Spiritual Essence
| Spiritual Essence Blossom and Thorn on the Summer Solstice |  |
by Pippin
Demetrius: I’ll run free from thee and hide me in the brakes,and leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.
Helena: The wildest hath not such a heart as you, Run when you will, the story shall be changed: Apollo flies and Daphne holds the chase!
– A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act II, Scene 1
Many of us went through our college productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream secretly hoping that poor Helena was just a frustrated fag hag, and those handsome boys, Demetrius and Lysander, would eventually get over it, declare their true love, and go bounding off through the woods to live happily ever after. Alas! It doesn’t work out that way, although Puck gives us a couple of opportune moments when the magic flower (a PANSY! – now purple with love’s wound) could go just a little astray and create the desired effect.
As he so often does, Shakespeare’s work skirts the bounds of the expected and forces us to consider other possibilities. For in this Midsummer story, with the sun at its height, Shakespeare puts all the action in the short hours between dusk and dawn. He takes the sun god Apollo’s power and up-ends it through the magic spells of the faeries, creating chaos that can only be resolved by Duke Theseus with the return of the morning light. In Helena’s speech, quoted above as she chases the recalcitrant Demetrius, she tells us that she is reversing gender roles. She proclaims that the nymph Daphne, for two thousand years a mythological figure of the hunted woman, will instead chase down the sun god Apollo and demand his love.
With countless “Shakespeare in the Park” productions in cities and towns across America, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the ways in which modern people ritualize our Summer Solstice. The Summer Solstice, also known to pagans as the Festival of Litha, is the longest day (or the shortest night) of the year. It is the peak, or the zenith, of our contact with the sun and represents a major turning point as the days begin to get shorter and decline toward Yule, the Winter Solstice. The ritualized productions of Shakespeare’s play, connected with the Solstice, can remind us that the origin of all theater, but especially that descended from the medieval European passion plays, is liturgical.
The Summer Solstice is a bittersweet holiday, representing the joy of full summer and the first taste of decline as well. At the Solstice, we celebrate the consummation of the wedding of the Horned God and the May Queen at Beltane, yet we also stand with the first realization that we will cycle back to the darkness. For this reason, many Summer Solstice rituals incorporate crowns of roses in full bloom. The blossoms are beautiful, abundant, bright red and shining; but under the blossoms are the thorns that prick and cause us to bleed, just a little.
In a world filled with calendars, clocks, watches, computers, start times and deadlines, we don’t keep track of time the way the ancients did. With electric lights brightening our homes and polluting our night skies, and with few of us working the land and rising up to greet the dawn, we are disconnected from the natural cycles of sun, moon, and stars. But for our ancestors, the astronomical cycles guided their daily lives, provided opportunities for myth-making and ritualizing and in many ways created a structure that ensured survival. In early agricultural societies, communities could measure where they should be in their food production and consumption based on sun cycles.
In many of the ancient religions, the deities of the Sun and Moon, like Apollo and Daphne, chase each other through the sky. But in many cases they are not lovers or would-be lovers but rather brother and sister. Apollo’s counterpart is actually his twin sister Artemis (or Diana in the Roman tradition), and many Native American peoples have Brother Sun and Sister Moon traditions. Rarely are the roles reversed, with the Sun as feminine and the moon masculine.
With the moon reflecting the sun’s light, the plethora of male sun gods and female moon goddesses may be seen as manifestations of patriarchy. It may be symbolic of men dominating women and women reflecting the power of men, but I believe that is a far too simplistic explanation. Women’s cycles of menstruation are connected to the moon cycle and women’s mysteries often happened in the dark of the moon.
This year my Summer Solstice celebration will be guided by meditations on right use of power. The Sun at its height is all-powerful, bringing us all we need to build a world of abundance. But with that power is also great danger, for like the willful and egotistical Icarus, if we fly too close to the sun, we will melt our wings and we will plunge headlong into the sea. The image of the blossom and thorn sticks with me at this time of year, there can be great beauty in power used for creation and great pain in the power of destruction.
We see this in Apollo’s attempted ravishing of Daphne (fortunately, she escaped, unharmed – rescued by Gaea, the earth mother). The sun is both life-giving and murderous, Apollo is an archer who shoots his arrows from afar but also a healer who drives away illness. He is a god of great skill in prophecy and divination: the Oracle at Delphi was one of his most well-known temples. And yet in most world religions, even ancient Greek religion, divination was reserved for the dark spirits of the underworld.
As queer people, all of us have experienced power misused. One of our most mythological moments, the Stonewall Rebellion occurred in the hot days around the Summer Solstice. When the New York City Police misused their power to harass and beat the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, those patrons used their own power to fight back, creating a movement for queer liberation that now seems evolutionary and almost inevitable in its march towards the future.
During this Pride season, I will be focusing my thoughts on where I can bring my power to bear rightly and where I misuse my power. As the sun rises to its zenith, I can contemplate whether I am Apollo Alexikakos, the Healer, or Apollo Hecatabolos, the Archer. Or maybe, like Apollo himself, we all have the capacity for both manifestations.
Get out there and enjoy the sun, Dearies, but don’t forget to wear your SPF 45!
Pippin is a radical faerie working with Faerie Camp Destiny in Grafton, Vermont. He is also known as Christopher Kaufman, the Executive Director of R.U.1.2? Community Center. He can be reached at pippin@sover.net.