HERALDS AT THE GATES OF THE SUN

A Summer Solstice Meditation on the Other

I sit in reflection every year at midsummer, when the Sun reaches its zenith and daylight triumphs over darkness. In the Western esoteric tradition, from Freemasonry to Thelema, the Summer Solstice has long been regarded as a sacred turning point in the solar cycle. It is no coincidence that around this time (June 24th) falls the Feast of St. John the Baptist, one of those most important yet often forgotten days of the esoteric calendar, as I often remind fellow practitioners.

In my own journey through ceremonial magick and initiatory orders, I came to appreciate that St. John the Baptist is not merely a biblical figure, but a rich symbol of thresholds and transformation, a herald of light at the peak of the Sun’s power.

St. John the Baptist stands as a solar sentinel at the gate of summer. According to Christian lore, John was born six months before Jesus; thus, the Church fixed John’s feast on June 24th, six months before Christmas Eve. This places St. John’s Day precisely at the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere – the longest day, when the Sun enters Cancer, the cardinal Water sign. In esoteric correspondences, Cancer’s water element resonates deeply with John’s role as the baptiser in the river. Indeed, in occult Masonic symbolism¹, I learned that St. John the Baptist is associated with the elemental Water, represented by the downward-pointing triangle of an interlaced hexagram.

He embodies the nurturing, emotional current ruled by the Moon – the waters of life and the maternal womb – in which the candidate for initiation is symbolically immersed. As I recalled in my first book², every time I attended a lodge meeting and heard the old phrase “erected to God and dedicated to the Holy Saints John,” I wondered at its meaning. Over time, I realised that the two Saints John – the Baptist at midsummer and the Evangelist at midwinter – represent a mystical polarity of light and dark, summer and winter, water and fire.

At the Summer Solstice, St. John the Baptist stands as a herald at the Gate of Men. Esoteric lore (echoing the Neoplatonic philosopher Macrobius and transmitted through Masonic teachings) holds that the two solstices are two great “gates” of the year.

Cancer, the sign of the summer tropic, was called the Gate of Men – a portal through which souls descend from the celestial realm into birth. Capricorn, at the winter tropic, was the Gate of the Gods, through which souls ascend back to the divine realm. As a student of occult symbolism, I find this imagery profoundly poetic. John the Baptist presides over the Gate of Men at the peak of solar light: he is the threshold guardian for souls entering the world of matter, just as his baptismal rite marks a spiritual rebirth. In contrast, St. John the Evangelist (whose feast falls right after the Winter Solstice, December 27th) stands at the Gate of the Gods in Capricorn, guiding souls in their return to the higher worlds.

One John opens the descent into incarnation; the other opens the ascent into immortality. Together, the two Saints John form an axis around which the year and the cycle of life and death revolve.

This polar symbolism of the two Johns also encodes a balance of opposites. In Masonic teachings, the point-within-a-circle emblem flanked by two parallel vertical lines is said to represent the individual (the point) bounded by the two St. Johns (the lines) at Cancer and Capricorn. The circle itself is the solar cycle, and the point at the centre is the Sun – or the divine spark – around which our existence turns. St. John the Baptist, associated with the June gate, corresponds to the nourishing waters of Cancer and the height of light; St. John the Evangelist corresponds to the winter gate in Earthy Capricorn, the depth of darkness and contemplation.

In one common interpretation I’ve encountered, John the Baptist symbolises the moist, reflective principle (Water/Moon), while John the Evangelist symbolises the fiery, creative principle (Fire/Sun). These are like the two halves of the alchemical androgyne or the twin pillars of the temple, complementary forces that must be equilibrated, a very common theme across Masonic and Alchemical lore. The Masonic scholar Albert Pike put it succinctly: “…through these two gates (Cancer and Capricorn) souls were thought to descend to earth and re-ascend to heaven”.

Thus, St. John the Baptist and his winter counterpart are mythic gatekeepers of the cosmic cycle, guarding the doors of the Sun.

