Want to see me in person?
May 17, 2023I’m back in Crawley County Mall from 13th June 2023! If you want to put some dates in your diary, this is my 2023 ‘tour diary’ so far:
13th June – 5th July – I’m back in Crawley County Mall for The pop-up shop in The Collective.
6th July – 9th July – We’ll be on the Crawley Continental Street Market in Queens Square!
17th July – 13th August – I’m back in Crawley County Mall for The pop-up shop in The Collective.
19th August – We’ll be at Crawley Pride!
21st August – 22nd October – I’m back in Crawley County Mall for The pop-up shop in The Collective.
26th – 29th October – We’re back for the final Continental Street Market of 2023, in Queens Square.
30th October – 24th December – We’re back in the County Mall for the Pop-up shop in The Collective for Christmas shopping.
Malachite – Real or Fake?
I get a lot of questions about whether I sell real crystals, and the short answer, is yes! However you shouldn’t take my word for it; nor anyone else who wants to sell you crystals. Here’s how to spot the fakes and the real ones:
- Very fine to micro banding. There are no ‘blocks’ of colour. There is banding within the banding! There is always something going on with malachite.
- Irregular banding and imperfections
- Weight – it is a copper ore, so it will have a heaviness to it
- Blocky bands of colour with no layering
- Uniform banding or swirls
- No textured appearance, although some fakes can look like there is natural fracturing in them!
- Ligher in weight than real malachite
- Very dark or black blocks of colour
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?Summer Solstice
We’ll siin be realching the part of the year where there is officially no ‘night’, meaning that the darkest the sky gets is called ‘Astronomical Twilight’.
The word Solstice is derived from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), or ‘Sun Standing’ because at the Solstices, the Sun’s declination appears to stand still; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun’s daily path (as seen from Earth) pauses at a northern or southern limit before reversing direction.
The Summer Solstice is an astronomical event that happens in a moment. It happens when the Earth’s tilt on its axis is leaning the closest towards the Sun, before it starts tilting back again. The Summer Solstice marks the longest day and occurs on Wednesday, 21 June 2023, 15:57 BST (Crawley time). The summer solstice is the moment the Sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere. This is the northernmost latitude it reaches during the year. After the solstice, it begins moving south again.
Litha or Liða
Litha is a Midsummer celebration often merged Summer Solstice celebration, and is a celebration of the Goddess and God at the height of their power: the King and Queen of fertile lands where they rule over the growing fruitful Earth, like a growing pregnancy. Litha marks the zenith of the Sun and the day of the longest light and usually celebrated with fire. In many places across Scandinavia, the practice of lighting a bonfire on midsummer is still celebrated. You may choose to celebrate this with a fire ritual of your own, or perhaps use the time to meditate.
It is a good time to draw down that the energy from the Sun at the height of its power, and use it in your magick. And when the sun goes down, this is the best time for divination!
Litha will start on Wednesday 21st June 2022 and is celebrated through to Saturday 24th June 2022.
In Old English, June and July were collectively called Liða (pronounced lee–thuh). The Old English character ð having the voiced th-. There are many theories as to what ‘liða’ means. Today’s pagans use the word to refer to Midsummer; however, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Bede mentions in his treatise De temporum ratione that ‘liða’ means ‘calm’, or ‘navigable’ in both the month and the serenity of the breezes, and the waters are usually navigable.” The fact that the Old English word for ‘to sail’ is ‘līðan’ would seem to support Bede’s statement, indicating that June and July were knows for calm waters and weather. On its own, June was sometimes also referred to as ‘Ærra-Liða’, which is ‘first Liða’, and July ‘Æftera-Liða’, or ‘after/second Liða.’
líða is an Old Norse word that appears in the modern Icelandic and Faroese languages today, and means ‘suffer’ or ‘feel’ as it did in Old Norse. This indicates that the meaning hasn’t really changed much within language evolution of Old Norse as it has done in Old English, and suggests Old English has Old Norse roots.