The Great Exhale
On the spring equinox, the Norse traditions that held it sacred, and the particular sweetness of a world tipping back toward the light
Come in... come in... shut the door behind you, the wind and rain has been carrying on something terrible since morning. Hang your coat there. The kettle has only just boiled and I've been saving the good tea for exactly this kind of day. It's the type that can't decide if it's winter anymore, so it throws everything at the trees at once and lets the birds sort it out. Sit down. I want to tell you something.
I woke before dawn today and couldn't say why. That peculiar pulling, like someone had laid a gentle hand on your shoulder in a dream. I went to the window and just stood there. The sky was that strange pale colour it gets in early spring, not quite dark anymore, the first light threading through the branches like it's testing to see if they're ready. And I thought: it's today, isn't it. The balance point. The great exhale.
Today the light and the dark stand equal. And then, very quietly, the way the most important things always happen, the world will tip toward summer. Some call it Ostara, those who keep faith with the old ways. And I want to tell you the truth of it, the real history and the honest uncertainty and all the parts that are still wild and alive underneath the name. Because it deserves that. You deserve that. So pour your tea and let the storm do what it likes outside, and let me tell you what I know.
The name Ostara comes to us from a single thread... a line in an 8th-century manuscript by the English monk Bede the Venerable, who wrote that Anglo-Saxon Pagans once held feasts in honour of a goddess named Ēostre, during the month of Eosturmonath. That is all we have of her. One monk. One paragraph. One wistful mention of something already gone, like finding a single wildflower pressed in an old book and not knowing whose hands put it there.
The German philologist Jacob Grimm tried to reconstruct her in 1835; connected her name to the Proto-Germanic root meaning "to shine," traced her through the rising of the sun, the light coming up out of the east. He believed she must have been a goddess of radiant spring, of dawning. It is beautiful, yet it is still reconstruction. The Old Norse sources are silent on her. She was Anglo-Saxon and West Germanic before she was ever Norse.
I tell you this, because I think honesty is part of the practice. We are not diminished by uncertainty. We are only asked to carry it honestly, the way you carry a candle in the wind, cupped in your hands, not pretending the wind isn't there.
What is in the Norse sources, what is real and documented and genuinely extraordinary, is something called the Dísablót. And this is where I always feel a particular ache of recognition, the way you feel it when you read something that names a thing you have always known without having words for.
The Dísablót was a blót (a sacrificial rite) held in honour of the Dísir. The Dísir are female ancestral and guardian spirits. Not gods in the way we usually picture gods, elevated and remote. Something closer. The grandmothers of your bloodline, made into spirit. The watchers. The ones who kept hold of the thread of your family line through every hard winter and lean year and loss that should have broken everything. They are mentioned in the Hervarar Saga, the Víga-Glúms Saga, Egils Saga, and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla... and in the Saga of Olaf Tryggvason they are described as being honoured in late February or March at Gamla Uppsala, in a ceremony so important that it brought people from all across the land, a week-long gathering of sacrifice and trade and community.
The 11th-century chronicler Adam of Bremen described a great spring sacrifice at Uppsala near the equinox. The Hervarar Saga gives us one of the only glimpses into the rite itself: it was performed by a woman (Alfhildr, daughter of King Álfr of Álfheim) who reddened a hörgr (a stone altar) with sacrificial blood. Women held this ceremony. Women called the Dísir home.
That image has never left me. A woman at a cold stone altar in the thin early-spring light, arms raised. Calling the grandmother-spirits back from wherever the winter takes them. We are still here. We made it through. Come home. There is something in it that makes the back of my throat ache, the way old songs do, the ones that were written before anyone thought to explain them.
And then there was the Sigrblót, the victory sacrifice. Snorri tells us there were three great annual sacrifices in the Norse year: at Winter Nights for a good harvest, at Yule for fertility, and in the spring for victory. Victory over the dark. Victory in the growing season and the trading season and all the bold-faced living of the warm half of the year. The community turning outward, shoulders squared, ready. We are going back out into the world. Let it go well. We intend it to go well.
Underneath every rite and every offering and every stone altar reddened with the first warmth of spring, are the Landvættir. The spirits of the land itself. Not abstract forces. This hill. This river bend. The particular intelligence of the woods behind your house that you walk through in a different mood every time and yet always come home from feeling somehow more yourself. The spirit in the old maple tree you always touch as you pass it, without quite knowing why you started doing that.
