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3 TIQMYOPG

BetweenLight&Darkness

She changes everything she touches,
Everything she touches, changes...
— Equinox Chant to Kore

ow comes the time when,
N driving down lonely country

roads in the Northeast
Kingdom, one begins to see splashes
of red, orange, and yellow winking
through the haze of the late
September sun. Hidden in the vast
green canopy are signs of the
impending winter even as we are in
the midst of the full and bountiful
harvest that began coming to us at
Lammas, the festival of the first
fruits, celebrated when the Sun was
in Leo, not two months before.

The autumnal equinox,
sometimes called by its Celtic feast
name of Mabon, is sacred to the
Greek goddess Kore, daughter of
Demeter. Kidnapped and ravished by
Hades, god of the underworld, he
took her by force to be his queen.
And for over two thousand years the
Eleusinian Mysteries were passed
from generation to generation in rev-
erence of her story.

Kore (also known as
Persephone) is a symbol of balance
between dark and light, between win-
ter and summer, between infertility
and abundance and between mascu-
line and feminine. Her story teaches
us to seek balance in our own lives,
to understand the roles that darkness
and light play as we dance our own‘
spiral dance. Because Kore is the
daughter of Demeter, the goddess of
Agriculture, she has a particularly

~ important role in our lives as rural

people. Demeter is one of Vermont’s
most important symbols; she stands
on top of the golden dome of
Verrnont’s State House and presides
over us all.

Afier her daughter’s cap-
ture, Demeter wandered in despair
for many moons, furious with her
brother Zeus, who had approved
Hades’ rapacious behavior. No fruit
would grow, no grain would ripen,
and the people began to waste away
from hunger and cold. Knowing that
his people would be destroyed by this
famine, Zeus ordered Hades to
release the girl goddess from his
realm of darkness and death. With
Kore’s return, all the earth burst into
flower once again. And yet Kore had
eaten seeds of the pomegranate — a
symbol of marriage and union —
while in Hades’ deathly garden, and
his control over her would never end.
In some versions, the number of
seeds Kore ate indicated the number
of moon cycles she had to spend in
the underworld.

    

And now Kore spends half
of the year in Hades. During that
time, beginning at Mabon, Demeter
mourns her lost daughter and all
becomes dark, bleak and infertile. Yet
with herjoyful return in the spring,
new life arises and the earth is filled H
with light and growth.

Kore is a symbol of the
cycles of change and the balance
between light and dark. This is why
her story is celebrated on the
Equinoxes, for her presence is most
keenly felt at those times of the year
when she is making her journey
between the worlds, when there is
balance between the darkness of
Hades and the shining light of
Demeter.

The pagan chant to Kore
only emphasizes the notion that bal-

‘ ance requires change. The balance of

the earth creates the change of sea-
sons that we see represented in the
story of Kore, Demeter, and Hades.
When I start to think of
balance and of change in a queer '
context, I begin to think of the strug-

gle that Kore must have had between t

the divine feminine represented in
Demeter and the divine masculine
incarnate in Hades. Within each of
us, we struggle to find the balance of
masculine and feminine, dark and
light, summer and winter. The autum-
nal equinox is one of those places in
the cycle of the year where that bal-
ance is easier to manifest.

Starhawk writes of this bal-
ance in The Spiral Dance: “Now day
and night are equal, in perfect bal-
ance, and we give thought to the bal-
ance and flow within our own lives.
 Life declines; the season of bare-
ness is on us, yet we give thanks for
that which we have reaped and
gathered.”

The equinox is the tipping
point in the seasons, andjust for a
moment, as though perched on the
top of a huge wave about to come
crashing down, we are able to see
over the horizon in both directions,
and we have a much larger perspec-
tive than we might normally be able
to have. At this point, although we

are in flux, we are able to see our
feminine and masculine energy
merge and swirl, creating a kaleido-
scope of colors, forms and energy. As
a queer man, this time is sacred to
me, elucidating my conviction that I
need not live in imbalance but rather
may chose to remain between the
worlds, outside of them and among
them all at once.

Queer people have been the
shamans and the sacred mystics for
many cultures for thousands of years.
Many of us believe this is so because
of our ability to live in balance and in
harmony with nature and spirit.
Many of the pagan sabbats celebrate
the moments in the cycle of the sea-
sons when balance is most easily
achieved or when the veil between
the worlds is at its thinnest. Because
of this, these holidays are inherently
queer. It is time to reclaim the story

The equinox is
the tipping point
in the seasons,
and just for a
moment, we
have a much
larger
perspective

than we might
normally be able
to have.

of Kore, the story of her struggle to
maintain her balance between the
dark and the light. Kore’s tale is the 
story of another queer goddess grrl 
walking toward freedom. V

Pippin is a radical faerie walking the
tightrope between Burlington and
Faerie Camp Destiny in Grafton. He
is also known as Christopher
Kaufman, Executive Director of

R. U.1.2? Community Center. He can
be reached at pippin@sover. net.