The strange and ancient origins of May Day

The festival of May Day has its roots in a culture which flourished five or six thousand years ago in what is now Ukraine.

Most of our holidays and festivals have obvious origins, either from an astronomical or agricultural point of view. Christmas, for instance, falls a few days after the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and celebrates the lengthening days which tells us that the sun will return and spring will come again. In Britain the August Bank Holiday was, until the 1960s, held at the beginning of August, rather than the end, and marked the traditional start of the harvest. May Day though does not fit into this general pattern. There seems no special significance to the date and yet it has long been an important date in the calendar, marked by a Bank Holiday in Britain. May Day is one of the most interesting festivals and has its roots not in agriculture, but pastoralism. That is to say it was an important date for those wandering tribes who did not till the land, but rather kept herds of cattle. These were the Indo-European peoples, who had their homeland in the steppes of Russia and Ukraine.

The Celts adopted this custom and named it Beltane. It coincides with what is known as Witches’ Night in Germany. The celebration of Beltane, which takes place at the same time as May Day and also, in parts of Europe, Walpurgis Night, has its roots in the customs of the Yamnaya tribes; the Indo-European speaking peoples who spread out from what is now Ukraine, thousands of years ago. We may be reasonably confident of this, because May Day has no relevance at all to the farming of crops. In other words, it was celebrated originally by pastoralists, those who kept or followed herds of livestock. Early May is when cattle are sent to their summer pastures, which means that this is almost certainly how May Day came to be a significant point in the year. We still mark May Day with a public holiday in Britain, despite the fact that it is thousands of years since we had anything to do with sending flocks to summer pastures.

The celebration of Beltane entailed lighting large bonfires. These, by means of sympathetic or imitative magic, would cause the sun to kindle and bring warmth to the earth over the summer. The cattle which were soon to be driven to the summer pastures were purified by being driven between two bonfires or sometimes urged to jump over the smouldering embers. This, it was felt, would strengthen or protect them.

Like Halloween, Beltane was a time when witches ruled and the Germans called the night before Mayday, Walpurgis Night or, even more significantly Hexenacht or witches’ night. The reason was simple. This was a time for celebration among the heathens of Europe before Christianity took hold. In Germany, Estonia, Finland and other Nordic countries, those following the old religious practices held the mid-point between the spring equinox and the summer solstice as being a special time. The bonfires which were lit were part of their way of encouraging the return of the warmer weather. This was anathema to Christians and a missionary called Walpurga managed to convert the German tribes and persuaded them to be baptised. Walpurga was an English woman, born in Devon in around 710 AD, who was determined to spread the faith as far as she could. She was very much opposed to the celebration of nature festivals and after she died, she was canonised on 1 May 870. This became another example of the way that Christians took over an old custom and put their own spin on it.

Instead of Beltane being the date when pagans and heathens got up to their old tricks, Walpurgis Night turned into a date in the calendar when everybody went to church and prayed for St Walpurga to protect them from witches. In the Czech Republic, the night of 30 April is known as Burning of the Witches. Effigies of witches are made and then thrown onto enormous bonfires, much as the British burn guys. In Estonia and Finland, this is the time of year for carnivals and fun.

There are clear and obvious parallels between Walpurgis Night and Halloween. In some rural parts of Germany it is accepted that young people will play practical jokes after dark, by rearranging things in people’s gardens and sometimes daubing graffiti. One is reminded of the British and American custom of trick or treating, although without the soliciting of treats.

With the arrival of Christianity, the adherents of which religion frowned upon the pagan festival of Beltane, Mayday became a substitute. Houses were decorated with green branches as a sign that the Earth had now come back to life again after winter. Dancing and other celebrations took place, many of them with a distinctly magical flavour. In fact some of the dancing around the Maypole became so obviously sexual and pagan in nature that the church clamped down on it. Maypoles were burnt and celebrations banned. It is by no means impossible that the Maypoles are a relic of the very old European tradition of what have become known as ‘pole gods’. These are crudely shaped wooden poles with human faces and often hugely exaggerated penises. The symbolism of young girls dancing around a tall wooden pole was felt by many respectable people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be unwholesome.

May Day has now been expurgated and turned into an innocuous and charming relic of merrie olde England. Few of those who mark it in any way have the remotest idea about its ancient origins.