Three times round the flame

Summer Solstice 2026

"Fire is the holiest of all things. Walk three times round a fire on St. John's Eve, and you will be safe from disease for all that year." - Lady Wilde, Irish Cures, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions (1887)

The 21st of June is the longest day of the year, the point where the light reaches its height before it begins, very slowly, to draw back again.

In Ireland from christian times on, this turning was marked a few nights later around St John's Eve on the 23rd, when fires were lit on the hills and people gathered to them in a way that went back long before the saint's name was attached to the custom, and the fire was the centre of it all.

Lady Wilde (Oscar's Mammy, and a noted folklorist) recorded the midsummer fires plainly in 1887, the young people leaping over the embers, the cattle driven through the flames, coals passed three times over and three times under the body of each animal for protection.

She called fire the holiest of all things, and the instruction that went with it was specific, that walking three times round the fire on that night kept you safe from illness for the whole year, so the number and the movement weren't decoration, they were the working itself, and you can keep both even when an actual hill fire isn't an option.

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