Sabbat
The sun at its highest and already turning — very old fires under a very new label.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Midsummer fires are among the best-documented folk customs in Europe. Frazer gives them chapter after chapter: bonfires on hills, blazing wheels rolled downhill towards water, herbs cut on the eve and hung up for the year, couples leaping the flames. Whatever else is uncertain, people across the continent lit fires around the June solstice for a very long time, and left plenty of written traces of it.
The name Litha is the borrowed part. Bede lists two Old English months, Ærra Liða and Æfterra Liða, roughly June and July — month names, not a festival. It was taken up as the solstice sabbat's name in the 1970s, alongside Ostara and Mabon, when the Wheel needed a full set of labels. Midsummer, the plain English word, is older and does the same job.
The solstice falls between 20 and 22 June, when the sun reaches its most northerly declination. Work suited to it wants full daylight: strength, abundance, gathering, anything you would rather do with nothing hidden. Southern-hemisphere practitioners keep it at the December solstice, which is why hemisphere matters more than date.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer collects the midsummer wheel: a wooden disc packed with straw, set alight at the top of a slope and rolled towards a river, with the year read from whether it reached the water still burning. He notes the same shape of custom turning up hundreds of miles apart, and treats that spread as the interesting fact.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Herbs cut at midday and hung to dry for the year ahead. Whether the hour improves them is unproven; that a fixed date gets the drying actually done is not in dispute.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.