There’s something peculiar about Summer Solstice. What’s peculiar is that so few people presently on our planet, at least in the industrialized world, remember what it is, or why it’s important. The probable cause: while the pagan roots of most holidays linger in some form, the socially disruptive reality of pre-Christian summer solstice festivities has been almost entirely obliterated.

Here’s the snapshot view: the word “solstice,” in Latin and French, references to the moment when the sun appears to stand still. In Greek, it’s “heliostasio” (same idea). In Old English dialect, it was “sunnestede” (same idea). It’s “solverv” in Norwegian. You get the picture. Every civilization on earth, from Turtle Island, now known more widely as the Americas, to Egypt, China and Persia, to the wilds of the frozen north, anticipated and recorded this phenomenon in many ways, etching spirals onto rock faces, digging earthworks, and arranging stones, as in Stonehenge, to serve as viewing platforms. (Here, it’s worth noting the concept of the “gowk stane” or “Cuckoo stone.”  Read on.) Not coincidentally, in more recent history (1996) June 21 was named National Indigenous Peoples Day. 

On every continent, our ancestors tended to believe that the sun travelled around the earth, an idea which shaped human thought until quite recently. Now we know that the summer solstice occurs at the moment the earth’s tilt toward the sun is at its maximum. On the day of the summer solstice, also called Midsummer, the sun appears at its highest elevation with a noontime position that changes very little for several days before and after the solstice. This observable phenomenon accounts for the misconception that the sun stands still during the summer solstice. And although we know differently now, we still seek to endow the moment with deeper existential meaning.

The Nordic term “Midsummer” is misleading, because in practical terms, mid-June is the beginning, not the middle, of summer to most of us. The confusion arises because in Scandinavia and other frosty places, May, not late June, the longest day of the solar year, was considered the start of summer. The reason: a cruelly short growing season made northern agrarian societies eager to get the party started as soon as the snow melted. This disconnect between the past and modern times may explain why so few people seem to know genuine, authentic, anonymous, folkloric songs of the summer solstice. One of the few surviving examples still in circulation is a Swedish folk song about little frogs, called “Små grodorna.” In Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia, revelers decorate a giant pole—a phallic Maypole—, festoon it with leaves and flowers, join hands, and start skipping, hopping, and, of course, swilling back large quantities of akavit to wash down equal amounts of pickled herring. But even this song, so well-known in Sweden, isn’t Swedish at all, and does not truly reflect any ancient Nordic tradition.  Its origin lies in a decidedly strange French marching song circa 1800, “Chanson de l’Oignon,” or, mais oui, song of the onion. You’ve been warned: summer solstice brings out the peculiar.

Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, of all people, stumbled into what may be a reasonably genuine discovery of the song, via visits from two Swedish guests:

As far as this singer/writer is concerned, there’s only one real explanation: a massive cross-cultural cover-up. The perp: (who else?) Christianity. Scholars of every persuasion, notably the fabulously caustic Camille Paglia in her brilliant book “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, have irrefutably documented the lingering pagan backstories of Christian, especially old-school Roman Catholic, ritual. One example: along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrim’s Way of Saint James, across Spain to the shrine of the saint’s relics, the arduous, month-long foot-journey is guided by weathered stone markers carved with scallop shells, what learned people would call pectens. The scallop shell is in fact the icon of Saint James, although no convincing explanation has ever surfaced. The shell, or pecten, is also the early Christian symbol for pilgrimage itself, oft-mentioned in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, circa 1387 CE.

But the scallop echoes a more ancient, and more voluptuous story of an entity who, while not exactly a saint, was indeed a goddess: Venus. In the Roman world, Venus was the most adored, glamorous and obviously amorous of all deities, and her symbol, the fluted shell upon which she arrived from her native Cyprus over the aphros, in Greek—the “sea-foam”—appears everywhere that Roman sandals passed in the ancient word. Her earlier manifestation as Aphrodite, the “foam-borne,” reflects her salty origins, present even far inland in the sizzling, arid Extremadura of western Spain. And her charismatic influence persists in our own language. To “venerate” means to adore, as the ancients adored Venus. And “venereal” …well, draw your own conclusions.

Just as the church sought to scrub the earthier aspects of pre-Christian belief from lustier human sensibilities, the history of summer solstice celebration seems sanitized if not wholly eradicated. At some point a millennium or so or ago, the mid-June date was appropriated as the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and previous traditions assumed the guise of expressions of Christian piety. Fire is central to these celebrations, signaling the ascendant power of the sun, Apollo at his most potent. Bonfires burned from hilltops across Europe, often consuming bones and broken promises. The locals risked cauterizing of their nether-parts by leaping over the billowing flames, releasing any blame for the past year’s trespasses in the perilous process. The word itself, “bonfire,” contains the prefix bon, meaning good. The torching of midsummer or solstice bonfires offered an opportunity to destroy past debts and grudges, and settle old scores. Maidens wove crowns of flowers and cast them into the rivers, hoping that the gift would fetch them a husband. The seasonal shift was also, according to some stories, a time of reckoning. Farmers made critical decisions for planting and harvesting, herding cultures decided when and where to move their flocks. Some Viking accounts cite the period as the point in the year when rival clans negotiated truces, war councils met, and plans for new expeditions and conquests were laid.

