LASTFROST: THE WORK BETWEEN

February 28, 2026

Hermes Thane

Original Publication: Issue #18: Lastfrost 2026 (Feb-Mar)

I. THE SEASON BETWEEN

The fire in the cave has burned down to ash. Outside, the world is caught between states, not winter anymore, but not spring either. This is the hardest season. The one no one writes songs about.

You survived the longest night. You sat with your shadows, named some of them. Maybe three things. Maybe one. You didn’t excavate your entire psyche, you glimpsed what you were ready to see. That’s the work. For now, that is enough.

Before we go any further, understand this: the descent into the shadow is not a one-time event. The old alchemists knew this. What they called the nigredo (the black phase of dissolution, death, shadow) is cyclical. Next Yule, you’ll go back. Find more. Go deeper. Shadow work isn’t a weekend workshop or a self-help chapter you “complete.” It’s the labor of a lifetime, turning with the Wheel, season after season. You will always find something of yourself you wish to burn away. This is the work of perfecting, purifying, identifying where to strike to create the next facet.

Right now, at Lastfrost, you’re tired. Winter broke you open and left you raw. The light is returning but it’s thin and cold, offering no warmth yet. Ice by night, mud by day. Nothing certain. We slog through the mire of discovery the same way shoots push through frozen earth. They can’t do it gracefully. They crack the soil only to then break themselves open. To grow is destructive, violent work.

You identified your shadows at Yule. Now comes the harder part: making the shadows real. Not banishing or transcending them. They are you and you must make space for them to exist in daylight, without shame.

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II. THE LANGUAGE THE UNCONSCIOUS SPEAKS

You can know something in your head. “I carry anger,” “I hide my grief,” “I’m terrified of being seen” but intellectual knowledge alone doesn’t complete the Work. Your ego, your conscious mind, can name the shadow. It can journal about it, affirm it, talk it through in therapy. That is real work. That is necessary work. But it’s only preparatory work.

The unconscious doesn’t respond primarily to words, therapy-talk, journaling, or affirmations. These are abstractions one layer removed from direct experience. They’re metaphors in the same way alchemical language is metaphor: symbols that point toward transformation but aren’t the transformation itself. They prepare you, the operator, but they don’t transform the materia, your essence.

For that, you need the older language. The one Jung recognized when he said individuation requires bringing the unconscious into consciousness. Not just understanding it, but embodying it. Symbols. Actions. Breath. Posture. The movement of your body through space.

Jean Mountain-Grove articulated this possibility. In Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, she is quoted:

“… since dreams seem to speak from our unconscious mind to our conscious mind, perhaps ritual is the way our conscious mind speaks to our unconscious mind.”

The cognitive work of naming, understanding, talking-through clears the ground. But integration happens when the ego speaks to the shadow in the language the shadow understands. Through doing. Through ritual. Through the conscious mind addressing the unconscious the way the old alchemists described: the operator working upon the essence, speaking not in words but in action.

The act of doing makes your intentions real.

III. AS ABOVE, SO BELOW

A text I like to reference is “The Kybalion” This thin work attributed to “The Three Initiates” appeared in 1908, claiming to preserve ancient Hermetic wisdom. Scholars debate its pedigree, it was likely written by William Walker Atkinson, but what matters for this work is whether it’s useful. It describes seven principles governing how things change and move. I return to it throughout all of my thoughts because those principles give language to patterns I see repeating in the world around us. In the seasons, in the psyche, in the way transformation actually unfolds. Three of these Hermetic principles show themselves clearly at Lastfrost.

Rhythm. “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left; rhythm compensates.” -The Kybalion

You went deep into winter’s darkness. Now the pendulum swings back with equal force. The deeper the descent, the longer and more demanding the emergence. This isn’t punishment. It’s physics. It’s the law written into the turning year.

Walk outside at Lastfrost and watch what the land is teaching. Freeze by night. Thaw by day. Ice forms, cracks, reforms. Water runs, freezes solid, breaks free again. Nothing rests. Everything oscillates.

You must do the same balanced work.

Polarity. “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.” -The Kybalion

Light and dark aren’t enemies. They’re the same thing at different intensities. At the equinox, equal day and equal night, the land holds both simultaneously.

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You’re learning to do the same. The shadow aspects you met at Yule don’t get healed away. They don’t disappear. They become part of your structure. You learn to hold both at once. The tenderness and the rage, the love and the fear, the yearning and the loss. Both, always both.

Correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” -The Kybalion

What’s happening in the natural world is happening in you. Seeds cracking open. Ice splitting. Roots forcing through cold soil. Not metaphorically. Literally. The early alchemists understood this when they said the vessel and the operator mirror each other, and spring shows you the same truth.

You are not separate from this process. You are this process.

The Hermetic principles aren’t instructions. They’re recognitions of what already is. The world works this way, and so do you. Ritual is simply how you align yourself with what’s already true.

IV. THE WORK OF MAKING IT REAL

So what do you do? How do you speak to your unconscious? How do you ritualize integration?

The practices of Lastfrost are alignment. Making the body enact what the mind is trying to understand. This is the point in the Work when the first whitening appears. The alchemists called this the albedo, when the dark matter that has been dissolved begins to purify, to pale, to show the first signs of transformation. The nigredo breaks things down. The albedo is when you start building them back, differently. This shift happens because the operator acts, because you move from witnessing to doing.

Our ancestors understood this. When the equinox came, they moved. They cleared winter’s accumulation from their homes: swept corners, burned bedding, opened doors to let old air escape, marked thresholds with salt and smoke, carried finished things to fire or earth. They were speaking to the part of themselves that doesn’t understand words, the part that learns through hands, through action, through the body moving in space with intention.

The body already knows this work.

Clear the space. Deep cleaning. Move furniture. Sweep corners untouched since autumn. Open windows even though the air is still cold. Let old air out. As you clean, speak out loud or in the quiet of your mind: You’re not hiding anymore. You get to exist here. Your unconscious watches your hands and learns that old things can be cleared, new things can grow.

Mark the thresholds. Doorways are liminal, between-places. The old practitioners marked them with salt, smoke, blood, symbols. Stand in your doorway at equinox and say: I cross as who I’m becoming. Let the threshold recognize you.

Burn or bury what’s finished. The shadow stays, but the hiding of it ends. Write down the parts you’re done pretending about. Burn the paper or bury it in thawing earth. Your unconscious learns that some things end.

Your ritual will look like your life. The form matters less than the doing. What matters is that you act, that you let your body speak the language your thinking mind cannot.

V. CROSSING (THE OLDEST RESOLUTION)

The equinox comes. Equal day, equal night. The hinge of the year.

Four thousand years ago in Babylon, when Akitu arrived, the Babylonian new year, people didn’t just think about starting fresh. They walked through the streets carrying what they’d borrowed, returning it. They paid their debts in coin and grain, hand to hand. They stood before their gods and spoke promises out loud. The ritual lasted twelve days because the body needed time to learn what the mind had decided.

The Romans knew it too. They made their vows to Janus at the turn of their calendar. Janus, the two-faced god who looks backward and forward simultaneously, who stands eternally in doorways, neither inside nor outside. The god of thresholds. They understood that crossing requires both: remembering what was and stepping toward what will be.

We still do this every January when we make resolutions. Most fail, not because we’re weak, but because we keep them in our heads. The ones that work, the ones that actually change us, are the ones you act upon. Join the gym on the first day. Throw out the cigarettes. Walk through the door. Do something with your hands. This is the same work, just older.

The ashes of Yule are behind you and the threshold is ahead. You don’t cross it complete. No one does. You’re still learning to walk with your shadows in daylight, still tired, still figuring out what integration means when other people can see you. But the Wheel turns whether you’re ready or not.

The land is greening. The Green Man is rising. Life erupts everywhere, messy, violent, unstoppable.

So you cross, not because you’ve perfected the Work, but because humans have been crossing thresholds since Babylon, since before, since the first fire in the first cave. You step through the threshold you acknowledged. You walk out of the space you cleared. You carry everything with you: the polished and the rough, the bright and the dark, all of it in the same vessel.

Here’s where it becomes difficult again: Spring doesn’t let you stay hidden. The next phase of the Work is what the old alchemists placed after the albedo, a relational moment. How do you bring this full, complicated self into community? How do you let others see the parts you’ve only just begun to accept?

The cave held your secrets. The threshold marked your becoming. The green world ahead asks for your honesty. That’s Springtide, where we’re going next.

For now we stand here like Janus with cold at our backs (what was) and the thin light on our face (what’s coming). We survived winter. We began the Work. We are not who we were. The Babylonians knew what we keep forgetting: the resolution that stays in your head fails, but the one you act upon with your hands has a chance.

Cross when you’re ready. Cross when you’re not. The Wheel is already turning.

J.G. ∴ Hermes Thane