Litha: Summer Solstice, Embodied Sovereignty, and the Courage to be Seen | S2 Ep.14

Litha mythology and astrology, 2026 Summer Solstice ritual, and the Oak King’s surrender at his peak | somatic psychoeducation, nervous system safety, embodiment, and the courage to be fully witnessed

The summer solstice doesn’t just bring more light, it brings more you. As we move into Litha, I’m holding the longest day of the year as a real threshold: a moment when the world is bright, the season is loud, and the body has to decide whether it will open or brace. This is priestess work in real time, rooted in the Wheel of the Year, nervous system wisdom, and the ancient human instinct to mark the sun’s peak as sacred.

We walk through the roots of midsummer traditions as a fire festival: bonfires, ritual leaping, protection petitions, fertility symbolism, and land-based practices that honor both ecology and spirit. Then I name what often gets missed, water. Sacred wells, rivers, dew, and bathing aren’t side notes, they’re the balancing element that keeps solar energy from turning into burnout. If you feel more yin than yang, or if summer intensity hits your system hard, water rituals can be a direct path into solstice without forcing yourself to “perform” the season.

From there we enter the mythic heart of Litha: the Oak King and the Holly King, and the teaching our culture has nearly forgotten, yielding at the peak. We also go straight into visibility as a somatic state, the witch wound thread that makes being seen feel risky, and the current astrology amplifying it all: Venus in Leo opposing Pluto, and Chiron moving into Taurus and asking whether your body is safe to inhabit at your actual size and pace. You’ll leave with simple, grounded practices for sun beings and moon beings, plus a relational reminder: we need people who can witness our light without consuming it.

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Transcript

Welcome And Solstice Window

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Priestess Initiations. I'm Casey Dunn, educator, priestess, and professional somatic therapist. In April 2025, I went through a Priestess Initiation of Old and launched the Priestess Initiations podcast six months later. Whatever brought you here today, I invite you to drop into the spiral with me. Let's begin. We are in the final approach to summer solstice, Litha, the longest day of the year. The sun at its absolute peak. And on June 14th, we had a new moon in Gemini, and I want to name that as the opening of this window because the new moon is usually an invitation to receive, not to do, not to push, not to produce or do more to open, to let something in to be in your feminine. And we've had a lot of Venus energy happening early this week, um, kind of amplifying that. And so that new moon in Gemini really seated this whole solstice week. And if you felt something quietly shifting, if you felt the light starting to return, something asking to be let in, something asking to be received, joy knocking at the door, perhaps. That's not coincidental. We're gonna move through what the sky is doing this week as we go, but first I want to talk about Litha itself.

Litha Origins And Fire Festival

SPEAKER_00 2:00

So Litha, which is summer solstice, is one of the oldest marked moments on the Wheel of the Year. Solstice observation goes back thousands of years, long before anyone wrote it down, people were tracking the movement of the sun. Stonehenge is aligned to the midsummer sunrise. The great passage, tombs of Ireland, oriented to catch the light at specific moments in the solar year. Across the ancient world and cultures that had no contact with one another, humans looked up at the longest day and marked it as sacred. That's not coincidence, that's something in the body recognizing something in the environment, in the sky, in the earth. And so in the Celtic and Norse traditions, Litha is a fire festival. It's maximum solar energy, the sun is at its apex, the earth is at her most abundant. This is the height of the growing season. Everything's green, everything's open, everything is reaching. And this morning I woke up and we went for a little morning walk with the dogs. And as we passed the rose bushes in the neighborhoods, all the little fuzzy bees were out. And I call them fuzzy bees because they're my I don't know. I just have done that since I was a kid. But the bees were out and they were sitting there rolling in the pollen of the roses. And that's solstice energy. The fields are full, the days are long, the light is somewhat relentless if you live anywhere sunny like Colorado. It's been hot, and the celebrations reflected that. Bonfires were lit on hilltops across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Scandinavia, the British Isles. These weren't small fires, these were enormous ones, visible for miles. Communities would gather and leap the flames, which is interesting. Um now I guess you probably would only see that at Burning Man. I don't know. Maybe they still, maybe there's still some places in Europe where they do that. Um, but fire leaping wasn't just a spectacle, it was ritual. And leaping the litha fire was a petition for protection, for fertility, for courage. You gave something to the fire and you came through the other side changed. And there are other traditions that have similar rites of passage with fire. You think about walking across hot coals, you think about traditions where you have to stick your hand in the fire. Um and on Litha, livestock were driven between two fires all day to cleanse and protect them before the summer grazing season. And the ash of those fires was scattered on the fields, which is a great practice of living in right relationship with the land, right? They're using it as fertilizer, and the fire was doing sacred work. And so Midsummer's Eve, which is the night before the solstice, was considered the most liminal night of the year. In some traditions, even more so than Solid. The veil between the worlds is thin, the Fae walked openly. This is where we get into fairy traditions. And in the British Isles, it was said that if you sat at a crossroads on Midsummer's Eve with your coat turned inside out, you would see the fairy host ride past. Herbs were gathered at midnight on Midsummer's Eve and were believed to hold their greatest potency. The plants at their peak, the magic at its height. John's wart is a big herb of solstice. Vervaine, mugwort, yarrow. Women wove flower crowns and wore them through the night. And there's something in that image, the flower crown, the woman adorned, the body decorated for the height of the year, Venus's body that I want to come back to.

