June brides were a pop song cliché when I was young. But it wasn’t just because June rhymed with Moon. It is a very ancient custom. People tended to get married in June for centuries because in the old days when Beltane was celebrated as the beginning of summer in May, that month was the month in which the god and goddess were wed and conceived the divine child to be born at Yule, nine months later. (See my posting Hooray! Hooray! The first of May…Beltane 4/27/2007).

Every pagan knows about that connection. People then didn’t want to compete with the deities, and marry in May, bad luck at least and great misfortune at worst. So they waited until June to follow the marriage example. And June 21, the Summer Solstice was treated by them as Midsummer, not the beginning of summer.

In November 2005 I posted a blog entry entitled Become a Magician in which I outlined a simple method that practicing magicians could use to make their "spells" more effective. It’s in the archives. Since a year has gone by and the last Harry Potter book is apparently scheduled for release on 7/7/07, a neat nod to Crowley’s book, 777, I thought to add a little to that posting and a few further hints on the matter of using dog Latin for your spells.

The principle of splitting the magic words so that one is at the beginning of the ritual you practice and one is at the end still applies. Eventually you can achieve the results of an extended ritual by saying the whole word, or words. The subconscious mind has got used to the word that begins the ritual and the word that ends it. Since there is no time in the subconscious it eventually produces the effect of the whole ritual when you say the word(s) you have practiced.