Litha
Today at 12:04AM [CDT] is the Summer Solstice, technically considered the “first day of Summer”, but the mid Summer by much of Europe.
Many Wiccans celebrate the day as Litha, while computer programmers honor their predecessors, the druids, who build the first solid-state computing devices, the megaliths, like Stonehenge.
The Slavs celebrate St. John’s Night, Иван Купала [Ivan Kupala], the battle between the White god [Белобог – Belobog] and the Black god [Чёрнобог – Chyornobog] for control of the Sun. The Black god always wins and the night begins to expand.
The sound track to the battle is Иванова Ночь на Лысой Горе [Night on Bald Mountain ] by Модест Петрович Мусоргский [Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky], which everyone should play very loudly.
Archæoastronomy tracks all of the important solar events, another of the many things I learned from Andante.
2 comments
The Black god always winning certainly explains the Slavic mentality in a nutshell…
You age is counted by the number of summers, as winters are considered ‘dead time’ in more ways than one. ‘Burning in Hell’ was a difficult sell to the Slavs, who consider all forms of warmth good, which is why they always used the funeral pyre, rather than burial. They didn’t see how putting someone in the ground, closer to Hell, was a good idea. In the early days of Christianity local priests were told that a fire was needed to thaw the ground in the cemetery, which was true, but they burned the body and buried a coffin filled with dirt.
Slavs hope for the best, but believe that things will probably get worse.