Water Wisdom For Hot Seasons

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Because alongside all of this fire, all of this solar heat and high invisibility, which as someone with so much water and earth elements is hard for me on occasion, there was water. This is the part that doesn't always get named in midsummer celebrations, and I think it's essential because it's water and sun that creates life. And so sacred wells were visited at Litha. Rivers and lakes were bathed in, water was drawn before dawn for healing. And in many traditions, the dew gathered on midsummer's morning was considered to have special properties, to be healing for the skin, clarifying for the eyes. You could try that this year if you live somewhere that gets dew. I don't get dew, but I will be harvesting some uh peppermint and lemon balm to make an overnight tea on Midsummer's Eve this year. But people brought the water element deliberately into the fire festival. And that wasn't to extinguish the fire, but to balance it. And on a personal note, I'm a moon being. I'm pretty fundamentally yin. I don't always sound that way because my my moon is ironically in Gemini, um, which is a little bit more yang energy. But the rest of my astrology, my Ayurvedic constituencies, my um in five five element Chinese medicine, I'm earth. And so I'm primarily earth and water pretty much everywhere. Dark moons, the long nights. That's my body's native territory. And the solstice, the summer solstice is not where I live most naturally. And every year at Litha, I have to find my way in, and my way in is water. The cooling element, the balance to the solar fire that the season demands. Right now that's literal. Um I've had some plantar fasciitis, which is like little micro tears in your heel from Red Rocks. We were at a show at Red Rocks. Um, my partner and I, we go see Trevor Hall every year. Um I have high arches, and Red Rocks is always worth it. And yet the rest afterwards is genuinely hard when every instinct is pulling me toward getting outside. Um my body is asking for stillness and water and tending. And the fire energy is asking for action and being outside and hiking, and um this is exactly why the ancestors built water into the fire festival. They knew solar energy without the water element just burns. So if you're a moon being finding your way to Litha, the water rituals are for you. Um, they are part of the tradition. And one that I love is a water crossing ritual. That's what I plan to be doing on Solstice this year. It's to cross a creek. Um, and talking about crossings, I want to talk a little bit about the oak king and the holly king.

Oak King And Holly King Turn

SPEAKER_00 9:50

Because this is the mythic heart of Litha in the Celtic tradition, and I want to give it some space. So the Oak King has res has reigned since Yule, since the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, when the light began its slow return. He is the king of the waxing year, the light half, the growing season. Under his reign, the days lengthen, the earth warms, the world becomes greener and reaches upward. He is energy expansion. He's the force of life pressing outward into form. In the old stories, sometimes he's depicted as a great horned stag or a man crowned with oak leaves, or simply as the sun itself in its ascending arc. Um, he's beloved, he's the king at its fullest, his reign is the season of abundance. He grows the abundance. But at Litha, which is the absolute peak of his power, and that's key, in the fullness of what he's brought into being, the Holly King rises to meet him. And the Holly King is the king of the waning year, the dark half, the descending light. He rules the season that's coming, the shortening days, turning inward, the preparation for winter. That's not to say we don't still have a lot of summer left, right? We're in this transition point, though. It's the point of transition. The Holly King is not a villain, though sometimes he's portrayed as such. He's necessary. He's what comes after the peak, and the peak cannot hold forever. In some tellings, they meet in battle. In others, it's simply a yielding. And I kind of love that idea. The Oak King recognizing that his season has reached its fullness and stepping aside. Not at the diminishment, not when he's like fading. He is most fully himself, and he still has energy, and there will still be energy put into the earth for a few more months that is going to feel like Oak King. He's most fully himself at Litha, and that's exactly when he makes room. That is a teaching about power that our culture has almost completely lost. We understand power as accumulation, as holding on to what you have, as refusal to yield until forced. The Oak King offers a different model entirely. He's saying, I have brought everything I have to this season. I have given him everything the light asked of me. And from that fullness, not from defeat, not from exhaustion, but from completion, I make room. That's sovereignty. That's divine masculine.