It is fitting, then, that John the Baptist in the Christian narrative is the forerunner, the voice crying in the wilderness preparing the way for a greater dawn. “He must increase, but I must decrease,” John says of Jesus, a phrase that uncannily mirrors the solar drama (after the summer solstice, the Sun’s strength diminishes, and the Christ child of winter will grow). In Thelemic doctrine, which often reinterprets and transcends Christian symbols, we likewise find an emphasis on solar spirituality supplanting the old worship of the Father. Aleister Crowley taught that with the dawning of the New Æon of Horus, humanity would move beyond the old Osirian worship of a slain/resurrected father figure. “In the new aeon, one does not live ‘in the son’ any longer but perpetually ‘in the sun’,” as Crowley wryly noted.

The solar principle – the immediate radiance of spiritual Light – becomes our guiding star, rather than any past messianic figure. It’s an elegant wordplay that encapsulates Thelema’s stance: the Solstice is not just an astronomical event but a spiritual metaphor. We celebrate the Feast of the Times as ordained in Liber AL vel Legis II:36 , which Crowley glossed as the equinoxes and solstices as proper occasions for ritual festivity. By attuning our ceremonies to the Sun’s cardinal points, we align the human microcosm with the macrocosm. The cycle of the year becomes a pageant of the soul’s journey: birth at the winter solstice, maturity at the summer solstice, and transitions in between.

From my perspective as a magician, St. John the Baptist exemplifies the initiate who stands at the threshold between worlds, mediating the solar currents. He is a liminal figure: last of the prophets of the old age, first saint of the new. Small wonder that even within Thelema’s liturgy, the memory of John persists as Crowley himself saw deep significance in the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist, identifying its wild apocalyptic symbols with key Thelemic archetypes: the Beast 666 and the Scarlet Woman Babalon. To our eyes, the Book of Revelation is not merely a Christian fantasy to find solace through the brutal repression of the Roman regime in Judea, but a prophetic cypher of the current Æon. If John the Evangelist was the seer of the end of one world and the beginning of another, John the Baptist was the living herald who announced a spiritual revolution in his time.

Every true initiate, in a sense, takes on the mantle of John, declaring the incoming of light, acting as a forerunner to greater consciousness.

As the midsummer sun blazes overhead, I feel John’s presence in the rhythm of our rituals. In my own practice, on St. John’s Eve, I have lit the traditional bonfires (echoing the “St. John’s fires” of European folklore) and performed solar adorations taught by Crowley. These acts are not empty nostalgia; they are, for me, a way of participating in the eternal drama of light and darkness. They remind me that the Summer Solstice is a peak but also a turning point, as the moment the pendulum begins its swing toward night again. Likewise, any peak spiritual experience carries within it the seed of transformation, even decline, that leads to the next cycle. In that sense, St. John, standing at the height of light, is also a guardian of the threshold of change. To step from the bright comfort of the known into the dim unknown requires a herald and a guide. Here, John’s esoteric role links to a broader theme in occultism: the encounter with the Otherworld and its messengers.

Angels, Aliens, and Ultraterrestrials: The Otherworldly Messengers

From angels descending on Jacob’s ladder to mysterious lights in the sky, human history is replete with accounts of Otherworldly messengers appearing at critical thresholds. As a magician, I was taught that Magick is fundamentally “getting into communication with individuals who exist on a higher plane than ours”. Crowley’s definition underscores that these beings – call them angels, spirits, gods, or „intelligences“ – have been part of the magician’s universe all along. In my own life, I’ve approached angelic evocation and spirit communication as a disciplined practice, journaling visions and dialogue just as magicians like John Dee did with his Enochian angels. So when I examine the modern phenomenon of UFOs and alien encounters, I cannot help but notice a familiar pattern. It seems we are witnessing old wine in new bottles, or perhaps old angels in new “spaceships.”

What modern UFO lore calls “aliens” often behave like the angels, demons, or fairy-folk of old.

