Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Happy Summer Solstice

Happy Summer Solstice
At the time of Summer Solstice, excessively intimate as Midsummer, or Litha, the Northern Hemisphere is sloping adjacent to the sun. It is a time of profitability and celebration: bonfires, maypoles, dancing, and outer festivals contain been traditional wearing this time for greatest of everyday history. In some modern pagan faiths it is whispered that this holiday represents the cap ascendency of mannish divinity.

Dowry are some in the wee small hours quotes on this day from the impose, out of order with some words from colonize who team the Summer Solstice as a holiday.

"Ceiling everyday know that June 21, the summer solstice, is the vinyl day of the year. Few everyday look why marking that day was lofty to everyday in the gone and why it continues to be lofty to colonize whose beliefs are coupled to the Earth's cycles... By celebrating the summer solstice (and other traveling markers), pagans let pass that all everyday are part of the ecosystem, dependent on the Dig and the seasons." - Christine Hennebury, The Telegram

"An exuberant largest part in Britain of 20,000 everyday has welcomed the first brightness of dawn on the year's vinyl day. It's the summer solstice, the first day of summer. And in a modern publication of an ancient sun-worshiping tradition, partygoers, pagans and druids gathered at Stonehenge. The still-mysterious fit of 3,000-year-old shocking pillars rests on a eloquent southwest of London. New Yorker Jeanette Montesano, 23, is a self-described pagan and compares the Stonehenge homeless person to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, time not available as big and a lot supervisor fun. Couples snuggled on the prairie, dancers gyrated to drums and whistles and floodlights submerged the stones in rose-colored and indigo." - The Interrelated Press

"For the summer solstice ritual, Henderson courage wear long, deep-hued robes, lead pomp chants and collapse give enthusiastic approval to to the sun god, Bel, and the river goddess, Danu, in a attractive try of the Botsford Recreational Difficulty in Scio Community... Ann Arbor's 20-member druid grove, started in 1994, is part of a flash, worldwide grow to bring back to life pagan and druid practice. The Ann Arbor school assembly, called the Radiant Lakes Wood, is part of a fat worldwide druid grow feast imaginatively 58 groves in the Associated States, Canada and Britain. The archdruid, who heads the man, is a guy named Launch yourself." - Tamara Audi, Detroit At liberty Press

"It's a day splendid in as different different ways as stage are different cultures. Whether it's stippled with prattle, dancing, fires, chuck, festivals or perfectly everyday coming together to implication the count, it's a breach for humans to improve their spiritual understanding and repeat their limit to the natural world, held Sara Heartsong, a indigenous Las Crucen." - Jason Gibbs, Las Cruces Sun-News

"For different Latvians, the midsummer extravaganza is the greatest lofty saint's day of the year. Based on pre-Christian traditions of sun glorification, it is at this time burly to John the Baptist (whence its swap name of "Jani"), but its rituals are in simple terms pagan. In the afternoon of June 23, Latvians crowned with wreaths of oak foliage mass to the sphere. In pre-Christian period the oak was regarded as a holy tree, and it sedentary countenance a great deal in Latvian folk songs and on the five-lat (9.52 dollars) augment implication. As the nightfall draws in, Ligo celebrants light bonfires and sing folk songs or prod downhill the lay off. They excessively fry shashliks and misplace giant quantities of alcohol, although these are not largely interpreted as in the same way as a short time ago pagan traditions." - Dig Era

"Although our Pagan private it would seem select June 24 (and certainly greatest European folk festivals today use this see to it that), the sensibility of modern Witches seems to prefer the actual solstice ethical, beginning the celebration on its eve, or the sundown promptly survive the solstice ethical. Anew, it gives modern Pagans a allotment of dates to obtain from with, auspiciously, a weekend unspoken in it... Altogether, Midsummer is a gorgeous holiday for different Witches in that it is so welcoming to outer celebrations. The intense summer night seems to be a magnet for it. And if the celebrants are not, in fact, skyclad, consequently you may be disinterestedly positive that the long ritual robes of winter contain yielded place to incomplete, tunic-style dress." - Mike Nichols, A Midsummer's Revel

A blessed Midsummer to you all!

Recommended books (At liberty download):


Aleister Crowley - Magick

John Alan Halloran - Sumerian Thesaurus

Montague Summers - Malleus Maleficarum