PART II The Summer Solstice Ceremony

Caelendra’s succession to the position of chief priestess had been unusual in that she was only distantly related to her predecessor. While in principle the spirit of the Mother Goddess taking leave of an elderly or gravely ill chief priestess might enter any ranking member of the inner circle of the elite women’s council, the “Transition,” as it was called, always seemed the most assured when the chief priestess had a daughter standing “at Her right side” (a phrase that described both the established order of ascent and the arrangement of the women’s line in formal events). If she didn’t have a daughter, a younger sister was thought the next best, and if—as was the case with the extraordinarily long-lived Eldrenedd—the chief priestess had no close female relatives left, the choice of her successor was usually made clear well before the final ceremony took place.

While Eldrenedd had been greatly loved and revered throughout the nearly five decades of her reign, she’d been known for putting off weighty decisions to the last possible moment—which accounted for the high level of tension surrounding Caelendra’s ascension. As wondrously ethereal as that moment had been, it was generally hoped that the next Transition would not be as fraught with uncertainty—and that if Caelendra chose not to take a consort, she would make use of the Sacred Summer Solstice ritual to ensure that she would have at least one daughter when the time came.

Having decided to deny themselves the enjoyment of sex, the Christian priests of Herrwn’s day bitterly reviled anyone they suspected might be having more fun than they did. That, at least, was what Herrwn’s father had once told him.

“When I had the unfortunate occasion to see and hear their orations for myself,” he went on to say (by which Herrwn understood him to mean the last time he’d left Llwddawanden to try to reconcile with their converted kinsmen), “I could not help but notice that those thundering the most loudly about the evils of physical pleasure were men so lacking in personal attractiveness that Christian priestesses choose each other’s company over theirs.” Here the elder Herrwn had allowed himself the sardonic speculation, “So perhaps they must make a virtue out of their failure to earn a woman’s affections,” before going on to describe in bitter detail how his two erstwhile brothers—who should have known better—had joined their benighted cousins in echoing the infamous accusation that the most ancient and hallowed rite of the Goddess, the Sacred Summer Solstice Ceremony, was no more than a lewd and licentious orgy.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth—and especially not in their shrine! While the priests and priestesses could not be held responsible for what overstimulated laborers and servants might be doing in the bushes, the Sacred Summer Solstice ritual was an act of devout homage.

Like all the shrine’s highest rituals, the Sacred Summer Solstice Ceremony was the symbolic reenactment of critical events in the creation of the mortal world. Understanding it required an understanding of a complex series of sagas that began with the taming of fire (and of the Sun-God as well) and went on to an explanation for the seasons and of the special relationship between the first Druids and the Goddess.

The several variations on this legend fell into two basic versions, known among the shrine’s scholars as the Eastern and Western Fire Tales. While there was disagreement between the two accounts over a number of significant details, both were in agreement that in the beginning, fire had belonged exclusively to the Sun-God and he carried it in a satchel slung over his shoulder from which he drew out a handful of flames to cast down to the earth whenever it amused him to watch the futile, panic-stricken scrambling of men and animals trapped in the wildfire’s path, until the Earth-Goddess—who’d given birth to the human tribes and was fond of animals as well—caught him at it.

Perhaps the most disputed point between the two traditions was that in the Eastern version, the Goddess disguised Herself as an irresistibly beautiful mortal woman, while in the Western one, she transformed Herself into a white mare so dazzling that the Sun-God turned himself into a golden stallion to chase her down. In any event, it was well established that the Sun-God agreed to stop his wanton cruelty in exchange for the opportunity to make love to Her (“in the heat of passion” was a stock phrase in most versions—and saying that smoothly without any hint of humor or acknowledgment of the pun was the mark of a master bard). After exacting the Sun-God’s promise to be kind to mortals—both human and animal—in exchange for becoming her main consort, the Earth-Goddess took a handful of flames out of the Sun’s satchel, placed them in a bronze bowl, and gave the bowl to the firstborn of her mortal children—who, as it turned out, were none other than the first in the line of Druids leading down to their own elite fellowship.

Both the Eastern and Western versions were in full agreement that the summer solstice marked the anniversary of the night that the Sun-God and the Earth-Goddess first made love together, in the process conceiving a son who spent a short but brilliant life in human form, during which he bestowed the gifts of song and dance and healing on his mortal brothers and sisters.

The reenactment of that first summer solstice began each year in the largest of the valley’s Sacred Groves with children’s games—of which the most popular was one in which the village boys and girls, along with their pet dogs and goats, ran with shrieks of laughter away from an apprentice priest wearing a costume festooned with goose feathers dyed yellow in imitation of the sun’s flames. For the rest of the longest day of the year, the young men and women of Llwddawanden, priests and priestesses, servants and laborers, took part in a flurry of contests—running, swimming, tossing lances, and shooting bows—intermixed with communal dancing, singing, and feasting.

Then, at the moment that the sun slipped out of sight behind the west rim of the valley wall, silence fell over what until then had admittedly been a noisy, raucous festival. As darkness gathered around them, the now motionless revelers scanned the shadows of the grove for the first twinkle of a lighted torch.

“There, look there!” would come not as a shout but as a reverent whisper, and the crowd would split apart and draw back as the priest chosen to act as the Sun-God passed by them dressed in golden robes, wearing a crown of summer flowers, and holding a blazing bundle of rushes above his head. Walking at a measured pace, like the stately march of the sun moving across the sky, the god’s surrogate approached the sacred altar stone at the front of a ring of upright stone slabs that, according to tradition, had been placed there as a peace offering to the Goddess by the giants before they retreated into the higher mountains to become stone themselves.

The sight of the designated priestess, swathed in green silk and adorned with glittering gems, stepping out of the gap between the standing stones as if she had just emerged from earth itself was always breathtaking, but never more so—at least in Herrwn’s mind—than the year that it was not a proxy for the Goddess but Caelendra herself who appeared holding out the sacred bronze bowl to receive the flames from the Sun-God’s torch.