Summer Solstice Event – June 18-20th Culmination on Sunday the 20th with Solar Equinox event and consecrations and point work to take place on Pyramid Mountain and Tripod Rock in Morris County. This would be a nice meet up area for those in the Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Mass, Maryland, New York and Delaware areas.
I would like to reserve a picnic or camping area for this event. So please let me know if you would like to attend so that I can get a space big enough to accommodate everyone.
Summer Solstice is the day when the tilt of the Earth’s axis is at its most northern inclination. It represents the longest day of the year and the start of the summer season. This year it will be held on Monday June 21st. Due to my work schedule, we will have to celebrate on Sunday the 20th. This Equinox also corresponds to the constellations Taurus and Sagittarius and very meaningful for those ruled by Gemini.
We will also be celebrating Midsummer and St. John’s Feast, which is traditionally celebrated on the 24th of June… but because of conflicting work schedules and traveling visitors, I thought it would be better to celebrate on this weekend as well. I would like to have a dinner and bon fire.. but we may just have to settle for a potluck feast and barbque at a reserved campsite on the mountain, depending on the rules and regulations of the Park.
The name solstice is derived from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), because during the solstices, the Sun stands still in declination or the Sun’s path north or south comes to a stop before reversing directions.
In the Oriental traditions, East Asian calendars divide a year into 24 solar terms (節氣). Xiàzhì (pīnyīn) or Geshi and means “summer’s extreme” and is the 10th solar term and marks the summer solstice. Like western solstice, it begins when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 90º and ends when the Sun reaches the longitude of 105º (around July 7th). The Chinese mark this day by honoring Li the Goddess of Light.
I hope to plan an event marking the dog days of Sirius and the Sirians up in New York… Long Island area with the Montauk Mountain Range if at all possible (so around July 23rd)
The concept of the solstices was embedded in ancient Greek celestial navigation. As soon as they discovered that the Earth is spherical they devised the concept of the celestial sphere, an imaginary spherical surface rotating with the heavenly bodies (ouranioi) fixed in it (the modern one does not rotate, but the stars in it do). As long as no assumptions are made concerning the distances of those bodies from Earth or from each other, the sphere can be accepted as real and is in fact still in use.
The stars move across the inner surface of the celestial sphere along the circumferences of circles in parallel planes perpendicular to the Earth’s axis extended indefinitely into the heavens and intersecting the celestial sphere in a celestial pole.The Sun and the planets do not move in these parallel paths but along another circle, the ecliptic, whose plane is at an angle, the obliquity of the ecliptic, to the axis, bringing the Sun and planets across the paths of and in among the stars.*
Cleomedes states: The band of the Zodiac (zōdiakos kuklos, “zodiacal circle”) is at an oblique angle (loksos) because it is positioned between the tropical circles and equinoctial circle touching each of the tropical circles at one point … This Zodiac has a determinable width (set at 8° today) … that is why it is described by three circles: the central one is called “heliacal” (hēliakos, “of the sun”).
The term heliacal circle is used for the ecliptic, which is in the center of the zodiacal circle, conceived as a band including the noted constellations named on mythical themes. Other authors use Zodiac to mean ecliptic, which first appears in a gloss of unknown author in a passage of Cleomedes where he is explaining that the Moon is in the zodiacal circle as well and periodically crosses the path of the Sun. As some of these crossings represent eclipses of the Moon, the path of the Sun is given a synonym, the ekleiptikos (kuklos) from ekleipsis, “eclipse.”