Litha

Old English Litha, the months of June and July; Midsummer

See it on the Wheel of the Sky

When it comes round

North of the equator: the June solstice, when the Sun reaches 0° Cancer, on .

South of the equator, where the seasons are reversed, the Wheel of the Sky keeps Litha in the same season, half a year later or earlier: the December solstice, when the Sun reaches 0° Capricorn, on .

The solstices and equinoxes are the Sun at 0° of a cardinal sign, so the festival is that moment itself. Worked out with the same Sun calculation as the calendar and the Wheel of the Sky.

The summer solstice, the longest day of the year: Midsummer.

In history

In the old English calendar Bede describes, June and July were both called Litha (Bede, The Reckoning of Time). Midsummer, at the summer solstice, began as a pagan festival to welcome the summer and wish for a good harvest; in Finland it may have been linked with Ukko, the god of thunder who sent the rain (Britannica).

Its festivities included dancing, singing, lighting bonfires and gathering flowers. It was thought a magical time of good fortune and healing: bonfires and loud noise drove away evil spirits, seven flowers under the pillow on Midsummer’s Eve brought dreams of a future partner, and bathing in springs and decking the house with flowers and greenery brought good health (Britannica).

With the spread of Christianity, many of these customs passed to St John’s Eve, before the feast of St John the Baptist on June 24, whose birth the Church had set six months before Christ’s: bonfires, fireworks, dancing and visits to holy wells and springs. The maypole had joined Midsummer by the 1500s. In Sweden and Finland, where Midsummer is a national holiday, its date moved in the 1950s from June 23 to a weekend (Britannica).

In modern practice

As the name of the summer solstice, Litha is modern: Aidan Kelly chose it in 1974, reasoning from Bede’s two Litha months that the solstice must have been called Litha, as midwinter was Yule (Kelly, 2017). It is the sabbat of June 20 or 21 (Britannica, “Wicca”). The eight-festival Wheel of the Year itself is modern: Wicca, which emerged in England in the 1950s, typically keeps eight seasonal festivals, called sabbats, based on traditional celebrations drawn from different periods of British and Irish history, and many Wiccans in the Southern Hemisphere move them to fit their own seasons (Britannica, “Wicca”).

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