On Approaching the Golden Castle

Before we can truly explore the Golden Castle, its denizens or its treasure, the Golden Lantern, we need to explore its environs, which is the endpoint of the month of March, the Vernal Equinox. The Golden Castle is placed in North East of the Compass, and it stands on a hill, surrounded by a burning lake, looking over the Spring Equinox. Now, we should say a few things about the Equinox and the way we think of it. All too often we run into junior Wiccans who have perfectly made calendars of feasts days invented or enhanced by Gerald Gardner in the 1950’s, and they will tell you, this is on that date and this is on that and the proper date of this is this and that is that. But the Craft is a return to the ancient. We can argue how ancient it really is, but we cannot argue that we are returning to something prime, and returning to something that, while forgotten in ignored in the west, is long remembered in other places. I did a great deal of damage to myself trying to celebrate and to feel a certain power on a given day for a certain number of hours. The Equinox, of course, is on a very specific day and done very quickly, but what it celebrates only begins there. The Equinox is the ending of winter ,the lengthening of days and the beginning of true spring. In many Craft circles it is called Eostara after a Goddes I have never seen appear in mythology, but others of us simply refer to it as the Equinox or by its Christian name the Annunciation. Each of the Sabbats is not only a thing we celebrate on a particular day, but the beginning of a particular season and a shift in our orientation. So it isn’t simply that we are celebrating the coming of true spring or the neopagan replacement of Easter, but that March 25^th,  and the days leading to it are all celebrating several things which together give us a more holistic picture of this time of year.

            In between the Candlemas (Imbolc) and the Annunciation (Vernal Equinox) is the Feast of Saint Valentine, and maybe we can look at him later, for much of what he means has long been commercialized and forgotten, turned into candy and women with hurt feelings. But around the time of the fifteenth clump three equally important days, as important as the three days of the full moon, the Feast of Saint Patrick (March 17^th) , the Feast of Saint Joseph (March 19^th ) and The Feast of the Annunciation, (March 25^th) .  As with Christmas, where Yule generally falls four or five days earlier, so the Equinox falls roughly the same number of days before Annunciation. What is more, all three of these days take place in the old Christian Season of Lent. There are many witches—self included—who have a difficult time with Christianity, and so attempt to ignore it or make its impact less than what it is. But the stream of Western wisdom moves through Christianity, in specific Catholicism and it is through its rituals, its calendar and its stories, biblical and otherwise that we connect to what was and what will be, and so I will make use of it often. There are many wounded Wiccans who cannot deal with this, but a witch is one wounded who is healed, who is seeking wisdom, and we make use of all of our traditions.