Litha

Modern celebrants of Litha

As the Summer Solstice approaches this week, you may hear the name Litha mentioned.

Litha, also known as Midsummer, is a festival celebrating the Summer Solstice. It is one of the eight "Sabbats" in the Wheel of the Year, observed by Wiccans, Neo-Pagans, and various European folk traditions.

The name Litha is derived from the Old English word for June and June/July, specifically appearing in the writings of the 8th-century monk Bede in his work De Temporum Ratione (The Reckoning of Time). According to Bede, the Anglo-Saxons referred to this time of year as Līða, which essentially translates to "gentle" or "navigable." This name reflected the calm summer weather that made it safe and easy to travel by sea.

In the 20th century, the name was popularized as a designation for the Summer Solstice by Aidan Kelly, an influential figure in modern Paganism. He sought historical-sounding names for the "Lesser Sabbats" on the Wheel of the Year, and Litha was chosen to represent the solstice, distinguishing it from the Christianized "Midsummer" or "St. John's Eve."

Today, it serves as a bridge to ancestral traditions, honoring the time when the sun is at its most potent and the earth is in full bloom.

Utopia (band)

Utopia, 1977 L–R: Roger Powell, Willie Wilcox, Todd Rundgren, Kasim Sulton

Todd Rundgren's solo work (1972 onward) is a study in genre‑hopping with songs that feel like soul, pop, psychedelia, electronica, and even a cappella. 

With the pseudo-band Runt, he made two albums of experimentation, transitioning away from the style of his first band, Nazz.

He was writing more deeply personal lyrics. He was doing a lot of studio experimentation. He was playing nearly all the instruments and doing the vocals himself. The signature albums of that early solo period include Something/Anything?, A Wizard/A True Star, Hermit of Mink Hollow, and Healing.

On his 1973 album A Wizard, a True Star, Rundgren had sung the line "Wait another year, Utopia is here." That lyric predates the band’s formation and suggests Rundgren already envisioned “Utopia” as a concept — a kind of musical ideal or creative destination he wanted to reach. In other words, Utopia wasn’t just a band name, but a kind of mission statement for that time. 

One of those genre-hops came with forming the band Utopia. That was 1973, and they performed and recorded through 1986 with occasional reunions since.

During its first three years, the group was a progressive rock band with a somewhat fluid membership known as Todd Rundgren's Utopia. Most of the members in this early incarnation also played on Rundgren's solo albums of the period up to 1975. For a short period of time (1973–74), Todd Rundgren's Utopia consisted of Rundgren and included Hunt Sales and Tony Fox Sales who had been in his former band, Runt. 

By 1976, the group was known simply as Utopia and featured a stable quartet of Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell, and John "Willie" Wilcox. This version of the group gradually abandoned progressive rock for more straightforward synth‑pop and a touch of new wave. 

This is the one band where it seems that Todd is a bandleader, not just a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist.

The band played long, complex compositions early on with long instrumental passages. The band evolved later into doing tight, hooky, electronic pop closer to Todd's solo work. 

In 1980, they had a top 40 hit with "Set Me Free". Though often thought of as a Rundgren solo project, all four members of Utopia wrote, sang, produced, and performed on their albums; "Set Me Free", for example, was sung by Sulton.

Utopia (the word, book and place)

 

The word utopia was invented in 1516 by Sir Thomas More. Thomas More was a 16th‑century English humanist, lawyer, statesman, and author best known for Utopia (1516). He served as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII but refused to accept the king as head of the Church of England. More’s steadfast commitment to conscience and Catholic doctrine led to his execution in 1535. He was later canonized as a martyr. 

The word's etymology is a deliberate linguistic pun built from Greek roots.  It literally means “no place,” but it also sounds like it could mean “good place.”  Built from ou-topos (no place), More coined the term for the title of his 1516 book describing a fictional island society. The "noplace" was More's way of indicating that such a perfect society does not exist. 

16th-century readers noticed that utopia sounds almost identical to eutopia - a good place. The sense was reinforced when the contrasting term dystopia (“bad place”) was coined in the 19th century.

More's Utopia is presented as a traveler’s account of a perfect island society in the New World. But the book is satire, not travel, and a critique of European politics, religion, and inequality. The book’s narrator, Raphael Hythloday, has a name meaning “speaker of nonsense,” reinforcing the satire.

The island’s map and alphabet were also fabricated to deepen the illusion. The word utopia quickly entered English (by 1551) to mean any imagined perfect society, and by the 1610s it was used metaphorically for unrealistic idealism. 

Phillumeny

via  flickr user Jim Chambers CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Phillumeny is the hobby of collecting items related to matches—most notably matchbox labels, but also matchbooks, matchboxes, and even the tiny printed wrappers from safety matches. Collecting matchbox labels gives us examples of mid-century commercial graphic design.

The free Matchbox Posters Archive via the Internet Archive is a philatelist's dream. This collection houses nearly 6,500 matchbox posters from as early as the 1920’s.  

