Today is May Day

A very, very long time ago, when I was young, our favorite days of the year were Christmas and Halloween, not necessarily in that order. At Christmas, we were dependent on the kindness of others; but on Halloween we were allowed to make our own fun and express our primal pagan spirits, perhaps for the only time that year. 

Other holidays made our ‘best of’ lists: Turkey Day, Valentines, St. Pat’s, Easter, the 4th. May Day was not on anyone’s list. Yet, a survey of Western traditions suggests that the First of May may have been the most important day of the year for a broad cross section of Western societies.  

May Day has roots in Norse Mythology, Pagan Cosmology, Christian Theology, and Marxist Ideology, as well as a link to ancient fertility rights. Before there was a Christian Easter, there was an annual celebration of new life…on May 1st. 

Each holiday has a special link to a particular virtue. Thanksgiving is gratitude. Christmas is generosity. Valentine’s is love. The 4th is independence.  What about May Day? What’s its defining virtue? Justice! (Specifically, socio-economic justice.) 

The May Day tradition in all its forms is a celebration of Natural Law (aka Oral Torah, Logos), a fundamental ordering principle in Universe that underlies everything from astronomy and biology to culture and ethics. In recent centuries, the Zeitgeist has focused on ‘man’s conquest of nature’, a concept far removed from the spirit of Natural Law. 

In Judaism, the law is twice manifest, once in the Written Torah and again in the Oral Torah. The Written Torah consists of 613 mitzvahs found in the first 5 books of the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to Moses. The Oral Torah is that same Law inscribed in the processes of nature and on the hearts of men and women.  

According to the pre-Christian calendar of Northern Europe, May 1 is the first day of summer. While this may not make sense from the point of view of the weather, it makes great sense astronomically. The summer solstice falls right in between May 1 and August 1 so why shouldn’t that 91-day period be labeled “summer”? 

In pagan lore, the eves of May 1st and November 1st are special times because that is when the spirit world is closest to our physical world. On those two eves, it is as though a ‘portal’ opens that allows direct communication between the two realms. The Christian celebrations of All Hallows Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day are extensions of this theme. 

Many of the activities that we now associate with October 31 were once also associated with April 30: Bonfires, wild merry-making and trick-or-treating, for example. Robert Graves (The White Goddess) wrote: “Christmas was merry in the Middle Ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned Maypoles…” 

And why not? Roughly, Maypoles are to May Day what Christmas Trees are to Christmas. Each links the respective festival to fertility (phallus). Like Christmas trees, a maypole may be a living tree or one that has been cut down for the occasion. It can even be ‘artificial’ in the sense that a bare log (or some aluminum wire?) may be decorated with greenery to suggest a living tree. 

Trees are powerful symbols, and important examples, of the fertility of the earth and the Maypole’s shape connects human sexuality and reproduction with the more general fertility theme represented by trees. In Tudor England, it was customary for people to spend May Day Eve making love in the fields to promote the fertility of the land. Children conceived on such occasions were known as ‘Merry-be-Gots’. 

In Norse mythology, a single tree, Ygdrasil, structures the entire cosmos. Separate ‘homelands’ are allocated to humans, gods, elves, giants, trolls and others; but the branches of one giant tree, Odin’s ash tree (Ygdr = Odin or Woden), link these semi-autonomous regions into a coherent Universe.  

The Maypole symbolizes Ygdrasil, the mythological backbone of the world. Beyond mythology, the Maypole also expresses an important astronomical concept. Early on, humans discovered that the periods of the Earth’s rotation and revolution were trivial compared to a cycle known as the Precession of the Equinox. The Maypole symbolizes axis mundi, the Earth’s axis, whose ‘wobble’ defines this 26,000-year celestial cycle. 

Does James Joyce reprise this theme in Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus lives in a tower which he calls Omphalos, the belly button of the world? (Sidebar: That S.D. lives inside the axis mundi, the navel of the universe, is a pretty good clue to the meaning of this supposedly impenetrable novel.)  

Finally, trees played a crucial role in early European religion and spirituality. Recall the ‘oak worship’ of Celtic Druids, for example. Across Europe, individual trees or whole species of trees were once regarded as divine and only later became associated with anthropomorphic deities alleged to live inside them (e.g. tree nymphs, hamadryas).  

