40
to a state of the earth. The same paradox is also apparent in the celebration of the other seasonal festival, the Flower Dawn with its emphasis on an upward yang direction. The latter festival was observed according to the lunar calendar, and so relating to the main yin manifestation in Heaven, the moon. To intensify this sense of femininity it was celebrated under the full moon of the second lunary. The second moon, being of an even number, also has female associations.
The Flower Dawn day highlighted the awakening Nature and the end of the cold season's hibernation. It celebrated arousal and the drawing out of life from the underground in an upward direction. It was a day to be spent in the open with picnics in 'the wilderness', away from built-up areas. This was in contrast to the centripetal She celebrations, which were focused on one particular, centrally located altar. Flower Dawn was a day of contesting games, food, and kite flying. Female sexuality was one main theme of the festival, people following old conventions as to the coming of age of young women, their betrothals, and coming marriages.
The latter point is somewhat puzzling. The period for betrothals of young people, and also marriages, started generally at, or after, the Chong Yang festival on the ninth day of the ninth moon, the culmination of the wedding season being on New Year's Day and around that time. This autumnal period was the social season that followed after the harvest of rice when the fields were left fallow and the life force of Nature withdrew into the ground.49
It seems then as if the Flower Dawn was a spring alternative for the celebration of relations of affinity. Both She Day and Flower Dawn appeared in a period of the year that saw a seasonal near-balance of the cosmic forces of yin and yang—complete at the Spring Equinox.50 Yin had now started to wane and yang was growing into dominance. In the world of death, the deceased in their yin guise in the graves were growing in ritual importance, while the dead in their yang semblance, as celestial phenomena and manifest in the form of ancestral tablets, were coming out of focus. These two festivals each explored one dimension of Nature's seasonal balance:
49 The autumnal equinox gave towards the end of the year.