And What It Did to You)
Virgo season is the part of the year where the world asks you to be useful to yourself.
To actually look at what you’ve been building instead of just building faster because stopping to assess feels uncomfortably close to stopping altogether. To separate the things that are genuinely working from the things that just have the smell of effort about them and have been coasting on that smell since the last eclipse tried to obliterate them from your story.
Virgo’s genuine gift is a capacity for precision that most signs can’t locate on a map. The ability to care about the quality of the actual thing rather than the story about the thing. To feel when something’s off by two degrees and know that two degrees matters.
To do the meticulous, tedious work that does not yield the immediate dopamine hit supplied by our endless social media feeds, of making something real without needing it to be witnessed in real time to feel worth doing.
That’s not small. That’s actually quite beautiful. Most of the things that hold civilization together were built by someone running very hot Virgo energy at two in the morning when everyone else had gone home.
But Virgo’s shadow is something a lot of us have been living in so long we’ve started calling it our personality. It’s the self criticism that has completely forgotten what it was originally criticizing and is now just a background hum of nothing being quite right. The anxiety of underperforming, the toxic comparison trap, the imposter syndrome, the ‘I should be doing more for them’ and the ‘They don’t fucking deserve me’ that exist in the same breath. The service that has been giving and giving until it’s hollow and is now running on the fumes of resentment rather than actual desire to give.
The shadow presents itself as high standards but is actually just your nervous system’s way of staying busy enough to avoid the specific discomfort of sitting with something unfinished.
The season asked you to look clearly and most of us found things we’d rather have kept looking away from. That’s helpful. That’s all it is. That’s what radical clarity looks like when it’s working.
The equinox is a threshold of change. Not from one state of being into another, bt rather as climbing another step, heavier with new wisdom in regards to ourselves and our direction, but lighter by all the unnecessary bullshit pertaining to ourselves and our direction that we left behind.
Mabon: The Invented Festival That Somehow Always Made Sense
It’s only since the early seventies that Neo-Pagan and Witchy folks officially placed the Autumn Equinox under a new, swanky and archaic sounding name onto the Wheel of the Year. The Wheel itself is an annual cycle of seasonal festivals mirroring and celebrating cycles of nature, death and rebirth.
Whilst most of the festivals carry their names from Celtic times, Mabon, Ostara and Litha are actually fairly recent additions, named by a prominent figure of American Wicca, Aidan A. Kelly. So although Mabon carries an air of great mystical solemnity, it’s helpful to be reminded, that this particular name was coined by a man in California sometime around 1974. It changes nothing about its validity, but is useful to know when you’re in the mood to be accurate about things, which I periodically am.
That being said, there is a vast and completely genuine history of harvest festivals being held at the end of September across essentially every agricultural civilization that ever tried to survive a winter.
The name Mabon is new. The impulse is as old as the first person who looked at what they’d grown and felt simultaneously grateful and terrified about whether it would be enough, which is to say: it is very old indeed, and also extremely recognizable.
The common historical consensus is that keeping tight grip on natural cycles helped our ancestors prevent starvation by knowing when the right time comes for sowing and harvesting crops, mating of animals and everything else that makes the difference between a community that gets through winter and one that doesn’t.
Nowadays, of course, in times of unprecedented (and globally highly unbalanced) abundance and overindulgence in an economic order built upon the cycles of making and spending money, the idea behind observing these ancient festivals turns inwards, to help us honour and nurture our own internal cycles.
The harvest festival no longer asks whether your grain stores are full enough. It asks whether your life is.
Whether what you’ve been growing this year is worth the field you gave it. Whether what you’ve been feeding deserves the feeding. Those are not comfortable questions. They’re also, weirdly, the most loving questions available.
“The Autumn Equinox is a time to see the abundance set before us so we can enter the darkness and await the transformation that’s promised there.
The Autumn Equinox is when we allow ourselves to begin to transform into our fullest selves. This is like the witch’s Thanksgiving Day, when we say thank you to the Universe for all of her abundance.”
— G. Herstik
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The rest of this piece is for the absolute legends who treated me to a coffee aka the paid subscribers.
Below the paywall you get the full Virgo-to-Libra psychological handover (including Libra’s shadow, which is significantly worse than its reputation suggests and significantly more common than any of us like to admit), the Persephone mythology and what Dionysos is doing at a harvest festival (more than you’d expect, honestly), your (or rather mine) usual inflamed little commentary on what the harvest festival means when you’re living inside one of the most obscenely unequal distributions of actual resources in recorded history, a full DIY Mabon ritual workshop for solitary practice that I promise you can do in a flat in a city with no garden and no ritual objects beyond a candle and something warm to drink, and the seven-card equinox tarot spread with journaling prompts.
Come in. The door’s open and the cider’s on.
🍂🕯️