According to Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough), Teutonic words for ‘temple’ derive from words denoting ‘sacred grove’ and ‘sanctuary’. At one time it seems groves and glades were our churches and cathedrals. 

More recently, the 20th century poet Ezra Pound recaptured the association between nature and spirit in his Cantos: “The grove needs an altar.” This theme first appears in Canto LXXIV, the opening of Pound’s Pisan Cantos, the beginning of his Paradiso. From LXXIV on, Cantos is Pound’s blueprint for building (rebuilding?) “The city of Dioce” (Paradise). Perhaps anticipating by several decades today’s ‘Green movement’, Pound prescribes the reunification of nature and spirit. He would have been at home among the Druids. 

Along with fertility, mythology and cosmology, ancient May Day rites share an economic theme. Again, according to Frazer (The Golden Bough): 

“At Thann, in Alsace, a girl called Little May Rose, dressed in white, carries a small May-tree, which is gay with garlands and ribbons. Her companions collect gifts from door to door, singing a song…In the course of the song a wish is expressed that those who give nothing may lose their fowls by the marten, that their vine may bear no clusters, their tree no nuts, their field no corn… 

“In some villages of the Vosges Mountains on the first Sunday of May, young girls go in bands from house to house, singing a song in which mention is made of the ‘bread and meal that come in May’. If money is given them, they fasten a green bough to the door; if it is refused, they wish the family many children and no bread to feed them. 

“…In some villages of Altmark at Whitsuntide…the girls lead about the May Bride, a girl dressed as a bride…They go from house to house, the May Bride singing a song in which she asks for a present, and tells the inmates of each house that if they give her something they themselves will have something the whole year through; but if they give her nothing, they themselves will have nothing.” 

How should we understand this pan-cultural focus on May Day giving? In few, if any, cases are the gifts substantial. They seem to be symbolic, but symbolic of what? 

First, there is the magical element. It is spring and over the coming months, we will be expecting the earth to give of itself for our benefit. According to the ‘principles of magic’ like begets like. If we expect nature to give, we also must give; just as in England, May merry-makers reproduced (Merry-be-gots) to encourage the land to reproduce. (Lie quiet Malthus!) 

On another level, the welfare of anyone is understood to be dependent on the welfare of everyone and the welfare of everyone must include the welfare of everyone. In a society where everyone has the necessities of life, the overall economy will be more prosperous. Obviously, the practitioners of early May Day rituals were not trained economists, but they may have intuitively grasped the nature and necessity of social solidarity. It is only in recent centuries that we have lost sight of this essential truth. As the ‘natural economy’ (fertility) benefits everyone, so must the ‘human economy’ (generosity) benefit all. 

It is here, of course, that these early May Day rites intersect with later day Christian and Marxist versions. In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, the month of May is dedicated to Mary, the mother (fertility) of Jesus. May 1st, May Day, stands at the head of Mary’s special month.  

In many Catholic areas, it has traditionally been a day of brightly colored, florid processions, reminiscent of the pre-Christian festivals (Maypoles) mentioned above. Controversially, in 1955 Pope Pius XII designated May 1st as the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, underscoring yet again May Day’s universal economic aspect. 

Mary speaks sparingly in scripture but when she does, she packs a punch. In her Magnificat (Luke 1: 46 – 52), for example, Mary says of Yahweh, “He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things but the rich he has sent away empty.”  

Are we reading Luke…or Lenin? Mary of the Magnificat is every bit as radical as Marx of the Manifesto…in fact, much more so! Compared to Christians, Communists are wimps! Even so, Communists and Socialists are primarily concerned with questions of economic justice so it cannot be overlooked that they elected, ostensibly for other reasons, to schedule their own chief annual celebration (May Day) on the very day that pagans and Christians choose to celebrate their commitment to economic justice. 

We have drawn material from anthropology, mythology, cosmology, theology, and economics; out of all of these cultural expressions, we can, I think, distill a common core: there exists a body of Natural Law that spans ages, continents and cultures…and economic justice is integral to that law. 

Happy May Day to all our readers! 

 ***

Spring. Johann Georg Platzer, 1704–1761. Oil on copper, 43.8 x 57 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by Julia Anne Bonnor (née Ricketts), 1901. Accession no. 367-1901. 

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