May’s History
The Fifth Month of the Ancient Celtic and Roman Calendars
The bright and beautiful month of May is named after Maia, the Roman Goddess of Spring. We will journey in our minds to the time and place of the ancient Celts where we meet Earth-in-her-Angel as the May Queen, the Lady of Flowers, the Goddess of Spring and the Maiden Bride: Earth and Sun preparing for the marriage bed; her beautiful green body, his radiant blue-gold showering light and rain. With these beautiful images, forms, and Beings in-and-of-themselves we are able to understand and experience Earth in the deep and quiet stillness of her own body-being; her nature upon and within which everything is brought into existence; everything lives and is nourished both by her own life giving nutrients and by the Sun’s light of life as the manifestation of divine love and then everything dies back into her. As the Goddess of Spring and the May Queen she is the embodiment of the purity and strength of all growing things. In ancient Europe and in Celtic Britain during May Day rituals and celebrations, she was embodied in the young virgin girl, dressed in white, wearing a crown of fragrant blossoms and respectfully attended to by all present who gift her with garlands and first fruits. Meanwhile, people gathered branches of rowan/caorthann (mountain ash) or more commonly the blossoming whitethorn/sceach geal (hawthorn) and wove boughs that they would hang over doors and windows. As part of the general celebrations people would also decorate hawthorn bushes with flowers, ribbons, garlands and colored eggs.
But this is also the time of the Sun in his form as Fire. It is the time when our magnificent life giving Sun-star sends love in flames to Earth in her most fertile season; in her radiant and blossoming beauty wherever she goes. Accordingly, for ancient Irish and Scottish practitioners of Celtic sacred traditions the Beltane Fire Rites that entailed the lighting of large bonfires held great significance at many levels. This ceremony was almost exclusively a Gaelic rite (Irish and Scottish) for we know that other Celtic cultures, such as the Welsh, Bretons, and Cornish, did not celebrate Beltane in the way we have just described. In ancient Ireland the main Beltane Fire was held on the central hill of Uisneach which was one of the most sacred sites the country, and can be found today in County Westmeath. For communities who tended livestock the Beltane signaled the beginning of the pastoral summer season when they would be herded out to the summer grazing pastures. The great bonfire was also considered the sacred source and gift of life not only for the community at large but also for individual families and as such families doused out their hearth fires that were kept lit year-round and then ritually relit the fires with torches carrying the flame from the sacred Beltane Fire. This would begin a new year of spiritual and general health, wellbeing and prosperity for all.
As an ancient and primarily sacred ceremony, the Tuatha Dé Danann at Beltane with its great bonfires marked a period of purification, transition and transformation and included a complex of rites that acknowledged and honored the presence of known benign and loving spirits and divinities and also offered protection from harmful and malignant spirits such as the Aos Sí who were understood to be particularly drawn to the ritual Fires like moths to flames. There was also a tradition of building “paired Fires” with a ritually prescribed path between each that was used by anyone needing to be purified, strengthened, healed or just “made right.” The smoke from the Fires was considered holy and special healing plants or fragrant boughs from trees and bushes such as juniper were added to the Fires to provide additional efficacious powers.