John the Baptist was born on June 24. Right at the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, when the sun peaks and starts its slow retreat.
His cousin Jesus was born six months later, at the winter solstice. Two men. Two solar turning points.
The Christian calendar has pagan astronomy stitched into it from the beginning.
Most people picture a simple desert preacher. He was not that. He lived in the Judean wilderness, ate locusts and wild honey, wore camel hair.
Scholars connect him to the Essenes, a radical Jewish sect that practiced full ritual immersion in water, kept sacred texts, and lived cut off from the Temple establishment.
The same community whose scrolls turned up at Qumrán in 1947.
The baptism he performed was not gentle. Total submersion. Symbolic death. Rebirth.
Before Christianity turned it into a ceremony, it was an act of rupture. You declared your old life finished.
He was beheaded for refusing to stay quiet. Herod Antipas jailed him for publicly criticizing his marriage to Herodias, his own sister-in-law. Her daughter Salome danced. Herod made a promise. She asked for John's head on a plate. This is not legend. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus records it independently, outside any religious text.
Did you know the world's first Masonic Grand Lodge was founded on exactly June 24, 1717, his feast day? Medieval stonemasons at Cologne Cathedral had already been calling themselves "Brethren dedicated to Saint John" since the 1400s. They did not pick that date out of religious devotion. They picked it because John represents the threshold. The one who announces something greater without being that thing himself. For a brotherhood built around seeking the Light, that logic is perfect.
An uncomfortable man. A man who lived between two worlds and belonged fully to neither. That is its own kind of power.
What does that tell you?
🌼 Katy Deroma
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