June

In the sixth book of the Fasti the goddesses argue over the month. Juno claims Iunius outright as her own, queen of the gods and patron of marriage; Juventas, goddess of youth, counters that the month honours the iuniores, the young men of fighting age, as May honoured the maiores, the elders; and Concordia proposes that the name records the joining, iungere, of the Romans and Sabines into one people. Ovid, as he did for May, declines to judge between them, and the derivation of June remains as open in modern scholarship as the poet left it.

The religious centre of the Roman month was the hearth of the state. The inner sanctum of the round temple of Vesta stood open to the city's married women from the seventh to the fifteenth of June, the only days of the year they could enter it barefoot with their offerings, while the Vestals cleansed the temple and carried its refuse away down the Tiber. Until that cleansing was complete the days were held religiously unfit for weddings, which is the root of the old preference, recorded by Ovid and long outliving Rome, for marrying in the second half of June rather than the first. The Matralia of the eleventh, the festival of Mater Matuta, belonged likewise to the women of the city.

June's bee keeping, haymaking calendar of saints' days in medieval Europe hung around the nativity of John the Baptist on the twenty fourth, the one saint's birth besides Christ's and Mary's that the church calendar keeps, placed half a year before Christmas at the sun's other turning.

Sources FastiOvid with Rome's Vestal Virgins: A Study of Rome's Vestal Priestesses in the Late Republic and Early PrincipateRobin Lorsch Wildfang, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

The summer solstice, falling on or near the twenty first of June, gives the month its religious shape. Modern Pagans keep the longest day as Litha or Midsummer, one of the eight stations of the Wheel of the Year, with vigils from sunset to sunrise and gatherings at monuments aligned to the solstice sun, of which the dawn crowd at Stonehenge is the most famous. Across northern Europe the older midsummer fires survived christianisation by attaching themselves to the eve of John the Baptist's nativity: St John's Eve on the twenty third of June is still a bonfire night from Scandinavia to Spain, and Scandinavian Midsummer remains one of the year's chief festivals under a nominally secular name.

In the southern hemisphere the same date is the winter solstice, and it carries the year's great sun festival of the Andes. Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, was the Inca celebration of the solstice and new year, suppressed by the Spanish in 1572 and revived in 1944 as a vast annual re enactment at the fortress of Sacsayhuaman above Cusco, where the ceremony petitions Inti, the sun, to return from his farthest point.

The month also carries observances of a newer kind. World Humanist Day, kept on the solstice itself, was established by the humanist movement as a deliberate reclaiming of the sun's turning for a non theistic celebration, and the movable feasts of Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart, counted from Easter, fall in June in most years.

Sources The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WitchcraftRonald Hutton with Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Inca Religion and Customs (Historia del Nuevo Mundo)Bernabe Cobo; translated by Roland Hamilton