Visibility Versus Being Seen

SPEAKER_00 13:05

And so Litha, I think for us, this year in particular, um, is asking a particular question. And this year's Litha is aligned with Chiron moving into Taurus, which is happening today, Friday, June 19th. Um, which I think I'll talk about a little bit later. But part of this question is coming from that. And the question's not are you productive enough, healed enough, ready enough, but can you be seen? There's a difference between being visible and being seen. Visible is more of a strategy in a way. It's but being seen is a somatic state. It requires the nervous system to actually allow the gaze and not to contract, not to manage, not to perform around it. And for most women, this is where it gets complicated because we've been subjected to the male gaze as a threat and consumption our whole lives. The nervous system doesn't distinguish cleanly between being witnessed by someone who loves you and being evaluated by someone who wants to diminish you until you teach it too. You have to teach your nervous system that distinguishment. Because historically, those have often been the same watcher. And so our bodies learn to stay small because staying small is how you've stayed safe. We've been told that being too visible is selfish, that if you have too much light, it's arrogance. This is not abstract. It's in the body, it's in the instinct to turn the camera slightly away, to qualify what you're saying when you're speaking your truth before you've even spoken it to shrink, um to shrink your physical form. And then Litha comes around every year and asks you to stand in it, to stand in your power at your fullness, and to not contract. And this is also where the witch wound lives in the background of this conversation, which I gotta name. Um, not as today's focus, but as a thread worth naming, because the historical reality that women is that women who were visible, who held power or knowledge or influence, who shone too brightly, were punished for it. And the historical reality is that women were pitted against each other for survival and women turned each other in. And we still do this when we see another woman standing in her power, the instinct that has been almost crosswired at this point is to want to diminish it because you feel insecure, because you sense that feeling of it's not safe and I want that, but I can't do that. Rather than to say, damn, like good for her. She can shine and I can shine. There's space for both. Um that's how it used to be. And then this witch wound came in, and that lives in all of us, whether or not you had ancestors that lived through that, or just people in the community, or just people who heard about it, that lives in the nervous system. It's not ancient history for your nervous system. It's ancestral and intergenerational trauma. The freeze that rises before you speak, before you post something, before you learn to take up space, even if you've been invited to take up space. It's an intelligent system doing exactly what it learned to do.

Venus Pluto And Chiron In Taurus

SPEAKER_00 17:11

And the sky on June 17th, a few days ago, this is where my Venus moment is going to come in. I'm going to give you a little Venus astrology, um, was speaking to this because Venus um is at five degrees in Leo. On the 17th, it was, I should say. It might be at six now. Um, but it moved into exact opposition with Pluto at five degrees Aquarius. And so Venus is the planet of feminine, of worth, of how we show up in relationship. Venus is Aphrodite. Um, now it's in Leo, Leo's the lion, Leo's the sun, the sign of sovereignty and visibility. And it's been in Venus is in direct tension with Pluto, which means that Pluto is asking what this visibility is going to cost and what it's going to transform. Being seen right now is not decorative, it's alchemical. And on June 19th, which is today, uh, a few days before the solstice, if you're listening to this on Friday, you might be listening to this later. That's fine. Um, but on June 19th, two days before the solstice, Chiron is crossing into Taurus for the first time since the mid-1980s. This is a big deal. Chiron is the wounded healer. We've talked about Chiron before. Um, episode a few episodes ago where I talk about Chiron and Hygia and being a healer. But Chiron is the wounded healer and he's entering the sign of Taurus, which is the body, Earth, um, sensuality. It's actually Venus's home sign of what it means to be a physical being, physical creature who takes up actual space. And this is a preview. Chiron's going to retrograde back into Aries in September, and then it'll settle fully into Taurus next April, where it'll stay through 2033. But it begins on June 19th, right at this threshold of solstice, and Chiron in Taurus is asking: is your body safe to inhabit? Not, will I be safe enough once I've earned enough, performed enough, shrunk enough? The question underneath that, whether your physical existence in your actual size, at your actual pace, taking up your actual space as you are right now, is allowed. And I'm thinking about my heel as I ask this question, my little plantar fasciitis. Um, a few days after Red Rocks, like the day after Red Rox, I could hardly walk in the morning. And the frustration of that, like wanting to be on a trail, wanting to move through the world in my full capacity, and being asked instead to rest to tend to be still. That's Chiron finding the wound before the planet even officially crosses. The body knowing before the sky. That wound is old collectively, too. It runs through the witch wound without being exactly the same thing. But you can hear it. You can hear, am I allowed to be me? Am I allowed to be me embodied in my fullness? It's Chiron's question. Is the embodied piece? The can I be seen? Is the Leo piece? The witch wound is both. The witch wound is am I allowed to be seen in my fullness? And Chiron is showing us this. It's illuminating everybody that learned to contract in order to survive. Chiron is asking us to see the pattern, name it, and begin the slow work of tending it. And so, what moves in you this solstice around embodiment, about around being in your fullest self, that's not random. That's the beginning of something that is going to be running through 2033. You're at the opening of a long initiation. And I'm going to circle back to the masculine thread for a second here with the oak king, because the oak king yields at the height. And that's worth feeling into because it points at something about what holding space actually looks like. The divine masculine, in its matured expression, doesn't fill every room. It creates space within. Within the room. It witnesses without consuming. That's not weakness. It's the fullness of what sovereignty can do when it's not afraid of someone else's light. When that kind of holding is present in a relationship, in friendships with other women, right? In a community, women's visibility becomes possible differently. The nervous system learns something new. That being seen doesn't have to mean being consumed, doesn't have to mean being envied, being feared, being ostracized. That's the partnership that Litha asks for in ourselves and in our relationships, right? We all have masculine and feminine within us. So what we're asking is our inner divine masculine to be in its mature expression, to witness our inner feminine and hold space for it without consuming. We're asking that of men in our lives. We're asking that of the masculine in each other.

