I love this old name for the dawn…the Daylight Gate. The earliest recorded use of this name was in 1613, as written by Thomas Potts, court clerk, who officiated as clerk at a number of notorious witch trials.
In just a few days, Sunday 21 June, we will be entering the western Tropical zodiac territory of Cancer the Crab; waking up on the day of the solstice to the longest hours of daylight in the northern hemisphere, and the shortest hours of daylight in the southern hemisphere.
The word ‘sol –stice’ is from the Latin ‘solstitium,’ meaning the ‘sun stands still.’
We have two official calendars: the astronomical calendar and the meteorological calendar.
The astronomical calendar is based on many thousands of years of observations of natural phenomena used to establish and mark time. This calendar follows the Earth’s rotation around the sun, defining the four seasons by two solstices and two equinoxes. The Earth’s tilt and the sun’s alignment over the equator determine these events, so the two solstices mark the times when the sun passes over the equator, on June 21 and around December 22,and the two equinoxes are on or around March 21 and September 22.
At the summer solstice, the Northern Hemisphere receives sunlight at the most direct angle of the year with the North Pole tilting towards the Sun at its maximum (about 23.5 degrees) resulting in the longest period of sunlight hours. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the opposite and the Sun is at its lowest point in the sky.
Astronomical timing is variable, depending upon when the Sun reaches its northernmost point from the celestial equator, and this date varies between June 20, 21, and 22.
The meteorological calendar is a more recent invention based on seasonal temperatures, separating the year into four groups of three months, based on the observation that summer is the warmest time of year and winter is the coldest, with transitional seasons in- between. These seasons are always 90 to 92 days long, and always start on the first of the month except for leap year. This definition makes it easier to calculate seasonal statistics for the purposes of weather forecasting.
Midsummer’s Day marks the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting and harvest. It is traditionally known as one of four “quarter days” in some cultures. Folks celebrated by feasting, dancing, singing, and lighting bonfires to usher in the hot summer days ahead in places like Stonehenge, where the mighty wild cattle, the aurochs once roamed, and the sabre tooth tiger crouched low, watching and waiting its chances.
Every summer solstice in the UK, as many as 10,000 people arrive at Stonehenge for a pagan style summer solstice festival on British shores, complete with druids. The main event is sunrise, when the first rays of the sun strike the gigantic Heel Stone and illuminate the centre of the stone circle, and people are allowed to touch the stones- a rare opportunity, and the only day of the year they are permitted to do so.
The Sun card
The Sun card is the ultimate summer card in the Tarot deck; number 19 in the Major Arcana. This positive card signifies all kinds of good news, starting with sunny weather in the literal sense, and overseas travel, usually to a hot country. It is our moments in the sun. It is the state of childhood. It is good health or recovery from sickness. The Sun card is vitality, just as the sun is life itself. The Sun card can therefore be predicting new life- a birth.
The Sun card, when it is drawn reversed is like the setting sun. It can mean the memories of childhood, nostalgia, beautiful, bittersweet twilight. It may mean sadness or delays or getting less than you hoped for.
The Sun gods can be cruel; Ra, Arinna, Surya, Mithras, Helios, Apollo, Sol – by whatever name we have called the Sun. Every card has its downside, just like every situation in life. The fire of the sun can also be cruel, even savage when ‘reversed.’ We might have drought. We might have wildfires.
The Sun card can signify death as well as life. It may also, in my experience as a reader, refer to a cremation.
Astrologically, The Sun card represents the zodiac sun sign of Leo, where The Chariot represents the time of the summer solstice, entering the western Tropical zodiac season sign of Cancer. Here, I am using the Sun card in its broadest meaning.
Reincarnation and The Sun card
As the sign of the Sun’s highest point in the skies as seen from Earth, the constellation of Cancer the Crab was considered nearest to the highest point of heaven. Greco-Roman philosophers (The Neo-Platonists) called it ‘the Gate of Men.’
The stars of Cancer, specifically The Beehive Cluster, were the gateway, the portal in the heavens through which souls descended to Earth to be born.
The opposite constellation, Capricorn, marked the midwinter solstice, and was the ‘Gate of the Gods,’ where the souls of the departed rose back to heaven, crossing the bridge of The Milky Way under escort from…the stories vary…Hermes/Mercury, Sagittarius, the Celestial Archer, or escorted by the archangels.
But did they later descend again to be reborn, in a cycle of reincarnation?
A true Tarot tale
I have been asked, do I believe in reincarnation? Everything gets recycled. I don’t disbelieve in it. I don’t know. But so many people do believe in reincarnation. The Hindu and Buddhist philosophies believe in reincarnation, while Easter is the great Christian celebration of Resurrection, signifying the hope of the soul’s eternal life.
Nature is cyclical. The seasons run in cycles and life runs in cycles. The span of our lives seems linear because it represents such a short piece of a curve. And because mostly, we have no memory of having been alive before- and if we have such a memory- how do we judge it, to know it is a memory of a previous existence and not a memory of this one, altered in a dream vision.
Perhaps it is only logical and natural that some will see human life as cyclical too, not only in terms of successive generations, but in terms of the individual persona, spirit or soul as something that is continuously recycled. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, ‘the mind has many corridors.’
