Merry Meet and happiest Litha to each of you! The Fae are often very active around this time so take a look at the Faery Queen’s crown and see what is in store for you!
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Litha is here! The longest day of year and what better way to celebrate than with a full sun salutation! I had found this sun salutation set on Pinterest YEARS ago and the link was broken for me to credit the original creator but I use this one very often. The bunnies are adorable and bring me joy. The poses are relatively easy and allow even someone like myself with chronic pain to do them. Downward dog and the upper push up are a bit difficult for me but I manage. This is a lovely way to express your gratitude for your body and celebrate all the sun does for us. Hold each pose for about 30 seconds with nice deep breaths throughout to truly benefit.
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The bodhran is a type of Irish drum made of goat skin and was a native drum of the Celts.
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Preparing for Litha: Start preparing for your Litha celebration by using lemon, lavender, and thyme essential oils in your home diffuser.
Greet the sun at dawn: See the sun rise and set. Whether with song, drumming, or a simple salute to the early morning sunrise, today is a day to bask in the strength of the sun, for this is its height and its joy. Midsummer is a time to absorb the sun’s warming rays and it is another fertility sabbat, not only for humans, but also for crops and animals. Enjoy time outdoors, allowing the sun to warm your body as you relax, walk, or read. Take a picnic and enjoy the warm light. Bid farewell to the sun god for a few months and be assured, he will return.
Honor the storms and the sun: Remember that the storms are integral to the day as well. In many areas, midsummer marks the start of the rains, and thunder and lightning are just as much a part of the season as the sun. Take time to reflect on the many facets of the season.
Family get together: Summer Solstice is a time for people to get together and celebrate life. Many people gather at sacred sites, where it is usual to leave an offering of summer flowers, a stone, or crystal as a thank you to the sun.
Litha Magic: To celebrate the new light and warmth of the Summer Solstice, gather a large bowl of beach sand, 3 candles, a sea shell for cleansing energies. As you welcome the glory of the sun, a symbol of energy, growth, and wellbeing, light your candles, representing your body, mind, and spirit in a triangle shape around the bowl. With your blessed seashell in the center of the sand, begin to draw a spiral clockwise, from the seashell outward, visualizing, new growth, renewal, and positive light energy finding way to you as you do so. Say:
With this symbol of life, death and renewal,
I now draw in new energy to manifest my desires.
I welcome opportunities of positive change into my life.
When complete, meditate with your new energy.
Midsummer Spell: Make a Midsummer incense for a solstice love spell to harness the magic of the solstice. Mix a handful of fresh or dried rose petals and lavender flowers in a non-metallic bowl. Add half a stick of crumbled cinnamon and two pods of star anise. Add six drops of rose oil to the mix. Now grind the ingredients together. If you don’t intend to use the incense immediately, keep it fresh in a sealed jar. Now you are ready to do your spell. Facing east, burn a teaspoonful of the incense on a charcoal block and, without holding a particular person in mind, ask for new love to come into your life. Close with the words: May this be for the highest good of all.
Litha Herb Charm: Take St. John’s Wort, Mugwort, vervain, and lemon balm, and then pour all of your worries, fears, and concerns into them. Then place them into a small yellow sachet bag. Feel free to draw a sigil, sun, or any other symbol on the bag. Drop the bag into the Litha fire or cauldron and watch how your worries burn away.
Cauldron works: Rituals include placing a flower ringed cauldron on the altar. Gather and dry herbs to put in the cauldron and plunge your athame into the cauldron for renewed energy. You can also set these herbs on fire to simulate a bonfire.
Roll a burning wheel: Roll a burning wooden wheel down the hillsides to represent the decline of the sun. The wheels were very large to ensure fertility and prosperity in the coming year. The ritual commemorates those ancient sun wheels and purification by fire.
Make solar water: Make solar water by leaving a bowl of spring water under the midday sun for a few hours. You can use this water for masculine rituals, those requiring significant power, and any kind of spell needing a power up.
