Litha and a Midsummer's Tale of Three Calendars

 This piece was originally shared as a reflection from the pulpit for the West Wind Unitarian-Universalist Congregation on 06/22/2025. You'll find that the written 'version' veers from outline to fully written text. Rather than filling in those gaps after the fact, I'll recuse the 'full' version for that place and that time.

Prior to my reflection, I read Louise Glück's poem “Midsummer,” followed by a solo piano performance by a congregant of "Bella's Lullaby,” from the Twilight original soundtrack.

Litha is the festival of midsummer. Summer Solstice. Solar maximum.

A note about the wheel of the year. Quarters (solstices and equinoxes). Cross-quarters (mid-points Imbolc Beltane Lughnasa Samhain).

The curious case of the disappearing attestations. Among quarters, only Yule obvs attested in the lit with variations on that depending on latitude. Christmas vs. Christmas tide.

Why are the crossquarters so much better attested than quarters in historical paganism?

Wheel of the Year is an informational technology associated with Wicca. It is a reconstructionist faith assembled from both historically attested and creatively reimagined elements.

The name Litha is derived from a reference in the writings of the Venerable Bede, a Christian chronicler, from the 8th century that lists names for the months of June and July from the Anglo-Saxon as meaning before and after Litha respectively. Much like the names used for the Spring and Fall Equinoxes in modern paganism, Litha is a name that was assigned to the holiday by Aidan Kelley in the mid-1970s rather than a traditional name for the holiday that can be widely attested from the literature. In this sense, it is a reconstructionist designation rather than a historical one though it is possible that it may have been celebrated using this name during the Anglo-Saxon period in England between the sixth and ninth centuries.

The keen-eared among us might take notice that there is a gap between the holiday’s designation as Midsummer and our recognition of June 21st as the beginning of Summer. This tension was observed in the meetings that set the modern pagan holiday calendar. It is historically attested that the seasons were observed as in transition on the crossquarters. So spring begins at Imbolc in February, summer at Beltane in May, fall at Lughnasa in August, and Winter at Samhain. 

If it were just a matter of saying, well the festival calendar and the social calendar are off, we can write it off as an historical quirk. I believe that the Wiccan wheel of the year attempts to deftly plow over a fundamental way in which it misunderstands how the pagan worldview it attempts to reconstruct experienced and measured time.

What is a pagan?

“Pagan worldview” is predicated on knowing what a pagan is.

The word ‘pagan’ is derived from the Latin ‘paganus,’ which means ‘someone who dwells in the country.’ Prior to its intimate association with religion, ‘pagan’ was almost always used in contrast with ‘miles,’ which meant soldier. So a ‘pagan’ was someone who lived outside of the city who was not bound up in military obligations due to their civic affiliation.  

Why this word came to be associated with other European non-Christian traditions is contested. Some scholars believe that it is an acknowledgment that top-down decisions about the religious direction of the Roman culture would be more slowly incorporated the further one got from Rome. So while city-dwellers may have been falling over one another to renounce polytheism to gain favor with the Christian-dominated political hierarchy above them, regular folks who work the land might continue to observe in the more traditional manner for generations after.

Another hypothesis is that a wide-swath of the Roman population never felt comfortable with the abandonment of the old gods. We see this most visibly in the short but brilliant reign of Emperor Julian (also known as Julian the Apostate), a grandson of Constantine’s, who tried to revert the empire to its pagan roots and took a spear to the chest from one of his own soldiers for his trouble. The scholarly argument there is that aristocrats would retire to their country villas and practice traditional polytheism away from the prying eyes of the state.

Either way, it’s not surprising that the early Roman church fathers associated ‘pagani’ with traditional Roman polytheism because that’s exactly what their ‘pagani’ would have been practicing. However it originated, the word took on an additional dimension of meaning as the Roman Christianity that outlived its political empire turned its attention on Christianizing the rest of Europe. It took on a colonizing dimension. It was a sorting word. 