Pioneering researchers, such as Dr. Jacques Vallée, have catalogued striking parallels between UFO close encounters and historical accounts of faerie abductions, medieval incubus visitations, and religious apparitions. The extraterrestrial hypothesis – that we are dealing with flesh-and-blood spacemen from other planets – has never fully satisfied me (or Vallée), because the phenomena are just too strange, too interwoven with consciousness and symbolism. Vallée proposed instead that we consider UFOs as part of a “control system”, a sort of cultural or interdimensional thermostat that adjusts human belief systems by speaking to us in symbols.

He famously suggested that UFOs can never be analysed or conceived in isolation because they are the means through which man’s concepts are being rearranged. In other words, the phenomenon acts as a trickster or teacher, shifting our perceptions of reality on a fundamental level.

Just as the appearance of celestial comets or angels in the sky once portended new epochs or divine messages, the modern UFO confronts us with the unknown and forces a paradigm change.

The veteran journalist John A. Keel went further, arguing that these intelligences have been with us all throughout history as part of our environment.

“Unidentified flying objects have been present since the dawn of man… They are not only described repeatedly in the Bible… you are obliged to conclude that the presence of these objects and beings is a normal condition for this planet…
They have always been here.”

The Mothman Prophecies

Keel dubbed such entities ultraterrestrials – not from outer space, but from a parallel reality that has coexisted with ours, occasionally manifesting as gods, devils, elves, or ETs as it sees fit. When I first read The Mothman Prophecies, I was struck by Keel’s depiction of West Virginia’s 1966–67 high strangeness: glowing orbs, “Men in Black,” prophetic dreams, all phenomena that felt eerily shamanic and dreamlike. Keel’s conclusion was that our ancestors were intimately familiar with these bizarre incursions; only our modern materialist culture insists on recasting them as spaceships rather than spirits.

Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that UFOs are modern humanity’s way of experiencing the very same Otherworld that our ancestors knew through myth and religion. When I converse with other occultists and Thelemites about UFOs, we often ask: if an Angel of the Lord appeared to a shepherd today, would he not simply report a “glowing entity from a spacecraft”? In ages past, a devout person might see the Virgin Mary in a beam of light; today, a secular person might see a grey alien in the same light. The flying saucer, complete with blinking lights and metallic hull, might be nothing less than an angel cloaked in the garb of science fiction – a “technological angel” for an era that idolises technology. This perspective doesn’t dismiss the reality of UFO encounters; rather, it elevates them to a mythopoetic level. The UFO becomes a symbolic event as much as a physical one, resonating with Jungian archetypes and cultural dreams. Jung himself wrote a book in which he referred to flying saucers as a “modern myth” and speculated on their mandala-like symbolism of wholeness.³

I find this convergence validating. For years, those of us on the magical path have been ridiculed for talking to “invisible beings” or exploring other planes of reality. Now, in the guise of UFO research, academics and scientists are being forced to grapple with mysteries that defy the conventional ontology. Even Dr. J. Allen Hynek – the astronomer who advised the U.S. Air Force’s UFO studies – eventually admitted that nuts-and-bolts physics alone couldn’t explain the data. Hynek began musing about the “astral plane” and “elementals” in his later years, sounding much like an occultist. He had been persuaded, in part by Vallée, that the UFO inquiry might demand “an entirely new science” bridging the psychic and the physical.

Things that were once the exclusive domain of magick are bleeding into consensus reality. The ultraterrestrials or “secret chiefs” are intruding into labs and headlines, wearing NASA-style coveralls instead of flowing robes, but their essence is the same.

Magick and the UFOnauts: An Occult Continuum

I have extensively discussed Crowley’s enigmatic entity LAM across various articles, lectures, and podcast appearances, and I trust most readers will already be familiar with the narrative.