Charge your crystals: Leave any crystals or items of jewelry you would like to imbue with the sun’s energy out in the sun for a few hours.
Protection Rattle: Create a Litha protection rattle that you can use while dancing around your bonfire. Using 2 shells that join together, twine, and carnelian, create your rattle to celebrate the solstice. Place the carnelian inside the 2 shells before wrapping the twine around the shells to hold it together. Secure the twine so that the shells do not open while in use.
Gather flowers: Summer Solstice celebrates the sun as it brings life to plants and flowers such as its namesake, the sunflower. Deck your house with Birch, fennel, St. John’s Wort. Also called goatweed, rosin rose, and chase devil, the St. John’s Wort flower is prized at the Summer Solstice. If it is native, seek it in your area. If it is not, seek another flower that blooms around this time of year. According to folklore, if you pick seven or nine types of wild flower in the evening, in silence, and place them under your pillow, you will dream of your future spouse. But you mustn’t reveal whom you dreamed about to anyone! Flowers or herbs picked at Midsummer are thought to be doubly potent. St. John’s Wort is so named because it traditionally flowers on Midsummer’s Day or St. John’s Eve, by its Christian name. If it is harvested at this time, it can be kept until the winter and made into an antidepressant tea with the qualities it has absorbed from the sun.
Create a wand: Midsummer is the time to cut magical wands as the trees hold their greatest amount of light at this time.
Decorate your altar: At this time when light will begin to wane, decorate your altar and house with sunflowers. Place honey on your altar to represent life’s sweetness. Light the same gold candle for a short time for four or five nights over this period. On the last evening, after the candle is safely snuffed, wrap what is left of it in yellow or gold colored cloth with sunflower seeds. Tie the parcel with a yellow ribbon and keep it somewhere safe for protection and good fortune until next Litha.
Divination: At Litha, the veils between the worlds are thin. The portals between the fields we know and worlds beyond stand open. This is an excellent time for rites of divination.
Sun wheel cake/bread: One way of marking the Summer Solstice in your own home is to bake round cakes covered in yellow icing. These traditionally represent the sun wheel, a symbol used to represent the sun in many ancient cultures, and should be eaten for breakfast. Ideally, you should get up before the dawn and sit on a hilltop to watch the sunrise, while eating the cakes as the sun’s golden disc rises above the horizon. Take any sponge or fairy cake recipe, but add saffron for yellow color in the cake, or to color the icing, and add some honey to taste. Garnish the mix with sunflower seeds to add midsummer ambiance. Once your sun wheel cake is baked, prepare a flask of mead, a traditional honey liqueur, to wash down a slice at sunrise. You can also bake bread in the shape of the sun as well.
Sunflower Solstice Cake: Bake a sunflower solstice cake decorated with yellow icing and sunflower seeds to share with your friends over a glass of mead. If you don’t want seeds on your cake, you can add chocolate chips to represent the seeds and make it more palatable.
Sun Wreath/catcher: Create a sun decoration covered in colors and plants of the holiday. Sunflowers, yellow ribbon, and lavender are great starts to your wreath. You can also make a sunny decoration from dried oranges or other citrus.
Reaffirm your dedication: Reaffirm your vows to the Lord and Lady or your dedication to following the old traditions. To celebrate, put out an offering to your deity.
Leave out an offering for the Fae: The faeries abound at this time and it is customary to leave offerings, such as milk, food, or herbs, for them for the evening. Summer Solstice, in particularly Midsummer’s Eve, is a time when fairies would bestow good luck on humans. An old ritual for children was to place food out in the garden for the fairies who would then sometimes leave crystals as a token of thanks. Shakespeare took the fairy legends and lovers traditions and wrote about them in his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when fairies with their magic, play the leading characters interacting with humans and mortals.
