Summer is suddenly near, according to the calendar at any rate – May Day officially marks its beginning and maybe it will actually happen. Spring has been and gone. I experienced the whole season in a profusion of smells, sights and sound during a half hour’s walk down the hill to the village: the rich, sharp stink of slurry being spread on the fields; cut grass laced with the diesel of mowers; and the vague hint of coconut in the fragrance of the bright yellow gorse bursting from the hedgerows; the warm but gentle sunlight gave an additional buttery hue to the green hills stretching away to the Yellow Mountain sharply etched against a clear blue sky.
The horizon seemed closer. During the grey, wet months of winter the misted hills march away in shadowy ranks to a far distant vanishing point. But now, in this sharper, unfamiliar light, they seemed piled above each other in the vertically layered perspective of an unfurled Chinese scroll painting. Finches, sparrows and robins flitted busily; the occasional lazy crow cawed overhead and high above, in the clear air I thought I heard the sweet notes of an invisible soaring lark.
May is a month of natural fecundity and encourages a corresponding promiscuity – it is not surprising that May Day customs are the remnants of ancient fertility rites. I first heard the term ‘to go a-Maying’ when I arrived in England as a small boy. Years later I got a true sense of the term from a Kipling poem when a young couple declared:
Oh, do not tell the priest our plight
Or he would call it sin,
But we have been out in the woods all night
A-conjuring Summer in...
...and God bless them, but back then “going a-Maying” evoked girls in white frocks with flowers in their hair singing “tra la la” as they skipped about in meadows picking wild flowers. I couldn’t really see the point but played along. My primary school teachers organised a May Fair and put up a Maypole in the playground. We wore white shirts and trousers, ribbon festooned straw hats and had sticks covered with nailed-on beer bottle tops which jingled pleasingly when shaken. In a vaguely choreographed melee, we skipped and jumped and banged our sticks together. It was called Morris dancing and was utterly perplexing but quite satisfying. After this strange ritual, we each grabbed hold of a coloured ribbon hanging from the Maypole and hopped about, weaving in and out of each other as we went. When we had finished, the pole was covered from the top down in a pleasing pattern of interlaced red, blue, yellow and green.
I had no idea what it all meant, but the parents thought it was lovely. I now realise that we 10-year-olds were dancing in formal adoration around a giant phallus, and that our pretty ribbons had woven a giant, multi-coloured condom.
The English Maypole never really caught on in Ireland. A few were erected around the Pale and parts of the North but after the 1798 uprising they were briefly in use as gibbets to hang rebels from, which subsequently made them less attractive as focal points for a dance. But elsewhere in the country we had a maypole of sorts.
Bealtaine, the first of May, like all ancient Irish festivals, is associated with the sun. The major events of the solar year are the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The halfway points between these are the cross quarter days: Lughnasa, Samhain, Imbolc and Bealtaine, which is midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The word means “bright fire” and the day was sacred to Belanus – “the Shining One” – a pan-Celtic god who brought heat and light. Bealtaine was the first day of Samh – the living half of the year, and is one of the ancient “Fire” festivals. Great bonfires were lit both in celebration of the end of Gamh – the dead half – and as a kind of sympathetic magic to rekindle and encourage the sun. Near the Bealtaine bonfire a pole was erected, and perched on top was the May Baby – a female figure draped with flowers and ribbons. A masked and costumed couple would dance lewdly beneath it, around the fire and gesturing explicitly – erotic pole dancing is an ancient art it seems. Childless women came from miles around to watch the hot action as a charm to aid conception.
Bealtaine along with Samhain, or Halloween, was an enchanted time when the gap between the human and fairy worlds was easiest to bridge. The Sidhe were especially active, often malevolent and at their strongest from dusk on May eve till noon on May Day: during which time there was powerful and potentially evil magic abroad. Lone travellers were waylaid by sudden fog and spirited away. The best protection was to wear your clothes inside out to confuse the phantom abductors. Or you could wash yourself in your own urine: the stronger the smell the better the deterrent. Apparently it made the fairies recoil and I am totally with them on this point.
I would far rather wash myself in May dew which was also common, and a much more socially acceptable potion. Collected on the eve of Bealtaine and bottled before the dawn, it was an elixir with magical restorative powers for a year. If you couldn’t be arsed to collect enough to bottle, benefit could still be got if you risked going out after dark: walking barefoot in the dew prevented corns and bunions; if a woman washed her face in it she improved her complexion; and if she undressed and immersed herself in the dew-soaked grass between dusk and dawn, she beautified her body. De Valera famously liked to imagine Irish girls as “comely maidens dancing at crossroads”, I much prefer to think of them rolling naked in the fields on summer nights.
The improvement in the weather encourages such thoughts – despite the church’s efforts over the years. In the 18th century a superior general of the Jesuit order in Rome grew tired of his students’ profound immorality and declared the entire month of May to be sacred to Our Lady: he hoped this would encourage moderation, abstinence and chastity. Recalling my own student days, I doubt this was successful, but the association of Bealtaine and the Blessed Virgin spread and by the 19th century most of Catholicism revered Mary as “The Queen of the May”. Throughout the month, statues of her were crowned with flowers and paraded in and out of churches to the accompaniment of children in stainless white, singing hymns in her honour.
I have a pretty memory of such a procession from my early childhood, but even then the tradition was waning. Celebrating maidenhood in general and Mary's maidenhead in particular, whilst the whole of Nature is aroused and throbbing was never going to be a festival destined to last. We are too suggestible a species. How can we be expected to suppress powerful urges when everything around us is encouraging them? It is far easier, and much healthier, to surrender to the season and "go a-maying".
Philip Judge is author of In Sight of Yellow Mountain (Gill Books, €14.99)