For those newer to the topic, a brief summary: in 1917–1918, during the Amalantrah Working, a series of trance meditations and sex-magick rituals, Aleister Crowley and his partners reportedly opened a portal through which they encountered a being Crowley named LAM.⁴ His drawing of LAM, with its distinct egg-shaped head and large eyes, bears a remarkable resemblance to the "grey" aliens described in UFO abduction reports decades later. Many later interpretations positioned LAM as possibly extraterrestrial or interdimensional, emphasising its name’s meaning in Tibetan: "The Way" or "The Path," underscoring its symbolic role as a gateway. Kenneth Grant, Crowley's disciple, further developed LAM within his Typhonian tradition, linking it explicitly to interactions with otherworldly intelligences.

Following Crowley’s trail, other magicians (myself included) have experimented with the idea that ritual magick might directly interface with UFO intelligence. This notion received a boost in the 1970s from Allen H. Greenfield, a UFO researcher and occultist as well as a fellow Thelemic Gnostic Bishop. Greenfield’s book The Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts made a provocative claim: many messages and names that come through in UFO encounters (for example, the odd alien names received by trance mediums or contactees) seem to correspond to an occult cipher found in Crowley’s Book of the Law. By applying a Qabalistic decoding key – the very sort of cypher Crowley himself hinted at in his holy book – Greenfield found coherence in what would otherwise be dismissed as gibberish. This implies that the “UFOnauts” might be communicating in the same symbolic language used by higher-dimensional entities in magical operations. This was electrifying as it suggests a continuity between the ancient art of summoning spirits and the modern experience of “contacting aliens.” We are, perhaps, dealing with the same eldritch family of beings, but perceived through different cultural lenses.

Greenfield’s work even made a pop culture appearance in the paranormal documentary series Hellier. In that investigation, a team hunting goblins and UFOs in Appalachia stumbled upon Greenfield’s cypher and began to use it, discovering that it yielded uncanny synchronicities with their case. The series shows them discovering a ciphered message that points to verses in Crowley’s writings – a beautiful example of how Thelemic magick and UFO phenomena can intersect in practice. I won’t spoil Hellier here, but suffice it to say, their journey blurred the lines between seance, ghost hunt, and UFO investigation, highlighting exactly the “ultra-dimensional” nature of the phenomenon that Vallée and Keel spoke of. As a Thelemite, I found it delightful (and not at all surprising) that they eventually were performing their own magical rituals in a cave, hoping to summon the truth behind the sightings. It felt like a vindication: the tools of the occultist are perfectly suited to probing these liminal mysteries.

Historically, magicians have frequently encountered strange lights and flying intelligences. Dr. John Dee in the 16th century reported angelic communications that came with beams of light and bizarre beings peering through dimensional “shewstones”. In the 1940s, rocket scientist and Thelemite Jack Parsons (a student of Crowley’s works) and L. Ron Hubbard performed the Babalon Working, aiming to manifest an avatar of the divine feminine.

In the weeks afterwards, the modern UFO wave began (1947). It’s intriguing: Kenneth Arnold’s famous first flying saucer sighting occurred on June 24, 1947 – the Feast of St. John the Baptist – as if scripted by some cosmic playwright to mark the opening of a new chapter in revelation.

The coincidence that the era of UFOs was heralded on St. John’s Day is not lost on me. John, the herald of Christ as the Logos, might in an occult sense also be the herald of humanity’s next step into the wider cosmos. If one is inclined to see patterns, the timing is deliciously symbolic: a “summer of the world” moment when hidden things came to light.

So what do we make of all this? Ultimately, my perspective as a practitioner of Thelemic magick and a student of UFO lore, is that the appearance of UFOs and alien beings is part of the same continuum as traditional spiritual and mystical experiences. The universe has never been the cold, dead space that materialism posited; it is teeming with consciousness and layered with dimensions. Occasionally, entities from those subtle realms cross our threshold. They may come as angels if we are primed to see angels, or as extraterrestrials if that metaphor better suits our Zeitgeist. The important thing is not the mask they wear, but the message they bear and the liminal state they induce in us. Like St. John the Baptist thundering in the desert, these phenomena announce that profound change is at hand. They challenge our dogmas, expand our sense of the possible, and often demand a kind of conversion of mind. Many UFO witnesses describe their sighting or encounter as life-changing, like an initiation of sorts, after which they are never the same. I’ve spoken to experiencers who, in the aftermath, dive into meditation, or start studying metaphysics, or feel called to some mission. It’s as if, having passed the threshold guardian, they emerge with a new purpose or understanding. This is strikingly similar to what happens after a successful magickal invocation or a Holy Guardian Angel communion: one’s True Will becomes clearer, one’s worldview widens.

