23rd June 2025, gather 6.45 at the gates in redcross way for 7pm portal.
23rd June is St John’s Eve, the traditional English midsummer festival, and this particular Vigil is attuned to the summer solstice, when light and dark are held in balance.
The Vigils were initated by John Constable (aka John Crow) on 23rd June 2004. In 2019, having completed 23 years of magical works at Crossbones, John conducted his last official Vigil. Since then, a Magical Collective of Friends of Crossbones, led by Jennifer Cooper, has carried on holding the Vigils every 23rd. This will be the 253rd consecutive monthly vigil in an unbroken line.
Having moved to Glastonbury, John has conducted many rituals to reactivate the London-Glastonbury connection and current intuited by Dion Fortune. Here is an excerpt from his book ‘GRAIL’ describing a ritual held in the garden of his new home on 23rd June 2001:
‘St John’s Eve derives from the time when Christian folk religion sought to accommodate older pagan practices. This traditional British midsummer festival is celebrated on 23rd June. In Celtic Britain and Ireland it was a time for bonfires. The farmers would jump over them, or drive their cattle between two fires – a symbolic blessing and a literal act of purification, fumigation. There’d be music and mischief and merry-making, with young lovers slipping away for illicit liaisons in the cornfields – and, doubtless, new lives conceived.
It’s the night before the feast day of St John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness, the desert prophet who baptised Jesus in the River Jordan. When Salome danced for Herod, for her reward she claimed John’s decapitated head. As the early Church assimilated pre-Christian solar festivals, it placed St John at midsummer and Christ at the contrary Winter Solstice. In The Gospel of John, The Baptist tells us:
I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him… He must increase, but I must decrease.
The image of Christ supplanting John subtly connects them with the solar cycle – the sun decreasing from midsummer, to rekindle at the Winter Solstice.
I’ve recently been reading The High History of the Holy Grail in which one of the many holy relics to be won is the sword that beheaded John the Baptist. When drawn from its scabbard it is still wet with blood.
23rd June is the night of the 205th consecutive monthly Cross Bones Vigil. To honour it, and St John’s Eve, Katy and I invite five friends who have a loose connection with the south London graveyard to celebrate with us in our Glastonbury garden.
It’s a beautiful evening with a single hieroglyphic wisp of cirrus cloud high in the sky, a winged spine stretched out in the blue. We follow the ritual forms, freely adapting to happen-stance. I’m about to open the ceremony with seven chimes when the bell of St John the Baptist, whose tower we see from the garden, strikes the hour.
In the Bardic Offerings, James talks about John the Baptist, the Water Man, and how water is the agent of rebirth and psychic transformation. And of the resonance between John and Orpheus, both poets and prophets, water men, decapitated by women, their heads taking on a kind of immortality, the talking heads of a living myth.
I’m listening entranced, and think of the head of Bran the Blessed, the legend recorded in the second branch of the Mabinogi. Bran is Old Welsh for ‘Crow’, and the story has always resonated with me. Fatally wounded during the doomed Welsh raid on Ireland, Bran asks his companions to cut off his head. The head continues to speak, consoling, inspiring and generally entertaining Taliesin and the rest of the seven survivors. They eventually bury the head, on Bran’s orders, on the White Hill guarding the Thames estuary at the gateway to London, to protect these islands from invasion.
Annabelle does her own dark/light and lovely poem. Steve sings The Water Song by the Incredible String Band. Sally tells of an old relative in Ireland who could remember when they used to drive the cattle between the rows of fire, how the fiddlers and dancers would carouse at the cross-roads until the priest came to remind them they were doing the Devil’s Work. Everyone would stop, suitably shamefaced and repentant, to strike up as soon as the Father was gone.
I sing my song for St John’s Eve, Spark In The Dark, a song of the love between the Earth and Sky, their separation and ultimate reunion. Many cultures conceive of a Sky God and Earth Goddess but these gendered roles are by no means absolute. The ancient Egyptians envisioned the cosmic pairing as Geb, the Earth God, and Nut, the Sky Goddess who gives birth not only to life on Earth but to all orders of being in the Universe.