Dr. Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen (historian of religion at Uppsala and Copenhagen), the scholar whose work has given me the most solid ground to stand on when I try to understand all of this, talks about Nordic Animism as the knowledge and practices of engaging and respecting the gods and spirits that inhabit the landscapes, the cycles of seasons, the long history of Northwestern Europe. He says the world is filled with persons, some of them human and some of them very much not, and that all of them deserve respect.
"Mythology is a language that places knowledge of relation into relation with people, in a way that appeals to our emotions and imaginations. It is a language that reaches deep into our instinctual system and our whole human constitution in order to make relational knowledge workable for us."
— Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen, Green Dreamer PodcastI heard that and I felt something settle in me like a stone into soft ground. Because that is what I have always felt, standing at the window in the dark before dawn, watching the light come back. That there is more going on here than I can see. That the world is full of company, if I remember to look for it. That the seasons are a conversation I am always either participating in or ignoring, and the difference between those two things is enormous.
His work is careful, too, about something I care about very much; he keeps this knowledge well away from the people who would make it ugly. Nordic animism is not blood and soil in the nationalist sense. It is about the actual soil. The actual blood of the earth... the groundwater, the spring floods, the mud under the frost. It belongs to anyone willing to stand in honest relationship with the place where they live and the beings who share it. That is all. That is the whole of the requirement.
Rune Rasmussen ~ Nordic Animism
So. We gather what survived the centuries of forgetting and we weave it together... the Dísir and the Sigrblót and the Landvættir and the fragmentary memory of a dawn goddess whose name holds the light of the rising sun... and we give the threshold a name we can call out into the dark. I do not think that is fraud. I think that's what living traditions have always done. I think that's what we are made for, those of us who feel the equinox before we can name it, who wake before dawn and stand at cold windows for no reason we can explain.
The land does not need us to have the perfect theology. It needs us to show up.
This is a ritual for one person at a kitchen hearth, or a fireplace, or a table where the candle is the only light. It is sized for a quiet morning or a stormy evening. It asks nothing of you except that you mean it ... and I think you do, or you would not have read this far.
It is rooted in what we know of the Norse spring: the honouring of the Dísir, the offering to the Landvættir, the Sigrblót's tradition of speaking plainly what you intend for the year ahead. What you will not find here is performance. There is no audience for this. It is a conversation between you and the world, and conversations do not need to be impressive. They need to be honest.
Gather
- A white or pale gold candle, your hearth-light
- A bowl of clean water
- Something to offer ; bread, grain, honey, or milk
- Something green and alive: a spring bulb, a budding twig, a handful of new moss
- A second candle for the threshold or windowsill
- Your tea, if you like. You are allowed to be comfortable for this.
Light your hearth candle. Sit down. Take three slow breaths and with each one, let yourself actually land in this moment. You are here, in this body, in this particular house, on the morning the world tips back toward the light. Your to-do list can wait. Your worry about doing this correctly can be put aside as there is no "incorrectly," only honestly or not. Feel the warmth of the cup in your hands. Let the candle do what candles do. Then begin.
Say the name of your place out loud. The hill, the tree line, the direction the wind is coming from this morning. Name the water nearest to you... the river, the creek, the rain moving through the gutters. Tell them you have noticed the shift. Tell them you felt the season change before you could explain it. Speak your own truth. In the animist understanding that roots this practice, this act of noticing, of saying aloud, "I know you are here, I know you are persons, I am paying attention," is itself a sacred act. Thank them for carrying the winter. Ask nothing yet. Only witness them.
These are the ancestral feminine powers... the grandmother-spirits, the ones who have been watching over your threshold since before you had a name for yourself. Call to them the way you would call to someone you have missed. You might say: I remember you. I carry you with me. I felt you in the long dark months when the world was still. Guard this threshold, guard this growing season, as you have always guarded those who came before me. Put your hand over your heart. Let yourself feel held for a moment. Because you are. You have always been.
