The simplest answer is, Beltane is a holiday of Irish origin celebrated from the eve of 30th April to 1st May, and it’s one of the four Greater Sabbats in the religion of Wicca. But, that’s not the whole answer.
I first discovered Beltane about ten years ago, when I first started formally studying occultism. I began with Wicca, as many do, because it was the most accessible. At the time, I didn’t know that Wicca and witchcraft were different things. I was vaguely aware that “Wicca is a religion, witchcraft is a practice,” but I didn’t actually know what the difference was. I remember making the comparison, “Hinduism is a religion, yoga is a practice.” That is not the same thing at all. Yoga developed as a sacred practice specifically in a Hindu context, while witchcraft is far older than the religion of Wicca and not at all interchangeable with it. But I really thought that non-Wiccan witches were the same thing, but secular. I thought that Wicca — its beliefs, practices, and liturgy — was simply what witches did. So I adopted its whole festival calendar without question.
I love Beltane. Beltane filled a hole in my life that I didn’t even know was there! I had always wondered why May Day was even on the calendar, and now here was an answer. It was an ancient fire festival, celebrating the sacred marraige of the God and Goddess, and all the sexy implications that go with it. Like other holidays, Beltane has a specific “vibe” that comes with it, and I always feel it coming on this time of year — roaring fires, the smell of dew and spring flowers, heat and passion, mead and elderflower wine. Beltane is one of those times of year when I really wish I had a coven or other in-person community to celebrate with.
But despite how I feel about it, it’s recently dawned on me that I know almost nothing about Beltane. Most of the lore underlying Wicca is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century fabrication. I discuss that in more depth in my previous post about The White Goddess, but here’s the short version: Basically, a bunch of rich Victorian academics started recording the folk beliefs and customs of rural Britain. They assumed that all these folk customs were pagan survivals, and interpreted them according to their own ideas about what paganism must have been like (mostly inspired by Romanticism, not by actual paganism). When the people who actually practiced those customs tried to tell them that no, this hundred-year-old tradition really was just for fun and not an ancient pagan fertility rite, the academics would respond with something akin to “Ha! Silly peasant! You are not smart enough to understand the hidden true meaning of your primitive superstition!” It’s the folklore equivalent of “the curtains were blue.” Actually, scratch that, it’s almost exactly like how white Americans fetishize Native American spiritual traditions, while actual indigenous Americans still have to fight for their right to practice their own religions. (If you thought the Victorians were above turning their colonial attitude upon their own countrymen, well you’d be wrong — ). So, how much of Beltane is legitimately pagan, and how much is a Victorian fabrication?
It’s been very difficult for me to find any scholarship on this. Most of what I found online either analyzed the modern festival, or was too old to be reliable. The best I’ve got is Ronald Hutton’s The Stations of the Sun. This particular book is still a bit outdated, so I can’t take everything he says here at face value, but Hutton’s scholarship is still mostly reliable. So, that’s my main source for what follows.
The Origins of Beltane Firstly, it’s Bealtaine, and it should be pronounced like “bee-yal-tinn-uh.” (I think it’s kind of hilarious that every witch post I’ve seen since 2013 has emphasized that Samhain should be pronounced “sow-in,” but “Beltane” has always been pronounced phonetically. They’re both Gaelic!) The earliest reference to it is a tenth-century dictionary of Irish words, the Sanas Chormaic:
BELLTAINE ‘May-day’ i.e. bil-tene i.e. lucky fire, i.e. two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations, and they used to bring the cattle [as a safeguard] against the diseases of each year to those fires [in marg.] they used to drive the cattle between them.
There’s actually a lot we can tell just from this. The earliest version of Beltane that we know of was already associated with fire (which makes sense, since the Irish word tine means “fire”). It’s also already associated with paganism — the writer specifies that the Druids built the fires using magical incantations. We can’t know whether that’s actually true or not, since sources on the Druids are rare-to-nonexistent, so, there’s no way to verify that claim. But the fact that Druids are mentioned means that Beltane was assumed to be pagan this far back (as opposed to having been declared pagan by James Frazer in 1890). We also know from this that Beltane was a herding festival, not an agricultural festival. The purpose of the fires is to bless the cattle, and the writer saw fit to scribble in the margins that the cattle would be driven between the balefires. This was supposed to protect them from disease (as opposed to, say, making them bear more calves), so this was an apotropaic rite, not a fertility rite. According to Hutton, this custom survived all the way to the nineteenth century. Even if Beltane isn’t pagan, it’s certainly extremely old, and survived as a nearly-unbroken tradition for a thousand years.