Solstice Practices For Sun Or Moon

SPEAKER_00 23:23

And so for this solstice, I wanted to offer a practice or two. And I'm actually gonna, I think I'm gonna split this up into like if you feel like you're primarily a solar being or a moon being. You can think about this as am I holding more masculine energy or more feminine energy? Am I holding more yang energy or yin energy? Like, where's your comfort zone? Where do you feel like you shine brightest to? Um, or maybe you want to do both. Maybe you want to challenge yourself to be in both places. But if you're a solar being, a fire person, someone who comes alive in summer light, stand in it. Literally stand in it. Feel the sunlight on your skin. Notice what your body does. Do you turn away? Do you shade your face? Can you stay and feel the sun? Can you let it in? And wear sunscreen. I'll throw that out there. I'm pale, so we'll wear sunscreen. But but then go outside. Lay down a blanket in the grass. Put on your swimsuit and feel the sun on your skin. Notice what happens as you receive the sun. As you let the sun see you. And if you're a moon being, yin dominant, someone who finds the solstice too hot, perhaps, bring in the water element. Perhaps it's a bowl of water set in the morning sun. Um perhaps you make moon water on Midsummer's Eve. A bath drawn with herbs. Putting your feet in a river or a stream or whatever body of water is around that feels right. The ancestors knew that litha without water is just burning. You're not opting out of the fire festival by tending to your nervous system with water. You're practicing the full tradition. And whichever one of these practices you choose, both are asking the same thing underneath. And that's where in your body do you contract when you're asked to be seen? Can you stay with that? Not force it open, just stay. And if there are women in your life who are able to witness you without diminishing you, who are able to witness you in your fullness, and if they notice that they're feeling anything but happy for you, they're able to notice that and name it for themselves rather than keeping it in the shadow. Tend those relationships this season. That co-regulation is real. That's not optional, it's the work. Your nervous system, Venus energy, needs safety to shine in her fullness. That's okay. And so the ask is to surround yourself with people, with things that feel safe. And Chiron's gonna ask this of us too, right? Like Taurus gets a bad rap for being materialistic, but it's okay to want to feel safe, to want to feel cozy, to want to feel held in your environment. The feminine needs that to open, the feminine needs safety to open. That's okay. The hardest part is learning to create that safety in your life for yourself in relationship to yourself, is usually the first place to start.

Carrying The Lesson Into Shadow

SPEAKER_00 27:58

And so the solstice is the longest day. And we're coming up on that, and then on the other side of that, it'll it feels almost imperceptible, it's slow, but the turn does begin. The oak king yields, and the light starts its long return to dark. And so as we as we move into that, this lesson that you take from solstice of what is it to be seen, embodied? What is it to be seen, embodied? You'll get to take that lesson, that work, whatever arises, into the shadow for the next half of the year. Because you were here. You were seen.

Subscribe And Closing Notes

SPEAKER_00 28:54

Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. Trust the spiral. This podcast offers spiritual and psychological education and priestess wisdom. This is not therapy, counseling, or mental health treatment. If you need mental health support, please contact a licensed provider and in a mental health emergency in the U.S., call 988.