The Summer Solstice: The Triumph of Apollo

The Summer Solstice is the day of maximum light. The Sun reaches its highest point in the sky, the day is at its longest, the noon shadow at its shortest, and the solar force is at the peak of its power. Then the Sun stands still, as it did in December, for 3 days of rising at the same point on the horizon, and turns.

The Greeks called it the summer τροπαί, the Romans the solstitium aestivum; the Temple calls it Heliostasion Therinon and keeps it on the 23rd and 24th of June for the whole world, in both hemispheres, because the Sun's entry into the sign of Cancer is the same instant for everyone.

Zevism is a religion of the Sun as much as of the sky. 666 is the number of the Sun and of the solar centre of the body, the magic square of 6 whose rows, columns and diagonals each sum to 111 and whose whole sums to 666 (Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.22).

When the Sun enters 0° Cancer the solar centre is amplified in every Zevist, and the day is the great day of solar magick: healing, which the solar centre governs; clarity of mind; divination, for which the eve has an immemorial reputation; the charging of water, herbs, crystals, wands, blades, cards and runes in the Sun's own light; love spells; fire magick; communication with elementals and the small folk of the wood, who come close to the midsummer fire. The traditional colour is white, the colour of the noon light, which is all colours at once.

The festival is Apollo's by nature and by the Greek calendar. He's the God of the Sun, of light, of music, of prophecy and of healing, the force of clarity and order that dispels darkness, ignorance and disease. At Delphi the summer was his: Plutarch records that the paean was sung to Apollo through the 9 warm months and the dithyramb to Dionysos through the 3 cold, because Apollo went to the Hyperboreans for the winter and returned with the light (De E 389c).

The solstice is the summit of his return. The festival is also his Father's: the Arcadians kept the Lykaia on Mount Lykaion in honour of Zeus Lykaios, Zeus of the Light, at the height of the solar year, so that the connection of the solstice with Zeus is doubly attested, through the Son who is the Sun and through the Father's own mountain feast.

The summit is the beginning of the descent, and the wise man knows it at the summit. From the 24th of June the days shorten, little by little, until the balance of September and the dark of December. The Temple doesn't hide this; the Psalm sings it. The Zevist who stands in the longest light takes it up in his hands and carries it down with him. That is why the festival is a triumph: not because the light will last, but because it was won, and what is won is kept.

The summit is the beginning of the descent, and the wise man knows it at the summit.

Apollo, Phoibos, Pythios, Paian

Apollo (Ἀπόλλων) is the son of Zeus and Leto, born on Delos after Leto had wandered the earth seeking a land that would dare to receive her; she clasped the palm tree, the Goddesses raised the cry, and the island turned to gold (Homeric Hymn 3.25 to 139). Themis fed him nectar and ambrosia and he burst his swaddling bands and spoke his first words: the lyre and the curved bow shall be mine, and I shall declare to men the unerring will of Zeus (131 to 132).

The swans circled Delos 7 times as he was born, and 7 has been his number since (Callimachus, Hymn 4.249 to 255).

He is Phoibos, the Bright and the Pure; Pythios, who shot the Python at Delphi and made the navel of the earth his seat; Paian, the Healer, whose name is the cry of the healed; Mousagetes, the Leader of the Muses, with the 7-stringed lyre that Hermes made from the tortoise; Loxias, the Oblique, whose oracles bend like a ray through water; Lykeios, of the light and of the wolf; Alexikakos, the averter of evil; Hekaergos, the far-worker, whose arrows are the rays and whose bow is the horizon.

The Temple's Ritual of Apollo opens him in 3 tongues: Apollon, Akouson; Shamash, Shime; Ra, Sedema. Shamash is the Sun of Babylon, Judge of Heaven and Earth, who gave Hammurabi his laws and who sees every deed; Utu is his older Sumerian self; Ra is the hidden Sun of Egypt who sails the night in the barque of the underworld and comes up new, having beaten Apophis 1 more time.

Mithra of the Persians, Surya of the Vedas, Sol of Rome, Belenos of the Gauls, Baldr the Bright of the North, Amaterasu who came out of the cave: the Sun is 1 Sun under every name, and a Zevist of any nation may call him by the name his ancestors used. The essence is the same, and the Ritual says so.

Zeus Lykaios and the Lykaia

Mount Lykaion in Arcadia is the oldest sanctuary of Zeus on the Greek mainland. The ash altar on its southern summit, from which the whole Peloponnese is seen, has yielded offerings from the Mycenaean period onward, and the Arcadians claimed that Zeus was born there and not in Crete (Pausanias 8.38.2 to 7; Callimachus, Hymn 1.4 to 14; Romano and Voyatzis, Hesperia 83, 2014). The Lykaia, the festival of Zeus Lykaios with its games, fell in the summer, and the name Lykaios is the name of the light as it is of the wolf: Apollo Lykeios bears the same word.

