Ritual: “Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant” Summer Solstice Ritual
As I’m writing this, misinformation and disinformation are flooding social media as part of a coordinated global campaign to undermine democracy and fully rupture any attempt at consensus reality. In the midst of the 2024 general election, one party is helmed by an actual insurrectionist who has a 50/50 shot at reclaiming power and establishing a theocratic autocracy in the United States, all of which is enabled by members of that party spewing outright lies without any meaningful pushback. Every week we seem to uncover yet another example of right-wing billionaires buying votes on the Supreme Court.
The ritual outlined below builds upon this idea and weaves in the energy of the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, with the goal of dragging these lies and liars into the stark light of the sun. This ritual harnesses the powerful solar energy of this time of the year to shine a spotlight on their corruption. This ritual calls in the purifying flames of the sun to burn away the darkness to expose their machinations.
The Ritual of Pride
Instead of making offers to the land to ensure an abundance of grain we are instead planting seeds of hope to sustain us through the next year. We celebrate our continued survival in the face of systems and ideologies that would seek to erase and destroy us, and mourn those we have lost to violence and oppression. We lift up our dead in prayer, song, dance, sex, and celebration to ensure their stories carry on.
Call To Action: Tending To The Dead
I want to start this by saying I am in no way the first person to discuss the otherworldly impacts of things like war, the pandemic, or climate change when it comes to the dead. If anything, I’m just adding to a list of voices that are calling for the same thing - the need to tend to our dead. The beginning of Spring (in the northern hemisphere) might seem like a weird time to draw attention to death and the dead, after all this is the time of rebirth and new beginnings and life coming back into the world, but strangely I think that is exactly why it’s important to remember our dead right now.