A Midsummer Mirror
From full expression to full impression . . . July 2026 Newsletter
Welcome to the July 2026 newsletter which is about the mirror of midsummer and midwinter.
House keeping
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Happenings
The Shamanic Sundays group is on the first Sunday of the month - 5th July - as normal. Times are 10am to 12.30pm - you can find out more and book a place here.
Festival Study Group - this has now begun but we are moving online - it continues every Tuesday from 2 - 3.30pm. This is a weekly study group considering the Christ Impulse or Consciousness festival work of Rudolf Steiner. We are working from the tome of lectures called ‘The Festivals and their Meanings’ and are currently working with the lectures concerning Michaelmas in readiness for that festival on 29th September. There is no cost but donations are appreciated. Details are on the website here.
A Midsummer Mirror
Last week marked the summer solstice / midsummer, the point in the year when the sun changes direction on the horizon and heads back south. I like to think of the summer solstice as the point when the sun enters the zodiacal sign of Cancer, and midsummer as St John’s Day on 24th June. This acts as a mirror to the winter solstice, when the sun enters Capricorn at the solstice point and Christmas Day is on 25th December. On both of these three days the sun appears to be stationary on the horizon - the sun ‘stills’ at the solstice points and three days later it begins to move again.
I decided this year to be a little bit more reflective over this time and it was really too hot to do anything else other than to be very still. I had been reading Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on The Gospel of St John and in it Steiner talks of midsummer as being the peak of the great outward breath of earth towards the cosmos. After this point, we begin to breath inwards again, bringing the experience of spiritual ‘expression’ (in the outward breath) back towards us in a sort of spiritual ‘impression’, as if everything we have built or desired up until this point will begin to mature ready to be birthed again, or in a new form, at midwinter. St John’s Day is the day of that great outward expression, a mirror of the inward ‘impression’ at the winter solstice time.
It occurred to me recently that the Twelve Holy Nights from Christmas through to Epiphany would be reflected in the days from St John’s Eve (on 23rd June) to 6th July in a sort of mirror. St John was, of course, the forerunner, or preparer of the way, for the coming birth of Jesus.
So I opened up my journal and looked back to the period of the Twelve Holy Nights from Christmas Eve 2025 to Epiphany 2026. Working with the Twelve Holy Nights has become a bit of a tradition but on this last occasion I had decided to follow them according to the work of Rudolf Steiner. It also happened to correspond with a very precise astrological conjunction - my progressed Sun was exactly conjunct my natal Jupiter in Pisces for one week within the Twelve Holy Nights. To explain that very simply - there was a homeopathic expansion of my understanding of spirit/soul which is part of my destiny. I wrote about it in the January newsletter - Revelation.
The Great Commandment
This winter conjunction of my progressed sun and natal Jupiter were at an exact degree - 8° - and minute - 2’ - for one week from 28th December to 3rd January within the Twelve Holy Nights. One week in which some sort of initiation took place although at the time I called it a revelation. It also felt like a birth, here I was, a new babe blinking and blind to a fresh world, not really knowing what had happened, only that I had arrived.
Now, at the time of Midsummer, I had a look at the astrology of this current ‘time’ and I noticed a mirror of sorts. On Tuesday 30th June, the midsummer equivalent to the mid point of the Twelve Holy Nights, there was a Full Moon in Capricorn (my birth sign). There are other aspects within that chart that are ‘significant’ but it is the daily transit chart (where the planets are at any given moment) that speaks volumes.
This is because the Full Moon, on one side of our Earth, was at 8°15’ of Cancer and the Sun, on the other side of our Earth, was at 8°16’ of Capricorn, not very distant from the aforementioned 8°2’ mentioned above. Now (I am doing a little jiggery pokery here) the significance of those degrees and minutes exactly reflect the clock time I was born at - between 8.15 and 8.16am. Time (my morning birth) and space (the positions of both Sun and Moon) seemed to collide - in numbers. I went back to the Twelve Holy Nights and looked at the Cancer (the midpoint mentioned above) entry in my notebook and read the quote for that day/night from Steiner -
“It is the night of the Great Commandment”.
What does it all mean? Have I received a great commandment at midwinter which would come to fruition at midsummer? Theoretically if I was (re)born during the Twelve Holy Nights then I am only 6 months old now - should I ‘know’ what it all means? Perhaps not but I’m aware of an intuitive understanding of this time as I chose the Full Moon day on Tuesday 30th June for the start of the Festivals Study Group where we study the Christ Impulse Festivals according to Rudolf Steiner. This date was arrived at after asking a horary astrological question but it is only now that I see the relevance of the timing and can see how my progressed Sun would be mirrored in some way during St John’s tide.
Spiritual heat - full expression on St John’s Day
Back to midsummer and despite being as 'still’ as possible during the heat it was imperative that St John’s Day was to be marked in some way with a spiritual act of ‘expression’. There was a plan afoot to ascend The Skyrrid Fawr again (a holy mountain on the borders of Wales and England and the subject of the most recent newsletter - Whitsun Fire) perhaps in the early morning to avoid the worst of the heat, but a lightbulb moment had us decide on something quite different - a baptism by water in the River Monnow at Skenfrith, because St John was the baptiser and a full ‘immersion’ was needed, as a reflection of sorts. We weren’t the only ones . . . the river was full of human bodies seeking relief from the heat . . . many bodies and many baptisms even if they were not intentionally baptising themselves!
The Templar Church
Following this baptism, or immersion, we made our way to the nearby Knights Templar church of St Michael’s at Garway . . . after all, if we couldn’t get to the St Michael ruins on the top of The Skyrrid there are a plethora of ‘Michael’ churches in that area.
The church has a large square bell tower which was, originally, attached to a circular nave but now has a rectangular nave with a connecting corridor. After a thorough look inside the church, on the way out my attention was caught by the swifts - ringing the bell tower in their own way by going round and round squealing their delight and occasionally flying full tilt into their nests under the roof tiles. Their ‘expression’ will be the readying of their young for the flight back to Africa . . . perhaps as far as South Africa which straddles the Tropic of Capricorn.
As St John’s tide is now on the wane I have picked up a Michaelmas ‘reader’ - an abbreviated short read of Steiner’s Michaelmas lectures. In the introduction, the compiler/editor says
“The intelligence in nature is innocent, unconscious and intuitive - a stage we cannot go back to. We are a long way from becoming . . . clear, but now conscious, vessels for the cosmos to work through - but perhaps it is time to make a start.”
So, at six months old, I make a start and strangely begin to see how my past paths begin to coalesce into a new order - the cosmos is working through us and, I might add, we are working through the cosmos. Mirrors work both ways.
Thank you for reading . . . Mandy
Such a good read, full of meaning and I question my own mirroring of the year at this point, inside and out. Thank you Mandy for bringing these things to light.