Litha

Litha is the Wiccan and Pagan Sabbat of the summer solstice (around 21 June), the longest day, when the sun stands at the peak of its strength; it is one of the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year. Practitioners honour the sun at its zenith even as they mark that, from this height, the days will now shorten toward winter; in the Wiccan myth-cycle it is often read as the height of the sun-god's power before his decline. Customs include lighting bonfires, keeping vigil for the dawn, gathering herbs held to be most potent now, feasting, and celebrating out of doors. Midsummer has genuinely been marked across Europe with fire and festivity for centuries, and modern Pagans draw on that broad tradition.

The name "Litha", however, is a modern adoption rather than an old festival-name. It is taken from Bede, who records Litha as an Old English name for the midsummer months, but there is no evidence it was ever the name of a solstice festival; it was chosen for the neopagan Sabbat in 1974 by Aidan Kelly, who supplied names for the solstice and equinox festivals that, unlike the Celtic-named cross-quarter days, had none, and it spread through the pagan press. This is a clear and well-documented case of the modern Wheel of the Year being furnished with a suitably archaic vocabulary, and it is worth distinguishing the ancient practice of midsummer fires from the recent name now attached to it.

Long before the name Litha existed for any festival, Midsummer fire customs were kept openly across large parts of Christian Europe under other names entirely, most visibly Saint John's Eve on 23 June, tied to the feast of John the Baptist, when bonfires, all-night gatherings and herb-gathering were widespread in Scandinavia, the Baltic states, France, Spain and elsewhere, often blending pre-Christian solstice custom with an explicitly Christian saint's feast rather than surviving as a separate pagan observance running alongside it.

Scandinavian Midsummer in particular remains a major, widely kept public and family festival today, complete with maypole dancing despite the name's more usual association with May, bonfires and outdoor feasting, entirely independent of Wicca or the Wheel of the Year and considerably older as a continuously observed public custom than the 1974 coinage of Litha; modern Wiccans drawing on bonfires and herb-gathering for their own Litha observance are consequently drawing on this much wider and mostly Christian-era European midsummer custom rather than on any single ancient pagan festival that used the name Litha itself, since no such ancient festival by that name has ever been shown to exist.