Supernatural Friday: So, June Is More than a Hot Month

Where did the first month of summer, June, get its name? In Old English, this month was often referred to as simply “midsummer month.” Today being June 1^st, there is more to the month than the end of spring and beginning of summer.

In Greek mythology, the month may come due to Hera, known in Roman as Juno. In Roman myth, she is the patron goddess of Rome. She is shown alternately as a cruel goddess in Virgil’s Aeneid, and the goddess of marriage and childbirth. In fact, summer weddings are still very popular, and they may have started because of the blessing that this goddess bestowed on those who got married in her sacred month.

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. He is Connected to the month June too.  The relationship between Janus and  the Greek goddess Juno is defined by the closeness of the notions of beginning and transition and the functions of conception and delivery, result of youth and vital force.

This Roman god is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past. In other words, sounds like Gemini twins in the zodiac, which is connected to birthdays end of May through a portion of June. Gemini people are thought to be two-faced in their personalities.

Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The gates of a building in Rome named after him, not a temple as it is often called, but an open enclosure with gates at each end, were opened in time of war, and closed to mark the arrival of peace (which did not happen very often). As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping. The ancient Greeks had no equivalent to Janus, whom the Romans claimed as distinctively their own.

The function god of beginnings has been clearly expressed in numerous ancient sources, among them most notably Cicero, Ovid, and Varro. As a god of motion, Janus looks after passages, causes actions to start and presides over all beginnings. Since movement and change are interconnected, he has a double nature, symbolized in his two headed image. He has under his tutelage the stepping in and out of the door of homes.

According to myth Janus was the first to mint coins and the as, first coin of the liberal series, bears his effigy on one face.

Representing time, Janus was worshipped at the beginnings of the harvest and planting times, as well as at marriages, deaths and other beginnings. He represented the middle ground between barbarism and civilization, rural and urban space, youth and adulthood. Having jurisdiction over beginnings Janus had an intrinsic association with omens and auspices.

The birthstone of June is the pearl. Arabian legend say pearls are drops of the moon that the oyster has fallen in love with. The Chinese believed that the pearl came from the brain of a dragon. 

As we forge ahead into June, thinking of the end of school, summer, end of spring, summer vacation, the beach or pool, and amusement parks, it is interesting to learn there is more to June than the mundane.

My Day at the Paracon at the Exchange 2017

Paracon at the Exchange happened this past Saturday, June 10th, at the Exchange Hotel Museum in Gordonsville, Virginia. One of the special guests were the Tennessee Wraith Chasers seen on Destination Truth channel. Luckily, the day was nice and not hot, not until closer to two o'clock. Bill and I got there about five after seven in the morning to set up the canopy and tables, Carol Smith and her husband about an hour and half later.  I sold books and paranormal World Seekers DVDs, plus Carol and I got a ghostly visitor by my EMF meter and ghost book, a soldier who died in the hotel used as a Civil War hospital during the War Between the States and was buried on the land). If you read my June 9^th “Supernatural Friday” blog post about the Exchange Hotel Museum, 700 had died at that time in the hospital and were buried there. If you haven’t, plus like to know some of the ghost encounters there, use this link to go to this post.

Anyway, he gave us his name by the initials over the ghost box, D. and we thought E for the second one. He admitted to yes, coming from North Carolina, as we did learn earlier he was a Confederate. The EMF meter blinked hard all the lights for the name Dennis. Exchange people told us there were rosters of the names in a book up in a room on the second floor, so Carol and I went inside, did a slight investigation and took pictures on each floor. Carol found a man with D. L. for initials of the first and middle names, plus he came from North Carolina. Our man?

Voices came over my box I had on in that room. The names of Dave (this one was very loud and clear), White, and Julep was mentioned twice (though I wonder if it might not be Jubal, when I saw the name Jubal Early in a plaque (No, I did not think this was the Jubal Early, just another Jubal). Jubal was a name used back then.

In a room on the third floor—where the house faced the train tracks on the west side of the house—the Freedom Bureau Room, I got the name, Lou, from a deep male voice over the box, and my right elbow grew freezing cold three separate times, and yet the rest of me felt normal. I also felt something touch beneath my hair at the right side of my back, before a feeling of a big, fat worm moving along where my neck met my shoulders from right to the middle. I now suspected it was a finger, as I had Carol and a nice, young man lift my hair to check, and they did not find or see a worm or caterpillar. I was told later from the worker in the gift shop, it might have been “Cornbread,” a name given to one of the male slave spirits haunting that room. It was something he would do.

We packed up about 4:30 p.m. and Carol and her husband and Bill and me met at the BBQ Exchange nearby, enjoying great barbecue for dinner, before we parted and drove home.

If you missed this paracon, the next Paracon we know about, that will happen in Virginia will be at Ferry Plantation last Saturday in September.

Carol Smith and me with Destination Truth's Tennessee Wraith Chasers.

Carol sent me this-she found an orb by her sleeve. She circled it.  Plus I found rectangle (card shapes?) distortions on the pianoforte by the candlestick, where there were nothing like those in real time.