As we approach the Autumn Equinox, I find myself returning to a question that has accompanied me for many years:
What did the ancients understand about time that we have forgotten?
We are taught to experience time as a straight line. We move forward, we achieve, we accumulate, we leave things behind.
And yet, the deeper I enter into Ancient Greek wisdom, the more I encounter another understanding.
Life moves in circles.
Mircea Eliade called this ancient understanding the myth of eternal return: through myth and ritual, human beings could step beyond ordinary, linear time and re-enter sacred time, returning to the primordial patterns that give meaning to existence.
This matters deeply to me today.
Because perhaps we do not always need to keep moving forward but we need to return. To what we have forgotten. To what remains unfinished.
To what is essential. To the deeper rhythm beneath the noise of our everyday lives.
The Solar Portals
In The Mysteries of Light, we explore this ancient understanding through the Orphic vision of the Solar Portals.
The Solar Wheel of the year becomes an inner clock of the soul. Each Solstice and Equinox is not only an astronomical turning point, but an invitation to an inner initiation.
The Autumn Equinox opens the movement of release and return toward the inner world.
From now until the Winter Solstice, Nature begins to withdraw her forces. We are invited to do the same: to release what is no longer needed, to strengthen our virtues, to restore harmony and healthy boundaries, and to prepare the inner ground for the rebirth of Light.
We descend not because the Light has disappeared, but because we are being asked to discover where the Light lives when we can no longer see it outside ourselves.
What if the myths are maps?
Almost everyone knows the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
But what does Persephone's descent really symbolize? What is Demeter searching for? What does the Underworld represent?
Why must the seed disappear beneath the Earth before new life can emerge?
For me, these questions are where the Mysteries begin.
Ancient Greek myths are not simply beautiful stories belonging to a distant past. They carry layers of symbolism, cosmology and spiritual knowledge. They can become maps of transformation, revealing movements of descent and return, fragmentation and wholeness, death and rebirth, forgetting and remembrance.
Learning to enter, embody and decode this symbolic language is at the heart of my practices for decades now.
I have walked this path for many years, not only as an artist and researcher, but as a devotee of Orpheus and the Orphic Mysteries.
The Orphic Light has become an inner thread guiding my research, my ceremonies, my artistic work and my own path of remembrance.
Again and again, it brings me back to the same mystery:
beneath fragmentation there is wholeness,
beneath forgetting there is remembrance,
and within us there is a spark of Light waiting to be awakened.
Archeological site of Eleusis. The Ploutonion cave, the place where Persephone descended to and ascended from the underworld each year, in effect an entrance to the Underworld.
Autumn Equinox, Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 3:05 a.m., Greece
What I will do this Equinox
On the day of the Equinox, I will find a quiet place in Nature and stand for a while in stillness, with both feet rooted on the Earth.
I will feel myself standing at this extraordinary point of balance between Light and Darkness, and I will breathe.
I will ask myself:
What has completed its cycle in me?
What am I ready to release?
What is essential that I want to carry with me into the months of darkness?
I will not search for the answers. I will allow them to come through my body, through silence, through whatever wants to be remembered.
I will choose one thing that I am ready to release and consciously offer it back to the Earth, with gratitude for what it has taught me.
Then I will place my hands over my heart and turn my attention from the diminishing light outside toward the Light within.
And I will whisper:
I release what has completed its cycle.
I protect what is essential.
I remember the Light within me.
If you feel called, wherever you are in the world, you can join me in this simple practice.
For a few moments, we can enter the Equinox together, each in our own place, each in our own silence, remembering that we are part of the same great cycle of Light.
With love,
Apostolia
