image: Wikimedia commons (link).
This year, we arrive at the point of September equinox at 0630 on 22 September for those in the Pacific time zone of North America, or 0930 for those in the Eastern time zone, and 1330 Greenwich time for those in England (from these references, you should be able to calculate the time in your particular geography anywhere on our earth).
The stations of the heavenly cycles, including the four great annual markers of the two solstices and two equinoxes, carry tremendous significance in the esoteric "language" of the world's ancient myths, and understanding the way the myths use these points on the cycle help us to understand what particular stories and figures are trying to tell us and show us.
In this regard, the explanations of the indispensable Alvin Boyd Kuhn are particularly helpful. His analysis argues that the cycles of the year figure the descent of the soul from the realm of pure spirit (the upper elements of air and fire) into the material realm of earth and water at the point of the fall or autumnal equinox, which is the point we reach on this day (the September equinox being the fall equinox for the northern hemisphere of our planet).
The fall equinox is representative of the plunge from spirit into matter, which the ancient philosophers sometimes described as an immersion of fire into water. Kuhn notes that the mysterious pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, declares: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water" (see Kuhn, Lost Light, page 6).
This plunge into the body, this submersion of cosmic fire into the lower elements of earth and water, is seen in the motions of the stars and other heavenly bodies, which can be observed to rise up in the east (due to the rotation of our earth) and cross the heavenly realm from the east to the west, sinking back down again into the west, where they plunge into either earth or water (depending upon where you are standing as you watch them).
And on the annual cycle of the year, we plunge into the "lower realm" at the point of fall equinox, when we cross from the "upper half" of the year (when hours of daylight prevail over hours of darkness) to the "lower half" (when darkness dominates, and each day contains more hours of darkness than of daylight).
Thus, this point of fall equinox was equated to the physical birth -- the point of our own plunge from the realm of air and fire (the realm of spirit) into this body of "clay" (the body of earth and water -- and note that many ancient traditions describe men and women as being fashioned out of clay by the divine powers).
But the ancient myths teach that there is another birth -- a birth which is distinct from the physical birth. At our physical birth, the divine spark is submerged in the lower physical elements, but there is a point at which we become aware of this submerged Higher Self, and this awareness or reconnection is described in ancient myth using a variety of metaphors -- including the metaphor of a second birth, a spiritual birth which follows after the physical birth.
And when we understand this esoteric message, then we begin to grasp the meaning of the prevalent pattern of the two mothers in ancient myths and sacred traditions around the world!
Alvin Boyd Kuhn explains this concept in Lost Light (published in 1940):
The exposition must begin with the puzzling and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth, that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs, all were depicted as having two mothers. How, one asks, could there possibly be rational significance in this? It has been put aside as just some more of the mythical rubbish and nonsense of early Paganism. The profundity of pagan intelligence, hiding sublime cosmic truth under glyph and symbol, has not been dreamed of.
The depiction should not have created incredulity, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of the divine principle in man, announced it categorically in declaring to Nicodemus that "ye must be born again." 5
That encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus is dramatized in the Gospel according to John, chapter 3.
Thus, Kuhn explains, this pattern of the two mothers in ancient myth points us to the concept of the two births -- and is seen in the Gospel stories, for example, in the presence of two Marys. In other myths, we see two mothers described in the Mahabharata of ancient India, in the two mothers of the five Pandavas (whose fathers are divine, another frequent pattern in ancient myth). And, as Alvin Boyd Kuhn explains, we also see this pattern in the story of Osiris and Isis and the child Horus:
The ancient books always grouped the two mothers in pairs. They were called "the two mothers" or sometimes "the two divine sisters." Or they were the wife and sister of the God, under the names of Juno, Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Cybele or Mylitta. In old Egypt they were first Apt and Neither; and later Isis and Nephthys. Massey relates Neith to "net," i.e., fish-net! Clues to their functions were picked up in the great Book of the Dead: "Isis conceived him; Nephthys gave him birth." Or: "Isis bore him; Nephthys suckled him," or reared him. [. . .] So divine spirit is conceived in the womb of Isis, the first universal mother, and brought to birth in the womb of Nephthys, the second mother, the immediate incubator and gestator of its manifest expression." 8 - 9
Above we see an image containing detail from an ancient Egyptian stela dated to around 1250 BC and showing the god Osiris in between the two goddesses of Isis (to the right as we face the image) and Nephthys (to the left as we face the image).
Kuhn also points out that the epistles attributed to Paul are conveying very much the same message when they declare: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual" (1 Corinthians 15: 46, cited by Kuhn on page 6 of Lost Light).
Now, when we note that Osiris is the god who is buried (as is Jesus in the Gospel accounts), this pattern of two mothers and two births comes home to us and to our situation in this life and in this very moment in a new way, because as I argue in my most-recent book Myth and Trauma, this pattern of the buried divinity, or the god or goddess who must go down into the Underworld, very much has to do with the suppression or "burial" of our own Essential or Higher Self, from whom we become alienated in this life through a variety of forces, often without our even knowing it!
The good news, dramatized for our understanding in countless different ways in the ancient myths given to all of the cultures around our earth, on every inhabited continent and island, is that our Self, although buried, is not lost -- in fact, it cannot even be damaged! Our Self is always available to us -- and has never actually left us. And I am convinced that this powerful message is conveyed to us through the esoteric symbolism of the two mothers and the two births.
And so as we reach this point of equinox, it is my hope that you will become aware of the existence of this buried and suppressed Self, and of the fact that the Self is available and that our relationship with Self can be restored. And the ancient myths point us towards that restoration and that recovery: indeed, this message must be considered to be one of the most central purposes of the myths, and among the most important to us, in this life and in this present moment.