Pausanias records that within the precinct on the mountain nothing cast a shadow, neither man nor beast, and that whoever entered it died within the year (8.38.6). A precinct without shadows at the summer solstice is the Sun at his zenith made into a place. The Temple honours Zeus Lykaios on this day with his Son, and the Grand Ritual of Zeus may be performed on the eve by those who keep the Lykaia.

Zeus of the Light and his Son of the Light on the same day. The Father's altar on the mountain, the Son's temple in the gorge.

Greece: The Skira, the Lykaia and the Paean of Delphi

Athens kept the Skira on the 12th of Skirophorion, the month of the solstice. The priestess of Athena, the priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus and the priest of Helios walked in procession from the Acropolis to Skiron on the Sacred Way under a great white canopy, the skiron, carried by the Eteoboutadai (Harpocration s.v. Σκίρον; scholion to Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 18; Parke, Festivals, 156 to 162). A priest of the Sun walking under a sunshade at the solstice is the whole festival in a single image: the light at its height, honoured and shaded in the same gesture.

On the same day the women held their own assembly at the Skira, from which Aristophanes drew his comedy of the women's parliament. In Arcadia the Lykaia drew athletes from all Greece; its games were ranked with the oldest (Pausanias 8.2.1, 8.38.5; Pindar, Olympian 9.96, 13.108). At Delphi the paean of summer rose when the God returned: the hymn of Aristonous of Corinth, carved on stone in 334 BC and still legible, cries Ie Paian to the Pythian rocks (Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina, 162 to 164), and the Temple's hymn library holds it.

Rome and Egypt

Rome kept Fors Fortuna on the 24th of June, the festival of Fortune's temple on the Tiber: the people went down the river in garlanded boats, drank, and came back late, as Ovid describes with affection (Fasti 6.773 to 790). The Vestalia fell earlier in the month. Egypt's solstice was the river's.

The heliacal rising of Sirius, Sothis, announced the flood, and the night of the 17th to 18th of June was kept into modern times as the Night of the Drop, Leilat al-Nuqta, when a tear of Isis for Osiris fell into the Nile and began its rising; the Egyptians of Pausanias's day still said the river rose from the tears of the Goddess (Pausanias 10.32.18; Plutarch, De Iside 38).

The Sun at his height and the water at its rising are married on this day, fire and water, and the Temple's older page kept the marriage under the druidic name of the union of Heaven and Earth.

The Fires of Midsummer

Across the whole of Europe the night of the solstice was fire.

Frazer collected the evidence page after page: the bonfires of Ireland on the eve, through which the young men leapt and the cattle were driven; the fire wheels of the Moselle, a great cartwheel wrapped in straw, lit and rolled blazing down the hill to the river, which if it reached the water unquenched promised a good vintage; the fires of the Vosges, of Brittany, of Sweden, of the Baltic, of Russia; the herbs gathered at midnight; the girls who looked into the water for the face of the one to come (The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., vol. 10, 160 to 219).

The Latvians still keep Jāņi with oak wreaths and fires through the shortest night; the Swedes raise the midsummer pole. The Church couldn't put the fires out, so it named the night for its Baptist and let them burn. The Temple keeps the fires and drops the name.

The oldest of all is at Stonehenge, built 4,500 years ago so that the first ray of the solstice sunrise falls over the Heel Stone into the circle: men hauled stones across Britain for 1 morning of the year, and the morning still works (Ruggles, Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland, 1999, 35 to 41).

The Church couldn't put the fires out, so it named the night for its Baptist and let them burn. The fires didn't notice.

The outer festival is the triumph of the light. The inner festival is the gate the light opens.

The 2 solstices are the 2 gates of heaven. The Platonists taught, after Numenius, that Capricorn is the gate of the Gods, through which souls ascend out of the world, and Cancer is the gate of men, through which souls descend into generation (Porphyry, De antro nympharum 22 to 23; Macrobius, Commentarii 1.12.1 to 2). The Winter Solstice is the feast of the light reborn; the Summer Solstice is the feast of life poured out.

On the longest day the gate of generation stands widest, and life comes through it: the Nile rises, the grain fills, the beasts bear, the sea warms. The Zevist who understands both gates holds the year in his 2 hands, and the Temple sets Zeus at the one and his Son at the other. The teaching has a practical face: the solstice is the hour of workings that bring things into being, into the world, into form, as the Winter Solstice is the hour of workings that raise things out of it.

