On the Radical Bones of Midsummer
Rooting out Entrenched Power from Midsummer to Lammas
It feels a long time since Midsummer now, and for many of us our hearts and very cells are gently aligning with Lammastide and harvest like a compass seeking north, but it was such an extraordinary midsummer this year, one that will never come again, that it feels important to mark it. And it feels important too to affirm that, amidst all that's unfolding in the news, there is much moving underneath the surface of the other-than-human-world that is offering us solidarity and sanctuary.
There is a line in the book, 'The Legend of Podkin One-Ear' by Kieran Larwood that really struck me when I read it. In a gentle world of rabbits, a group called the Gorm hope to take over the peaceful, tribal culture and wield power over everyone and everything. Their leader tells the eponymous hero that when the Gorm win, "there will be no Balance. No more tribes, no more petty feasts and pointless festivals."
Podkin's adversaries, the Gorm, provide a perfect analogy for the 'powers and principalities' in our world; they want to suck out joy & relationship, quiet & connection, and turn the rabbits into automaton. And what they most fervently want to do is to break their devotion to ancestors & Spirit so that they can have ultimate power and reap the rewards. It is much the same in our world, where we are told that the only virtuous life is one that is in endless production & busyness, that self-care and attending to community as a pleasure is 'selfish'.
And that is one of the reasons why it matters to celebrate our 'petty feasts and pointless festivals", because they are a root resistance to the oppressor. Our medieval ancestors had a calendar of festivals and saints' feast days that encompassed almost every day of the year; they knew that Spirit was an ally and a refuge. Rather than necessarily take the Church's meanings for these days, many of them were subverted to mark the everyday concerns of the people; rest, food, resistance, justice, and reparation. I also believe that within our festivals, in the earth itself, there is an inherent challenge to any power that seeks to dominate. Sometimes, as they have this summer, all these things align to create something extraordinary.
I have written many times about Midsummer and power; after all, in the northern hemisphere, the sun, which fuels life on this planet is at the height of its own power then. Many years ago when I facilitated a group called Tribe of Avalon in London, we used to visit the statue of Boudica by the Houses of Parliament as part of our Summer Solstice celebration and consider the different ways that power is held in our world, how it can be for or against the good of the common people (“We are the many, they are the few”). More recently, I have been writing about John the Baptist. I hope that you will forgive me for revisiting a little of that writing now.
On 23rd June we come to St John's, or Midsummer, Eve. Midsummer and Midwinter are the Tree of Life that we dance around, the axis mundi of summer and winter, heart and head, flesh and bone, a vortex spinning with petals and ice. They have become in many ways the focus of my ritual year.
Midsummer is a celebration of the people, fixed on 24th June, which is also the Feast Day of St John the Baptist. This is also the date of one of our now, largely forgotten, quarter days, when rents were due, servants were hired, and school terms started. So many everyday human concerns, but drawing attention to the ways in which power is held, or absent, beneath the skin of our land.
In our culture, we have been taught that power once gained must be kept at all costs, that there is a 'natural order' to things, that it would be best for us to accept the status quo. But to challenge that idea, here is the wild green Christ, the turner over of tables, the disturber of the peace of Empire and all places where power has been unjustly and undeservedly held for millennia. Here is our disturbing God, and here is John the Baptist. It was John who came first, born at midsummer; six months before the holy child of winter stars. Long before Christ began his teaching and his own disturbing of the peace, John the Baptist was drawing crowds and had adoring followers who clung to his every word.
St John the Baptist, in animal skins, a girdle of mugwort at his waist, living on locusts and wild honey in the wilderness places of a religion where power and authority are tightly held, comes as the 'holy disturber' with the message that, "after me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie." I love midsummer-born St John for his knowing that, even at the height of our greatest power (the sun on the longest day), the seeds of our decrease have already been sown, that power must rise and fall. Those amongst us who follow a Pagan path will recognise in this echoes of the Solstice dance of the Oak and the Holly Kings ~ the stories change but the sacred truth always breaks through. But this is different. Often the Holly & Oak Kings are seen to do battle. Here, a man with status relinquishes power, willingly, humbly, and even joyously. This is hugely counter-cultural and utterly subversive. No wonder that the story has been appropriated and changed in ways that compel us to conform. If we looked to the roots it might change everything.
Steven Charleston, retired Episcopal Bishop of Alaska and member of the Choctaw nation, in his book ‘The Four Vision Quests of Jesus’, describes John the Baptist as a 'sacred clown'. In the Pueblo traditions of the South-West he would have been recognised as a 'koshare', a provocative spirit figure appearing in dance ceremonies to disturb and provoke participants. In the Plains traditions he would be considered to be a 'heyoka', a visionary or contrary, doing everything backwards, never as expected. Both the koshare and the heyoka break through convention to reveal what moves beneath the skin; disorientating, unsettling, exposing held power as a spell and an illusion to be broken as the holy comes blazing through.
