Summer Solstice (also known as Litha), the longest day of the year, is such a bittersweet day. The sun is at the peak of its power, yet at this moment its decline begins, and the days to come will become shorter and shorter as the year advances toward autumn. The very first ritual our circle ever conducted was summer solstice in 1992, so this is a special day for the Crow Women. Our group is now 28 years old. That’s longevity! We love this holiday–our summer solstice page gathers together all our blog posts about this Sabbat.
The song Celebrate Summer does just that!
I wrote Celebrate Summer to celebrate my experiences with our local event for this Sabbat, which we call the Summer Long Dance. Did you know that each and every one of the Crow Women’s songs has its own dedicated page? The one for the song Celebrate Summer is here.
Have a listen to this YouTube link to the song as you read, and I’ll tell you the story behind the song, as well as my suggestions for using it in ritual.
Our album Seasons: A Pagan Journey Around the Wheel (available directly from us in our store on this site) includes songs directly (or sometimes tangentially) related to each of the 8 Sabbats of the pagan yearly cycle of holidays. The 3 components of Celebrate Summer were all written at different times. When we put together this album, I combined them into one composition, and that’s what we took into the recording studio.
Honoring solstice dawn
The track Celebrate Summer has three components. The first is an instrospective account of the experience of watching the Summer Solstice sunrise. Because there are a lot of words, and the song is in free meter, I would recommend having a soloist (or a duet as in our recording) sing this if you’d like to incorporate it into your Litha ritual. It also works well as a recited poem for a dawn ritual.
Before the dawn on the longest day
from Celebrate Summer, music & lyrics © Alane Susan Brown (ASCAP) 2019, recorded by the Crow Women on the album Seasons
We stand upon the hill and wait
We bid farewell to the shortest night
And drum and sing in the growing light
The grey horizon slowly blooms
With rose and gold ‘til the sun’s disc shows
Amaterasu, Inti, Ra, Wala
We greet you on your day of power
On solstice morning, a few of us who are very dedicated get up before dawn and process our way through the liminal grey light, drumming and stumbling to a spot where we can see the horizon. There we wait. And wait and wait for the sun to rise. It’s amazing how long it takes when you are standing outside in the cool of dawn, keeping the chanting and drumming going as the sun sloooowly nears rising. It makes me appreciate that glorious moment when the first wedge of fire brims over the horizon!
This section of the song celebrates four sun deities. Amaterasu is the Japanese goddess of the sun, Inti is the Peruvian god of the sun, Ra the Egyptian sun god, and Wala is an Australian Aboriginal sun goddess. It’s more common for the sun to be seen as a masculine deity, but there are many sun goddesses as well. The sacred nature of the sun, giver of life, has surely been honored since the earliest of human cultures.
An easy sunrise chant
The second component of the song is a very simple chant suitable for singing by a group watching the sun rise. Because there are so few words, I have found that people pick this up very quickly! I composed it so that it would cry out for harmonies. When the Crow Women started rehearsing this little chant, I demonstrated a few options for harmony, then turned everyone loose. As you can hear, the harmonies got very fat!
Sun rise, sun arise
from Celebrate Summer, music & lyrics © Alane Susan Brown (ASCAP) 2019, recorded by the Crow Women on the album Seasons
Sun rise, sun arise
This chant was written for summer solstice, but it could also be used for dawn on winter solstice, to celebrate the return of the sun’s power. You could use it for any dawn ritual or sunrise ceremony, really, perhaps after an all-night vigil such as a visionquest or rite of passage.
Dance with the ancestors on the longest day
The third and final element of the song is heralded by a cymbal, and the song switches into 6/8 meter. This is a lively little songlet. I was musing on how ancient the celebration of the summer solstice is. I pictured generations back to the dawn of time, gathered with us in the circle–the ancestors we carry in our blood and bones and genes. I pictured their spirits singing and drumming and dancing joyously alongside us in the circle. In my local community, we keep the sound field and dancing going from sunrise to sunset on the longest day of the year. It’s lovely to spend such a long time in sacred space. So seldom in life do we have such a gracious plenty of time. That’s why we call it Long Dance. It’s a long, long dance!
Gather together to celebrate summer
from Celebrate Summer, music & lyrics © Alane Susan Brown (ASCAP) 2019, recorded by the Crow Women on the album Seasons
Connect to the source of the most ancient ways
of ancestor chanters and dancers and drummers
Within us, beside us on this longest day
Even the longest day comes to an end
After you have lived the long day of summer solstice, be sure to give your full attention to its sunset. This is the pivot of the year’s turning. I always hold my hands up to catch the last rays of the sunlight and let the bittersweet emotion rest in me. Now the power of the sun will wane, the year will wane, as everything must wane. The precious sadness of that moment, lived year after year, made its way into another of my songs:
As the last of the setting sunshine bathes my upraised hands
from She Calls, music & lyrics © Alane Susan Brown (ASCAP) 2019, recorded by the Crow Women on the album Seasons
I am filled with a knowing as the darkness gathers the land
Pagan Artists Celebrate the Sabbats
I enjoy creating playlists of pagan music on Spotify. I have 18 of them published as of this writing, and a bunch more in process. Check out my Spotify profile for the current list. I have a playlist for every Sabbat in the Wheel of the Year. Some Sabbats are very popular with pagan songwriters and have quite a lot of music written about them. That’s reflected by the number of tracks I’ve found for each holiday. Can you guess which is Sabbat #1? Ding, ding, you got it, it’s Beltane with 49 tracks and counting!
Tied for second place are Samhain and Summer Solstice with 33 each. There’s a middle group: Winter Solstice (20), Fall Equinox (19), Spring Equinox (18) and Imbolc (17). Distinctly under-represented is Lughnassad with just 12 tracks. Yes, I know, I’m getting carried away. I just love data. But there’s a point to all this. If you (or someone you love) is a pagan songwriter, how about writing about the underdogs? And, please let me know about it when the song hits Spotify so I can add it to the appropriate list.
Here’s my playlist of Summer Solstice songs. (I invite you to check out my other pagan playlists, too!)
However you celebrate summer, here’s wishing you find joy in the power of the sun. May Amaterasu, Inti, Ra and Wala bless you.
For more information about the Crow Women pagan choir, and access to all the blog posts by Alane and the other 9 crowsingers who have written for Pagan Song, you can visit the Crow Women author page here on Pagan Song.
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