Calan Mai
May: Ashes to ashes
🎼 Let it Burn by Goat
Calan Mai, also historically called Cyntefin, is the Welsh celebration of May Day (1st May). It marks the beginning of summer and traditionally involves festivities around bonfires, maypoles, and carol singing. Some of its traditions parallel the Gaelic festival Beltane, and similar traditions across Europe. May Eve (Welsh: ‘Nos Galan Haf’) is considered a ‘Ysbrydnos’ or spirit night, when spirits are wandering and divination is possible.
Traditionally, bonfires (Welsh: ‘coelcerth’) were lit at Calan Mai in parts of Wales. The tradition continued in Glamorgan until the 1830s, and the Scottish Highlands had very similar May Day bonfire customs, suggestive of a tradition that was once more widespread. Fire rituals are believed to be a kind of imitative magic, mimicking the Sun to “ensure a needful supply of sunshine for men, animals, and plants”, as well as to symbolically “burn up and destroy all harmful influences” (Frazer, 1922).
The bonfires were kindled by friction between wood in a highly ritualistic ceremony known as a need-fire. Need-fires were traditional among Germanic, Gaelic and Slavic peoples, used as protective magic against witchcraft, supernatural harm, plague, disease and sickness — in this instance particularly those affecting cattle and sheep. Only certain people could make the need-fire. In Wales and the Scottish Highlands, it had to be kindled by nine men, after they had gathered branches of nine different trees, and removed all metal objects from their clothing. In one account a large need-fire had to be kindled by eighty-one men, divided into nine shifts of nine. In some regions, the rope should always be pulled by two brothers, or the tree had to be felled by a pair of twin brothers. In Serbia, the need-fire was sometimes kindled by a boy and girl who worked naked in a dark room. In Bulgaria, two naked men would kindle the fire by rubbing dry branches together in the forest, and with the flame they light two fires, one on each side of a crossroad haunted by wolves.
The flames, smoke and ashes were believed to protect and purify. To ensure a good harvest, a selection ritual would require someone to leap three times over flames, or run thrice between two bonfires. Torches from the bonfire would be carried home and used to rekindle hearth fires. Livestock would be driven around the bonfire, or over its embers once it had died down. The ashes would be scattered over fields to protect crops, and people would daub each other or their cattle with them to ward off or counter sickness.
Some rituals may have embodied the memory of human sacrifice, real or symbolic, and mock burnings were also part of spring and summer bonfire festivals in other parts of Europe. There is some archaeological evidence of human sacrifice among Celtic peoples, although it is rare. A wicker man was a large weaved statue in which the druids, priests of Celtic paganism, allegedly sacrificed humans and animals by burning them to death. The motif of the wicker man has inspired neopagan ceremonies and modern festivals such as Burning Man.
In the 1st century BCE, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus wrote that the Celts sacrificed human and animal captives by burning them on huge pyres along with the first fruits — religious offerings of the first agricultural produce of the harvest. While a number of Roman writers described human and animal sacrifice among the Celts, only the Roman general Julius Caesar mentions the wicker man as one of many ways the Gauls performed sacrifices. Modern scholars have linked this source to an earlier Greek writer, Posidonius, and treat its authenticity with scepticism given the obvious motives of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire to transmit negative information about ‘uncivilised’ and ‘barbaric’ indigenous populations outside of their sphere of influence.
Totemic trees and Wild Men
Being the time between Summer and Winter, Calan Haf would also be the time to stage a mock fight between the two seasons. The man representing Winter carried a stick of blackthorn (Welsh: ‘draenen ddu’) and a shield that had pieces of wool stuck on it to represent snow. The man representing Summer was decorated with garlands of flowers and ribbons and carried a willow-wand which had spring flowers tied on it with ribbons. A mock battle took place in which the forces of Winter threw straw and dry underbrush at the forces of Summer who retaliated with birch branches, willow (Welsh: ‘helygen’) rods, and young ferns (Welsh: ‘rhedyn’).
Eventually the forces of Summer would win, and there was feasting, dancing, games and drinking until the next morning. Common drinks during festivities were mead, made from fermented honey, and sometimes flavoured with herbs or spices and known as metheglin (Welsh: ‘meodyglyn’). Elderberry and rhubarb wines were popular, as well as various beers and drinks included woodruff, a sweet-smelling herb which was often put in wine to act as a tonic for the heart and liver.
The festivities of summer’s victory were preceded by the selection and crowning of a May King and Queen. Since at least the 13th century in the British Isles, the May Queen is a girl who personifies youth, fertility, springtime and the coming summer, whose duty is to begin the celebrations. She is generally dressed in white, crowned by flowers and makes a speech before the maypole dancing begins.
A maypole (German: ‘maibaum’ meaning literally ‘May tree’) is a tall wooden pole erected as a part of primarily Germanic European folk festivals, around which a maypole dance often takes place. In Britain it was found primarily in areas of English rather than Celtic influence, though they were set up for Calan Mai. The earliest local account is from a Welsh poem by Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd in the mid-14th century, in which he described people making festivities around a tall birch pole at Llanidloes.
Its origin remains unknown. It has been speculated that despite its probable importance in Iron Age and early Medieval Germanic paganism, its original meaning and tradition have not survived the transition through Christianisation. One theory holds that they were a remnant of the veneration of sacred groves, trees and wooden pillars, which were targeted for destruction by early Christian missionaries and kings. An Irminsul (Old Saxon: ‘great pillar’), likely a tree trunk erected and worshipped beneath an open sky, was destroyed by Charlemagne during the Saxon Wars and replaced by a church in 783 CE. Thor’s Oak was similarly felled and used to build a church at the same site around 723 CE. The sacred tree and the Temple of Uppsala was destroyed in the 1080s by Inge the Elder, a devout Christian king who founded the first abbey in Sweden and acted harshly against pagan practices. Perhaps behind these symbolic poles stood a mythic prototype of the immense cosmological world tree, known in Norse mythology as Yggdrasil.
Emerging from a similar era as the May Queen came the broader European motif of the Wild Man, although similar figures occur worldwide from very early times — the earliest being the character Enkidu of the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh. Similar medieval concepts also drew on lore from the Classical world such as Pan, Silvanus and fauns.
The Welsh tell a story about Myrddin Wyllt (Welsh: ‘Myrddin the Wild’), a warrior in the service of King Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio. When his lord is killed at the Battle of Arfderydd (573 CE), Myrddin travels to the Caledonian Forest in a fit of madness which endows him with the ability to compose prophetic poetry. Later to be recalled by the name Merlin:
He crept away and fled to the woods, unwilling that any should see his going. Into the forest he went, glad to lie hidden beneath the ash trees. He watched the wild creatures grazing on the pasture of the glades. Sometimes he would follow them, sometimes pass them in his course. He made use of the roots of plants and of grasses, of fruit from trees and of the blackberries in the thicket. He became a Man of the Woods, as if dedicated to the woods… discovered by none, forgetful of himself and of his own, lurking like a wild thing.
Images of wild men similarly appear in the nooks and crannies of cathedral roofs, in positions where one is also likely to encounter the foliate head of the Green Man. By the 16th century the latter term was used in England for a man who was covered in foliage as part of a pageant, parade, or musical procession, a predecessor of the relatively modern variant of the May King known as Jack in the Green.
The Green Knight
The Welsh hero Sir Gawain, knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, has an encounter with a Green Knight (Welsh: ‘Marchog Gwyrdd’). Firstly, at Camelot where Gawain beheads him in response to a challenge, then a year to the day later outside the Green Chapel, where he expects the decapitated Green Knight to return the favour, as promised. When he arrives at the end of his adventurous hero’s journey:
The knight caught up the reins and came to the hill, alighted, and tied up the reins to the rugged branch of a tree. Then he went to the hill and walked round about it, debating within himself what place it might be. It had a hole at the end and on either side, and it was overgrown with tufts of grass and was all round and hollow within. He thought it nought but an old cave or a crevice. Within and about it there seemed to be a spell. ‘Ah lord,’ quoth the gentle knight, Is this the green chapel?
The Green Chapel appears nothing more than an earthen mound containing a cavern, perhaps not unlike the ancient barrow tombs of yore. There he finds the Green Knight sharpening an axe to deliver the fated blow. Is this where ancient pagan traditions and inescapable primal nature exacts revenge on virtuous ‘civilised’ Christianity?
To fulfill the purity of rebirth something first must die…
The Christian poem in question represents nature as lawless, rough and indifferent, constantly threatening the order of men and the civilised courtly life of Camelot. Nature invades and disrupts this order, both symbolically and by challenging the inner, true nature of humanity — an underlying force, forever within man and keeping him imperfect. In this view, Gawain is part of a wider conflict between nature and chivalry, an examination of the ability of man’s order to overcome the chaos of the living world.
Some have interpreted the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a critique of the hypocrisy of Christian knighthood of the time, particularly as embodied in the chivalry of Arthurian ideals and its contrast with the violence perpetuated by court nobility. In its zeal to extirpate all traces of paganism, Christianity had cut itself off from the sources of life in nature and the female. The whole enterprise is doomed unless it can acknowledge the unattainability of the ideals of the Round Table, and, for the sake of realism and wholeness, recognise and incorporate the pagan values represented by the Green Knight.
Part of Heathens seasons: a celebration of indigenous European traditions
All content adapted or transcribed directly from Wikipedia. Sources: Calan Mai, Need-fire, Wicker man, Wild man, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
