The autumn equinox, on or near the twenty second of September, balances the year and carries the month's oldest living observances. Japanese Buddhists keep Higan in the equinox week, as they do in spring, visiting and cleaning the family graves; the name means the other shore, the far bank of the river of existence, and the level crossing of the sun is read as the moment the two shores stand nearest. Modern Pagans keep the equinox as Mabon, the second of the three harvest stations of the Wheel of the Year, a name applied to the festival in the 1970s from a figure of Welsh legend.
The fixed feasts of the month climb toward its end. The Nativity of Mary on the eighth is one of the oldest Marian feasts, nine months after the Immaculate Conception in the reckoning of the Western calendar. The Exaltation of the Holy Cross on the fourteenth descends from the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 335 and gathered to itself the memory of the recovery of the relic of the cross from Persia in the seventh century. Michaelmas, the feast of Michael and All Angels on the twenty ninth, was a quarter day of the English year, when rents fell due and geese were eaten, the archangel's feast woven into the working calendar.
September also usually opens the Jewish Days of Awe: Rosh Hashanah falls in the month more often than not, beginning the ten days that close with Yom Kippur, so the month's equinoctial balance often coincides with the season of judgment and return.
Sources Buddhas and Kami in Japan: Honji Suijaku as a Combinatory ParadigmMark Teeuwen and Fabio Rambelli (eds) with The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Calendar and Community: A History of the Jewish Calendar, Second Century BCE to Tenth Century CESacha Stern