(photo – Andrejs Broks)
The Latvian Midsummer festival appears to the onlooker to be an unbroken series of playful merriment, and so it is. Nevertheless, to the observers of the ancient Latvian religion, now called dievturība (akin to the Japanese Shintō), it is more. In ancient days the world over, the Summer solstice was among the holiest of holy occasions. The Lettish Sun myth, of which the Jānis myth is a part, still holds the age-old idea.
Nowadays, we take as our example
of how to celebrate Jānis' Day from the the Latvian farm as it was at the turn of the
nineteenth to the twentieth century.
That era has become something of a golden age in our minds, for then we
still practised what our dainas sing. Dainas are the approximately
one point two million short songs that collectively
portray the Latvian soul and that form the largest part of our many
thousands-year-old oral tradition.
Today's
festivities necessarily interweave contemporary ways with the ancient. Instead
of small groups gathering on a farm, most celebrants nowadays come in huge
numbers to a park, in fact, not on foot but in automobiles. Nor do we brew our
own mead; we substitute for it beer from a store. The rituals also tend to be a
patchwork, taking elements from various historical periods across the
centuries, and yet the center holds.
In fact, strangers who came to
rule over the Latvians forbad us our festivals but at Jāņi we drew the
line every time. We defied first the crusaders,
later imperial Russia, and recently, the communist regime. Jāņi
is the plural of Jānis and that is what we call the festival. During Jāņi we sing līgo
songs [dainas with the refrain līgo] to celebrate the
jubilant victory of light over darkness, warmth over cold, fertility over
barrenness, moisture over desiccation, the joyful song of the universe over
stillness, success over failure, beatitude over turmoil, grace over
imperfection, order over chaos, in other words, the plenitude of benefits that
the supreme deity Sun (akin to the Japanese Amaterasu) can bestow and that
humanity receives.
The bringer of these gifts, in the
myth, is, as one of the dainas tells us,
the Son-of-God Jānis, who has been on his way to his
"children", meaning all of us, the whole year, to arrive with his
gifts "tonight". Like all foundational rituals, the Jānis' Day
ritual is a re-creation of what took place in illo tempore.
The deities in the sky and the people on earth interacted synchronously and in
interlinked fashion, gods assuming human form and vice versa throughout the creation, and during the
festival's three days we do likewise.
As befits a major celebration,
quite a long time beforehand the farmstead buzzes with many preparations. The
jobs of the season about to close, need to have been completed: the summer crops seeded, the winter crop fields tilled, the vegetable
garden weeded and hoed, clothing aired and repaired, white goods freshly
laundered, all farm implements and utensils repaired, cleaned, oiled and
polished, every nook and cranny in every building thoroughly cleaned and aired.
Nothing must be left unfinished; everything must be in readiness for the
harvest chores to begin immediately following Jāņi. If not, the failing
is certain to be pointed out, albeit good-naturedly, in a witty and ironic daina
composed on the spot, calling shame upon the perpetrator.
No one is allowed to let on that the insult stings, but one must instantly
answer in a daina of one's own. You have to be quick about it, too. It
is not easy to be a Latvian.
For the occasion
itself, the Lettish sacred drink mead must
be brewed, cheese "bound" in the round shape of the sun. The honey of
the mead honours the bee, God's sacred animal and messenger. The cheese derives
its sacred status from the whiteness of cows' milk, white standing for purity
in both the physical and the spiritual sense. Plenty of mead and cheese have to
be on hand for offering to the "Jānis' children" as soon as
they arrive. Again, shame if there is not enough.
To all things there is an order,
and so it is fitting that it is the very youngest, the least patient, who
"ring in" the time of līgo.
The little shepherds guiding
their flocks from lush spot to lush spot in the pasture call out to one another
in song from hilltop to hilltop. Līgo is a benediction. The word and the
melody express the same thing. The two-syllable word means "let the
deities weave and bind every big and little thing into a unified whole by
moving in the wave-like swaying motion
characteristic of nature". A līgo daina celebrates the
accomplishment in words: let the sun
sway, let the bee sway, let the youths and maidens sway, let the whole wide
world sway. And the humans' motive and
duty in singing is to strengthen the deities as humans participate in the
dynamism of the world to keep it energetic and strong.
The voices of young maidens and lads soon join those
of the shepherds. They sing the līgo
songs as they work, as they move about the farmstead and the fields. They
address one another in song, and receive replies, at times to challenge or
provoke one another, at times for the pure joy of their healthy youth and
strength and movement. Eventually, their song encourages the older people to
join in, until everyone everywhere is
singing from morning to nightfall. Singing will continue up to and during the
three days of the Jānis celebration, only to come to a complete stop
once "Jānis has departed".
At the solstice, the universe is wide open; underground, earth
and heaven are equally accessible. This is the glory of a festival but at the
same time dangerous too. The witches, evil and mischievous spirits take
advantage of the free passage everywhere. To keep everyone safe, people stick a rowan branch at every sill and
gate, around the fields and animal enclosures;
to impede the movement of the evil ones, they strew nettles, thistles
and barbed greenery on roofs, along walks and on fences.
Once all these preparations are
well in place, the celebrations can begin. The first day of Jāņi is
devoted to bringing the outdoors in.
Garlands of oak and linden boughs and flowers of the field festoon the
walls, the furniture and all else in the dwelling house, as well as the animal
barns. The oaks will strengthen the men,
the linden the women, and the birches enhance the widening family tree as they
stand for cousins, progeny, and relatives-by-marriage far and wide. Together
with the aromatic sweet flags on the floors, the greenery exudes the unique Jāņi
aroma. (Swedes and Estonians observe the same custom.) After Jānis' Day, the greenery will be
gathered, dried, and kept for feeding to the livestock at needy times such as
at a calf's birth or during an illness.