The word ‘pagan’ was used after the fall of the Roman empire in a very specific way and we can pair it with another word, ‘heathen’ to understand the fullness of its intended meaning. A pagan was a person, often living in a place being conquered by a Christian, who held outdated ideas about God and needed your help in coming to the correct understanding of who He was and how best to serve him. Sure, that help often came in the form of torturing people and burning stuff down but it was still help.

A ‘heathen’ is a person who is incorrigible, who can not be rehabilitated and, truth be told, may not even be a person. Pagans were to be shepherded to increase the flock. Heathens were harvested and reallocated as resources. 

While this may look like unsophisticated racism on its surface, there is, I believe, a deeper ideology at work here. For example, who was a pagan and who was a heathen could be, to some degree, plastic. The term ‘heathen’ means ‘a person who lives out on the Heath,’ meaning a person who didn’t live on arable land and therefore wasn’t participating in the civilizational experiment by farming on behalf of a state. Much like the nomadic herder and the hunter-gatherer, there was nothing in the life of a sedentary agriculturalist to recommend to a heathen who was beholden to no one for her comings and goings and who wisely relied on nature, her wits, and her kin to meet her needs.

This was an unsuitable candidate for the domesticating agenda of Christianity, which sought control above all other virtues. This may sound like I’m bashing Christianity. I’m not. Were it taking place in Asia, it would be Buddhism. Were it happening five hundred years earlier, it would be Roman Hellenism. These are all different operating systems driven by the underlying hardware of civilization.

With this in mind, I offer my definition of ‘pagan’ which feels the most relevant to the discussion at hand, ‘a European who farms but is not yet civilized by Christianity.’ And that European who farms but is not yet civilized by Christianity doesn’t measure the passage of time using the sun. He uses the moon as do all agrarian people who have not yet been civilized.

The Solar Fixation

Based on the evidence still available to us, we know that ancient peoples had three ways of keeping track of the Solstices and equinoxes, which are solar observances. I offer them here in order of ascending complexity.

1. Marking the position of the Sun rise and set from a fixed location over a period of years

2. Measuring the shadow of an upright pillar

3. The creation of light effects that took place within built structures.

It’s that third one that I want to focus on for a minute. The Neolithic Period is defined by the arrival of a new human technology in its built environment, the Megalith: a monumental building technique that often contains some aspect of solar worship or observance in its use. These were essentially limited function computers capable of alerting the cultures from which they emerged of the arrival of solar events like solstices and equinoxes. They are always a symptom of social complexity. Why? Well, neither your affluent forager (who is heathen) nor the subsistence agrarian (who is pagan) has time to learn how to pile massive stones in just such a way to record anything. Or to spend multiple generations observing where the light strikes a thing on just such a day. He’s busy using the same set of skills that everyone has to feed himself, build and repair his shelter, and relax while enjoying the fruits of his labor. That kind of ‘free time’ is the product of the specialization of labor, which is one of the drivers of social complexity. And it only happens when the labor of subsistence is taken up by someone else on your behalf.

The urge to know precisely what day the sun is doing a certain thing is a religious concern, not a pragmatic one. You can hunt food, grow food, shepherd food, all the food just fine without knowing. But you can’t order your kingdom to do it all at once over a wide geographic range without having a calendar to pin your orders to. The strict observance of solstices and equinoxes is about control; it is about demonstrating dominion over time itself.

Given civilization’s success in colonizing the world, we think of it as being powerful, even inevitable. But, in reality, civilization is very fragile. Fragility is a quality of complexity. The story of Pythagoras in Babylon.

To see this at work in the story we are telling today, let’s return to the geographical inspiration of modern paganism, the British Isles.

Stonehenge along with other stone and barrow monuments in the British Isles exhibit this fascination with the solstices and equinoxes. The best scholarship today suggests that Stonehenge was begun by the Pritani, who inhabited the islands around 4000 BCE. DNA mapping suggests that these people were from the area around modern Turkey and brought with them the practice of grain agriculture that dominated that region. They were civilized. They were a grain state.

The Celts, who were a Germanic tribe that migrated from Europe around 2000 BCE, were uncivilized agrarians upon arrival. So while they were lunar calendar people, they inherited some of the material culture of a solar calendar people like Stonehenge and Newgrange. 