The second teaching is the union of Heaven and Earth. The druids celebrated it at midsummer, and the Temple's older page read it correctly: Heaven and Earth are the crown and the base, the summit and the root of the spine, and the union is the fire of the Sun come down to meet the fire of the serpent gone up. The solar centre, whose number is 666, stands between them as the healer.

The circle dance around the fire is the Sun's year drawn with the feet; the snake dance, the winding line that doesn't break, is the fire in the spine drawn with the body. The Zevist who has condensed the life force within himself knows how hot it can be, like the Sun, like the kundalini serpent, and knows it best on this day.

The third teaching is prophecy. The eve of the solstice has been the night of divination in every land, and the Temple keeps it so. Prophecy is the light seen before it arrives: the Sun is already over the eastern mountain while the valley is dark, and the seer is the one who stands on the summit.

Pythian Apollo opens the eye of the seer on his own night. The runes, which are of fire, the cards, which are of light, the water the Sun has charged, the flame that leans: all are read tonight, and the God of the tripod sits on every tripod. The Zevist asks nothing he doesn't want answered.

The 4th teaching is the measure. Nothing in excess, said the door at Delphi. The Sun that heals at noon burns at noon, and the healer's art is the dose. Apollo gives the light and the measure together or he gives nothing. The one who stands in the longest light learns from it that the light has a limit, and that the limit is what makes it a blessing.

The names in this table are the same essence under the tongues of different peoples. A Zevist of any nation may address Apollo under the name that the ancestors of that nation used, provided the essence of the God is understood as one. The Temple sets the Greek name first because the Greek sources preserve the fullest theology; it doesn't set it as the only name.

The ancients themselves did the same: Herodotus wrote Greek names for Egyptian Gods without hesitation, and the Romans wrote Jupiter over every altar of Zeus they found (Herodotus 2.42 to 2.50; Caesar, Gallic War 6.17; Tacitus, Germania 9, 43).

The Apollo [Azazel] Power Ritual of the Temple invokes the God as Phoibos, Pythios, Mousagetes, Hekaergos, Lykeios, Shamash, Utu and the Hidden Sun of Ra, and restores him from the scapegoat of the Hebrew rite. That is the Ritual of the God for this day.

The Summer Solstice alone is the easiest festival of the year to keep outdoors, and it should be kept outdoors wherever possible: on a hill, in a garden, on a roof, at a window that takes the Sun. The 3 moments, noon, sunset and dawn, are the frame. At noon on the 23rd go out, stand in the Sun with the arms raised, speak the Noon Salutation, and set the bowl of water and the wand and whatever tools are to be charged where the Sun will stay on them until evening.

Gather the herbs then, at noon, cutting them with a clean blade and the God's name: St John's wort, vervain, mugwort, chamomile, bay. Make the wreath.

At sunset, in white, light the candle, if it can be done, with a lens from the last of the Sun, and hold the Rite in the order above. The Apollo Ritual takes about 25 minutes; the whole Rite with the Psalm, the charging, the dance of the hand through the flame and the divination fills the evening to midnight. The Paean is cried aloud even alone; the neighbours may hear 3 words of Greek and survive it.

At midnight consult the art of divination that is yours, with 1 question, and write the answer down before interpreting it. Sleep, if sleeping, with the question for the healer's dream, as the sick slept in the temple of Asklepios. Rise for the dawn if it can be managed; the solstice Sun comes up far to the northeast, earlier than at any other time of the year, and the Dawn Salutation is spoken facing it.

The day of the 24th is for the body: the sea or the river, the Sun on the skin in measure, the feast in the open, the herbs hung to dry in the shade, the charged water kept in a dark bottle for the year's healing work. The Zevist who keeps the Lykaia adds the Grand Ritual of Zeus on the eve, before the Ritual of Apollo, and honours the Father on the Father's mountain day.

The gathering for the Summer Solstice is held on high ground, with a fire that can be seen from a distance, and it runs from noon of the 23rd to dawn of the 24th. The ancient models are the Skira, with the priest of Helios walking under the white canopy; the Lykaia, with their games on the mountain; the Delphic paean; and the midsummer fires of every village in Europe with their leaping, their wheels and their dances.

