Door into Summer

 

The Summer Solstice brings to my all of the wonderful and magical things that I have experienced during the summer months from my earliest recollections to now that I am an old geezer. This is interesting because summer magic is so different than what I have experienced as autumn and winter magic. I am a decidedly an autumn and winter kind of person, or at least late autumn and early winter. The dregs of winter before spring is a time where the magic of winter has completely disappeared and is just something that must be endured until rebirth of spring.

For me the start of summer was a release from the drudgery of school and the ability to be active outdoors without any kind of boundary or restraint. It was a time for vacations with my family, although that was a mixed bag of both good and bad, depending on the mood of my parents and how obnoxious we three kids were to each other. 

One of my earliest memories was when I was four and I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother when my father and older siblings had gone off to work and school. It was early June, before school let out. My mother did not work at that time, and so she was in her summer dressing robe and I was in my jammies, and the sun was brilliantly shining into the kitchen because it faced the east. Because the shades were down, the kitchen was cast in warm and beautiful golden light. A little later, I went outside to play while my mother began her daily chores. 

Summer time was idyllic, with the kids on the block playing games all day, going to the park and doing artwork or playing board games in the park building,  riding bikes, and being fully outside from morning to late afternoon, when we had to return home for supper at exactly 5 pm or receive punishment. After supper, we went out again and did not return until after the sun had set. Twilight was the perfect time to play hide and go seek or kick the can. It was all very magical, in a childish but wondrous way.

Despite those magical times when I was a child, as an adult ritual magician I have typically worked my greatest magic during the autumn and winter. In fact, after Summer Solstice, the magical order and temple that I helped to found closed because the members saw summer as a kind of recess from magical workings. The temple would close for the periods of July and August and not reconvene until September. However, summer is a magical time all unto itself, and I would be disingenuous if ignored what it has to offer. It is not a time to be cooped up in a temple, of course, and it is a time where magic and pagan liturgy would be shifted to the outdoors. In a grove, whether a part of my home, or at a pagan retreat, I have had many amazing experiences being fully immersed in nature. Yet nighttime is preferred by me over daytime, which is just my preference, since the magic of living and thriving occurs every single day during the summer months. This is because global warming has turned summers into periods of deadly heat, and only the shade and the evenings give folks a refuge or respite from the untenable and blazing sunlight.

From a mythic and pagan liturgical perspective, the boundary between spring and summer occurs when the light of the sun has reached its apotheosis. In the northern latitudes, vegetative life has fully awakened and the growing season has commenced. In northern Virginia where I live, summer weather actually occurs in May, so that Beltane is more like summer with leaves and plants resplendent and fully matured, and the flowers of spring have already faded away.  Still, the moment of the apotheosis of light that is the solstice, points to a mystical fact that darkness, death, and the wasting tides of winter are not permanent. The light shines through the gloom and illuminates the hearts and minds of the people of whatever religious stripe or creed, since it does not discriminate. Trees, plants and animals seem to rejoice, simply because there is the beginning of an abundance of food in various forms, whether warm sunlight and gentle rain, edible plants, and the fullness of life to prey upon for those who are predators. Summer is also light-hearted, adventurous, outgoing, flirty, downright sexual, and a paean to all things of the flesh and blood. It is also a sign post for transformative ascension, illumination, and conscious enlightenment. To occult neopagans, such as myself, the Summer Solstice is the beginning and the end, the moment of the highest spiritual and magical accomplishment, and the completion of all the work that occurred from autumn through winter and spring.

One of the ordeals that I developed, based on the writings of Jean Dubuis, was the Talismanic Portae Lucis, or Gateway of Light. A central magical operation within Mr. Dubuis’ occult system was a process whereby a person could achieve a direct connection and rapport with the powers and intelligences of the Supernal Triad. He called this the Experience of Eternity, and it was a necessary step for a magician to achieve the proper connection and linkage with their higher self. 

While Dubuis focused on the generation of talismans via the passive and auspicious method, and integrated spagyric alchemical medicine into the working, I found another way. What I did was develop a comparable methodology that used only talismanic magic to achieve a similar sort of powerful ascension and alignment. I generated metallic talismans for the Moon, Sun, and Saturn as the pathway from Yesod, to Tiphareth, and then to Binah on the Tree of Life. I used a metallic talisman for Mercury to represent myself as the theurgist. These talismans contained all four elements for each planet, representing a condensed magical artifact of four talismanic elementals fully active within it. These four artifacts were highly charged, consecrated, and then had four consecutive talismanic elements projected into them. They generated a powerful magical machine, and I used these talismans in a ritualized variation of the Portae Lucis on the exact moment of the Summer Solstice in the year 2012. Five years later I repeated that exercise, and both times were absolutely mind blowing.

I have annotated this entire journey through developing the Portae Lucis in my blog, and I think that you might find it interesting. I did this working back in 2012, which was 14 years ago, but I believe that it is worth sharing. I posted ten articles about my adventure, and you can find them in the following links.

