The dates on which the sun’s ecliptic reaches its extreme northern and southern latitudes.
In the Northern Hemisphere, these fall around June 21 and December 22, which are
known, respectively, as Midsummer and Midwinter Day. The celestial turning points
have been celebrated for millennia with rituals designed to ensure the progress of the sun.
In both pagan Europe and pre-Columbian North America, fire making and dancing were
common practices. The Sioux Sun Dance, for example, was a summer solstice rite;
Pueblo kachina dancing was a winner counterpart.
In Europe, Christianity absorbed pagan solstice customs, and in the case of the winter
solstice virtually effaced them. The Catholic Church’s early growth may be credited
partly to the skill with which it conflated Roman and Persian solstice festivals (the
Saturnalia and Mithra’s birthday) to the birthday of the Christ Child, the “light of the
world.” Christmas gradually obscured other December rites, although the lighting of a “new fire” was preserved vestigially in the northern European custom of burning a Yule
log.
Midsummer festivals, too, were Christianized, although the traces of sun worship
remained more visible. When the liturgical calendar established June 24 as the Feast of
John the Baptist, the bonfires that traditionally had honored the sun came to be associated
with the saint whom Jesus called “a burning and shining light” (John 5:35). In parts of
Europe, they are still called St. John’s fires, although the attendant revelry has been
muted. Traditional amusements included nocturnal dancing and leaping through, or over,
the bonfire flames.
St. John’s Day was introduced to North America by European immigrants, especially
those from sun-poor Scandinavia, who transplanted not only the bonfires and the dancing,
but also the belief—probably a pagan survival—that Midsummer’s Eve was suited to
divination. Midwestern folklore is rich in midsummer spells, many of which, like
Halloween divinations, enable girls to identify future husbands. Fortune-telling and love
were also linked, although more erotically, in the snake-dance ritual established for June
23 by New Orleans “voodoo queen” Sanite Dede (Anderson 1960).
Water, appropriately, also figures in beliefs surrounding the Baptist’s feast day. In
Latin areas, including Mexico and Puerto Rico, public bathing was a St. John’s tradition,
while Slavic families forbade their children from swimming until the saint had “blessed
the water” on June 24 (Cohen and Coffin 1987:218). In one divination, a girl seeks her
betrothed by reading the shape of an egg white in a glass of water; in another, the index is
a wreath floated on a stream.
In the 1990s, such devotions are less visible than civic festivals. In Minneapolis,
Svenskarnas Dag (Swede’s Day) draws tens of thousands of tourists to a midsummer folk
fest. Seattle’s Vasa Day celebrates folk traditions in honor of Sweden’s first king,
Gustavus Vasa. At the Fyr-Bal Fest in Ephraim, Wisconsin, business leaders elect a
“Viking chieftain” who consigns a “winter witch” effigy to a bonfire. A number of
Alaskan communities hold midsummer festivals that celebrate both the memories of the
Yukon gold rush and the late June arrival of the midnight sun.
Tad Tuleja
References
Anderson, John Q. 1960. The New Orleans Voodoo Ritual Dance and Its Twentieth-Century
Survivals. Southern Folklore Quarterly 24:135–143.
Cohen, Hennig, and Tristram Potter Coffin, eds. 1987. The Folklore of American Holidays. Detroit:
Gale.
Hatch, Jane M., ed. 1978. The American Book of Days. 3d. ed. New York: H.W.Wilson