Hold the bowl of water in both hands. Let the warmth of your palms move into it. Water is sacred in the animist world; springs and wells and river bends are places where the Landvættir gather, where the old rites are performed, where people bring their prayers and their grief and their hope alike. Carry your bowl to the doorstep. Pour a small amount onto the earth. What the land gives, you give back. That is the whole of the reciprocity. It is not complicated. The oldest things rarely are.
Place your bread or honey or grain at the threshold. The Norse blóts include feasts shared between the living community and the powers of land and sky... the meat and the mead pass between them, the sustaining things given freely. Your piece of bread on the doorstep is that same conversation, only quieter. It counts. It has always counted. Do not let anyone tell you that the small offerings are less real.
Carry the second candle to your doorstep or set it on the sill that faces the world. Light it. This is your signal: I am here. This house is alive and paying attention. I am part of the wider community of beings and I have not forgotten it. Watch the flame for a moment. Let yourself be someone who lights candles on equinox mornings and means something by it. That is a good thing to be. That is an ancient thing to be.
The Sigrblót was the victory sacrifice, the spring dedication of will toward the warm half of the year. Before your candle, speak plainly what you are tending. Your work. Your healing. Your grief that still wants tending. Your craft. Your longing. The relationship you are trying to grow toward. Say it the way you would say it to a trusted friend, honestly, without flourish, without apology. The Dísir and the Landvættir do not need your performance. They need your truth. They have been waiting for it.
Thank the Dísir. Thank the Landvættir of this particular place, this hill and water and treeline that has been here through the whole cold dark without you saying a word to it. Thank the light that has been making its quiet way back since Yule, patient as anything, certain of its own returning. Blow out the hearth candle. Let the threshold candle finish its burning. You have done what people have done at cold stone altars in the pale March light for longer than either of us can count. You have shown up. You have said: I am here. I know you are here. Let us tend this together. In the animist understanding, that is the whole practice. That is everything.
A word on the Berkana rune : ᛒ : the birch. The birch is the first tree to bud in the northern spring, coming back from bare and grey to trembling pale green seemingly between one morning and the next, as if it never once doubted that spring was coming. Berkana carries the energy of birth, of new beginnings, of the quiet ferocity of things that intend to grow regardless of what the winter thought of them. If you work with the runes, draw Berkana over your offering, or trace it on the doorframe, or simply press your finger to your own palm and make the shape there. You are invoking the birch. You are saying: I, too, know how to come back.
ᛒThe storm is still going outside. I can hear it moving through the tops of the trees, that particular sound — like the forest is having a conversation too large for human ears. I think it probably is.
I want to leave you with this, the thing that Rune Rasmussen's work keeps returning me to, which is this: the Dísir are not waiting for you to have the right words. The Landvættir of your particular patch of earth do not require that you know their names. What they have asked for, across the centuries and the sagas and the long quiet years when this knowledge was driven underground by modernity and forgetting is simply your attention. Your presence. The willingness to stop in the yard on an equinox morning and say: something is happening here that is larger than me, and I am glad to be standing in it.
The hyacinths are already up, you know. There they sit in the mud, small and determined and entirely unimpressed by the weather. The land does not wait for us to feel ready. It was never asking for our permission.
But it does notice when we show up. I am certain of that. I have felt it in the way the air changes when you step outside and actually look, when you let the season land on you instead of moving through it like it's something to get past. The Landvættir lean toward you a little. The morning feels inhabited. The old conversation, the one that has been going on since before any of us were born, opens up a space and waits to see if you will fill it.
So go, love. Light the candle. Pour the water on the earth. Stand at the threshold and name what you are growing this year, plainly and without apology. The season has already begun... it began this morning when you felt the shift before you knew what it was. There is still time to step fully into it.
Sources & Further Reading: Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen's work is available at nordicanimism.com, through his podcast Nordic Animism, and in his book The Nordic Animist Year. Historical sources on Dísablót include the Hervarar Saga, Víga-Glúms Saga, Egils Saga, and Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla. Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis (11th century) documents the Uppsala spring rites. The sole primary historical source for Ēostre is Bede the Venerable's De temporum ratione (8th century). Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (1835) contains the earliest modern scholarly reconstruction of Ostara as a spring goddess.
Other Suggestions: Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting the Living World; David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous; David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
1 comment
I enjoy reading all of your work! Thank you for your insight and prose.