Myths and Legends of the Celts (Penguin Reference) (15 page)

Calendar stories based on the vegetation cycle abound in comparative mythology, the best known probably being that of the lovers Aphrodite (or Venus) and Adonis in classical mythology. When the lovers are together, nature blooms. Adonis, a hunter, seeks out a wild boar against Aphrodite’s advice, and is severely wounded, descending to the underworld. Nature withers and dies. After six months Adonis makes his way to the land of the living, is reunited with Aphrodite, and nature flourishes anew. An antecedent of this story is found in the Babylonian myth of the lovers Ishtar and Tammuz, where, once again, the male figure ‘dies’ in the autumn and rises again in the spring. That fatal day when the hunters Tammuz and Adonis depart for the realm of the dead clearly corresponds to Samain of the Celts. As neither day was fixed in the solar calendar, however, they need not have been the identical day. Among the peoples of sunny Greece and Babylon, the day Adonis or Tammuz departs is the end of a cycle. The Celts, living in more northerly climes, saw it as a beginning.

From the earliest records, Samain/Samonios is seen not simply as a day for the dead but when the dead might reach out to the living. Julius Caesar (first century
BC
) reports that the Gaulish Dis Pater was especially worshipped at this time. The Roman god Dis Pater [rich father] is an aspect of Pluto, ruler of the dead, but one ‘rich’ in the treasures of the underworld, especially the shades of all the living who have gone before. The native identity of his Gaulish counterpart is not known. More chillingly, other classical commentators depict deities venerated with human sacrifice. Sacrificial victims were drowned in vats to worship Teutates, the war god linked to Mars. Being burned alive in wooden vessels was the fate of victims sacrificed to propitiate Taranis, the ‘master of war’ sometimes linked to Jupiter. The spirits of the dead revisited their earthly homes on the evening of the holiday, and yet the time was thought favourable for examining the portents of the future and planning for future events.

After the Romans conquered the Gauls and partially integrated the subject population into the empire, aspects of the calendar feasts began to attach themselves to the Roman festivals. Samain/Samonios coloured the celebration of the harvest festival at the calend of the eleventh month (approximately 1 November), dedicated to Pomona, goddess of the fruits of trees, especially apples. The Hallowe’en festivities using apples, harvested just before this time, may date from this era.

Samain was the principal calendar feast of early Ireland. A festival,
feis
, was held at Tara every third year, to which each of the five provinces sent delegates. At Tlachtga, twelve miles west of Tara, the lighting of the winter fires was a key part of the Samain ceremonies commemorating Dagda’s ritual intercourse with three divinities, the Mórrígan, Boand (goddess of the Boyne) and the unnamed daughter of Indech, a Fomorian king and warrior. No record survives that these were fertility celebrations, but in later Irish and Scottish Gaelic oral tradition, Samain was thought a favourable time for a woman to become pregnant.

Early Irish texts are always precise when pointing out that important action takes place at Samain. On this date the predatory Fomorians would exact their tribute of milk, grain and live children. The triple-headed monster Aillén Tréchenn would come from Co. Roscommon every Samain to wreak havoc on the entire island, especially Emain Macha and Tara, until he was eliminated by Amairgin, the first poet of Ireland. The fiery musician Aillén mac Midgna, known as ‘the burner’, came every Samain to Tara, where he would lull the inhabitants to sleep with dulcet melodies and then set fire to the place. The hero Fionn mac Cumhaill dispatched him on first meeting. Not all encounters were violent. Cúchulainn encountered a succession of otherworldly damsels at Samain, and the lovers Cáer and Angus Óg fly off in swan form on this day. It was, summarize Rees and Rees (1961), a time of confusion, the setting for voyages to the otherworld, sexual relations between mortals and others, and gender-blurring customs of cross-dressing.

Standing between the two halves of the Celtic year, Samain seemed suspended in time, when the borders between the natural and supernatural dissolved, and the spirits of the otherworld might move freely into the realm of mortals. It was also a time to relax after the most demanding farm work was done. Country lads would visit neighbours’ houses, collecting pence and provisions for celebrations. It was a time for the building of bonfires, a custom that began very early in Irish and Scottish Gaelic tradition and continues into the twenty-first century. As people might perceive more of the realm of the dead at Samain, it was a time to look for portents of the future. James Joyce commemorates one of these practices in the story ‘Clay’ in
Dubliners
(1914).

In the pastoral and agrarian societies of ancient and medieval northern Europe, winter and spring comprised the quieter half of the year. War-making and cattle-raiding receded. The Irish historian Geoffrey Keating (
c
.1580–
c
.1645/50) reported that from Samain to Beltaine, the people of Ireland were required to house and feed the samurai-like
fianna
, who would offer their military service to different kings and princes in the other half of the year. In the dark months the greatest struggle was to make sure that provisions from summer and autumn lasted through the cold months without benefit of advanced food preservation technologies – not just something to eat but something approaching a balanced diet that would ensure health or at least the diminution of disease.

The return of fresh milk at this bleak time undoubtedly occasioned great joy. Ewes in Britain and Ireland begin lactation after lambing about February, midway between Samain and Beltaine. Cows’ milk would have petered out by that time and not be available again until later in the spring. In any event, sheep’s milk is richer in fat content than cows’ milk and was greatly enjoyed in the early Irish diet. In the twelfth-century satire
Aislinge Meic Con Glinne
[Vision of Mac Con Glinne], a supreme delicacy is ‘fair white porridge’, made with sheep’s milk. The ewes’ lactation was a sign of lambing and the increase of the flocks. Sheep would lamb and therefore come into milk earlier than cattle at that time because of their ability to crop lower for grass and get along better than the cow on the sparse vegetation of late winter. Cows would safely be in calf by early March.

Based on the link between Imbolc and lambing, Nerys Patterson (1992) has suggested that the day may have important connections with the seasons of human sexuality. Marriages in early Ireland tended to be concentrated between Twelfth Night (5 January) and Shrovetide (three days before the beginning of Lent, that is, from mid-January to early March). Newly married couples would live together until 1 May, when they separated, the men going with the cattle. Many firstborn babies would then appear between mid-October and 1 February. New mothers’ need for good nutrition came just as the sheep came into milk.

From the earliest times Imbolc was associated with Brigit, the fire goddess, and after Christianization with her successor, St Brigid of Kildare. The saint is often seen as a patroness of sheep, the pastoral economy and fertility in general. It is under her name that the day is now universally known in Celtic countries. The pre-Christian associations of the day have vanished from popular tradition. February 2, sometimes called Candlemas Day, is also sacred on the Christian calendar. It commemorates the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary, when Christ presented her in the Temple. The faithful may have their throats blessed on this day by having two crossed candles placed before them.

There are also teasing echoes of Imbolc in the secular American holiday Groundhog Day, 2 February, on which a large rodent (also called a woodchuck) seeks a subtle and ironic sign of the advent of spring. If it is a sunny day and he sees his shadow, winter will last another six weeks.

The etymology of the word Beltaine is tantalizingly uncertain. The second two syllables,
-taine
, appear to come from the word for fire,
teine
. Lore associated with the day specified the requirement for ‘need fire’, or fire begun afresh by rubbing two sticks,
teine éigen
. Fire was part of celebrations for the day in all the Celtic countries, on mountaintops in Scotland. In Cornwall the custom persisted until the late twentieth century. The first syllable
bel
- may mean ‘shining, brilliant’. The same syllable has also invited speculation of a root in the name Belenus, the Gaulish god who may be an aspect of Apollo but who was usually worshipped under this name alone at temples from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. The root of his name may be ‘bright’, like the Irish word. Nineteenth-century speculation linking Belenus with the Phoenician Baal is now rejected. Names for the day in the P-Celtic languages allude only to the time of year, not to fire or a lost god: Welsh Cyntefin, Dydd Calan Mai; Cornish Cala’Mē; Breton Kala Hañv, all of which mean either ‘beginning of summer’ or ‘first of May’.

It was also a time of anxiety. Food stocks from the winter would be running low. This is projected in oral tradition with stories of witches, animals or fairies who steal food from hungry families. Some of the anxiety was social. Nerys Patterson describes Beltaine as the day when peasants and landless cattle-owners were required to pay part of their tribute to overlords and decide whether to enter into new arrangements. May was also the end of the marriage season, and Beltaine was thought to be a singularly unlucky day for a wedding.

In later European history, Celtic May Day celebrations begin to merge with those of other countries, especially in the north. English peasants danced around beribboned maypoles until the Puritans, noting their unmistakable phallic symbolism, suppressed them in the mid-seventeenth century. May also being about the time many northern flowers first bloom, the day became a time to display garlands of blossoms. The pan-European May Day has roots in the Roman celebration of Floralia, 27 April-3 May, in honour of Flora, goddess of flowers, dating to at least the third century
BC
. A much studied phenomenon, this May Day began a month-long celebration of the oncoming of spring with the honorific ‘election’ of a May king and May queen noted as early as 1576. It was this version of May Day that was Christianized by the Roman Catholic Church when the entire month was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary and a statue of her was crowned, or sometimes a young woman known to be of blameless character might be crowned as her surrogate. This practice, once common, has much diminished in recent years. Ceremonies more pertinent to Beltaine were of less concern to the Church, although it did suppress the burning of a ceremonial fire at the hill of Uisnech in Co. Westmeath, sometimes described as the centre of Ireland. Geoffrey Keating reports that the Uisnech fire was still current in the mid-seventeenth century.

When the Irish adapted European May Day to Beltaine, they did not allow many roles for women. Sir William Wilde noted in his
Irish Popular Superstitions
(1852) that there was no May queen in Irish spring parades, but that the leading female figure was played by a cross-dressing man. Folklorist Kevin Danaher (1972) retrieved a description of a Mummers’ May Day parade in Wexford from 1897 in which the parts of the fool and his wife were both played by men. It may be, as Nerys Patterson has speculated, that cross-dressed men parading next to men dressed as men may indicate the hag-like female in the winter half of the year, her ritual potency now spent, while the male next to her is the summer half. Or the reason might have been male dominance and exclusion.

The all-male May Day parades appear to have led to the day’s becoming an international holiday for labouring people. The link is found among Irish immigrants in the United States. After the Civil War, thousands of Irish-born workers joined the first American labour union, The Knights of Labor. Founded as a secret society in 1869, the Knights at first grew slowly, eventually claiming a peak membership of 700,000 in 1886. After some poorly directed strikes, its membership plummeted, losing ground to the rival American Federation of Labor. During its prime, the Irish-born members of the Knights paraded on what was in effect the first Labor Day, with men marching together on 1 May as they had in Ireland. Shortly afterwards the International Socialist Congress adopted 1 May as a day to honour the working man in 1889. Nearly four decades later the leaders of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia searched to find a holiday on which all of society might pay tribute to the contributions of labouring people. They chose the Irish-American May Day, now shorn of its religious and pastoral roots.

We prefer the unreformed Modern Irish spelling Lughnasa for the day because it was used in Máire MacNeill’s landmark 700-page study
The Feast of Lughnasa
(1962), but to be consistent we should use the classical Irish
Lugnasad
, whose suffix
-nasad
may mean ‘assembly, festive or commemorative gathering’. MacNeill’s spelling also appears in the title of Brian Friel’s admired drama
Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990), which draws thematically on festival traditions. The reformed Modern Irish spelling is Lúnasa, which is now more likely to denote the month of August than the nearly extinct festival. The August holiday has mattered much less in Wales and Cornwall, where the local names carry no echo of Lug’s name, viz. Calan Awst [first of August] and Morvah, site of distinctive megaliths.

Lughnasa is a harvest festival of the first crops to ripen, wheat and barley. Once they became plentiful, it also marked the maturing of potatoes. Celebrants enjoyed climbing hills, both to pray and to gather bilberries that matured at this time. Six months after Imbolc, it was the time ewes’ lactation ended the maternal phase of the flocks, and mating might begin again. Following nature’s example, it was also a time of increased human sexual activity.

Surprisingly, Lughnasa has no mythological connection with the harvest in early Irish literature. Neither is it the date of many important events, only the invasion of Ireland by the Fir Bolg in the
Lebor Gabála
. The Fir Bolg would have a connection with the feast of Tailtiu, as it is named for one of their queens.