Persephone Rising
After shedding the cloak of winter during February’s new moon, we’re finally ready to welcome the Spring Equinox and all of the new opportunities that come with its arrival. Ostara is right around the corner, and many witches have started planning their rituals to honor the rebirth of the sun. This equinox is a time when day and night will be in perfect balance, carrying with it the powerful themes of rebirth and new beginnings. It’s a celebration of renewed life and the abundant fertility of our Mother Earth. For our resident fae witch, this makes it the perfect time to honor a true queen of balance: Persephone.
Goddess and Queen: A Balancing Act
Persephone is a powerful Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Underworld, spending half of the year with Hades where she presides over spirits who have crossed over. The other half of the year, however, she returns to the surface to be with Demeter and bring life back to the Earth after a barren winter. Just as the plants have begun to pop up from the ground, Persephone bursts forth from the Underworld on Ostara to shower us with her light and warmth.
Persephone teaches us the power of adaptability in the way she merges the role of Queen and Goddess. In her duality, she shows us the transformation that we all must go through during life and the need for balance. Sometimes we must persevere through the dark before we can grow in the light. She also serves as the perfect example of a strong goddess that chose her own destiny by choosing to split her time between worlds, embracing both roles with equal passion. Persephone can help us learn to balance our responsibilities and commitments in the same way, as well as show us that we can forge our own fate.
Renewal & Rebirth
The spring equinox is the time for Persephone to resume her role as a Spring Goddess and breathe life back into the Earth. She symbolizes endless renewal and rebirth, bringing life back to the flora and fauna after the dark days of winter. It’s no easy task balancing the dark and the light, but Persephone shows us how to do it with grace. Although the Earth flourishes when she returns from the Underworld each spring, she understands that it is also necessary for her to light the way for spirits in the dark half of the year. She juggles these roles with ease, flitting between Queen and Goddess in a way that brings abundance and comfort to all who are willing to accept her help. She is also the planter of seeds and a symbol of our planet’s fertility. Reunited at her mother’s side, Persephone plants the seeds of spring and asks us to rejoice in the Earth’s ability to be reborn each year. She asks us to join her and plant our intentions like seeds, as well as urging us to choose what we wish to focus our energy on during this time of renewal and rebirth, just as she chose to split her time between Spring Goddess and Underworld Queen. The intentions you plant with her now are what will manifest in the harvest season.
Honoring Persephone at the Spring Equinox
The spring equinox is the time when the world gets Persephone’s bright and inspiring energy back, and her mother, Demeter, bestows her gifts of growth and harvest to us once again. This is a great time to start a magickal garden in her honor and ask for her blessing over the seeds you plant. You can also honor her return during the spring equinox by setting up an altar with a few of her favorite offerings.
Because of her association with spring growth and the sprouting of seeds, Persephone loves offerings of grains and wildflowers during Ostara. She’s also fond of black onyx and obsidian, although I’ve found that she also enjoys the crystal quartz and peridot that I set out for her each year. As a Spring Goddess, she loves sweet fragrances and bright colors. I tend to light a lot of jasmine incense during this time of year, but she will enjoy nearly any floral scent. A little tip: dry and keep any flower offerings to Persephone during the Spring so that you can burn them during the Fall Equinox when she returns to the Underworld.
In honor of Persephone, the spring equinox serves as a time to seek out new opportunities and new beginnings. Through her story, we can appreciate how the changing of the seasons holds the ability for renewal and transformation, no matter how dark things were during the winter. In a way, we're all coming out of hibernation and into the light. Let's use this year's spring equinox to rebalance and make some magickal new beginnings together.