And speaking of conquests being laid, could there be any doubt that the season, when the earth is newly green and bursting with blossoms, and the suddenly-balmy night air is thrillingly sharp with woodsmoke as the hillsides blaze, led to “Animal House,” spring break-style antics? (Another linguistic aside: our English word “antics” relates to the word antique, as in antiquity, referencing the bad behavior of those guys and gals in togas, and some clad in nothing at all.) This inevitability may hold the key to the dearth of genuine summer solstice music, memory and ritual. Reformers seem to have successfully wiped out thousands of years of warm weather hijinks.

What are we left with? What I call “Pyramid Collection” re-mythologizing. Pyramid Collection is a perfectly nice online retail shopping site which appeals to weekend Wicca sorts, stocking ooky-spooky jewelry (spiders, crows, skulls), crystals, “witchy” shoes with pointy toes, and flowy gauze gowns in plus+plus+plus sizes. Great. I love Halloween as much as the next Morticia. But the neo-Goth wardrobe is as close as we get to any genuine window into the pre-Christian psyche. Indeed, Litha, the midsummer sabbat celebrated by latter-day Pendragons, is a sort of improvised holiday, using an authentic Old English word as a handy catch-all term for ceremonies of hybrid and dubious provenance, as well as an occasion to wear those groovy Pyramid Collection purchases. All of this carries with it a sort of sad “Lord of the Flies” quality, of lost children struggling to piece together an ersatz culture from wisps of half-remembered prayers.

The music which accompanies this milieu is equally feathery and drifty, often vaguely Celtic in affect. There’s lots of cosplay trilling and twirling, and since no firm record exists, it’s tough to disprove its validity. But it just smacks of Ren-Faire dress-up

What’s missing is the true wildness and anarchy of how our forebears probably greeted the retreat of winter. Surprisingly, scripture’s sensuous Song of Songs, or Canticle of Canticles, usually mislabeled The Song of Solomon, seems closer to the genuine article, including the passage:

For lo, the winter is past,
The rain is over and gone,
The flowers appear on the earth,
The time of the singing of birds is come,
And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,
And the vines with the tender grape
Arise their sweet perfume.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

The fig is universally recognized as a sexual symbol, and has been since, well, antiquity. Grapes naturally suggest pleasant intoxication, later transmogrified by Christians into a sacrament. And then we come to birds.  Down through the ages, many a head has been scratched puzzling over the phrase “the voice of the turtle,” mine included. As a child, I consulted the tiny green turtle I had won by guessing the number of beads in an enormous jar at the Danbury State Fair. No amount of query produced a peep from the reptile. Since then, better translations reveal that the reference is to the turtledove, which coos tirelessly, especially when mating in spring. The bird’s dappled feathers may have suggested to some the variegated patterns of precious tortoiseshell, while other explanations have to do with the onomatopoetic tuk-tuk-tuk call of the bird, suggesting the word “turtle.”

But that ornithological lore pales in comparison to the song of the cuckoo. This repetitive call is perhaps familiar to most of us when produced by a souvenir Schwarzwald cuckoo clock. But to the ancient people of northern Europe, like those further to the south and east who felt their pulse quicken to the call of the turtledove, the call of the cuckoo was an invitation to havoc, truly the call of the wild. The oldest known song in the English language exists in manuscript form dating 1261 – 1264 CE, called “Summer Canon” r the “Cuckoo Song.” It is written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English, and its authorship is unclear. Furthermore, medieval scholars generally agree that although the name of a mid-13^th century copyist may be attached to the manuscript in its various forms, the song is probably older, and anonymous, arising from the collective folk canon of Sarum memory.

It is a part-song, sung in rounds, and the repetitive, dreamy quality does indeed suggest the murmuring and twittering of birds in a virgin forest in the lost days when bird and beast and flower and man were one, in a world lit only by fire. It exists only as a fragment, making it more elusive, and more beautiful. The song begins,

Sumer is icumin in,
Lhude sing cucc
Groweb sed
And bloweb med
And springb be wde nu
Sing cucu.

In modern English,

Summer has arrived,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
The seed is growing,
And the meadow is blooming,
And the wood is coming into leaf now,
Sing, cuckoo!.

The imagery of fertility is not disinfected in this randy and charming song. Further lyrics describe the ewe calling her lamb, the cow calling her calf, bulls prancing in anticipation of coupling, and buck-goats or billy-goats merrily farting with a hey-down, hoe-down, derry, derry down, among the leaves so green-o. Yes, then as now, loudly, deeply breaking wind was a source of bawdy amusement and pride among males, perhaps as proof of virility or at least undeniable and quintessential “guy”-ness.

Shakespeare knew this, and often used birds as metaphors, drawing upon a rich ancestral memory held in the collective unconscious of the British Isles.  “Love’s Labors Lost” includes the song excerpted here:

When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver-white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Do paint the meadows with delight,

The cuckoo then, on every tree,

Mocks married men; for this sings he:

“Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O, word of fear.