In the evening, the people go to
the steam bath house to cleanse themselves physically and spiritually. The bath
whisk must include many "Jānis' herbs", the ones with blue
flowers (cornflower, blue-collar, etc.) in sympathetic magic of Jānis' phallus,
as well as many healing plants, such as valerian. (In England, the preferred
plant is bloodwort, reflecting the yellow or "gold" of the sun.)
At sunrise, Sun begins her
three-day "dancing" or "līgo" in the sky; the first day she appears to be
"hovering" at a spot in the south east sky almost on her farthest
sunrise point south east, on the second day at the exact location of the
solstice, and on the third back in the
spot of the day before, as she resumes her northward journey.
During the middle day, called
"Jāņi eve" hundreds, if not thousands, of the ritual "Jāņi
songs" or "līgo songs" will fill the air. Every feature of the farmstead will receive
its due attention according to the age-old liturgy given by the deities. At the
rye field the people ask: "What kind of flower does the rye have, līgo,
līgo?" And answer: "The
rye flowers with grey blossoms, līgo, līgo". Then the
wheat, the barley, the flax, the pastures, the fallow lot, gardens,
granary, woodlot, bath house, laundry, well, buildings, machinery, implements,
each kind of animal. To each there is a question about its characteristic
feature, and each answer affirms its unique identity, as they received it when
they were created in illo tempore. Moreover, the most important animals,
such as the cow, the horse and the sheep receive wreaths about their necks.
After an evening meal,
neighbouring ”Jānis' children”
start arriving. There is an
established custom as to who visits whom; the tendency is to gather in
farmsteads that have the highest hillock for reasons we will see in a moment.
The neighbours come singing, their arms full of wreaths for every one of the
members of the host household, and flowers and grasses for strewing in
soliciting blessings for the animals and the important features of the farm.
Upon arrival, they sing the ritual
song -- "have you been expecting the Jānis children?" This is
the sign that the host or Jānis-of-the-day must offer mead and the
hostess cheese. The cheese is large and round, like the sun. The milk of the
cow has been a sacred drink from time the time the Hindu and Lettish ancestors
were one people. (Hindus still hold the cow sacred.)
The wreaths find the heads for
whom they are meant, together with the fitting song, starting with that of the local
Jānis. But on Jānis' Day, every man is Jānis and every woman
is Mother Jānis, avatars of the deity and his wife. In real life this is
not as confusing as it sounds.
During the ensuing walkabout, the
guests invoke blessings for everything on the farm, much in the way the home
people did earlier. More guests arrive, they blend in, and the singing,
welcoming, eating and drinking reach a high pitch. Some may leave for other
farms, still more arrive, and so on.
At sunset it will behoove the head
of the farmstead to set alight the pūdele, which is a barrrel full of
pitch earlier hoisted to the top of a post on a hilltop. This fire must burn
until midnight. It becomes the sun for
the few hours that the physical sun will be behind the horizon.
In sympathy of the sun's slow
setting, people roll a huge round bundle of burning hay
down a hillside. At the bottom it lights another fire.
While the fire at the top of the
post (phallus symbol) blesses all the land
that its light reaches, this ground bonfire is for lighting and warming
an area for dances, ritual games, and the receipt of fire blessings
(fertility). To receive those, people jump over the fire; in ancient days they
did so nude so that the fire touched their bodies. Some still do.
As midnight approaches, some young
people slip away to look for the wondrous fern whose mythical flower of gold
and silver is said to open at the midnight hour. Many believe, especially those to whom Jāņi
have become a source of secular entertainment, that this custom of "looking for the Jānis'
fern" is licence for sexual
activity, and so to them it has become the Jānis' day mystery. The fern
on the forest floor, of course, never blooms, only some fireflies flit about
it.
The real mystery will be happening
in the sky, where Jānis will "greet" the Sun Maiden (enact the hieros gamos). The "Jānis children" stand in awe and reverence, their
eyes fixed on the constellation Orion (Jānis), lest they miss that brief
moment when the constellation against the paling night sky and the thin gold
line of the rising sun on the south eastern horizon will be visible
simultaneously.
Sun continues to rise on the
heavenly mountain, growing into her full glory at the peak, and then she is the
sparkling gold fern flower stroking the earth with her rays of silver.
The water blessing comes in the
cool of the morning. The sun shines
through the dew droplets on every blade of grass and leaf, transmuting them into her tears. This sacred
water, the golden dew, washes peoples' faces and and infuses fertility into
their naked bodies as they roll in it.
Well may the sun weep this morning, for as a
maiden, she will be going to her betrothed's landholding, leaving behind all the dear people,
things and places she has known and loved all her life, perhaps never to see
them again. Leaving the rose garden, which she has lovingly tended, is
particularly painful; it was the one thing that was truly hers. Of course, it
is sweet sorrow, for she also looks forward to becoming the mistress of her own
household. One way that Latvians describe the sunset is to say "the Sun
goes into God", thinking of God as the entire universe, and one of the līgo
dainas tells us that Jānis and Sun spend this day together.
We, the people, fill this last day
of Jāņi singing joyful songs about every living thing under the sun,
reveling in the glory of nature's plenitude.
"The sun moves as līgo, the bee moves as līgo, the
whole wide world moves in one huge lī-ī-go!"
And so we continue, moving in
groups from one farm to another, singing, eating, drinking at this household
and that, in small groups and in large. As evening approaches and it is time
for Jānis to ride back into his heavenly vault, we see him off:
"Good-bye, Jānis, we take leave of you now. Come again another year!"
The midsummer miracle has been accomplished.
The hieros gamos has taken place.
© Maruta Voitkus-Lukins 2020
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