Many years ago I did a distance Tarot reading by email for a young lady who wanted to know, was her brother OK? This struck me as a strange question. I asked her, what did she want me to investigate that she could not ask him herself?
The lady answered that her brother was dead. He had committed suicide. She did not tell me more, nor did I ask about the circumstances, but these were her questions:
-Where was her brother now?
AND
–Was he OK?
I do not advertise as a psychic medium. Nor did I accept payment for this particular reading. I have, all the same, over the past twenty odd years, done a number of readings which have explored client’s questions about deceased loved ones, when the Tarot has facilitated me in offering feedback which only the client could verify. There been some deeply curious and strange, and equally, deeply moving responses.
Now, looking at this lady’s poor dead brother, wondering what on Earth the Tarot would make of this. I drew the Sun card, the card of sunshine, happiness, innocence, childhood. Birth.
The Sun is life itself. If our planet were closer to the Sun, or further away, there would be no life on Earth. People like to post images of Earth to make the point that we are tiny and insignificant. I think those images from space, the photographs taken by Cassini from Saturn, showing Earth as a teeny white dot make the exact opposite point; illustrating the enormity of the miracle of this ball of rock inhabiting the sweet spot at exactly the ‘right’ distance from the Sun for Life.
Where was he? How was he? Some might say, perfectly reasonably, that the question was nonsensical. That he was gone. That he was nowhere, or that he was in the grave.
But I am not in the business of pooh-poohing people’s questions, and she wasn’t asking anyone else. It was my Tarot she was asking.
It is hard to describe, but as you look deeper into a card, a door opens in the mind, or in the imagination if you wish to classify it as that. The brain wave activity has switched from conscious, intellectual, beta state wavelength to a more meditative alpha state wavelength, or maybe gone even deeper, into delta-wave.
I gazed into the Sun card, and it struck me that ‘wherever’ her brother was, or ‘whatever’ he now was, he was like a child again, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep. I received a strong impression- there is no other word for it- that he did not remember the moment of his death. Not at all. Nor did he remember whatever it was that drove him to it.
He was a little boy again. I was struck with a sudden but vivid impression. A small boy, kicking about, splashing in a puddle. Wherever he was, he wasn’t on Earth. He had his back turned to the Earth, but he wasn’t far out in space. Had not crossed the bridge of The Milky Way. The Earth was big and bright behind him. He was neither bored, nor sad nor lonely, simply quietly, happily preoccupied.
If her brother had any memories or consciousness surviving death- if that could be possible, then so far as I could detect, this was his afterlife, all trauma forgotten.
It may simply have been telepathy, and I was picking up on the lady’s own memories of her brother. I had never met her
But then, and this too was prompted by The Sun card, I told the lady to expect news coming soon, very close to home. A new baby was on the way. This was probably a birth within the immediate family, and whether it was a boy or girl, the Tarot was suggesting the possibility, however bizarre, that it was the soul of her brother being reborn. And if not, that he could choose to be reborn. He could. When he was ready.
The Sun card said that her brother would be returning, whether or not this new coming baby was her brother returning again (down through the Gates of Men)
I sent off this lady’s email reading, and three weeks later received an email in reply, telling me that her sister had just found out she was expecting a baby. Wouldn’t it be something, she joked, if she was going to be her brother’s auntie this time around?
That baby would be his or her own person. Unique. Not to be burdened or haunted by this previous tragedy. But if nothing else, the Tarot was proven absolutely correct in forecasting the imminent news of a coming birth in the family.
I would like to think the Tarot’s vision offered this lady and her family some kind of comfort, however odd, however peculiar, for a truly terrible grief. Some sorrows are more natural to be borne than others. Not all losses and sorrows are equally terrible.
I lost a new-born son, the day of the summer solstice 1993. But at least it was not violent. My mother tried to comfort me, that he would get another chance at life, would come again. And maybe so. But in the rawness of that moment, I could only say, he won’t be my child, he won’t be returning to me.
Some souls, it is said, wait many centuries before they are ready to get in the queue again. Others wait decades. Others only months. Time means nothing to them. It is when they feel ready. Just that.
I once had an experience that made me wonder. I was in the kitchen, stirring a pan when suddenly the kitchen changed around me. I was now standing in a very different kitchen with white walls, a stone floor, a high ceiling. It was simple, a few notches above basic, an urban kind of rustic, not rural. There was an open door to my left, with an evening light sunshine streaming in at a low angle, and I knew that the door led down steep stone steps to a small, rather dark cobbled courtyard. I was not anxious, but I was starting to wonder where Pietro was, and when he would be arriving home.
I had the idea that I was in northern Italy. I have never known any such person as ‘Pietro.’
A vision. A day dream? An hallucination? Of course. It could have been anything or nothing. It has only ever happened that one time. But it had a particularity and a familiarity, just in that fraction of an instant. A time slip? Some ancestral memory? I have no Italian heritage that I am aware of.
“There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”-Hamlet, Shakespeare.
Indeed, Mr Shakespeare. There are many documented stories of people claiming that they have lived another life before this one; some so detailed, it almost beggars belief.
You can read some of these Stories here
Thank you for reading.
Till next time 🙂
True Tarot Tales 