In the old calendars,
solstices and equinoxes were not seen as the beginnings of their respective seasons, but
rather as their highpoints. While we think of the Summer Solstice as the beginning of
Summer, early people in tune with life's rhythms considered it the midpoint. Great
festivals celebrated the solstices and equinoxes, but other festivals were celebrated to
herald the arrival of each new season.
Throughout human history, the arrival
of Summer has always been a time of great rejoicing and the festivals to celebrate it have
always reflected the character of summer. The names and local character of these
summer-greeting festivals change from time to time and place to place, but always they
reflect the same themes.
This was the time to head with the
flocks up from the lower ground into the summer pastures. This was the time for planting
new crops. This was the time that the horned god of the greenwood, who was born with the
first light of the new Equinox and will die at the Winter Solstice, comes into his prime
and takes the goddess as his bride. Other seasonal festivals address essential, but darker
themes: death and darkness, often with human enactments of sacrifices built on vegetal
symbols of killing and pruning and harvesting. But May Day / Beltane / Walpurgisnacht and
the Floralia were concerned with the experience of life in its most exuberant, fertile,
lusty and joyous aspects.
I heartily recommend the
collection of May Day symbols, themes and celebrations available on the net at http://www.schooloftheseasons.com/mayday.html
for an excellent overview of the historical forms this festival
has known. Our celebration intentionally removes itself from any particular festival of
the past, but all the forms and symbols of the past remain as inspiration and source
material as we imagine the future.
May Day
"Bringing in the May" is an
old English tradition, signalling the beginning of planting season. Young people would go
out into the woods searching for the first blooms of the Hawthorne or "May"
tree. Once found, they were carried back to the village with dancing and rejoicing and
flowers and greens.
Tradition held the night before May
Day to be a time for fairies to be afoot, with enchantments and dangers. The Fairy Queen
would ride forth looking for young men to carry away to the Land Under the Hills for seven
years. Beautiful and belled she would ride forth on horseback in white, and woe to he who
did not flee the sound of her bells.
The night before May Day also
saw the young people go out into the woods to gather flowers and greens, frolicking in the
open all night. "I have heard it
credibly reported by men of great gravity, credit and reputation; that of forty,
threescore or a hundred maids going to the woods over night, there have scarcely the third
part of them returned home again undefiled." -
Puritan author, Phillip Stubbs. In part for this reason, children conceived in May were
deemed of suspect lineage and were often given names such as Green or Robinson, suggesting
they were fathered by The Green Man or Robin of the Green.
Maypole and Morris dances celebrated
May Day, and many villages erected permanent Maypoles in the town square. The dances
involved a kind of formalized flirtation, while weaving bright ribbons round the pole. May
Queens were selected to preside over the festivities, and all were subjected to their
whim. Flowers and greens and lemons were displayed, as decorations and ornaments.
May Day retained a reputation as a
people's holiday even through Christian times, as old forms of celebration broke out in
defiance of Church authority. It retains this association in the present day with May Day
seen as a worker's holiday, celebrated in grand military style in Communist countries.
During the HUAC and Joe McCarthy days, an effort was made in America to recast May Day as
"Loyalty Day," but the practice never seemed to catch on. Today, May Day is
often trivialized as a children's holiday, a time for processions and games, but the deep
associations of the day remain entirely adult in character.
Beltane
Beltane was the Celtic celebration of
newsummer, exploring these same themes. Traditions including blessing the animals by
driving them in procession between two bonfires. The symbols were of weddings and
fertility, and couples would make love in the fields to bless the crops.
Beltane and May Day are days for
rising early and going forth to meet the day. Young people would leave baskets of flowers
on other's doorsteps. Sprigs of greens were passed out to the early risers, and boys would
go about in the afternoon throwing buckets of water on those who overslept and did not
wear the greens.
Another beautiful tradition involves
Beltane Dew.
"The fair maid who, the
first of May
Goes to the fields at break of day
And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree
Will ever after handsome be."
- Mother Goose
Many variations of this theme of
bathing in Beltane Dew are found throughout Europe, with the dew gathered from ivy or
grass or other plants, but always witht he magical effect of preserving a woman's beauty.
The Flower Maiden is another
personification of female power whose story reflects in the tales of Guenivire and the
romance of Tristan and Isolt. Her personality is uniquely European, powerful and perilous
in her own right, and faithful to her own true nature, completely aware of her own sexual
power. She is the goddess and queen, and by her authority does she make her man the King.
But should he fail, her nature demands that she be served by another, and the best of all
knights.
"This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from
townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of
their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the
people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among
the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets
lover." - Alexander
Carmichael
Walpurgisnacht
In Germany, April 30th
is Walpurgisnacht, the night when it was believed that witches flew on their brooms to
mountaintop gatherings where they danced all night around bonfires. Halloween is a festival of death, a time for letting go and
mourning. May Day, on the opposite side of the Wheel of the Year, is about life, about
falling in love and frolicking in the woods. Death is an ending but also a beginning.
Fallin in love is a beginning which is also a death. The Goddess who manifests herself at
May Day calls you out of yourself and you may never return, at least to the same world you
knew.
All of these festivals celebrate the
same themes, the same harmony with the rhythm of nature, and harmony with the rhythm of
our own lives. The seasons are deeply imprinted in our consciousness as symbols of
transformation, and will not be erased from our vocabulary of symbols while humans are
humans. 400 years from now, these same symbols and associations will still speak to our
lives, and in our future Floralia, we will explore new forms to restore these symbols to
force and effect through new myths and personal experience.