The Offices of the Day

The Order of the Gathering

1. The Noon Procession. The assembly, in white, walks to the high place at noon, the Presiding Priest under the white canopy, the Chorus singing Movement I. At the summit the Noon Salutation is spoken by all; the bowls of water and the tools are set in the Sun; the Herb-Gatherers lead the cutting of herbs and the weaving of wreaths.
2. The Afternoon. The games: running, throwing, wrestling for those who will, in the manner of the Lykaia; the children's races; rest in the shade.
3. The Public Call, at sunset, by the Herald: the fire of Apollo is open to every person of good will who comes for light.
4. The Rite, in the order above, led by the Presiding Priest. The fire is lit from the altar flame at the Opening. The Paean is cried by the whole hill. At the Charging, each celebrant's bowl and tools are blessed together.
5. The Jump and the Wheel. After the second half of the Psalm the fire is jumped by all who will; where the slope allows, the Fire-Keepers roll a wheel wrapped in straw, lit, down the hill, and the assembly cheers it to the bottom.
6. The Dances. The circle dance sunwise around the fire; then the snake dance, the whole gathering in 1 winding line led by the Chorus, which doesn't break.
7. The Contest of Music. The Musicians compete, lyre, voice, flute, whatever instruments the gathering has; the Presiding Priest crowns the winner with bay.
8. The Divination, at midnight. The Seers sit; the celebrants bring their questions.
9. The Closing, and the bell.
10. The Vigil. The fire is kept; the feast in the open, white cloth, honey, fruit of the first summer, wine cooled in the stream; song until the sky lightens.
11. The Dawn. The assembly faces the northeast and the Presiding Priest speaks the Dawn Salutation at the first ray, the assembly repeating it. The wreaths are kept; the herbs are taken home.

The inner rite of the mountain, where it is held, is held apart from the hill by those who hold it, and the assembly isn't told its hour.

A priest of the Sun under a white canopy at noon: the light at its height, honoured and shaded in 1 gesture.

The Psalm is sung in 2 halves at the 2 points marked in the Rite: Movements I to III after the Ritual of Apollo and before the Paean, Movements IV to VI after the Charging. Each passage stands in 3 columns, Ancient Greek, transliteration and English. 72 passages to Apollo.

The full Psalm stands on its own page: Psalm V: The Psalm of the Summer Solstice. The first 24 of its 72 passages are shown here; the drawdown below unfolds the remaining 48.

1. Homeric Hymn 3 to Apollo; Homeric Hymn 4 to Hermes 24 to 61, 496 to 502; Callimachus, Hymns 1, 2 and 4; Orphic Hymns 8 and 34; the Paean of Aristonous (Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina, 162 to 164); Pindar fr. 54, Olympian 9.96, 13.108.
2. Plutarch, De E apud Delphos 9, 389c; De Pythiae oraculis; De Iside et Osiride 35, 38; Quaestiones Graecae 12; Pausanias 1.3.4, 8.2.1 to 6, 8.38.2 to 7, 10.24.1, 10.32.18; Strabo 9.3.5 to 6; Herodotus 1.47 to 53, 1.91, 4.33 to 35; Diodorus Siculus 2.47; Alcaeus fr. 307 Voigt.
3. Harpocration s.v. Σκίρον; scholion to Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 18; H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (1977) 156 to 162; L. Deubner, Attische Feste (1932) 40 to 50; D. G. Romano and M. E. Voyatzis, “Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project,” Hesperia 83 (2014) 569 to 652; Plato, Republic 565d, 507b to 509c.
4. Hesiod, Works and Days 582 to 596, 663 to 665; Homer, Iliad 1.43 to 52, 3.277; Porphyry, De antro nympharum 22 to 23; Macrobius, Commentarii 1.12.1 to 2, Saturnalia 1.17 to 1.23; Julian, Oration 4 (Hymn to King Helios); Proclus, Hymn 1, In Timaeum 3.63 to 65 Diehl.
5. Ovid, Fasti 6.773 to 790; Metamorphoses 6.382 to 400; Pliny, Natural History 25.30, 26.85 to 87; Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 2.22; Nicomachus, Harmonicum enchiridion 3; the Epidaurian iamata (IG IV² 1, 121 to 124); the stele of Hammurabi (Louvre Sb 8).
6. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., vol. 10 (1913) 160 to 219; C. Ruggles, Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland (1999) 35 to 41; R. J. C. Atkinson, Stonehenge (1956); W. Burkert, Greek Religion (1985) 143 to 149; H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle (1956); J. Fontenrose, The Delphic Oracle (1978).
7. The Temple's own Summer Solstice page (the Baal fires, the white colour, 666, the solar centre, the workings of the day, the union of Heaven and Earth), its page on 666 and the Solar Centre, the Hymn to King Helios on its doctrine pages, and the Apollo [Azazel] Power Ritual on the ritual site of the Temple.