Unpleasing to a married ear!

Elsewhere, in his “Merchant of Venice,” Portia says “He knows me as the blind man knows the cuckoo. By his bad voice.”

For there is a darker side to the cuckoo’s song. It is difficult to know how much our ancestors actually understood about the bird’s behavior, but today the species is notorious as what is called a brood parasite. The cuckoo is an opportunist. Female cuckoos are now known to watch other birds during the nesting season, spring and summer. After another bird species has built a nest and produced eggs, the gravid (pregnant) female cuckoo will swoop in and lay her own enormous egg in the nest. This happens when the host bird flies off, creating an opening for the gambit. The adult female cuckoo may flip the host bird’s eggs out of the nest in that moment. In any case, the host bird parents are generally oblivious to the dupery. The host parents, male and female, will unwittingly incubate the cuckoo’s weirdly massive egg, allowing it to hatch under their care. Once hatched, the cuckoo fledgling rapidly grows huge, raucously demanding constant feeding.  And if any of the host’s eggs or fledglings remain in the crowded nest, the young cuckoo will push its competitors over the edge to their certain death.

By no coincidence, the term “cuckold,” meaning a man who has been betrayed by his woman, arises from the word “cuckoo.”

 

The cuckoo is an imposter, an interloper. With this knowledge, it’s not much of a stretch to wonder if the call of the cuckoo seemed like an alluring summertime challenge to abandon all reason, chastity and fidelity and do the wild thing among the buds and blossoms.  Who knows? There may even have been an accepted body of permissions, rituals, ceremonies, traditions — a seasonal hall-pass, or get Out of Jail Free card — which sanctioned a brief break from the accepted social order of fidelity.  If this ever was the case, it certainly would be no surprise that the Christian church fathers brought the hammer down hard on the errant cuckoo.

We might surmise that pre-technology people were unaware, but songs of the cuckoo would seem to indicate otherwise. When songs from the British Isles crossed the Atlantic to the American South, other songs of the cuckoo joined the chorus. Many of these Appalachian songs begin with a benign description of the cuckoo, but quickly lead to accounts of inconstant lovers, cheating honky-tonk women, with props to Richards and Jagger, who “rob your pockets of silver and gold,” and card sharks. Jean Ritchie’s chillingly pure version states that “The cuckoo is a pretty bird” that “sucks pretty flowers to make her voice clear.”   More recent songs of the cuckoo describe the cuckoo as “sucking upon the wild bird’s eggs”, not “pretty flowers”, to sustain herself, hinting at the cuckoo’s vampiric nature.

One version of the lyric states:

“The cuckoo is a giddy bird,”…substituting “giddy” for “pretty” in Jean Ritchie’s version.  It is worth noting that “giddy” arises from the Old English gidig,gydig, meaning possessed by a  demon or spirit.

The full lyric reads:

The cuckoo is a giddy bird,
No other is as she,
She flits across the meadow,
And sits in every tree.
A nest she never buildeth,
A vagrant she doth roam;
Her music is but sorrow,
Cuckoo!  Cuckoo! Cuckoo!
I nowhere have a home.

In fairly current Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Pictish culture, the cuckoo is embodied as a distinctly female betrayer, a Lilith (embodied in Judaic tradition as a baby-stealing desert screech-owl), perhaps.  But those roots run deep.

Celtic mythology references the cuckoo as the “gowk.”  In Scotland until recently, April 1, Fool’s Day, was called “Gowk’s Day.” In a more forgiving context than is applied today, “fools” were believed to be “faerie-touched,” sublime, sacred, holy.  The “Luftmensch” and “Luftmaidel”—seemingly daft, ragged men and women, with no visible means of support, no families, no homes, who roamed the Jewish shtetls of Eastern Europe, raving, babbling, possessed, a century or more ago, were perceived, tolerated, and embraced in a similar way. The cuckoo’s contrarian place in what is recalled of the European folk canon is perhaps analogous to Coyotl (original Nahuatl spelling), the infamous Trickster figure in First Nations storytelling of the Great Plains and, of course, classic Warner Brother cartoons. In traditional songs of spring and summer, the cuckoo may shape-shift from a sweetly singing bride into a thieving Jezebel. And like the archetypal Coyote, even when confronted and accused, the reckless, feckless Trickster escapes to live and deceive another day, scorned but unrepentant.

Back to Scotland, the call of the cuckoo was believed to beckon the souls of the dead, and the cuckoo was believed to be capable of passing between the realms of the living and the dead. Cross-Atlantic into the Smoky Mountains, cuckoos were said to have the power of prophecy and could foretell a person’s lifespan, the number of children they would sire, and when they would marry. To this writer, the most indelible expression of this tradition is the Joan Baez version of the haunting “When You Hear Them Cuckoos Hollerin’.”

Sign of rain, buddy, it’s a sign of rain.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victoria Thomas is a Bronx-born arts writer who now calls Los Angeles home. She has been a continuously publishing journalist since the Nixon impeachment, and now travels the world in search of great stories. Will yours be next?  She may be reached at victoria@hyperfire.com