Welcome to the Summer Solstice 2025 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer! Our theme for this issue is music! Jazz and blues. Rock and opera. Ballads and filk songs. Music has been an integral element of human creativity and culture since we first learned to carve holes into bones. In this issue, our contributors explore music in many different forms, places, spaces, and time periods through mythological, Pagan, polytheist, and witchy lenses.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the poems and short stories that were submitted — and ultimately accepted — focus on the most well-known musicians of Hellenic polytheism: the semi-divine Orpheus, the satyr Marsyas, the wild Pan, and the God of Music himself, Apollo. Other submissions drew on the indigenous polytheisms and folktales of north-central Europe, and the lands of the ancient Celts, Mesopotamia, and the modern United States. Despite the overlap in origin tales, however, the results are markedly different, varying in tone and focus from heart-broken to argumentative to triumphant to wondering.

For some of our contributors, music is a source of solace. It comforts us in times of grief, lends us courage when we are frightened, or reminds us of our connection to other people, to the natural world, and to the Gods and Goddesses and Powers That Be. Such music might be human-crafted, divinely-inspired, or naturally-occurring. Whatever its origins, such music is a fount of wonder and peace.

For other contributors, music generates fear, panic, and pain. There is an alienness to such music, an Otherness that brings on grotesque transformation, mental breakdowns, even spiritual oblivion. Such music often comes from other-than-human minds, either deliberately malicious or indifferently oblivious. When such music is heard, humans suffer, sometimes justly, sometimes unfairly, both singly and collectively.

Music makes us human. Music allows us to communicate our dreams, our emotions, our desires in a way that written and spoken language cannot. Through music, we question and express our humanity to one another, past and present and future. Through the music we create, we connect to the natural world. Through our appreciation of the music of creation, of birds and whales and trees, we remind ourselves that we, too, are of creation, not above it. Through the music of myth and hymn and prayer, we connect with and lose ourselves in the wonder of the Divine.

As always, please post any comments and questions and concerns. And enjoy!