CELEBRATING WISDOM, MAY DAY AND BELTANE
Rev. Cliff Reed
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting, 2nd May 2021
Text: The Song of Songs, chapter 2, verses 10 to 13.
Those lines from the ancient Hebrew love poem that is the Song of Songs contain one of the most beautiful and memorable evocations of spring ever written. They are very appropriate for today, at the beginning of May, when spring reaches the height of its beauty and ebullience.
It is not surprising that May Day has long had a great significance for human beings, although it managed to avoid having a major Christian festival associated with it. It is the feast day of a few saints, notably Joseph, the natural father of Jesus, and two of the Twelve Apostles, James the Less and Philip, but this doesn’t really register in the popular consciousness and probably never did to any great degree. In fact, May Day is, at root, an ancient pagan festival. To the Celts it was Beltane. This marked the time when the flocks and herds of sheep and cattle were put out on to the freshly-grown summer pastures, there to remain until the autumn and the festival of Samain. Beltane was celebrated with the lighting of bonfires and with dancing and feasting. It was the time of transition from spring to summer’s beginning, full of the promise of warmth, long sunny days and the richness of field and pasture on which human life depended – and still depends.
It was a time for the lifting of the human spirit, called to celebration by blue skies, blossom and birdsong, by the return to our skies and our countryside of swifts and swallows, cuckoos and turtle-doves – whose gentle purring is mentioned in the Song of Songs but which is all too rarely heard in our woods and hedgerows today.
We know from the Hebrew scriptures – from the Song of Songs, the Psalms, the book of Ecclesiasticus and so on – that the natural world and its seasons were crucial to the faith of the people who wrote, read, heard or sung them. And we know that the Celts and other ancient peoples celebrated the natural cycle too, and when these traditions met with Christianity the results could be mixed! Ordinary Christians still wanted to celebrate the natural world and its cycles and seasons. They did so either by amalgamating ancient pagan festivals with the newer Christian ones or, as with Beltane, May Day, just carrying on regardless with what they had always done, maybe minus some aspects of the pagan celebrations.
No doubt though there were always churchmen of a more severe type who lamented and disapproved of the pagan survivals, but that did not stop these continuing throughout the Middle Ages, when times of celebration were a welcome relief from lives of toil and, for many, of hardship. The reason why the ancient festivals were closely associated with the seasons was because the production of food was the most important activity that anyone was engaged in. The festivals, which always had their religious or spiritual aspect, not only celebrated nature’s bounty but were seen as central to ensuring its continuance. Failed harvests and animal murrains meant hunger and famine and were signs of divine disfavour or the result of the malicious activities of evil beings, both human and otherwise. Placating the gods and showing due reverence and obedience to them was part and parcel of these festivals as well as celebrating nature’s bounty and beauty with due thanksgiving.
In the 17th century, though, Puritanism became the dominant religious force in some places, of which this country was one. The Puritans set out to purge the Church and society generally of the old pagan survivals and the ancient festivals and their traditions were suppressed. No doubt there were still people who celebrated May Day but this became a more marginal activity, no longer really ‘respectable’ and usually associated with those regarded as the ‘lower orders’ of society, with the ignorant, the superstitious and those inclined to drunkenness and debauchery whenever an excuse presented itself. But May Day was to make a comeback!
In the 19th century there arose a nostalgia for ‘merrie England’, for a somewhat sanitised past, and May Day re-emerged. Ancient practices – real or imagined – made May Day a time of celebration once again, complete with May Queens, Maypoles and children dancing round them, innocently unaware of their phallic origins. The popular Victorian novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, gives us an example of how people in the 19th century imagined the May Days of earlier times to have been in his book ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (Book 1, chapter 1, ‘The May Queen’).
This charming picture may well owe more to Victorian sentimentality than to history, but it is the picture that has moulded our image of May Day ever since. What religious significance it may have retained in the Middle Ages from the paganism of the more remote past was largely lost, at least until more recent, somewhat contrived, attempts to revive it.
But something else happened to May Day in the 19th and 20th centuries, and this was its association with working class identity, with what was called ‘the common man’, with labour, with socialism and communism, with trades unionism and with left-wing causes generally. This was a direct development from the traditional May Day, seen as a time for labouring people to celebrate the work they did and the communities they formed.
May Day is thus a number of things – all of them worth celebrating in their own way. It is a celebration of spring’s climax, of nature’s beauty, bounty and triumphant rebirth after the long weeks of winter. It is a time of great agricultural significance, of new growth in the fields and when summer grazing promises meat and milk and all manner of important animal products. It is a nostalgic enjoyment of our country’s real or imagined past and the traditions we link with it – such as morris-dancing, Maypoles and the re-enactment of old myths and legends. And it is a celebration of ordinary people, their lives and the work they do. As the author of Ecclesiasticus put it over two thousand years ago, describing manual workers and craftsmen of all kinds, “All these rely on their hands, and each is skilful at his own craft…They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. But they maintain the fabric of this world, and their prayers are about their daily work.” (Ecclesiasticus 38: 31, 33b-34)
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‘THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES’ by William Harrison Ainsworth
Extract from Book 1, chapter 1, ‘THE MAY QUEEN’
“After this came the Maypole, not the tall pole so called , and which was already planted in the green, but a stout staff elevated some six feet above the head of the bearer, with a coronel of flowers atop, and four long garlands hanging down, each held by a morris-dancer.
Then came the May Queen’s gentleman usher, a fantastic personage in habiliments of blue guarded with white, and holding a long willow wand in his hand. After the usher came the main troop of morris-dancers, the men attired in a graceful costume, which set off their light active figures to advantage…
Ribands were everywhere in their dresses, ribands and tinsel adorned their caps…In either hand they held a long white handkerchief knotted with ribands.
The female morris-dancers were habited in white, decorated like the dresses of the men; they had ribands and wreaths of flowers round their heads, bows in their hair, and in their hands long white knotted kerchiefs.
This gay troop having come to a halt before the cottage, the gentleman usher entered it and tapping against the inner door with his wand, took off his cap as soon as it was opened, and bowing deferentially to the ground, said he was come to invite the Queen of May to join the pageant…”