Summer King 2025

Bob Ball

I have been doing these fire festivals since Samhuinn 2018, where I had no clue what was going on. I like to add ecology to festival stories. In snake-themed groups, for example, we entered or left hibernation. That was important to me. Ensuring the snake costume did not look like a ninja turtle was incidental (and difficult). Samhuinn is about Autumn, and Summer changing to Winter. Summer monarchs have often worn red and green, and had stories of change, war, love, and death.

The next step is obvious: 

SALMON.

Years after leaving the rivers of their birth for the sea, in Autumn, adult salmon return to them.

There, they transform (✓) to red and green (✓), fight (✓), mate (✓), and die (bingo!). Their bodies feed forests and peat bogs with energy from all over the ocean. 

In Irish legends, there’s a Salmon of Knowledge. He ate nine magic nuts, so he knew everything, and so did the first person who ate him.  We now know more about the world than we ever have, but we use that knowledge to destroy the world and each other. Knowledge and power are hoarded to a small few.  

My Summer King is a salmon of knowledge who has decided he will not complete the cycle. No-one else can change, either. He’ll dam up nature’s cycles and keep hoarding forever. Summer is longer, seas are rising – why would he give that up? 

Someone else will need to catalyse the Summer King’s transformation. I’d like to interact with Summer groups who recognise something’s wrong, even though they benefit, and with all groups who need to break free from this stagnation. 

In the wild, it’s the mid-September chill that tells an Atlantic salmon to change. We can’t expect that to happen anymore. Once that change starts, the dams break. In his new form, he will frenzy, fling fire, and drive the changes he has held back. 

He dies his natural death, and wanders, rotting and mindless. 

Finally, he is eaten, spreading his knowledge to everyone.

My Summer King is about misuse, repression, and how change is still possible. I want to push for us all to learn about the real world and how to affect it¹. I want to take mythological patriarchy, gut it, and fry it². 

1 Whole fields of academia can be contrived to justify whoever’s in charge by cherry-picking. (Edinburgh played a part in that.) 2 Myths can be made and remade to justify whoever’s in charge by appeals to emotion. (Celtic ‘noble savage’ mysticism is one example, or there’s the more famous stuff.)