Autumn Equinox is next Monday evening, September 22nd. Equinox, from the Latin, means “equal night” and is the time when it appears that the Sun crosses the plane of the Earth’s equator.
But how do we know it’s Equinox? Who’s measuring, and how do they do it?
Measuring time and our place in the universe is an ancient task. Many areas of our world are populated with the ruins of what can rightly be called “astronomical observatories”, designed specifically for timekeeping. Think of StoneHenge in England or the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Nearly every culture had a method for measuring time and determining Equinox, through the continually moving positions of Earth, Sun, Moon, and stars. The sites developed for observation became sacred centers for ritual ceremony and celebration of everything from the gift of life, to the bounty of the harvest, to the passage of souls out of this world in death. The sites on the Earth where these monuments and temples were erected were always specific because they were aligned to the Sun and Moon and stars above. And because of this, these sites were also considered the most sacred.
In contemporary culture, the International Astronomers Union measures the Equinox point through a system they call the “International Celestial Reference Frame.” It is based on the ‘galactic radio sources’ that are used to determine Earth's position. In this method, the celestial equator and the Sun’s apparent movement across this plane are no longer central. In other words, from the earliest history of humanity to the present-day, we have arrived at a system for measuring Equinox that is no longer one in which human beings are looking up from the Earth, but is determined by machine technology that measures the Earth from remote locations throughout our galaxy.
As this system for determining Equinox has changed overtime, so, too, have our observations and ceremonies, and the way we determine the sacredness of places on the Earth. Ancient cultures would frown on this shift. Their prophets referred to the separation of human beings from the world of planets and stars as the 'silencing of the stars.' They believed it would herald a time of chaos in the world.