is for Humanitiesis for Humanities| A newsletter for students enrolled in the Humanities |
 Mayflowers. In some locales, the revels of May eve included the midnight gathering of Mayflowers4 to leave at people's doors with a song: "...it is a sprout well budded out, the work of our Lord's hand" which the householder rewarded with a drink of cream or beer. In France the young male chorusters were called Maillotins. May Riddle. "White Coates! Whom choose you! whom you list: Some Ana-tolleratorist: Wolves, lambs, hens, foxes to agree By setting all opinion-free: If Blew-coates doe not this prevent, Hobgoblins will be insolent." 1647 Almanac, Samuel Danforth. |
May1 May Day, Beltane (also spelled Beltine, Beltain, Beal-tine, Beltan, Bel-tien, and Beltein), Die Walpurgis-Nacht is celebrated annually on May eve, and/or May first throughout pagan Europe. It marks the beginning of the light half of the year by a fertility festival in which bonfires are used to mark the symbolic return of the Summer sun and renewed life. It was on a Thursday, the day before the first of May, and the seventeenth day of the moon that the sons of Miled arrived in Ireland. The Book of Invasions. Mortal beings who sail in from the west, the sons of Miled are the last invaders of Ireland, and they make their appearance on the festival day of Beltene, Lord Death. The inhabitants, the Danaans (Lords of Light), are defeated in the ensuing battles and Ireland is forever divided into two realms: the spiritual realm, still governed by the children of Danae and the physical realm which is governed by humans.
So says Mephistopheles to Faust on Walpurgis Night1 as they make their way through the forest of the Harz Mountains presumably to the Brocken, the highest peak, known to be the meeting place of the witches where one can see spectres.2 In ancient times, young men of the European village ventured into the spring woods, cut down a tree and brought it back to be decorated with garlands and blossoms. Over time, many villages in England simply set-up a permanent May-pole. Reformation Puritans disliked the revels, the dancing, and the crowning of the May Queen, which were part of the festivities, nor did they care for the customary "marriage" of a young man and woman commemorating the joining of the goddess and the god, and so they destroyed the May-poles in both the old and the new worlds of the English. In 1628 Thomas Morton set up a May-pole on his plantation of Ma-re-Mount and welcomed all who would to participate in the celebration of the May, with the result described in his book New English Canaan (1632).3 See Nathanial Hawthorne's version of the tale in The May-Pole of Merrymount. Yet, behind the revelry of Beltane there lies a sense of foreboding. Will summer's weather be good? Will the first early crops just now appearing above ground survive? Will the animals removed from the safety of their winter pens thrive in unguarded summer pastures? In the Welsh Mabinogian (where the personages are embodiments of the ancient gods and goddesses of the land in the guise of Welsh kings) we are told of a man called Tiernan who has a wonderful mare which drops a foal every first of May, but every colt disappears.This is paralleled by the disappearance of lady Rhiannon's first son and the appearance of a great claw through the window.5 Life and death touch once again. By the time of Louisa May Alcott, both the Lords of Light (made small by Christianity) and the May blossoms were consigned to the realm of children's stories see, for example, "Little Annie's Dream; Or, the Fairy Flower," in Flower Fables. Tradition manages to survive, however, in Aukland, New Zealand, where Morris Dancers still dance the sun up on May Day. Whether morris dancing is a pagan holdover or an innovation of the English gentry in the 15th century is the subject of Robert Trubshaw's article Paganism in British Folk Customs. |
 Saint James Large illumination (469x743) |
May 2 Jacob (Jakob, Gr.) James the Less, James the Just, James the Righteous was the head of the Nazorean community and first leader of the congregation in Jerusalem following the death of Jesus (Acts, xv, 13; xxi, 18). He is spoken of as one of the brothers of Jesus by Matthew (Matt. xiii, 58), Mark (Mk. vi, 2-6), by the apostle Paul (Gal. i, 19) and Eusebius: Then there was JAMES who was known as the brother of the Lord. For he too was called Joseph's son [also of] Joseph Christ's father,.... This James, ... whom the early Christians surnamed the Righteous' because of his outstanding virtue, was the first (as the records tell us) to be elected to the episcopal throne of the Jerusalem church.... Ecclesiastical History, Book 1.1. |
He is credited as the author of The General Epistle of James (61 ce) which was written for Jews of the diaspora "to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad" and therefore was not widely circulated among the Gentile ecclesia.6 It is Jacob who was instrumental in releasing converted Gentiles from the rites of circumcision (Acts, xv, 20). The victim of judicial murder (an illegal trial) in 62ce, he was thrown from a terrace or parapet of the Temple and clubbed to death by person(s) below. The Memoirs of Hegisippus quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Bk. II. xxiii, describe Jacob as a lifelong Nazarite: one who has taken ascetic vows to abstain from animal food, strong drink, neither shaving nor cutting his hair and wearing only linen garments. Roman Catholic authorities differ on the lines of ancestry, for which see the Brethren of Jesus. |
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 In the Night Sky:
You will not see Venus as is she is in this Magellan
photograph, without her veil of clouds, but the brightest
evening star is high in the sky through the month of May.