Help the Environment: Make a pledge to Mother Earth pertaining to something that you will do to improve the environment. Try to make long term changes to make the earth a better place for all life.
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Animals: butterflies, salamanders, sea horse, crow, hawk, bear, cattle, horse, bee, wren, snake, caterpillar, donkeys, robin
Mythological Animals: Dragons, Faeries, Phoenix, Satyrs, Firebird, Thunderbird
Drink: red wine, fruit juice, herbal tea, mead, milk, dandelion wine, sun tea
Food: fruit, vegetables, herbed bread, pastries, vegetables, cheese, cold cooked meats, fried chicken, potato salad with hard boiled eggs, grilled pork and beef, cinnamon, ginger, honey, lemon, lime, nuts, oranges, turmeric, yogurt
Colors: blue, brown, green, orange, purple, red, white, yellow, gold
Gods: Apollo, Baal, Baldur, Hadad, Jupiter, Lugh, Osiris, Prometheus, Ra, Sol, Holly/Oak King, Zeus, Helios, Prometheus, Bel/Belenus, St. John the Baptist, Eriskigal, Jack in the Green, Hercules/Herakles, Dogda, Ares, Mars, Father Sun/Sky, Arthur, Archangel Uriel
Goddesses: Anu, Aphrodite, Astarte, Bast, Demeter, Elat, Flora, Freya, Gaia, Gerd, Grainne, Hathor, Hera, Ishtar, Isis, Juno, Nut, Muses, Artemis, Inaana, Isis, Epana, Vesta, Diana, Danu, Sol, Sunna, Vespa, Venus, Epona, all goddesses of love, passion, beauty, and the sea, and pregnant, lusty goddesses, goddess of the wells, Maia a Greek mountain nymph and the most beautiful of the 7 sisters, the Pleiades
Gemstones: Emerald, lapis lazuli, diamond, tiger’s eye, jade, amber, green agate, alexandrite, fluorite, moonstone, pearl, amethyst, malachite, topaz, gold
Incense: Lemon, Myrrh, pine, rose, wisteria, oak, sage, cedar, frankincense, lemon, lavender, saffron, orange, mint, cinnamon, sandalwood, copal, jasmine, lemon, lotus, heliotrope
Plants: Mugwort, chamomile, vervain, rose, honeysuckle, lily, oak, lavender, ivy, yarrow, fern, elder, wild thyme, daisy, carnation, cinquefoil, elder flower, fennel, thyme, hemp, larkspur, St John’s Wort, wisteria, chamomile, hemp, larkspur, cinquefoil, basil, daisy, dogwood, mistletoe, saffron, sage, cinnamon, mistletoe, rosemary, heather, marigold, hazel, rowan
Note: All herbs gathered on this day are said to be extremely powerful.
Symbols: suns, summer flowers, fruit, fairies, sea shells, fire, solar disc, feathers, athame, bonfire, candles, dagger, oak leaf, sun dial, sun wheel, sword, wreath, cauldron, rosettes and roses, sacred wells, solar cross/ sun wheel, spinning wheels, spirals, wand, sunflowers
Magical Energies: magic, protection, love, marriage, divination, abundance, baking, battle, blessing, blooming, bounty, crops, divination, faery work, feasting, fertility, fire, fulfillment, good health, growth, healing, heat, honor, illumination, life, light, love, luck, marriage, maturity, passion, potency, power, pregnancy, prosperity, repel evil spirits, sacrifice, strength, success, summer, sun, transformation, unions, victory, virility, nature spirit/fey communion, planet healing, divination, cleansing, creativity, opportunity, warmth
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Other pagan traditions have different names for the holiday: Midsummer, Summer Solstice, Sun Blessing, Gathering Day, turning-of-the-season day (Old European/Neo-Pagan/Wiccan), Whit Sunday, Whitsuntide, St. John’s Day/Eve (Christian), Day of Cerridwen and her Cauldron (English/Welsh), Day of the Green Man (Northern Europe), The Great Mother (British), Feast of the Great Spirit, and Alban Hefin/ Alban Heruin (Druid).
