By Charly SHELTON

May Day is fast approaching and, for many, it still remains a mystery. Many Americans know there’s something about a pole, but that’s about it.

May Day stems from Beltane, an ancient Gaelic festival celebrating fertility. While its celebration had dropped off in popularity by the mid-20th century, it has since been revived by neo-pagans and Wiccans to become one of the most important holidays of the year.

Beltane is the beginning of summer, the midway point between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. It is the counterpart to Samhain, or Halloween, when the veil between worlds is thinnest. On Samhain we can see the dead. On Beltane, the dead can see us. It is a festival celebrating fertility and healthy sexuality and marks the time to move the herd of cattle to summer pastures. It is time for the earth to wake up and start making new life.

The Roman festival of Floralia was celebrated around the same time of the year, May 1, and became popular with the nomadic tribes surrounding the empire, including the Celtoi or Gauls. This may have combined with an existing festival or had just been changed along the way to become Beltane, the Celtic spring festival of fertility. Beltane translates to either “bright fire” or ‘fires of Bel,” depending on the scholar translating. Bel is short for Beil, the sun god of Wiccan practice. His origins are somewhat a mystery, though. He is mentioned specifically only once in antiquity as being an idol god who had a cult devoted to him. Some have theorized that he is an import from Norse lands, a new version of Baldr, son of Odin and god of light, but that is mere speculation. Beyond that, it wasn’t until Seathrún Céitinn (anglicized to Geoffrey Keating) published his “Foras Feasa ar Éirinn” (“A General History of Ireland”) in 1723 that we had a full description of the Beltane festival.

“It was at Bealltaine that this fair took place, at which it was their custom to exchange with [the other tribes] their goods, their wares, and their valuables. They also used to offer sacrifice to the chief god they adored, who was called Beil;” Keating wrote, “and it was their wont to light two fires in honour of Beil in every district in Ireland, and to drive a weakling of each species of cattle that were in the district between the two fires as a preservative to shield them from all diseases during that year.”

By this time, Ireland had become fiercely Christian; yet, as is common with converted Christian populations, it continued to practice pagan traditions as secular festivals. In 1852, William Robert Wilde described a practice at the Midsummer Festival in his book “Irish Popular Superstitions.”

“[At the end of the festival, it was common to] drive the cattle through the greeshagh or warm ashes as a form of purification, and [as protection] against witchcraft, fairies, murrain, blackleg, loss of milk and other misfortunes or diseases,” Wilde wrote.

In fact, a more modern German version of the Beltane festival called Walpurgisnacht celebrates Saint Walpurga, a nun who found witches meeting for a Beltane festival on the top of a forested hill in the Harz Mountains. God helped her chase them away. So now on May 1, the locals light bonfires to chase witches and evil spirits away. They celebrate Beltane to chase away the Beltane.

Common practices include lighting of bonfires, feasting, enjoyment of sexuality and dancing around a tall pole with ribbons, which became the May Pole of medieval May Day celebrations. The dancers would circle the pole back and forth, weaving ribbons with the other dancers as they went. When the ribbons were fully wound, a local priest would interpret the pattern to foretell the abundance of that year’s harvest. Wiccans believe this dancing creates an energy vortex that opens a portal to the other world and awakens the fey (fairies) from their winter’s slumber and invites the earth to bring forth new fruit. At the end of the festival, when the fire is going out, the fires in the home were doused and relit with fresh fires from the bonfire before ashes were smudged on the celebrants and scattered over the fields to offer protection and fertility.

  Charly Shelton