May Day
The great festival of rebirth and renewal, May Day, the first day of May was an occasion of great joy in the past among the common people of Europe. As a ceremonial day it was superimposed upon the ancient festival of Beltane, the inauguration of the second half of the Celtic year. But in the form in which it was observed by our forefathers it was a dramatized presentation of the union of spring and summer.
Very early on May morning, in the past, the young people of the community would rise from their beds and make their way to the woods. Here they would gather garlands of flowers with branches from the trees and, it is said, indulge in ‘wanton dalliances.’ As a symbol of rebirth, the greenery would be brought back to the villages and used as decoration for the doors and windows of the houses. This ancient rite of ‘bringing home the May’ was in effect a method of ritually conveying the fertilizing powers of fully awakened Nature into the human community.
The central figure of the celebration was the maypole or May tree; in England this was the white hawthorn, which symbolized the transition from spring to summer, while in America it was the evergreen arbutus. Like so many other magical objects the hawthorn was dualistic in character, being a force both for good and evil. As long as the 12th century its sinister aspect was recorded in Ireland, and in England the once beneficent May has become a flower of evil that must never be brought into the home.
The election of a Queen of the May, one of the great May Day ceremonies, was no doubt connected with the ancient Scandinavian custom in which a mock contest was staged between two individuals, the one representing summer and the other winter, from which the former always emerged the victor. This ceremony, which continued in the Isle of Man until early in the 19th century was described in the Universal magazine in 1786 as a ritual contest between the Queen of Winter (a man dressed in woman’s clothes) and a female Queen of the May. The same basic idea was also represented in the better-known ritual marriage between the May bridegroom and the May bride, which has been supposed to symbolize the union of spring and vegetation. A King of the May was also elected in former times.
The crowning of the May Queen, however, is integral in the surviving rite in the British Isles. This is accompanied by merrymaking and ceremonial dancing around the decorated tree or maypole.
On May Day it was once the custom for groups of young people to visit all the houses in the village bearing garlands of flowers and soliciting donations, in return for which they received the ‘blessing of May’ to bring them good luck for the coming year.
All the characters in the May Day rites embodied the power to endow crops and women with fertility and good luck. The maypole or May bush, originally a tree brought in from the woods, was only in later times set up as a permanent fixture on the village green. The famous maypole in London’s Strand, which was 134 feet tall, was later transferred to Wanstead in Essex, where it was used to support the largest telescope then known.
One feature of the English ceremony was the dance of the Morris men, the man characters being Robin Hood, Maid Marion, Will Scarlet, Little John, the Fool in cap and bells, Tom the Piper, and the hobby-horse, all symbolical of primitive ceremonial magic. The hobby-horses still pay a prominent role in the May Day ceremonies at Padstow and Minehead in the West Country where they attract visitors from all over the world, but the other characters in the play have long since made their exit.
It was perhaps inevitable that the Puritans should have taken deep offence at the May Day ceremonies, detecting in the may-pole obvious fertility connotations and also a close affinity with the Roman games dedicated to the goddess Flora, held on 28 April. To the English and American Puritan the sight of rustics capering about an upright pole was all too reminiscent of pagan worship.
The Puritans’ hostility to the superstitions of May Day apparently did not extend to the prohibition of washing the face in May due, the traditional recipe for a good complexion as well as for health and strength; presumably they were unaware of the custom in some parts of Europe for young girls to roll stark naked in the magical dew on May morning. It is on record that even the great Oliver Cromwell himself was not above making use of May due on medical advice.
Inevitably the May Day celebrations, like many Christmas customs, were suppressed during Puritan rule, to re-emerge at the Restoration. Later they became part of that gradual decline to which all the elements of ‘Merry England’ were now subject. The May Day rites continued throughout the 18th century and into the 19th with May games on the village green, and with dancing chimney sweeps and garlanded milkmaids a common sight in the London streets. As the drab century of industrialism drew to its end May Day underwent a temporary metamorphosis as the festival of international labour, the hobby-horse and Morris men being replaced by processions of trade unionists marching behind banners. Today remnants of May Day celebrations survive only in rural areas.
Taken from “Man, Myth & Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural”, edited by Richard Cavendish.