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Sunshine

I think sometimes as a witch the moon tends to get pride of place and the sun perhaps takes a back seat?  But it is an incredibly powerful source of natural energy and magic.

I’ve repeatedly run into wheel of the year narratives that encourage us to align our lives with the sun’s cycle. This, we are told, is more natural. We should dream and hibernate in the depths of winter, plant the seeds for our projects in the spring, watch them grow through the summer and take our harvest in the autumn. Never mind that many projects are not shaped like growing grain in the first place.

What do you do if the winter is a depressing time? What do you do if you need the warmth and comfort of sunny days to do your dreaming and planning? What do you do if you work best in the winter, locked away from the world? If your nature doesn’t align you to the solar wheel, how can forcing yourself to fit with it be natural?

Summer is now in full swing! Today is the Summer Solstice, also known as Litha in Old English or Midsummer, is a festival celebrated as either the beginning or midpoint of summer in many cultures throughout Europe, with parallels across the world in other locations as well. It’s opposite is of course Midwinter, which is celebrated at the same time on the other side of the world.

As always we’ve gathered all of our related posts as well as those we found across the internet that we thought you might enjoy . We hope you have a great time this summer!

-Aryós Héngwis

You stand before the Sun.

He is tall and shining, golden.

In his hands, he holds a golden cup.

He offers, and you take, the burning vessel.

You meet his eyes.

You drink his fiery liquor.

One of the things people coming from either Wicca or Christianity to Asatru notice is that the idea that the sun god gets resurrected at Yule doesn't fit in our culture, because to heathens the sun is she. Yet, people still try to wedge the sun god into heathenism, and go looking for a sun god, and identify Baldr as a sun god-- correctly! -- and end up trying to celebrate Baldr's resurrection at Yule, although the lore says he won't come back until the after the end of the universe. 

I have novel gnosis on this topic, that is, gnosis that I received while writing my overgrown unpublished novel Some Say Fire. In the Fireverse, powers that are transferred to another host upon the previous host's death always swap to a host of  the opposite gender. Thus, when Baldur died, the sun power was transferred to Sunna, who became the sun goddess. When Baldur's wife Nanna died, the moon power was transferred to Mani, who became the moon god. Like many things in the Fireverse, that's an oversimplification of the process, but has a kernel of truth in it.

Solstice: literally, “the Sun stands [still].”

The Sun is a god of constant motion. Every day of the year, he rises from a different place on the horizon.

But at the solstices, summer and winter, his movement slows. For several days in sequence, he seems to rise from the same place.

Sun stands still.

And while the Sun stands, the world waits.

The 2^nd century Protoevangelium of James tells a strange story.

I start awake with the prickling knowledge that someone is in the room.

Every house has its secrets. I am about to learn one.

My eyes fly open. A luminescence hovers mid-air at the foot of the bed.

We'd been in the house nine months. My bedroom faces west, so I was accustomed to wake to darkness.

But now a shaft of red-gold, ancestral light slants in, spans the room, and illumines the windows of the west.

Minneapolis is a four-square city, its good Midwestern street-grid laid out cardinally. As the Sun rises due east at the equinoxes in his annual journey along the horizon, his light shines in through the east window, streams in a thick, tangible column down the hall, and into my bedroom on the west.

Like something out of New Grange.