Midsummer
A Time of Heightened Macrocosmic Effects
Midsummer Festivals celebrate the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. We see the effects of the summer sunshine in the radiant beauty of nature. It can carry us away in a dreamlike sleepiness if we let it. However, rather than being mindlessly swept up by such external forces of nature, our task is to willfully join in the natural splendor, trusting it is safe to leave our lower selves behind. We forego the lower aspects of ourselves in favor of the Higher Self that is in harmony with nature. We let our inner self shine with the same radiance in the external world. After this peak time of the sun, we then begin a six month progression toward Christmas and Winter solstice, the longest night of the year. We must then carry these Divine cosmic forces of the macrocosm into the darkness as a microcosmic seed which will then germinate to carry us further in our spiritual development. In a lecture given during the winter of 1914, Rudolf Steiner explains:
We know that only a materialistic outlook can believe that man is the only being in the world order equipped with thinking, feeling and willing, whereas a spiritual point of view must acknowledge that just as there are beings below the human level, there are also beings above the human stage of thinking, feeling and willing. The human being can live his way into these beings when, as microcosm, he immerses himself in the macrocosm. However, in this case we should have to speak of the macrocosm not only as a macrocosm of space, but as if the course of time were of significance in cosmic life. Just as in order to kindle the light of the spirit within him when he wants to descend into the depths of his own soul, man has to shut himself off from all the impressions his environment can make on his senses and has, as it were, to create darkness round him by closing off his sense perception, likewise the spirit we can call the spirit of the earth has to be shut off from the impressions of the rest of the cosmos. The outer cosmos has to have least effect on the earth spirit if the earth spirit is to be able to concentrate its forces within. For then the secrets will be discovered that man has to discover in conjunction with the earth spirit, because the earth has been separated as earth from the cosmos.
The time when the outer macrocosm exercises the greatest effect on the earth is the time of the summer solstice, midsummer. And many accounts of olden times connected with festive presentations and rituals remind us that festivals like these take place at the height of summer; that in the midst of summer, the soul, in letting go the ego and merging with the life of the macrocosm, surrenders in a state of intoxication to the impressions from the macrocosm.
On the other hand, the legendary or other kind of presentations of that which could be experienced in olden times remind us that when impressions from the macrocosm have least effect on the earth, the earth spirit, concentrated within itself, experiences within the eternal All, the secrets of the earth's life of soul, and that if man enters into this experience at the point of time when the macrocosm sends least light and warmth to the earth, he learns the most holy secrets. This is why the days around Christmas were always kept so sacred, because whilst man's organism was still capable of sharing in the experience of the earth, man could meet the spirit of the earth during the point of time when it was most concentrated.
Read more: Rudolf Steiner, Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, Lecture IV, GA 275, 31 December 1914, Dornach