For new witches, how do you celebrate solstice?
Well, it definitely depends on the witch and their personal beliefs. Pagan witches, including Wiccans, have a variety of very vibrant solstice traditions, some of which are quite old or revivals of older practices and some of which are new and innovative. I am not pagan nor Wiccan, so I’ll let those who are describe their celebrations themselves by providing links! Most of these are about the Summer Solstice because, being in the western hemisphere, that’s what I and most of my friends who are pagan or Wiccan commonly celebrate this time of year.
This site in particular is very general and gives links to all kinds of ways people celebrate within various traditions, including Wicca and other pagan paths. This is also a really interesting article on different ways of celebrating. For information on the history of the solstices and their role in ancient societies, I recommend the book Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton.
For me personally, both solstices are what one calls “liminal periods.” The image above is an attempt by me to sum up to concept. In short, they mark a turning point. In the case of today, it is the tipping point between the rise and fall of summer. The length of the days increased between the equinox and today, and now they’ll begin decreasing. That explanation sounds rather facile, but in reality the experience of the seasons changing and temperatures rising and falling has a profound psychological effect.
In centuries past, when society was more overtly agrarian, solstices and equinoxes marked a major change in the day-to-day activities of the people, and I believe humans have a strong collective memory of this that persists well into modern society. Even if you don’t believe that, anyone who spends any amount of time interacting with the sun and weather (as most witches, and arguably most people do), will be affected by the experience of the solstice. I argue that all these factors put those who pay the most attention to it into a liminal state on these days, themselves.
It is natural for some witches to parlay collective and personal emotions surrounding the changing seasons into powerful magick. In the case of this year’s summer solstice (today!), I decided several weeks ago to make spirit communication my focus for it, and spent those weeks preparing and orienting myself in order to make contact with the spirit of the city where I now reside in order to develop a working relationship with her (the spirit).
You may have seen me blogging about this earlier - my original plan was to perform a spell written for me by the awesome @springtart at dawn (another example of a liminal time) in order to call and welcome the spirit. I actually ended up doing the ritual much later, when the sun was quite high in the sky, and while I did this indoors, it turned out to be a very solar, fiery working that, I believe, fully utilized the collective force of the summer solstice.