Midsummer Thoughts

St John’s Day is a fire festival, three fires are created, one of bone (the bonfire), one of wood (the wake fire) and one of bone and wood (the fire of St John). Goatsbeard and masterwork used to be made into crosses, but crosses can also be made from hypericum branches. It is a day to bathe in the water of holy springs (I used to bring home water from the springs in Springfield Park, from my mother’s home in Glengarriff, or from my local spring at the Elizabethan Hunting Lodge, and put the water in with my bath water with some Hypericum flowers! 

It is a day to collect fennel, rue, rosemary, lemon verbena, mallow, laburnum seeds, foxgloves, and elderflower to make an incense/smoke sticks that are said to repel all evil. Yarrow is also burned, a herb sometimes used for the I Ching divination. It is likely that the red antibiotic juice of Hypericum was used by the Knights of St John, where it’s common name, Wort of St John could have originated. The Wort of St John is a medicinal plant that blooms at midsummer when the feast of the Baptist is celebrated often by ecstatic dancing, carnival processions and costumes as the plant is also known to have antidepressant qualities. St John is known as the Sacred Clown possibly because of his wild living style of wearing goatskin and eating locusts and honey and crying out for repentance and to prepare the way for the messiah. 

It is said that the Baptist jumped in his mother’s, (Elizabeth’s) womb when She met Mary, pregnant with Jesus, so John is said to be born 6 months before Jesus, so the date of the Baptist’s birth is 25th June. We also are told from the gospellers that as John decreased in strength, that Jesus increased, so both have sun attributions, Jesus born just after the winter solstice when the sun moves towards strength after its few stationary days, so John was born a few days after the summer solstice when the sun begins its annual decline. One remembers the death of St John the Baptist as he lost his head, ie the sun’s decline at the summer solstice, and St John the Revellator who described the end of days, has his feast at midwinter, when the sun is at its nadir. The birth festivals begin the previous evening. 

St John’s Day is one of the Quarter Days; Michaelmas, Lady Day and solstices as these were days of hiring servants, making accounts and collecting rents. In Ireland the dates were Candlemas (Oimelc), Beltane (May 1st), Lugnassah, (Lammas) and Samhain (Hallowmas). 

Article by Wendy Stokes https://wendystokes.co.uk