People who collected matchboxes were once simply called "matchbox collectors." That changed in 1943 thanks to a British collector named Marjorie S. Evans. She wanted a more distinct, sophisticated name for the hobby, similar to philately (stamp collecting) or numismatics (coin collecting). She combined two linguistic roots: phil- (from the Greek philos, meaning "loving" or "fond of") and lumen (from the Latin lumen, meaning "light"). Purists occasionally point out that combining Greek and Latin roots into a single word is a bit of a linguistic "hybrid" faux pas, but the name stuck beautifully.

And why were matches once known in the UK as "lucifers?"

Two Lucifers

 

 
The Fall of Lucifer, engraved by Gustave Doré
for Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1876)

The association of Lucifer with the devil is the result of some historical chain reactions.Strictly speaking, the word Lucifer never appears in the original Hebrew Bible as a name for Satan, though the stoy begins with the Old Testament, specifically in the Book of Isaiah (Chapter 14).

Isaiah was writing a scathing condemnation, but not of a fallen angel. He was writing a taunt-song directed at a very human tyrant: the King of Babylon (likely Nebuchadnezzar II or Nabonidus), who had conquered Jerusalem and oppressed the Jewish people.

The king was notoriously arrogant, fancying himself a god on earth. Isaiah mocked this pride by comparing the king's inevitable political downfall to a star that thinks it owns the night sky, only to vanish when the sun comes up.In the original Hebrew text, Isaiah called the king Helel ben Shachar, which translates to "Shining One, Son of the Dawn." That is a reference to the Morning Star (Venus).

The word comes from two Latin roots: Lux (meaning "light") and Ferre (meaning "to bring" or "to carry"). In ancient Rome, Lucifer was simply the Latin name for the Morning Star (which is the planet Venus), because its bright appearance in the early dawn signaled the arrival of daylight. It literally translates to "the bringer of light."

In the late 4th century AD, a scholar named Jerome translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into Latin. This version became known as the Latin Vulgate. When Jerome reached Isaiah 14:12, he had to translate Helel ben Shachar ("Shining One, Son of the Dawn"). Because the Romans called the morning star lucifer (the light-bringer), Jerome translated the phrase literally into lower-case Latin prose:

"Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, lucifer, qui mane oriebaris?" (How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, who rose in the morning!)

At that point in history, lucifer was still just a common noun describing a planet, not a proper noun naming a demon. In fact, early Christians even used the word lucifer as a title for Jesus Christ (e.g., in Revelation 22:16, where Jesus calls himself "the bright morning star").

As the centuries rolled on, early Christian theologians—most notably Origen and St. Augustine—began reading the Old Testament through an allegorical lens. They looked at Isaiah's poetic description of someone "falling from heaven" because of supreme arrogance and decided it was too grandiose to describe a mere human king of Babylon. They argued that Isaiah was weaving a double meaning into the text: a description of a historical king on the surface, but a cosmic backstory for the origin of Satan underneath.

Slowly, readers stopped treating lucifer as a descriptive Latin adjective and began capitalizing it as a proper name: Lucifer, the archangel who rebelled against God out of pride and was cast out of heaven.

By the time the Bible was translated into English (most famously the King James Version in 1611), the translators chose not to translate the Latin word back into "Morning Star." Instead, they left the Latin word intact, printing it as a proper name:

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!"

The final, definitive lock on the name in the English-speaking world didn't come from theology, but from literature. In 1667, John Milton published his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton took these scattered biblical verses and wove a massive, dramatic narrative detailing Lucifer’s pride, his rebellion, his fall, and his subsequent transformation into Satan.

Milton's brilliant characterization was so incredibly influential that it shaped the modern Western imagination. For most people today, the distinction between the historical Latin translation and the literary character has completely blurred—making "Lucifer" permanently synonymous with the Devil.

Using lucifer to describe a match sounds rather dark and sinister. Matches being called "lucifers" actually comes from the literal Latin and some 19th-century branding. No Devil or Biblical connections. 

When inventors in the early 1800s finally figured out how to create portable, self-igniting fire on the tip of a wooden stick, "light-bringer" was an incredibly fitting description. 

In 1826, an English chemist named John Walker invented the first friction match. They were a massive scientific breakthrough, but Walker never patented them. Seeing an opening in the market, a clever London businessman named Samuel Jones copied Walker's design, tweaked the chemical formula slightly, and began commercially manufacturing them in 1829.

Jones needed a striking name for his new product. Leaning into that literal Latin meaning of bringing light to the darkness, he patented them as "Jones's Lucifers."

The product was an absolute sensation. Because they were among the first widely available commercial matches in Britain, the brand name "Lucifer" quickly became a generic term for any friction match, much like how we use "Kleenex" for tissues or "Band-Aid" for bandages today.

While Samuel Jones chose the name for its poetic "light-bringing" definition, everyday citizens couldn't help but notice some irony. These early friction matches were made using a harsh chemical mixture of potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide. When you struck them against sandpaper, they didn't light smoothly—they ignited with a violent, energetic pop, showered dangerous sparks, and released a suffocating, foul-smelling cloud of sulfurous smoke. To the Victorian public, striking one of these matches literally felt like conjuring a tiny, smelly burst of hellfire right in your living room. The double meaning was too perfect to ignore, and the nickname stuck around for generations.