On another page, the author of the Sanas Chormaic associates the May Day festival with the name of a god, Bil/Bial or Bel. This might be a reference to the Gaulish god Belenus, but Hutton casts doubt on this theory. According to him, Belenus was mainly worshipped in Noricum (Austria), and there’s only two dubious references to him in Britain. The writer of the Sanas Chormaic might instead have been referring to Baal, the Canaanite god that acts as the rival of the Abrahamic God in the Old Testament. Despite how far Ireland is from Canaan, this actually makes more sense, because the writer of the Sanas Chormaic was Christian and would have been more familiar with Baal. Lady Jane Wilde identifies the supposed god of Beltane as Baal, and claims that the fires were used for human sacrifice, which is almost certainly untrue. (Frazer makes the same claim, and describes it as “unequivocal,” because of course he does.) Hutton says that, regardless, there’s no need to connect the name “Beltane” to a god, because “the common Celt preface ‘bel-’ did indeed apparently mean ‘bright’ or ‘fortunate’.” So, I guess we can scrap that theory.
The only other ancient or early medieval source that mentions Beltane is Tochmarc Emire, one of the stories in the Ulster Cycle:
“Fair is this plain, the plain of the noble yoke,” said Cuchulainn. “None comes to this plain,” said she, “who does not, from summer’s end to the beginning of spring, from the beginning of spring to May-day, and again from May-day to the beginning of winter meet Benn Suain, son of Roscmelc.”
The context of this is sort of similar to the “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” dialogue in Hamlet, in that Cuchulainn and Emer are engaged in innuendo-laden sniping at each other. Cuchulainn says, “Your breasts are so beautiful!” (i.e. the “plain” he refers to), and Emer answers, “You can’t touch until you [meet impossible standard].” The context isn’t important. What’s important is that this tells us that Beltane and Samhain are the beginnings of summer and winter, respectively. Is Beltane authentically pagan, then? Eh… maybe? It has a higher chance of being pagan than some other holidays, since its earliest references put it in a pagan context, but those references are still filtered through centuries worth of Christianization. This is literally as good as we’re going to get for anything Celtic, so I’ll take it.
Beltane Traditions and Superstitions
There’s a number of other Beltane traditions that Hutton provides sources for. Regarding jumping over balefires for luck, he cites a nineteenth-century account from Sir William Wilde. Wilde explains that people might pray circling the fire, or leap back and forth across it for success, or pass through it to make themselves invulnerable, or step over it to ensure happy marraige or smooth childbirth. I’ve already explained why I don’t trust nineteenth-century academics, but his description is comparatively harmless, and he dismisses the “Baal” claim that his wife makes, so there’s that. At least he doesn’t call the people “savages.” Wilde claims that the disinfectant properties of fire are what give it its sanctity and association with purification. He might be right about that, since a lot of of similar folklore about apotropaic charms has to do with the natural antibiotic properties of things like salt and garlic.
Wilde provides a lot of other interesting information about Beltane:
At this time also, small-plays and various rural games are resorted to, as “dance in the ring” and “threading my grandmother’s needle;” in which latter the boys and girls join hands and dance a sort of serpentine figure up and down the roads, sometimes for a mile in extent — the men generally carrying green boughs, or springs of sloe and white-thorn, then in blossom, and the girls decked with posies, wreaths of noneens (daisies), and garlands of May-flowers and buttercups. As the evening advances, and the assembly breaks up into small parties, lovers seeking the greenwood shade, and crones retiring to the hob, a few solitary individuals may be seen walking out in the gloaming, courting the moonlight by the ancient rath, or wandering into the lone fairy-peopleed valley, or the dreary fell, in hopes of hearing the mystic pipers of the sheogues, which on that night, more than any other, are said to be on the alert, and to favor mortals with their melodies. Great is the agility and grace believed to be conferred on those who are fortunate enough to trip it to the music of fairy pipes; so great that it has become a proverb in Connaught, upon seeing a good dancer, to say “Troth, ma bouchel, you listened to the piper on May Eve.”