Link 1 - beginning.
Link 2 - First working - Talisman of the Sun.
Link 3 - Second working - Talisman of the Moon.
Link 4 - Third working - Talisman of Saturn
Link 5 - Fourth working - Talisman of Mercury
Link 6 - Ordeal Preparations
Link 7 - Portae Lucis - part 1
Link 8 - Portae Lucis - part 2
Link 9 - Additional workings
Link 10 - Fifth Year Anniversary
 

I believe that the ordeal of the Talismanic Portae Lucis is where I truly opened the door into summer in a manner most becoming to an adept ritual magician. These experiences should be incorporated into a book, and someday they will. Right now, they are buried amongst nearly 500 blog articles, but they can be found just by using the index search for Portae Lucis. I decide on this Summer Solstice of 2026 to resurrect them here for you to read and examine.

Frater Barrabbas

Happy Summer Solstice 2011

According to the calendar, the 21st of June will be the first day of summer, which is kind of silly even way up here in the tundra of Minnesota. We have had summer-like weather since the end of May, but summer officially starts on Tuesday, when the sun enters the sign of Cancer. However, pagans have referred to this date as Midsummer, and this evening is known as the famous Midsummer’s eve, for those who are fans of William Shakespeare. I can almost hear Puck saying to his comrades, “What fools these mortals be?”

Whether it’s the first day of summer, or midsummer, there seems to be something incongruous about the calendar and what’s happening outdoors in regards to the weather. This incongruity becomes more apparent if you happen to live in the higher latitudes in either the northern or southern hemisphere of the globe, such as I do. Even though most of the witchcraft traditions have adopted the wheel of the year with its eight Sabbats, I personally believe that the four quarter date celebrations (equinoxes and solstices) and the cross-quarter date celebrations (Imbolg, Beltaine, Lugnasad and Samhain) don’t belong together. The reason why has to do with the problem of the seasonal weather and vegetation vs. the actual solar positions. We might be about to celebrate midsummer, or the first day of summer, but for us, the growing season started the first week of June. For others who live in the southern parts of the country, the growing season started almost a month earlier. So it would seem that the date is neither midsummer nor the first day of summer, but something altogether different.

Solstices have been marked and celebrated by ancient people perhaps even before the advent of the Neolithic era. Megalithic sites (such as Stonehenge and Avesbury) and ancient earthworks around the world seem to have been built with an ability to signify in some manner when these events exactly occurred, representing a certain uncanny knowledge of the seasons and their association with the shifting plane of the solar ecliptic. Later on, the equinoxes were also marked and measured, making these the annual four great celebrations. We modern pagans have continued this tradition, although we have added four more cross-quarter celebrations, which likely have no actual ancient provenance of being considered distinctly from the four solar celebrations; they were likely Celtic extensions of them. 

Some years ago, as a way of rebelling against the obvious erroneous habit of putting all of the Sabbats together in one basket, as it were, and calling it the “Wheel of the Year,” I decided to break out the quarter celebrations from the cross-quarter ones and look at them as a distinct cycle with their own myths. So instead of having one wheel, I now have two, which are slightly off center from each other. What this means is that the Equinoxes and Solstices represent the annual solar cycle, and the four cross-quarter Sabbats represent the vegetative seasonal changes. Therefore, when the Vernal Equinox occurs around March 21st, we know that even though it looks like winter outside, from a solar perspective, the days are growing longer and that spring is on the way. By the advent of Beltain, we can see nature catch up and start showing signs of spring, although it has been known to snow up here as late as early May. This same logic applies to the Autumn Equinox, which often still seems warm, even though the leaves have already begun to turn color in the early part of September. However, by Samhain, autumn is most definitely evident, and in fact, the snow pack will begin to accumulate by or after Thanksgiving. The winter and summer solstices may mark the apex of the solar disposition (either waxing or waning in regards to duration of sunlight), but the mid points of those seasons are better represented by the celebrations of Imbolg (February 1) and Lugnasad (August 1).

For the reasons stated above, I decided some years ago to work with two distinct wheels of the year, one Solar and the other Seasonal/Vegetative. I have pulled the myths associated with the wheel of the year into two different wheels, and have found the end result to be sensible and logical. There is the cycle of light and darkness, and there is the cycle of life and death. They may be related, of course, but they operate at a different schedule, especially up here.

Perhaps this is just a minor adjustment, or to some, it might be a big deal messing with one’s tradition, but I believe that it helps me not only work with these seasonal celebrations, but also to be able to teach them to others. In adopting this double theme, I am able to make complete sense to my students when I tell them about it, and it’s also easier to remember. As a practitioner of ritual magick and a pagan witch, I have found the eight Sabbats to be very useful, mystical and magickal events that act as seasonal milestones, forcing me to pay attention to the earth and what is happening in it. I have found that often one can be distracted by life’s many tasks and crises, but it is very important to periodically re-focus on the earth itself, which helps one gain a more balanced perspective. There are also the mythic themes and their underlying mysteries for these Sabbats, but I will leave that for a future article.

Bright Blessings -

Frater Barrabbas