By the time the Romans, who made contact with Britain in 43 BC and conquered it in 43 AD, the Celts were almost wholly lunar. Without the wealth pump of militarized agriculture, the Celts lacked the complexity to maintain an understanding of how and why the megaliths had been built in the first place. So they told the Romans that they believed they were built by giants.

The Romans were a wholly solar people and well-civilized even before Christianity subsumed them, but the Anglo-Saxons, who took possession some four hundred years later were a pagan, lunar people. And of course, the resurgent Roman Catholic church who eventually converted the Anglo-Saxons were a solar institution but the Danes and other vikings who conquered it back were lunar pagans…before they were in turn converted by the solar Church.

Why does this matter? Because of the eventual triumph of the solar Catholic church over all of Europe, we have a tradition of celebrating Midsummer, though we have little evidence of the pagans celebrating it prior to conversion. This is one of those cases where modern paganism is giving Christianity a little of its own medicine by appropriating a solar holiday for pagan use!

Midsummer

According to the Catholic church calendar, Midsummer is more formally the Feast of Saint John. It was instituted in the 4th century CE as a replacement for a Roman festival called Vestalia. A festival to the goddess Vesta, a patroness of virginity and, as such, one of the protectors of marriage, alongside Juno. Her clerics were the Vestal Virgins, which people still know about because of that Procol Harum song. 

The worship of Vesta in celebration was a complex one. Unlike many Roman deities, she was not typically portrayed in statuary. Instead, the flame of the hearth represented her at the family altar. Likewise, in a town or village, the perpetual flame stood in the stead of the goddess herself.

Worshiping Vesta

For the celebration of Vestalia, the Vestales made a sacred cake, using water carried in consecrated jugs from a holy spring. The water was never permitted to come into contact with the earth between the spring and the cake, which also included sacred salt and ritually prepared brine as ingredients. The hard-baked cakes were then cut into slices and offered to Vesta.

During the eight days of the Vestalia, only women were permitted to enter Vesta's temple for worship. When they arrived, they removed their shoes and made offerings to the goddess. At the end of Vestalia, the Vestales cleaned the temple from top to bottom, sweeping the floors of dust and debris, and carrying it away for disposal in the Tiber river. Ovid tells us that the last day of Vestalia, the Ides of June, became a holiday for people who worked with grain, such as millers and bakers. They took the day off and hung flower garlands and small loaves of bread from their millstones and shop stalls.

So if you are looking for an authentically pagan way to celebrate Litha, you could do worse than to bake a cake as an offering, decorate your home with flowers, and do a ritual cleansing the week before Litha.

The festival of St John was comparatively a drag. A thirteenth century writer captured the details of the festival as follows:

On St. John's Eve in certain regions the boys collect bones and certain other rubbish, and burn them, and therefrom a smoke is produced on the air. They also make brands and go about the fields with the brands. Thirdly, the wheel which they roll.

In her book Midsummer: Magical Celebrations of the Summer Solstice, Anna Franklin documented that in England, rural villagers built a big bonfire on Midsummer's Eve. This was called "setting the watch," and it was known that the fire would keep evil spirits out of the town. Some farmers would light a fire on their land, and people would wander about, holding torches and lanterns, from one bonfire to another. If you jumped over a bonfire, presumably without lighting your pants on fire, you were guaranteed to have good luck for the coming year. Franklin says that "Men and women danced around the fires, and often jumped through them for good luck; to be blackened by the fire was considered very fortuitous indeed." Some contemporary practitioners will light a devotional fire on midsummer and then make an amulet from a clay made of the ashes and water for protection in the year to come.

The Third Calendar?

Regarding the Heathen. . .

Symbolizing a dynamic relationship into an understanding of time that can be captured in a Wheel of the Year represents a degradation of the richness of our lived experiences.

Gluck’s poem represents the kind of ‘lived experience’ understanding of a thing that is much more fundamental, more visceral, more dynamic, and more real.

How much more abundant is time when left unbroken by periods?

It is only by understanding the nature of the cage which contains us that we may begin to formulate our escape. . .like the proper heathens we are meant to be.