The following custom of the Irish is described in a MS. of the sixteenth century, and seems to have been of Pagan origin: “Upon Maie Eve they will drive their cattell upon their neighbour’s corne, to eate the same up; they were wont to begin from the vast, and this principally upon the English churl. Unlesse they do so upon Maie daie, the witch hath power upon their cattell all the yere following.”—N. & Q. 1st S. vol. vii. p. 81.
Sir Henry Piers, in his Account of Westmeath, 1682, says:—“On May Eve, every family sets up before their door a green bush, strewed over with yellow flowers, which the meadows yield plentifully. In counties where timber is plentiful, they erect tall slender trees, which stand high, and they continue almost the whole year; so that a stranger would go nigh to imagine that they were all signs of ale-sellers, and that all houses were ale-houses.”
May 1.] MAY DAY.
May 1.]
MAY DAY.
The festival of May Day has existed in this country, though its form has often changed, from the earliest times, and we find abundant traces of it both in our poets and old chroniclers. Tollet imagines that it originally came from our Gothic ancestors; and certainly, if this is to be taken for a proof, the Swedes and Goths welcomed the first of May with songs and dance, and many rustic sports; but there is only a general, not a particular, likeness between our May-day festivities and those of our Gothic ancestors. Others again have sought for the origin of our customs in the Floralia, or rather the Maiuma, of the Romans, which were established at a later period under the Emperor Claudius, and differed perhaps but little from the former, except in being more decent. But though it may at first seem probable that our May-games may have come immediately from the Floralia or Maiuma of the Romans, there can be little question that their final origin must be sought in other countries, and far remoter periods. Maurice says (Indian Antiquities, vol i. p. 87) that our May-day festival is but a repetition of the phallic festivals of India and Egypt, which in those countries took place upon the sun entering Taurus, to celebrate Nature’s renewed fertility. Φαλλος (phallos) in Greek signifies a pole, in addition to its more important meaning, of which this is the type; and in the precession of the Equinoxes and the changes of the calendar we shall find an easy solution of any apparent inconsistencies arising from the difference of seasons.
That the May-festival has come down to us from the Druids, who themselves had it from India, is proved by many striking facts and coincidences, and by none more than the vestiges of the god Bel, the Apollo, or Orus, of other nations. The Druids celebrated his worship on the first of May, by lighting immense fires in honour of him upon the various carns, and hence the day is called by the aboriginal Irish and the Scotch Highlanders—both remnants of the Celtic stock—la Bealtine, Bealtaine or Beltine, that is, the day of Belen’s fire, for, in the Cornish, which is a Celtic dialect, we find that tan is fire, and to tine signifies to light the fire.
The Irish still retain the Phœnician custom of lighting fires at short distances, and making the cattle pass between them. Fathers, too, taking their children in their arms, jump or run through them, thus passing the latter as it were through the flames—the very practice so expressly condemned in Scripture. But even this custom appears to have been only a substitute for the atrocious sacrifice of children as practised by the elder Phœnicians. The god Saturn, that is, Moloch, was represented by a statue bent slightly forward, and so placed that the least weight was sufficient to alter its position. Into the arms of this idol the priest gave the child to be sacrificed, when, its balance being thus destroyed, it flung or rather dropt, the victim into a fiery furnace that blazed below. If other proofs were wanting of Eastern origin, we might find them in the fact that Britain was called by the earlier inhabitants the Island of Beli, and that Bel had also the name of Hu, a word which we see again occurring in the Huli festival of India.—New Curiosities of Literature, vol. i. p. 229. See Higgins’ Celtic Druids, chap. v. sect. 23, p. 181; Household Words, 1859, vol. xix. p. 557; Tolan’s History of the Druids, 8vo, p. 115; Celtic Researches, 1806, 8vo, p. 191; Vossius, On the Origin of Idolatries: Essai sur le Culte des Divinités Génératrices.