Fire, Ash, and the Crescent Moon: When Three Sacred Seasons Arrive Together

This year, the world is inside three different calendars of reckoning at once. That's worth paying attention to.

Something unusual is happening in the first weeks of 2026. On February 17th, more than a billion people around the world welcomed the Lunar New Year — specifically the Year of the Fire Horse, a combination that only returns once every sixty years. Then on March 1st, Ramadan began, calling 1.8 billion Muslims into a month of fasting, prayer, and heightened devotion. On March 5th, Ash Wednesday opened the Christian season of Lent, marking foreheads with mortality and stepping forty days toward Easter.

Three traditions. Three ancient rhythms. All arriving in the same narrow window of weeks.

The easy response is to note the coincidence and reach for a feel-good summary: we are all more alike than we know. But the more interesting move — the one that actually respects all three traditions — is to look at what each of them asks, and of whom, and what happens when the machinery of sacred tradition runs specifically through the lives of women.

The Fire Horse and the Daughters Nobody Wanted

Start with the one that rarely makes the interfaith conversation: the Fire Horse.

In Chinese astrology, the Fire Horse year arrives every sixty years, when the element of fire aligns with the horse in the sixty-year zodiac cycle. The fire horse is described as a symbol of bold action and risk-taking, associated with disrupting the existing order. Horses are revered in Chinese culture — the saying mǎ dào chéng gōng translates as "upon the arrival of a horse, the success is secured." The Fire Horse, with its doubled intensity, should be a year of extraordinary energy and possibility.

And for men, broadly, it is. For women in Japan, the story was something else entirely.

There is a superstition, specific to Japan, that a woman born in the year of the fire horse has a strong temperament, shortens her husband's life, and brings ruin to their families. The origin is traced to an Edo-period story about Yaoya Oshichi, a young woman executed for arson after setting fires in a desperate attempt to see a man she loved. Her birth year was retroactively assigned to a Fire Horse year, and her passion — her refusal to accept limitation quietly — was transformed into a warning about female dangerousness itself.

The consequences in 1966, the last Fire Horse year, were measurable and stark. Births in Japan dropped by roughly 25%, leaving a visible notch in the population pyramid that demographers still point to today. The reason wasn't war, famine, or disease. It was a superstition centered almost entirely on women. Families used contraception, shifted birth records, and in some cases sought abortions — not because they feared a difficult year, but because they feared having daughters.

Traits that might be admired in men — assertiveness, ambition, intensity — became liabilities when attached to women. A strong-willed man is a leader; a strong-willed woman is stubborn.

As one business journalist who was himself born in 1966 put it: "The problem lies not with women born in hinoeuma years, but with the male-dominated society that has allowed discrimination based on birth to continue."

The research suggests that 2026 will see no comparable panic — arranged marriages have dwindled, Japan is more urban and secular, and the cultural conditions that made the superstition so powerful have mostly dissolved. But the story itself remains one of the most precise case studies in how a tradition — even a non-religious one, rooted in culture and cosmology rather than scripture — can transform a woman's very existence into a problem to be managed.

The Same Sky, Two Fasts

Ramadan and Lent both involve fasting. There the surface resemblance ends, but it's a useful place to start. Ramadan calls for total abstention from food and water from dawn to sunset for an entire month — a physically demanding practice that reshapes the daily rhythm of life. Lent asks for fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and for forty days of giving something up — a quieter, more interior season.

Both traditions locate spiritual transformation in the body. Both use hunger as a kind of clarifying instrument: strip away what you consume and something else becomes audible. Both traditions, at their best, are also communal — the pre-dawn suhoor meal, the breaking of the fast at iftar, the parish fish fry on Friday, the family gathered around a table rearranged by Lenten sacrifice.

And both traditions, in practice, have organized the labor of that communal sustenance around women. The fast is individual and devotional. The feeding is collective and gendered. Women are the infrastructure of religious life across both traditions — planning, cooking, organizing, sustaining the domestic conditions under which men's spiritual practice becomes possible. What has been less consistently available to women in many branches of both faiths is the authority to lead, interpret, and decide.

This is not unique to Islam or Christianity. It is a critique of how patriarchal cultures have reached into every tradition and arranged things to their preference, then called the arrangement sacred.

Religions Are Not Inherently Good or Bad

Here is the most important thing to say clearly: neither Islam nor Christianity is essentially, irreducibly a system of female suppression. Both traditions carry within them texts and histories of radical female dignity.

The Quran insists that men and women were created from a single soul.

It grants women rights to property, inheritance, and divorce that were historically more advanced than those available to women in Christian Europe at the same period. Khadijah — the Prophet's first wife — was a successful merchant who employed Muhammad before their marriage, and she was the first Muslim, the one who recognized and affirmed his revelation when he doubted it himself.

Christianity's own founding stories are quietly subversive on this score. Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection — a woman, in a culture that considered women's testimony legally inadmissible. Jesus spoke openly with the Samaritan woman at the well, discussed theology with Mary of Bethany while her sister Martha worked, and protected a woman from stoning in a story that implicitly indicted the men holding the rocks. These are not incidental details. They are the core of the tradition.

The problem has never been the revelation. The problem has been the interpreters — human beings, overwhelmingly male, existing inside deeply patriarchal cultures, who had both the authority and the incentive to make God sound like the status quo.

Religions are not inherently good or bad. They are practiced. And in the practicing, they take the shape of the hands that hold them.

What This Convergence Asks of Us

The Fire Horse arrives once every sixty years carrying an energy that Chinese medicine practitioners describe as "fast-moving and uncompromising" — a year that "moves, ignites, and refuses stagnation." The same year, Ramadan and Lent arrive together, calling their respective communities into slowness, hunger, and introspection. The contrast is almost comical: the cosmological year is demanding speed and disruption; the religious calendars are demanding stillness and sacrifice.

But there's a thread connecting them that feminist thinking is well-positioned to pull. All three traditions, in their dominant cultural expressions, have historically pointed to women as the problem — the dangerous Fire Horse daughter, the woman whose testimony doesn't count, the woman who must be veiled or modest or covered or quiet so that the spiritual order can be maintained. In each case, what is being managed is not actually danger. What is being managed is female power and the threat it poses to male authority dressed in the language of the sacred.

The women who have stayed inside their traditions despite this — who have loved their faith enough to refuse to leave it to the men — are doing something both demanding and important. The female imam. The Catholic theologian arguing from scripture for women's ordination. The Muslim feminist scholar excavating the egalitarian core of early Islamic practice from beneath centuries of male jurisprudence. These are not anomalies. They are the long reclamation project that happens inside religion, and it is quietly ongoing.

The Honest Conversation

True encounter between traditions — not the polite kind, but the kind that might actually produce something — requires honesty about what each tradition has taken as well as what it has given. It requires Christians to sit with the history of crusade, colonialism, and missionary violence. It requires Muslims to engage unflinchingly with how women's autonomy has been curtailed in the name of faith in many communities. It requires everyone to acknowledge that the cosmological and cultural traditions that shape us — including the sixty-year zodiac — have not been neutral about women's place.

We are simultaneously in a Fire Horse year — a year that historically disrupts existing orders — and in two of the great seasons of religious introspection. That is an unusual alignment. Disruption and reflection at the same time. Momentum and stillness. Fire and ash.

Maybe that's the invitation: to bring the Fire Horse energy into the seasons of fasting. Not to burn everything down, but to ask, in the quiet that fasting creates, which parts of our traditions we have accepted as sacred that are actually just old, inherited fear of women who refuse to be small.

The ash says: you are dust.

The fast says: you are not only your hunger.

The Fire Horse says: now is not the time to play small.

All three might be right.

The women born in 1966 who were told they were too dangerous to exist grew up anyway. They are in their sixties now — the age of completion and rebirth in Chinese tradition. That seems worth noting.

As a woman in my fifties - I celebrate. Now is the time for woman around the globe. We will not be silenced.

It is not the time to play small