Lamenting July
How to Beat the Heat like an Ancient Topless Maiden
On the other app that shall not be named, for we don’t dare whisper the name of the toxic things in our life on this sweet little app (hint: it rhymes with mintstagram), I posted a random story about feeling sad. I have been in Greece continuously since Christmas and I felt overwhelmed by the overcrowding and was missing some comforts of home and family. That post spiked massively in engagement; partly because people love to revel in other’s misfortunes but also partly because many felt the same.
July is strange. I had messages from other women discussing their summer gloom as well. The heat is tiring. The cicadas are loud. The world is burning. We want to move fast and take advantage of long summer weekends or kids off from school, making the most of the enduring light of each day, but the heat begs for siestas and slowness.
I came across a post by author Katherine May on if she would ever consider a follow up to her book Wintering and call it Summering. Not a chance, she explained. There were no amount of words she could summon to put July on a pedestal. Coming from Santa Fe, I never really felt the sting of a hot European summer. Santa Fe is high in elevation making it the best place to be in July. Nights and mornings are cool and snow melt streams are still brisk for swimming. A European July is stifling.
Breast-beating Summer Madness
Can we equate a dim mood to a post-solstice slump? In Ancient Athenian Greece the ‘New Year’ began on the first New Moon after the summer solstice. Maybe I’m feeling a post Athenian New Year slump of sorts. All that energy and light building for the solstice and here’s the come down. Don’t we all feel in January also a little gloomy and slow at the start of our new year? There’s a massive build up of energy around the winter solstice, with Christmas and end of year deadlines, and then— nothing.
Interestingly, in July, around this very time, in the ancient world, women had a strange way of coping with the intensity of mid-summer. In the throes of this month they would worship an Adonis figure, a tale that falls under Aphrodite’s watch. Heartbroken that her mortal lover was also admired by Persephone, she found him fatally wounded on a boar hunt, his blood turning into crimson anemone flowers.
After spending a few seasons in Greece the blood-red anemone do rise heroically and romantically in the spring and burn off by the start of summer. This fleeing of the flowers was symbolized by the return of Adonis to the underworld to serve his other lover. To lament this in ritual, every summer in mid-July when the flowers have burnt off, women would strip topless and beat their breasts loudly with music and incense. You can bet Sappho was on board:
Delicate Adonis is dying, Aphrodite: what are we to do? “Beat your breasts, girls, and tear your garments”
Sappho, Lament for Adonis
It all feels a bit maenad-like and it existed not only in Greece but across the near Eastern world, through Turkey and Mesopotamia. Women also took on a rather strange gardening practice in the summer fever.
They sowed rapidly germinating seeds of fennel, lettuce and other green herbs in flowerpots or on pieces of pottery. They lamented their hero on the rooftops of houses and discarded these green pot-gardens when they marked Adonis yearly departure for the underworld.1
The women had had enough. Enough of the heat, enough of their husbands and enough of daily inside work.
Throw it all away, bare thy breasts and yell like an indecent woman for gods sake! For it is July and I am tired.
Brings a whole new perspective to beat the heat doesn’t it?
Fox, Robin Lane. Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer, p 242