Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon my Darlings.   Today’s post is a Full Moon Monday Magical Media Analysis of ‘The Hare Moon’ episode of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina!    I chose to do this post today because it is the Full Moon in Libra, or the first Full Moon when the Sun is in Aries, which aligns with the timing of this particular episode.    The episode is the Vernal Equinox-themed tale in this series, with the Satanic Witches celebrating the Hare Moon, the Full Moon closest to the Spring Equinox, but it is also stated to be Ostara by the Pagans, meaning that the Hare Full Moon took place on the Equinox in this series.   

The episode is the twenty-fourth of the series and the fourth episode of the third part (as they broke it up into parts instead of seasons).    In many ways, I think that this show could be interpreted as taking place in a reality where all the claims made about witches during the height of Witch Trials hysteria were actually true, including worshipping the Devil, and I am certainly not the first person to see this possible alternate history interpretation of the series.   Not to mention, much of the magick used in the show has a deep basis in many old Folk Magick customs from around Europe, making it a very intriguing series to analyze through a magickal lens!   

Now getting into the actual magickal content of the episode, before the actual Hare Moon sequence, the Satanic Witches, that is to say, Sabrina and her Coven, are struggling with waning magick and have discovered that Lucifer has taken away his gifts of their power because they had overthrown and imprisoned him at the end of part two of the series!   I wanted to give some context here, as it is an episode more than midway through a series, but also because there is an important reference to actual history made when Ambrose is explaining that ‘The Dark Lord’ has taken away their magick.    He stated that the Pendle Coven had insulted him in 1612 and had the same issues with their magick ebbing out which their own Coven was experiencing and also explained that the Pendle Coven was killed by Witch Hunters only months later!   For those interested in Witch Trials history the 1612 Pendle Trials will be very recognizable, and I loved that this little reference was thrown in.   On a side note, this is also the episode where Sabrina’s aunts Hilda and Zelda learn that she has taken on the mantle of Queen of Hell, for in this series she is the daughter of Lucifer and she is fighting for her right to rule Hell against the Prince Caliban. 

There is a carnival that has come to town and is run by the Pagans or Pagan Witches, as they are simply known in the series, but they are technically Pagan deities who are immortals worshipping their own Great God, the Green Man.    In this season they are in opposition to the Satanic Witches, causing much strife.   It is in this episode that Sabrina’s Coven and the Pagans officially meet, and they realize who each other is.   This is a very tense time for Sabrina’s Coven, as they are trying to use the power of the Hare Moon to re-ignite the power of the Coven by doing a Moon Bath and having the Pagans there at the time puts their plan in jeopardy.   There are some interesting interactions between the Pagans and Satanic Witches, notably, Circe is very offended that Hilda keeps spiders as familiars because she believes that animals should be left to live in freedom in the wild of nature, not kept as pets.   This leads Circe to cast a spell on Hilda which causes her to transform into a half spider creature in the next episode!   The transfiguration powers Circe displays are directly attested to in her own appearances in Greek myth, where she famously turned Odyssey’s men into pigs!

Likewise, Medusa turned Roz and Dorcas to stone in this episode, keeping with her Greek mythic powers.   For his part, Pan drove Agatha mad, which is one of his most noted abilities, as he is a wild-horned God who is shown in myth to revel in madness!   Now, I have written an entire Magical Media Analysis of the Pagans as characters in this series in another post, so I will not delve deeper into their mythic ties here.   But I do want to note that it is very interesting that the Pagans are calling the Spring Equinox Ostara, as that is a relatively modern name for the holiday, only being able to clearly be traced back to the nineteenth century when Jacob Grimm (yes of the Grimm Fairytales fame) used it as a possible name for the holiday in his book of German myth titled Teutonic Mythology.   There has been much discourse over the years in magickal and spiritual circles as to whether Ostara is a name that should be used for the holiday and whether the Goddess Eostre was really worshipped in ancient times, but I have to state that deities go by many names over many millennia, so whether or not the name was used in antiquity does not mean it is invalid, and the same can be said for the name for the holiday.   I just wanted to acknowledge that it was an intriguing choice to have the Pagans refer to the holiday this way since they pre-date the earliest known usage of the term for the holiday!

Finally, I want to end this post by stating that having the Satanic Witches celebrating the Hare Moon is a great way to tie together all of the Spring associations to both sets of magickal practitioners.   Sabrina, as the youngest of the Coven, is the one to release the pardoned Rabbit according to the Hare Moon tradition.   The fact that the youngest member is the one to sing a song and release the Rabbit harkens to the fact that Spring is a season associated with youth, maidenhood, and new blooming energies of the Earth after Winter’s slumber.   Rabbits are symbols of the Spring, relating both to innocence and sexuality, which the Springtime certainly represents both.    I think they likely chose to use the term Ostara since it is linked to the Goddess Eostre, who is said to have Rabbits be her most sacred companions.   It also serves to tie into some great folkloric beliefs that witches could transform into Rabbits!   The episode is one of my favorites of this part (or season) and I really love how they worked in themes of rebirth along with folklore, mythology, and history.

I hope you have enjoyed reading my thoughts on this episode of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.   Did you pick up on all of the magickal lore in the episode?  Did I forget to mention a piece of magickal lore featured in this episode?   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

~BLESSED FULL MOON TO ALL!~

Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is a picture of the Moon Bath taken by the Coven during the Hare Moon.   I found the image on https://riverdale.fandom.com/wiki/Hare_Moon.

Tarot Note: I have a page offering tarot and oracle readings for those interested in these services!    I am very happy to be offering these readings to my treasured readers at White Rose of Avalon!  Link to page: https://whiteroseofavalon.life/tarot-and-oracle-readings/

Further Watching/Reading

• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018)
• Teutonic Mythology by Jacob Grimm
• Mythology by Edith Hamilton
• Bulfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch