The summer solstice holds great significance in pagan traditions and beliefs. Paganism, a diverse set of spiritual practices that celebrate the natural world and its cycles, views the summer solstice as a time of powerful energy and spiritual connection. The summer solstice occurs when the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky, resulting in the longest day of the year and the shortest night. Pagans see this as a symbol of the triumph of light over darkness, and it serves as a reminder of the ever-turning wheel of the year, marking the midpoint of the solar year. In pagan communities, the summer solstice is often celebrated with various rituals and festivities. Bonfires are commonly lit to honor the Sun and its life-giving energy.
Summer Solstice
Bart Everson of A Celebration of Gaia observes how those in the United States have forgotten the meaning of the summer solstice:
“Sadly, most Americans are ignorant of this seasonal moment. We seem marginally more familiar with the winter solstice, probably because of the vast commercial pressures that have accreted around that time in late December. Even so, most of us remain unaware that the winter solstice, our time of maximum tilt away from the sun, is the inverse, the opposite, the antithesis of the summer solstice. Six months removed from one another, we might regard these two celestial events as antipodes, points on opposite sides of a circle representing the cycle of the seasons.
“The poetics of the winter solstice are perhaps slightly better understood in our popular culture: the birth of light in the depths of darkness. What, then, are the poetics of the summer solstice? If it is truly the inverse of the winter solstice, then it stands to reason that it must be the birth of dark at the peak of lightness, or the dying of the light at its very summit.
“Perhaps this is why Americans have forgotten the summer solstice and the Midsummer holiday. We love summer, with its connotations of fun in the sun and trips to the beach. You’d think we’d be interested in celebrating this moment when the sun is at its zenith. But at this moment of the sun’s greatest power, it begins to decline, to wane, to die. There’s something subversive about recognizing this, something almost offensive to our national character. Our nation is caught up in a fantasy of endless growth and constant improvement. Acknowledging limits established by nature goes against our grain”
The Summer Solstice is known in Contemporary Neo-Paganism as Litha or Midsummer. Neo-Pagan mythology often marks this as the moment the sun god meets his death, though sometimes that event is reserved for the cross-quarter in August or the autumnal equinox in September.
“This is the time of Summer Solstice – the time when the light part of the day is longest. In our part of the world, light is in Her fullness. She spreads Her radiance, Her fruits ripen, Her greenery is everywhere, the cicadas sing. Yet as Light reaches Her peak, our closest contact with the Sun, She opens completely, and the seed of darkness is born.
“As it says in the tradition, this is the time of the rose, blossom and thorn, fragrance and blood. The story of Old tells that on this day Goddess and God embrace, in a love so complete, that all dissolves, into the single Song of ecstasy that moves the worlds. Our bliss, fully matured, given over, feeds the Universe and turns the wheel. We join the Beloved and Lover in the Great Give-Away of our Creativity, our Fullness of Being.”
To symbolize this, Livingstone distributes flowers, fruit, and the like to ritual participants, who then give away this bounty by casting it into the central fire.
NaturalPantheist of the Nature is Sacred blog recites the following from ADF Solitary Druid Fellowship ritual on this day:
“As I stand here on this celebration of Litha, the sacred wheel of the year continues to turn. As my ancestors did in times before and my descendants may do in times to come, I honour the old ways. This is the time of the Summer Solstice, Alban Heruin, the Light of the Shore. On this longest day of the year, when the warm sun has reached its height and the world around me is abundant and green, it is time to honour great Sol as it shines down brightly upon the earth. In the midst of the warmth, light and beauty of the summer sun, it is a time to look forward and to anticipate the coming harvest as the days begin to shorten and we head once again towards winter. I give thanks for the blessings of the great star.”
Jon Cleland Host of the Naturalistic Paganism yahoo discussion group suggests kayaking local rivers or lakes, hiking in the woods, and holding a ritual in the forest. He also takes this as a time to celebrate marriage, as well as to consume mead:
“Mead is often consumed – celebrating the honey of our marriage and the season. Mead is honey wine, and the full moon closest to Litha is traditionally called the mead moon or the honey moon (hence the name “honeymoon” for the vacation after a wedding).”
Áine Órga of HeartStory.org writes how the summer solstice is a time for harnessing the energy of the season:
“I often conceive of life as being a wild and dangerous dance. It starts slow, speeds over time, careening wildly, until it gradually slows from exhaustion, and finally dies. This pattern is visible in human and animal life, but also in the changing seasons on Earth, and throughout Cosmos as stars and planets are born, collide, and die, only to be reborn again.
“The Summer Solstice is the peak of the dance. It is that time in your time, that moment on Earth, those millennia in the life of a star, when performance and creativity are at their most prolific. It is the time when dreams are manifested, art created, offspring born.
“Beyond it is the inevitable spiral back down. But right now is the time to dance.”
Why we celebrate the summer solstice
Today, the Northern Hemisphere celebrates the summer solstice, the longest day of the calendar year (happy winter solstice to the Southern Hemisphere!). Around 1:00AM, the sun was directly above the Tropic of Cancer—and though I was fast asleep at that precise moment, along with most of my fellow East Coasters, I probably woke up earlier than I normally would, and will go to sleep far later. That’s the beauty of the longest day of the year.
But while the day is, technically speaking, an astronomical occasion, its historical and cultural significance extends far beyond the relative length of the daylight. The word solstice itself comes from the Latin, from sol (sun) and stare or sistere (to stand or stop), and its celebration dates back to ancient pre-Christian tradition. For the Greeks, it would, according to some calendars, mark the start of the new year—and the month-long countdown toward the Olympics. It was, too, often the annual occasion for the festival of Kronia, to honor the god Cronus, the patron of agriculture. The day was marked not only by the typical feasts and games, but by an even more remarkable occurrence: for once, slaves could participate in the festivities along with the freemen, joined in equality for a single day.
For the Romans, the solstice was the occasion for another unique exception to everyday life: on the first day of the festival of Vestalia, married women could, for one day only, enter the temples of the vestal virgins. There, they would be allowed to make offerings to Vesta, the goddess of hearth and home.
Many Native American tribes celebrated the longest day of the year with a Sun Dance, while the Mayas and Aztecs used the day as a marker by which to build many of their central structures, so that the buildings would align perfectly with the shadows of the two solstices, summer and winter. In many European pagan traditions, the solstice was called Litha, a day to balance the elements of fire and water, while for the druids, it was, simply, midsummer, a night and day with properties like no other. According to tradition, certain plants—St. John’s wort, roses, rue, verbena, and the like—acquired properties on the year’s shortest night that they wouldn’t have if picked at any other time. And on this evening, if you were very lucky, you might even catch a glimpse of faeries, who favored midsummer to reveal themselves to the common folk. (Rub fern seeds on your eyelids at midnight’s stroke if you want to spy one—but if you do, be sure to come equipped with rue, lest the pixies lead you astray). It’s only too clear why Shakespeare set his famous comedy during the magic of midsummer’s evening.
The day also figures in religious calendars. With the rise of Christianity and accompanying threat to pagan traditions, the summer solstice became celebrated in many parts of Europe as the day of St. John the Baptist—St. John’s Eve in Denmark, the Feast of St. John in France, the festival of St. John the Baptist in Spain, Ivan Kupala Day in Russia. The Festival of Ivanje in Croatia. In Jewish tradition, it’s known as Tekufat Tammuz, the solstice of the month Tammuz, and legend has it that, on this particular day, no one has a shadow.
But perhaps my favorite story of the solstice comes from the East, from Chinese legend. While the day itself is a celebration of yin, earth, and femininity (in contrast to the winter celebration of yang), there is a separate tradition that I find oddly moving: that of the Duanwu, the Dragon Boast Festival. While Duanwu is always held around the solstice, it does not always fall on the actual astronomical date. Instead, it takes places on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. Why the strange timing?
The origins of Duanwu are uncertain. But my favorite story is this: it is the exact day on which the poet Qu Yuan committed suicide, in 278 BC. Qu was a descendant of the Chu royal family and rose to prominence both for his lyrical verse and his ministerial prowess (he was both Confucian scholar and, at one time, a minister of the Chu State). When the Chu Kingdom fell to the Qin, Qu drowned himself in despair in the Miluo River. But that’s not where the story ends. Qu was so well-loved—and his display of patriotism so moving—that the townspeople took to their boats in the hopes of saving him, or at least recovering his corpse. When that failed, they decided to throw rice, wrapped in bamboo and reeds, into the river to feed the fish, in the hope that the fish would then leave Qu’s body alone. Each year, on the anniversary of his death, they would repeat the ritual. And so, Duanwu was born—except today, instead of throwing the bamboo-wrapped glutinous rice (called zongzi) into the water, you eat it yourself (and the wrappers no longer contain simply rice; depending on the variation, zongzi can have pork, egg yolk, chestnuts, mushrooms, cabbage, chicken, red bean, and on and on).
There are myriad traditions, myriad histories, myriad reasons to choose from when you celebrate the sun’s longest daytime path. But at the end, we may not need any of them. Maybe, the reason we want to commemorate the day is much more prosaic—and fundamental—than any story or legend will ever be. On this day, we may, quite simply, be the happiest we’ve been in a long time.
Psychologists have long suspected a link between our level of happiness and the amount of sunlight in the day, and even though much of the data has been self-reported and anecdotal (it’s challenging, though not impossible, to run a controlled study with adequate data that spans an entire year), there have been some experimental results that suggest that, comparatively speaking, individuals suffers greater levels of depression when daylight decreases. That is, if you move someone to a more northern latitude (so, one where the days are relatively shorter), he is more likely to suffer an increase in symptoms of anxiety; move him to a more southern latitude, and the opposite is the case. Still, until relatively recently, data collection has hampered a more systematic approach to the question.
Enter social media. In 2011, a group of researchers decided to look at the tweets of some 2.4 million people from all over the world, for a period that ranged from February 2008 to January 2010, selecting 400 tweets at random for each individual. They wanted to see if emotional content varied as a function of the time of day, the day of the week, and the amount of actual daylight (i.e., the season). They found meaningful differences on all fronts—but most significantly for this discussion, they discovered that what mattered most when it came to the time of the year was not the absolute amount of daylight but the relative change in that daylight. That is, was the day, relatively speaking, longer or shorter than the day that came before? When the change in daylight was positive (i.e., in the approach to the summer solstice), people expressed significantly higher positive affect than they did when that change was negative (i.e., approaching the winter solstice).
By the time the solstice rolls around, then, we’ve been on a happiness up-slope for half the year—a build up of positivity if ever there were. No wonder the urge to celebrate runs high. And an even greater reason: it’s all downhill from here on out, relatively speaking – at least for the next six months.
It seems somehow wrong, though, to end such a day on a down note. Better perhaps to turn back to ancient traditions, and see if we can’t increase our luck for the months to come, on this most magical day of midsummer. The options are many. You can light a bonfire—and jump over it if you dare. Succeed, and you may find yourself finding your true love. You can leave a piece of gold jewelry in the sunlight, and wait while it soaks in its power. Wear the jewelry later, and you may find that power transferred to your own life in the coming year. I, for one, may have missed my window. As I found out earlier today, I would have done well to have spent the last night keeping wakeful watch amidst a circle of standing stones (how sad that Stonehenge is so far from New York). Legend has it, such a stunt could kill me or drive me mad—but if it didn’t, would turn me into a great bard, or storyteller.
Image credit: Stonehenge 2013 sunrise: Stonehenge Stone Circle, Flickr. Midsummer Night's Dream, Titania and Bottom: Edwin Henry Landseer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. Zongzi: Chen Zhao, Flickr.
References
Golder SA, & Macy MW (2011). Diurnal and seasonal mood vary with work, sleep, and daylength across diverse cultures. Science (New York, N.Y.), 333 (6051), 1878-81 PMID: 21960633
Rosenthal, N. (1984). Seasonal Affective DisorderA Description of the Syndrome and Preliminary Findings With Light Therapy Archives of General Psychiatry, 41 (1) DOI: 10.1001/archpsyc.1984.01790120076010
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Maria Konnikova is a science journalist and professional poker player. She is author of the best-selling books The Biggest Bluff (Penguin Press, 2020), The Confidence Game (Viking Press, 2016) and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking Press, 2013). Follow Maria Konnikova on Twitter Credit: Nick Higgins
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A Time for Rebirth & Renewal
The longest day of the year marks the beginning of summer, also known as the Summer Solstice (in 2021, the solstice falls on June 20th). From the Latin word solstitium, meaning “sun stands still,” the summer solstice occurs when the tilt of the earth is angled furthest away from the sun, positioning the northern hemisphere to receive the maximum amount of sunlight in a single day. In many faith traditions, this midsummer moment is acknowledged and celebrated as a time of rebirth, renewal, and cleansing.
In pagan tradition, the midsummer celebration is known as Litha, and has been traditionally observed as a particularly potent time for engaging spiritual or magical forces, with the life-giving energies of the sun at its fullest. Over time, other faiths and practices established similar rituals to mark and honor the midpoint of the year.
Whether or not you consider yourself spiritual, or follow a specific faith tradition, the summer solstice offers us a moment to pause and reflect on the first half of the year, acknowledge the turning of seasons, and celebrate the beginning of summer! We can draw inspiration from a variety of ancient midsummer traditions to honor the continual process of change, rebirth and renewal:
A communal bonfire fire is a great way to connect.
Bonfires are commonly lit to honor the Sun and its life-giving energy. These fires are believed to have purifying properties and are seen as a way to burn away negative energies and make way for new beginnings. Gatherings and ceremonies are organized to commemorate this special occasion.
Light a fire to honor the light
Perhaps the most commonly practiced ritual during the midsummer season is the lighting of a bonfire. Pagans believed the fire kept evil spirits at bay, while Roman Catholics used candles and fires to honor the lives of ancestors and saints. In medieval and renaissance Florence, large processions would make their way through the streets followed by large fireworks.
The element of fire is closely associated with the masculine energy of the sun, igniting our passions, fueling our energies, and offering protection for the darker days to come. Ancient pagans believed that jumping over a bonfire would give you luck and protection during the rest of the year.
While we don’t recommend jumping over hot flames at home, gathering around a fire is a natural way to connect with others. There’s a deeply ingrained reason why barbeques and fireworks are so popular during this time of year! If you’re feeling more solitary, lighting a candle can be a more reflective way to connect to the energy of fire. Word of caution: whenever dealing with fire during the hot summer months, do so with care. Check any fire danger levels, campfire restrictions, or firework bans in your town or city.
The Dry Farm Wines Family sits down to a family feast.
Pagans often come together to create sacred spaces, where they perform rituals, offer prayers, and connect with the natural world. Many individuals take time during the summer solstice to appreciate and honor the abundance of nature, expressing gratitude for the bountiful harvests to come. The symbolism of the summer solstice in pagan beliefs extends beyond the physical aspects of the season. It is also seen as a time of personal growth, introspection, and spiritual renewal. This period offers an opportunity for individuals to reflect on their own inner light and discover their personal power. In addition to its spiritual significance, the summer solstice has also been celebrated in pagan cultures for centuries as a time of joy and merriment. Festivals and fairs are held around the world, where people come together to dance, sing, and revel in the warmth and light of the season. While the summer solstice holds a particular meaning in pagan traditions, people from all walks of life can find inspiration and connection in the symbolism of this powerful day. Whether celebrating the forces of nature or embracing personal growth and renewal, the summer solstice serves as a reminder of the cyclical nature of life and the interconnectedness of all beings..
Reviews for "The Summer Solstice as a Time of Fertility and Abundance for Pagans"
1. John - 1 star
I found "Summer solstice meaning pagan" to be a total disappointment. I was expecting to learn more about the ancient pagan rituals and traditions associated with the summer solstice, but instead, the book barely touched on the subject. The author seemed more interested in discussing unrelated topics, leaving me feeling frustrated and misled. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a comprehensive understanding of the summer solstice and its pagan roots.
2. Sarah - 2 stars
While I appreciated the attempt to explore the meaning of the summer solstice from a pagan perspective, "Summer solstice meaning pagan" fell short in providing any meaningful insights. The book lacked depth and failed to provide a thorough exploration of pagan traditions. The author's writing style was also rather dry and unengaging, making it difficult to stay interested in the topic. Overall, I was disappointed by the lackluster content and would not recommend this book to those genuinely interested in delving into the pagan meaning behind the summer solstice.
3. Alex - 1 star
"Summer solstice meaning pagan" was a complete letdown. I was expecting to gain a deeper understanding of the ancient pagan beliefs and rituals associated with the summer solstice, but the book barely scratched the surface. The author seemed more focused on personal anecdotes and unrelated musings than providing any substantial information. The lack of research and depth left me feeling unsatisfied and unimpressed. I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking a comprehensive exploration of the pagan origins behind the summer solstice.