The Moon and Venus will come close on the 18th. Mars, so
bright in April, is fading this month. Equuleus, the Foal will peek over the eastern horizon about midnight April 30. Interactive Equuleus Chart. Ptolemy and the Arabs identified it as "part of a horse" or 'horse's head." It preceeds the appearance in the night sky of a larger constellation, the winged horse Pegasus, whose body encloses the stars of the Great Square. |
| Notes and References |
Notes1Saint Walburga (Walpurgis, Walpurde; in France, Vauburg or Falburg) patroness of hydrophobia, was the daughter of Saint Richard an under-king of the West Saxons. From the stone slab and the surrounding metal plate on which rest the relics of St. Walburga in her church in Eichstädt in Bavaria flows the Oil of St. Walburga (Walburgis oleum). Her saint day is May 1. 2The Spectre of the Brocken is the reflection of ones' shadow on the face of a cloud, an optical illusion caused by a combination of sun, shadow, and fog. 3In 1625, the English Captain Wollaston made an unsuccessful attempt to settle an area (Mount Wollaston) known today as Quincy, Massachusetts, and set up a trading post with the native Algonquins. Wollaston left for the Virginia colony leaving control to his raucous associateThomas Morton who apparently traded firearms and swapped furs for rum. Morton re-named the area "Ma-re-Mount" or Merrymount. The colonial governors eventually sent Miles Standish to subdue the settlement and had Morton deported for debauchery. 4Trailing Arbutus (Epigaea repens) a member of the Heath family, is a prostrate trailing plant with semi-heart-shaped evergreen leaves with fragrant white or pink flower clusters. The raw corolla or flower tube makes a sour-sweet nibble. 5Lady Rhiannon is an eponymous goddess, "She of the white mare," known in England and among the Belgae as Epona, and in Ireland as Macha or Etain. 6Ecclesia is Greek for "meeting" but is usually translated as "church." Early Christians remained within Jewish communities as late as the 4th and 5th century, and participated in Jewish festivals. John Chrysostom, preacher of Antioch, exhorted his congregation in a sermon, "you must stop going to the Synagogue, you must not think that the Synagogue is a holier place than our churches are." 7Background Sound Madrigal: In Pride of May by Thomas Weelkes (1576 - 1623) from The Madrigal Woodshed. ReferencesEusebius, The History of the Church, (to A.D. 324) (tr. G.A. Williamson, Penguin pb.) was written ca. 325 A.D., by the bishop of Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, who was a friend and (ca. 337-339) the biographer of the Emperor Constantine. Frazer, James, The New Golden Bough, Criterion Books, 1959. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, Modern Library, 1950. Heinrich Heine's poem Auf dem Brocken *in German. The Mabinogion. tr. Jeffrey Gantz. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1976. Ovid. Fasti. tr. James Frazer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. T. W. Rolleston, Celtic, London, England: Senate, 1994 |
| copyright © 1999 Joan A. Andersen, all rights reserved |
Revised: 27 April 1999