Summer 2009
Fires of the solstice
By Marguerite Yourcenar (1977)
The winter solstice has Christmas as its festival; Easter, at the spring equinox, occupies all by itself the place of other festivals of renewal, such as that May Day which the beauties and gallants of the Middle Ages celebrated by riding into the woods or dancing on meadows, or those Rogation Days which have become virtually outdated, as the men of today love neither earth nor heaven enough to invoke the blessings of the one upon the other. The Feast of Saint John, the festival of the summer solstice, has had its fires of joy extinguished almost everywhere, except perhaps in Scandinavian countries, where their tall flames are reflected upon the water of the lakes. But no one in Sicily any longer watches at dawn on June 24 to see Salome dancing naked in the rising sun, bearing on a golden platter which is itself' a solar image the head of the Baptist. There are exceptions; scattered here and there the old rites survive. In Greece and in Portugal, there is the ceremony of walking barefoot on burning embers, which is more ancient than Christianity itself. Florence has its fireworks, and in Greece and some small villages of France children roll in front of them wheels adorned with candles. But all this is hardly connected in people's minds with the antique glory of sol invictus.
And, indeed, this man of the desert nourished with honey and locusts, this prophet burned by the shimmering of the noonday sun on the rocks, this preacher with words of fire, can be a good symbol in the Middle East for the scorching season; the refreshing contrast of the river Jordan only increases its intensity. Yet it would appear that that element of splendor and luminous serenity, so closely associated in our temperate regions with the very idea of the June solstice, is sorely missing in this story of asceticism and blood. There are other Christian festivals of summer--Pentecost, with its mystical flames, and Corpus Christi, with its rustic, floral profusion around the monstrance; but they have never been felt to be the festivals of summer. That season which is a festival in itself lacks, properly speaking, a festival of its own.
Nevertheless, it would appear that in France our Chinese lanterns and fireworks on the Quatorze Juillet and in the United States the avalanche of firecrackers and Roman candles on the Yankee Fourth of July answer man's age-old need to reproduce on earth a great solar episode, to add a bit more, if he can, to the heat and light which fall from the sky. And one cannot regret too much that those ancient fires of joy which traveled from village to village and from summit to summit, threatening the forests and the high grass with conflagration, have been definitively extinguished, however picturesque the leaps of the dancers jumping around or over the flames must have been. Our dances in the streets and in the dance halls, themselves almost obsolete, have in their own way taken their place, but they are desacralized, except perhaps for a few drops of patriotism, instilled into the consciousness of the dancers by some of the images d'Epinal out of our history. And it may be that the vast, almost panicky summer exodus of today is some solar rite without a name.
Yet, at the very thought of a solstitial festival, a curious sort of vertigo overtakes us, like that of a man balancing on a slippery sphere. That full measure of light, that longest day of the year, which lasts almost ten weeks at the North Cape, is also the moment in Antarctica when night reigns, illumined only by the distant fires of the stars. What is more, this apogee signals the beginning of a descent; from now on, the days will get shorter and shorter, until they reach the nadir of the winter solstice; the astronomical winter begins in June, just as the astronomical summer begins in December, when the hours of light imperceptibly grow longer again until they reach the pinnacle of the Feast of Saint John. We have before us three months of green meadows, flowers, harvests, warm sand on the beaches, and songs in the branches; but the movement of the skies is already preparing our winter, as, in the depths of winter, it prepares the summer. We are caught in this rising and falling double helix. "Verweile loch, du bist so schon," Faust could have said to the June solstice. But he would have said it in vain. It is within ourselves, and without too much hope or belief, that durability must be sought.
Reprinted from the collection That Mighty Sculptor Time, Noonday Press edition, 1992, translated by Walter Kaiser. Marguerite Yourcenar died in 1987. |