At the Threshold of a New Revelation

Standing in the twilight of a midsummer evening, at the conclusion of a Solstice ceremony, I often feel a mysterious presence, as if the “invisible guests” have been watching from the corners of the temple.

In the orange glow of the setting solstice sun, I recall that John the Baptist was said to decrease so that the Light could increase. The herald steps aside when the greater arrives. In our age, we have many heralds and threshold guardians: some are humans like Jack Parsons or Allen Greenfield, boldly experimenting at the fringes; others are the very phenomena of lights in the sky and beings in our dreams, beckoning us to cross into a fuller cosmos.

The Summer Solstice is an invitation to illumination, but also a reminder that even at the apex, a transition looms. As a magician and a mystic, I interpret the contemporary UFO wave as a Summer Solstice of the collective soul, a bright flash of the bizarre that heralds a turning point.

We are being told, in no uncertain terms, that reality is more multifaceted and complex than we previously assumed. The esoteric meaning of St. John’s Day today, for me, is exactly that: prepare, for the Light is coming in a new form. Just as John prepared his followers to meet the transformative figure of Christ (the solar Logos of the Piscean Age), so too might these UFO intelligences be preparing us to meet a new level of consciousness or a new Æon altogether. In Thelema, we speak of the Crowned and Conquering Child as the lord of the New Aeon. Perhaps the UFO meta-drama is part of the birth pangs of that Child: unsettling sightings, paradigm shifts, and the shattering of old faiths, all ushering us toward an awakening on the horizon.

In any case, I remain both a skeptic and a believer-or rather, as Charles Fort would say, I “believe nothing of belief”. I am willing to entertain the hypothesis that flying saucers are at once metaphysical and literal, both projecting archetypes from our psyche and punching holes in our sky. In this liminal stance, I find I am in good company with magicians and forward-thinking scientists alike. We are all, in a sense, following in St. John’s footsteps: stepping beyond the comfortable city walls, into the wilderness where one might hear voices from heaven or see disks of fire, and from there returning with a message. The voice of the Other, whether angel or alien, challenges us: “Reform your worldview, for a greater reality is at hand!”

As I finish writing these thoughts, the midsummer night is warm, and the stars – those distant suns – begin to appear. Each star could be a sun with its own worlds, maybe even its own intelligences gazing back at us. Every man and every woman is a star, teaches Thelema, and perhaps every star is also a mind.

It’s a humbling and exhilarating idea. St. John the Baptist, in his esoteric aspect, invites us to baptise ourselves in the living waters of truth, no matter how unconventional or disorienting that truth may be. The Summer Solstice reminds us that light will inevitably recede into darkness, but also that it will return. Likewise, humanity may stumble in confusion as unknown lights dance in our skies, yet from that very confusion, a new gnosis can emerge.⁵

The heralds at the gate of the Sun are telling us to pay attention. Whether it is an ascended master from the inner planes or a UFO hovering over a city, the message is similar: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The next time you read about an uncanny sighting or perhaps witness one yourself, remember that the cosmos speaks to us in the language of symbols and synchronicity.

A solstice, a saint, a saucer – disparate as they seem – all carry the spark of the divine Drama.

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1. That is, not the kind you will find in a regular Lodge of United Grand Lodge of England…

2. The Aleister Crowley Manual: Thelemic Magick for Modern Times, Watkins (2023)

3. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Routledge (1959)

4. As this has never been proven in Crowley’s diaries, this story comes to us from his last disciple, Kenneth Grant.

5. There is a dark side to all of this, and we must remain vigilant at all times. I wrote about it here: