Everlasting God, you have ordained and constituted in a wonderful order the ministries of angels and mortals: Mercifully grant that, as your holy angels always serve and worship you in heaven, so by your appointment they may help and defend us here on earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. — The Book of Common Prayer
In the Episcopal Church, September 29 is the feast of St. Michael and All Angels. For Catholics, this day has a slightly different designation: the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, the Archangels. Meanwhile, some old-school Pagans and Wiccans refer to the Fall Equinox as Michaelmas, suggesting a correlation between veneration of the angels and the shift from summer into fall — a shift from the light into the dark half of the year.
Who is Saint Michael? He is listed as one of the seven archangels according to the ancient Jewish text the Book of Enoch, and shows up several times in the Bible, most notably in the Old Testament book of Daniel and the New Testament book of Revelation. His name literally means “Who is like God?” Which implies a sense of awe or reverence toward how the holiness of God sets God apart from all of creation. Michael is perhaps best known as the angel who expelled the devil from heaven, and so much of the iconography of Michael depicts him as a military figure, wielding a sword and triumphing over a submissive demon.
That may sound patriarchal and dualistic, but I think this is why the fall equinox connection matters. Michael is an angel of light, and the devil, ironically called Lucifer (the light-bearer) represents darkness. But at the time of the equinox, we shift from light to dark (or vice versa, depending on which hemisphere we are in). If it seems that the dark is winning as summer gives way to fall, the Archangel reminds us that light will overcome darkness in the end — even if “the end” is six months away.
Mystically speaking, Michael defeats Lucifer not to imply that light “defeats” darkness, but to remind us that darkness cannot triumph over light. There is a nondual unity between darkness and light that sees darkness not as bad or evil, but as a rhythmic counterpart to light. Just as music requires silence, or words require a page, so — in the folksy words of Arlo Guthrie, “You can’t have a light without a dark to stick it in.” If we view darkness as the domain of evil, we can get caught up in a dualistic view. But when we acknowledge darkness as bringing us the gift of rest, then the relationship between light and dark becomes unified in a greater (nondual) reality.
Quotation Source: The Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 244. Arlo Guthrie quote from “The Neutron Bomb” on Arlo Guthrie and Peter Seeger, Precious Friend.