The Summer Solstice marks the beginning of summer when the sun is at its highest point in the sky resulting in the longest day and shortest night of the year. There is often around 14 hours of sunlight on this day. This is the turning point from spring to summer. Litha lies directly across from Yule, the shortest day of the calendar year. The Summer Solstice is the point at which the life giving sun is at its strongest over the power of darkness. When the sun is at its peak in the sky at Summer Solstice, Earth is as close as possible to the sun. Solstice comes from solstitium meaning sun stands still. Litha is the ancient Germanic name for summer and the time to celebrate its warmth.
The joyous rituals of Litha celebrate the verdant earth in high summer, abundance, fertility, and all the riches of nature in full bloom. At midsummer, the Sun God has reached the moment of his greatest strength. Seated on his greenwood throne, he is also Lord of the Forests, and his face is seen in church architecture peering from countless foliate masks. The Christian religion converted this day to the Feast of St. John the Baptist, often portraying him in rustic attire, sometimes with horns and cloven feet (like the Greek Demi God Pan). This important time in the solar year is when the Oak King, God of Light, hands over reign to the Holly King, God of Darkness, who rules from this point forward for the second half of the year.
The solstices are celebrated mainly in Northern European temperate countries where the difference between light and dark gives marked seasonal alternation. Celebrations would start the evening before and people would stay awake all night, usually reciting poetry and stories to keep themselves amused, until the moment the sun rose. The sun would then be welcomed in with drumming.
England: In England, the Summer Solstice is marked by the Glastonbury Festival. Stonehenge has special alignment with the sunrise at solstice. The stones were aligned to the Summer Solstice sun about 4,000 year ago. The Heel Stone and the Slaughter Stone align with the rising sun. Each year thousands of modern Pagans and Witches gather at Stonehenge in celebration of the Summer Solstice. Many other stone works are aligned to the Summer Solstice, attesting to the widespread importance of this day in cultures around the world. There are more than 37,000 people who gather at the ancient stones to watch the sunrise each year.
Celebrations are generally held on 21 June, although the solstice covers a period of about four days on either side. Summer Solstice Midsummer/Litha is celebrated with the lighting of bonfires, feasting and merrymaking. Litha, is one of the eight solar holidays or sabbats of Neopaganism, especially Wicca, though the New Forest traditions (those referred to as British Traditional Wicca) tend to use the traditional name Midsummer. It is celebrated on the Summer Solstice or close to it.
By Summer Solstice, all the seeds have been planted. It is the pause between the early crops of leaves, such as lettuce and nettles, and the harvest of fruit, root vegetables, and grain. In agricultural communities, the Summer Solstice is a time for people to get together and celebrate life. The holiday is considered the turning point at which summer reaches its height and the sun shines longest, but at the same time it is said we are reminded that the days will soon begin to shorten.
Midsummer or the Summer Solstice is the most powerful day of the year for the Sun God. Because this Sabbat glorifies the Sun God and the Sun, fire plays a very prominent role in this festival. Honor sun gods, complete fertility rites, and celebrate with bonfires to remember and honor the sun. The element of Fire is the most easily seen and immediately felt element of transformation. It can burn, consume, cook, shed light or purify and balefires still figure prominently at modern Midsummer rites. The date of the Solstice can vary – in some traditions, it always falls on the 21st, in others, the astrological date is used, which can vary from the 20th to the 22nd. After Litha, the days will become shorter and nights longer.
Midsummer Night’s Eve is also special for those that adhere to the Faerie faith. This time of year is considered a time of a great magical power. It is one of the best times to perform magic of any kind. Spells pertain to love, healing, and prosperity are very effective now. Giving away fire, sleeping away from home, and neglecting animals are taboos on this holiday.
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