Wilde can’t help himself, and adds in a footnote that the dances must obviously be “a relic of the ancient mystic dance of Druidism,” because *checks notes* circle dances are a ritual activity in Athens, which (in case you weren’t aware) is nowhere near Ireland. I like the fairy superstition, though. I have no idea if that’s a real colloquialism, but I certainly like the idea of wandering into the mist-shrouded hills to listen to fairy pipes. (And I think that’s part of the problem here — romanticism trumps actual scholarship.) I’m including this passage here anyway because I think this makes for good raw material for modern pagans to build Beltane rituals out of. Whether it’s a real superstition or not, I like the idea of dancers being inspired by fairies who play on May Eve. I think it’s doubtful that any of this is an authentic pre-Christian survival, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Wilde also describes the superstition around dew on May Day as a tool of witches:
The May dew, as everyone knows, possesses peculiar virtues. If an old woman be seen gathering it in a sheet, or with a sieve, or with her hands, upon a May morning, nothing will persuade the people that she is not performing a charm by which she can steal the butter of all the cows that graze upon that pasture from which she selects it. […] The girls rise early on the first of May, and kneeling down over the glittering gossamer, “Brush the light dew-drops from the spangled lawn.” and bathe their necks and faces therewith to keep off freckles and beautify their skin […]
Again, I have no idea if this is a real superstition or practice, but if nothing else, it may be the source for the idea that May dew will improve your beauty, or be useful for spellcasting. I’ve put dew from the grass on my face on 1st May before, so if it wasn’t a real superstition then, it definitely is now. There’s also this nursery rhyme:
The fair maid who, the first of May, Goes to the fields at break of day, And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree, Will ever after handsome be.
I tried looking for the origin for it, and found some generic Mother Goose books, as well as a circular justification that this describes a pagan custom associated with Beltane. So… I have no idea how old this rhyme is or where it comes from, only that it exists. Most nursery rhymes date roughly to the eighteenth century, though. Regarding oat cakes, Hutton quotes an eighteenth-century writer, Thomas Pennant.
On the first of May, the herdsmen of every village hold their Bel-tein, a rural sacrifice. They cut a square trench on the ground, leaving the turf in the middle, on that they make a fire of wood, on which they dress a large caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal, and milk; and bring, besides the ingredients of the caudle, plenty of beer and whisky, for each of the company must contribute something. The rites begin with spilling some of the caudle on the ground, by way of libation: on that every one takes a cake of oatmeal, upon which are raised nine square knobs, each one dedicated to some particular being, the supposed preserver of their flocks and herds, or to some particular animal, the real destroyer of them: each person then turns his face to the fire, breaks off a knob, an dflighing it over his shoulders says ‘This I give to thee, preserve thou my horses; this to thee, preserve thou my sheep’; and so on. After that, they sue the same ceremony to the noxious animals: ‘This I give to thee, O Fox! Spare thou my lambs; this to thee, O hooded Crow! this to thee, O Eagle!’ When the ceremony is over, they dine on the caudle.
My first reaction is that this sounds… kind of animistic. Giving burnt offerings to spirits and animals, in the hopes that they will bless the herds and/or leave them alone? It sounds almost too pagan to be true, and sure enough, Pennant provides this helpful footnote: “My account of this, and every other ceremony mentioned in this Journal, was communicated to me by a gentleman resident on the spot where they were performed.” So… this is a second- or third-hand account, so many degrees of separation from the ceremony itself that it means practically nothing.
However, Hutton mentions that the oat cakes (just the oat cakes) are attested in other sources, and that traditions around them lasted into the twentieth century:
By the late nineteenth century the “Bannoch Bealltainn” had shed its knobs and was instead marked with a cross on one side like a Hot Cross Bun. It had become widely employed by children in the central and eastern Highlands after the same manner as Easter eggs, of being rolled down hillsides. The custom was still associated with the arcane, however, for if the bannock landed with the cross underneath it, this spelled bad luck to the person whom it belonged. The tradition still continued in the 1950s, and may do so yet.
Hutton cites a whole list of sources for this claim, and I’m going to take him at his word.
There are other superstitions brought up in some of these sources that I haven’t mentioned yet: the drawing of lots to determine one unlucky person who must jump back and forth over the fire; the building of a “May bush” that is cut from hawthorn and decorated with ribbons, flowers, and candles; the use of torches taken from the fire to drive off witches and malevolent spirits, and a corresponding taboo against taking fire from someone’s house on May Day. On the other hand, missing from these accounts are specifications of the nine types of wood burned in a balefire (I’m betting we can thank Graves for that one), and anything having to do with sexuality.
On that note, Hutton draws a distinction between the apotropaic fire festival of Beltane, celebrated in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, and the more celebratory May Day, celebrated in England. May Day is more obviously sexual. Hutton quotes this song from the seventeenth century:
Thus the Robin and the Thrush Musicke make in every bush While they charm their prety notes Young men hurle up maidens cotes.
Hard to get more overt than that. (A PG version of this is the more famous “Now Is the Month of Maying,” which I won’t quote here because I do not want to have to sing it in my head every time I read this.) Hutton points out, however, that there was no corresponding baby boom, because — shockingly — 30th April in England is way too cold for that, “and the woods generally too damp.”
In this chapter, Hutton also cites some tree lore. The types of tree flowers gifted to women indicated the way the men felt about them, with hawthorn being a sign of respect, and elder or blackthorn (what the Farrars describe as a “dark goddess” tree, likely pulling from Graves) being a sign of sluttiness. There’s generally a much heavier emphasis on flowers in the English May festival than in the Irish/Scottish Bealtaine, probably because it’s warmer. Maypoles, likewise, were more popular in England and Wales, where the balefires were less common. Hutton explains that they have no clear origin, but that they were well established by the fourteenth century. He proceeds to strike down the notion that maypoles are phallic symbols, and, yeah. That checks. Just because something is phallic in a Freudian sense does not mean that they’re intended to be phallic symbols. (Studying Dionysian festivals has made it abundantly clear to me that if something is intended to be phallic, it will literally be shaped like a giant penis.) There’s also no evidence that maypoles are intended to be Yggdrasil or any other axis mundi. Occam’s razor applies: maypoles are exactly what they appear to be, tall things to hang ribbons and stuff off of. Even despite lacking an explicit association with sex, that didn’t stop Puritans from trying to ban them, because they involved courtship dances in which young couples would *gasp* kiss each other. By the nineteenth century, maypole dances were relegated to a cutesy kids’ thing, like Easter egg hunts. So, May Day is not a sanitized Beltane. It is, in fact, an entirely separate thing.
Based on all of the above, here’s what I’ve determined:
Beltane is old enough to at least have a chance at having been based on something pre-Christian (though, as usual when it comes to Celtic sources, that is nearly impossible to verify).
It’s well-attested enough to have been sufficiently widespread until at least the nineteenth century, so it’s a real tradition, not something Aiden Kelly pulled out of his ass.
It is mainly an apotropaic festival, not a fertility festival. There’s a lot about using the fire to protect from various ills, and nothing about a hieros gamos, let alone any sexual activity among the participants.
There’s an interesting body of folklore associated with it. I don’t fully trust the word of the people who recorded that superstition, but many similar traditions are recorded independently by different people, so it isn’t all taken from Frazer’s quasi-mystical extrapolations, or Graves’s headcanons.
The historical Beltane and its lore is all but unrecognizable compared to the modern Beltane, but, for once, I’m not complaining. All that matters to me is that there’s something authentic about it, and it looks like there is. I have enough personal investment in the modern concept of Beltane as a fertility festival, so I think I’ll continue to recognize it that way, but there’s also enough older Beltane lore to provide me with some new ideas for rituals.
It’s important to understand where different traditions come from so that we can incorporate them conscientiously, and so that we don’t claim that something is an authentic relic of ancient paganism when it isn’t. But I’m definitely not trying to say that the modern Beltane is bad, or that it should be “more authentic.” Festivals naturally evolve over time to be meaningful to the people who celebrate them, and, well… many of the modern celebrants don’t raise cattle. Like I said before, I’m pretty emotionally invested in the modern Beltane, and it’s one of the things I retained even after having lost my faith in Wicca. After doing all the scholarship, I recognize the need to come back around and find the magic again. To lose myself in this archetypal dreamspace, and remind myself why Beltane was so important to me in the first place. And I think part of that has to do with answering the enlivening vibe of the beginning of summer — flowers, antlers, dancing around firesand sex in the woods.
I still plan to involve Beltane in Shadowbook, as a turning-point in which Nyx finally accepts that she wants to permanently stay in Umbragard and belong to the Shadow community. I might have to call it something different (since there’s no reason Shadows, with their own religion, would celebrate an Irish festival), but it’s important to me that it’s Beltane and not the perhaps more logical choice of Samahin, or even Anthesteria (which is an Ancient Greek festival that’s something of a combination of the two). There’s the obvious symbolism of the beginning of summer corresponding with the beginning of a much happier chapter of Nyx’s life, as well as the heiros gamos aspect metaphorically sealing her relationship with Astor and indicating the onset of adulthood.
Beltane is one of those times when I remember why I got into both paganism and witchcraft in the first place, and that’s worth sustaining.
“You know,” Tom said, “one reason for all the rituals we do — the offerings and the ceremonies — is that it’s supposed to help us find our divine selves. The part of us that’s god and goddess. The magic that’s in us.” It was drunken philosophy, but he seemed utterly sincere. “So we become little gods,” Ellery said, thinking of Aspen and his necklace, thinking of statues and the tiny toy car glued to Bob’s dashboard. “We’re witches, after all,” Alistair said, in a hushed way that seemed strangely sincere. Maybe he was acting like that because she’d said that he was never serious, but he meant it, she could tell. “Our gods aren’t supposed to be distant. Let’s go say hello, one divine being to another.” — Holly Black, “Little Gods”
Sources:
The Stations of the Sun, Ronald Hutton.
Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, edited by Jonathan Strahan
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