And so we have come to this Midsummer, which began with the Queen's Platinum Jubilee on 2nd June. This came in the midst of a week of powerful anniversaries, all of which are a reminder that power must not, & cannot, be held as though it is an immovable object.
First, 30th May marked the anniversary of the first day of the the Peasants' Revolt, also named Wat Tyler's Rebellion or the Great Rising. Caused in part by high taxes and social & political tensions due to the Black Death in the 1340s (disturbing hierarchical structures, as many who held authority over the common people had died), the Peasants' Revolt began in Brentwood, Essex in 1381 when John Bampton, a royal official, attempted to collect unpaid taxes at a time when many were already struggling. This led to a violent confrontation which spread across the south-east of England, causing many rural people to rise up in protest by burning court records, opening up local goals, and eventually, inspired by Wat Tyler & radical preacher, John Ball, marching to London to demand a reduction in taxes, an end to serfdom, and the removal of King Richard II's senior officials and royal law courts.
The Kentish rebels were met at Blackheath by representatives of the King but refused to return home. On 13 June, they entered London and, joined by many Londoners, attacked symbols of authority, killing anyone associated with the royal government. The following day, Richard agreed to most of their demands, including the abolition of serfdom. On 15 June, he met Tyler and the rebels at Smithfield. Violence broke out, and Wat Tyler was killed. Richard broke his promises and set about restoring order. Nevertheless, unrest continued until the intervention of Henry Despenser, who defeated a rebel army at the Battle of North Walsham on 25 or 26 June. By then, this "working-class revolt against oppression" had extended north & west, forcing the king to mobilise 4,000 soldiers to crush the revolt.
Most of the rebel leaders were tracked down and executed; by November of that year, at least 1,500 rebels had been killed.
We are often told that other countries have revolutions but that we never have. It is not so. John Ball, excommunicated by a Church in league with worldly power & liberated from prison as the Peasants' Revolt began, preached to the rebels on Blackheath;
"When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of evil men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, He would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty."
His voice is as relevant today as it was then.
Then, on 1st June, the 37th anniversary of an event which many have never heard of but which shaped the way that I feel about the wielding of power perhaps more than anything else; the Battle of the Beanfield, one of very many examples of police brutality that continue to scar this land.
During the 1970s a British New Age Travellers movement began to offer an alternative, more sustainable, way of life to those who were alienated from mainstream society. By the mid 80s they represented, in the mind of the State at least, a genuine threat to the established order. One group became known as the Peace Convoy, having spent time staying at a CND peace demonstration. It was this group that was so brutally attacked by police as they attempted to reach The People’s Free Festival at Stonehenge.
Despite restrictions, the Peace Convoy, at that time comprising around 140 vehicles which were family homes for 600 men, women, and children, was making its way to Stonehenge. To avoid roadblocks, they stopped in a Wiltshire field where they attempted to negotiate with police. The police’s response was to order the arrest of all 600 people by officers wearing riot gear, many with their name badges illegally covered. Pregnant women, and those carrying babies, were hit with truncheons, homes were destroyed, and those arrested (500 people; “the largest mass arrest of civilians in English legal history”) were taken to police stations throughout the Midlands and Northern England with no thought for keeping families together.
Independent eyewitnesses, journalists and photographers, some of whom were also arrested, reported to the extreme brutality used that day; "There was glass breaking, people screaming, black smoke towering out of burning caravans and everywhere there seemed to be people being bashed and flattened and pulled by the hair. Men, women and children were led away, shivering, swearing, crying, bleeding, leaving their homes in pieces."
Twenty-four travellers later sued the police for unlawful arrest, false imprisonment, and destruction of property. Six years later they were awarded a desultory amount but the court refused to award their legal costs, meaning that even that small compensation was lost. The Earl of Cardigan, an ally to the travellers and a witness to their treatment, was labelled a class traitor by the Daily Telegraph.
An enquiry into what happened on that day has never been held, despite repeated calls. No member of the police forced has ever been held to account. Cathy Augustine, in her piece on the Beanfield for Counterfire, writes, “We must never forget how the few seek to control us through the machinery they have set up to keep us “in our place” – when they perceive the threat to their economic power and state power is becoming too great, or likely to succeed.”
The Battle of the Beanfield, the Peasants’ Revolt, and other events that reveal the brutal face of the establishment, were the ground in which the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations attempted to take root. But this was midsummer and not the season for entrenched power to have all its own way.
Because even the word ‘jubilee’ itself holds a seed of subversion, and it’s a seed that the holy disturber, John the Baptist, would have been familiar with.