Spark In The Dark
Hark! Hark! A Spark in the Dark
In the Dance of Death and Rebirth,
The Son of the Sky look down from on high
In Love with The Daughter of the Earth.
Son steal a horse from his Father’s house.
Seven long nights he ride.
Until he come to the Earth Woman tent
And she open and she led him inside.
Hark! Hark! A Spark in the Dark
In the Dance of Death and Rebirth,
The Son of the Sky is come down from on high
In Love with The Daughter of the Earth.
Then the Men of the Law come a knockin’ at the door
And they say that The Son must die,
To atone for the shame to his Father’s Name,
And they hang him on a tree to dry.
Hark! Hark! A Spark in the Dark
In the Dance of Death and Rebirth,
The Son of the Sky is condemned to die
For Love of The Daughter of the Earth.
Daughter take the broken Son
And she put him back together.
And she give him kiss of life.
Now they live forever
In the Spirit, in the Flesh,
In the Fire, in the Water,
Where the Sky and Earth mesh
In The Son, in The Daughter.
Hark! Hark! A Spark in the Dark
In the Dance of Death and Rebirth,
The Son of the Sky is arisen on high
With the beautiful Bride of the Earth.’
(‘Spark In The Dark’ from ‘GRAIL’ by John Constable
Here performed live by Hawklords, Islington Town Hall 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1btyzqlvQA
Music by Ron Tree)
If you’re unable to be at the Redcross Way gates in the flesh, you can participate in Spirit, connecting with The Goose and the Crossbones Vigil on The Astral.
Or join Jacqui’s world-wide online Zoom Vigil here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85624178240
Meeting ID: 856 2417 8240 Passcode: 377295
To help those who’d like to fully participate, with or without the Zoom, here’s our basic ‘order of service’ – with opening, 3 ritual observances and closing. When conducting the ritual, the aim is to get out of the way, allowing The Goose to work her magic through you. Do it at your own altar and be part of it all. Like this:
1. Opening (on the stroke of 7pm)
Light a candle, incense. Ring seven chimes. Say:
‘Spirits of The Dead, Spirits of the Living, Kindred. Welcome!’
As you say these words, be aware that you are connected with all Spirits, incarnate and disincarnate, and with the transforming agency of The Goose, in this act of mutual healing taking place within a single, undivided consciousness. Remind yourselves that Crossbones is a pauper’s graveyard, the final resting place for the sex workers (Winchester Geese) who worked in brothels owned and licensed by the Bishop of Winchester in Southwark’s ‘Liberty of the Clink’.
Thanks to our work over the past 23 years, this once despised, desolate site has become a holy place for pilgrims from all over the world – a shrine and a garden of remembrance ‘for the Outcast, dead and alive’
2. Hold the candle for one minute’s silence, as you imagine lighting the open pathways for all beings to make their individual journeys. It helps to cultivate a state of “shining emptiness”, in which all sounds, sights and other sense impressions can arise and vanish, with nothing for anything to attach to.
3. “Binding and loosing”. Imagine tying a ribbon to Crossbones Gates. Invest the ribbon with all that you would wish for yourself, and as you tie it, release that blessing for others, saying five times:
“Here lay your hearts, your flowers,
Your Book of Hours,
Your fingers, your thumbs,
Your “Miss You Mums”.
Here hang your hopes, your dreams,
Your Might Have Beens,
Your locks, your keys,
Your Mysteries.”
4. Bardic offerings.
Perform a short poem or song from ‘The Southwark Mysteries’, or something of your own dedicated to The Goose – or to St John the Baptist and the summer solstice.
5. Closing.
Close the ceremony with a libation of gin. Say:
“Life! Health! Happiness! Open Pathways!
Health in the Body.
Peace In the Spirit.
Love In The Heart.
It is this that we wish,
for ourselves,
for our friends and family,
for all our Brothers and Sisters,
for The Goose and The Crow,
and for all Humanity.
May it be so.”
then:
“Goose may you never be hungry!
Goose may you never be thirsty!
Goose may your Spirit fly free!”
And so she does…
Open pathways!