My friend, Paul Williment, explained the ancient. rooted meaning of jubilee very well on Facebook when he wrote, “For those who don't know the word "Jubilee" comes from the Hebrew for Ram's Horn. Every fiftieth year Ancient Jewish Law says that a Ram's Horn should be blown to herald a year when all debt is cancelled, prisoners and indentured workers are released and all wealth is equally redistributed. To celebrate, the entire Jubilee Year is to be a public holiday. Maybe the Queen's Jubilee isn't aiming anywhere near high enough. And as for all those Conservatives that go on about biblical values, the Leviticus Jubilee is a good place to start.”
“And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field.” (Leviticus 25: 10-12)
The Biblical Jubilee refers, not only to human affairs, but to the land and other-than-human beings. ‘Jubilee’ was/is the year at the end of seven times seven cycles of ‘Shmita’; a ‘sabbatical year’ every one in seven, during which the land was left to lie fallow and all agricultural activity, other than maintenance, ceased. There was no thought of increase or of productivity, only of rest. Further, any fruits or herbs that grew without human intervention were considered ‘ownerless’ and could be picked by anyone. Leviticus promises a bountiful harvest to all who observe the shmita.
Christian theologian, Ched Myers has championed an economic system known as ‘Sabbath Economics’, based in Sabbath, Shmita, and Jubilee, of which he writes, "God's people are instructed to dismantle, on a regular basis, the fundamental patterns and structures of stratified wealth and power, so that there is 'enough for everyone." Amongst the principles of Sabbath Economics are the voluntary redistribution of wealth and a presumption and foundation of abundance, in contrast to other economic models which are based in scarcity, fear, and competition.
The Queen’s Jubilee fell in a Sabbatical Year.
And what seeds have begun to grow in this newly rested and radicalised midsummer ground, the ground in which the voices of Wat Tyler, John Ball, , the Diggers and the Levellers, the Luddites, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists, the victims of the Beanfield, and and so many more, continue to call for human dignity and justice?
What has unfolded has been a huge and unprecedented TUC rally, during which thousands upon thousands of people vowed to work together to demand better, a summer of rail strikes, during which Mick Lynch, General Secretary of the RMT Union, said; “The working class is back…we refuse to be meek, we refuse to be humble, & we refuse to be poor anymore.”
And, on Thursday, 7th July 2022, Old Midsummer Day when counted by the older Julian calendar, our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, resigned in a manner which comedian Tom Walker’s alter-ego Jonathan Pie, described as having, “no dignity, just desperation and delusion, and a despotic disposal to cling to power no matter the harm to our country.” But midsummer has never been a time to cling to power. The sun is at its height, and at its height it holds the seed of its decline. With his interest in mythology Boris Johnson might have known that. But then he is no John the Baptist and he is certainly lacking in humility.
What was at the centre is no longer centred, no matter how those who have power might desperately try to cling on. What was fixed is crumbling, and many are finding that the shifting of power is unsettling, disturbing, and in so many ways both longed for and glorious. It will be a long road still but the true Jubilee of the people & the land has come, and on the other side of Jubilee is justice. Midsummer has called in, as it always does, the wild green Christ, the holy clown, the trickster, the crow, the Midsummer Lord of Misrule. Midsummer is a time for turning the tables on the money lenders and for the World Turned Upside Down. We need that now more than ever.
And so, under the heat of the midsummer sun, we come with our mugwort girdles to call the spirits in, and we come with arms full of golden St John's Wort to carry the summer sun into our shadows, because the people of the land need not fear the dark. We come with our radical ancestors’ songs singing in our blood, and we come with our bone-fires, because surely we are being stripped to the bone. We come knowing that this is just as it should be; that in this Midsummer~Midwinter vortex of petals and ice we will, at last, find Liberty. Thank our disturbing God, thank Life, that our “silly feasts and festivals" are with us and that, soon, harvest, the time of sharing with the many, not the few, will be here.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsummer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_John%27s_Eve
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Baptist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nativity_of_John_the_Baptist
http://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-peace-of-wild-things-celtic-advent.html
https://www.truehighlands.com/the-fires-of-midsummer/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wat_Tyler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_economics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmita
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2025:8-55&version=ESV
https://www.gospelliving.org/sabbath--jubilee.html
https://chedmyers.org/tag/sabbath-economics/
http://www.sabbatheconomics.org/Sabbath_Economics_Collaborative/Resources.html
https://radicaldiscipleship.net/2022/01/21/the-nazareth-sermon-as-jubilee-manifesto/
https://faithandmoneynetwork.org/resources/sabbath-economics/
What a baptismal piece of wordsmithing to celebrate this new home. '... the wild green Christ -- a beautiful new phrasing heard here for the first time!' And jubileeing will now carry joyful disrupting too. Thank you.
What bliss to have this writing.. Beautifully woven words of our stories. Written from heart and wild wonderings, the tales of what went before. Thank you ❤