May – I Remember

May 2, 1992

In today’s “Ledger” appeared pictures of Kingsford Elementary School’s “first May Day Celebration.” There were photos of children holding the ribbons of a maypole and dancing. This news feature stirred reminiscence and reflection.

When I was a child, somewhere between the ages of four to seven, I was part of two or three “Mayday Parades.” Mothers, including mine, would fashion crepe paper into costumes and make paper hats. We carried lunch boxes likewise decorated with crepe paper. Escorted by two or three mothers, the two-by-two procession to Glendale Park was led by the King and Queen of the May whose paper hats were gilt-paper crowns, the signs of their one-day Royalty. At the park, we played children’s games, ate our lunches, and then in procession returned to our homes on Oliver and George streets.

I surmise that those mothers of nearly eighty years ago and the organizers of this week’s May Day celebration at Kingsford Elementary did not know that they were innocently re-enacting ancient fertility rites.

In the ages before history, the May Day festival was a wanton, ritual orgy. To ensure crops, ancient peoples copulated wildly in the newly-sown fields so that the agricultural deities would take the hint and produce abundantly (imitative magic). The Maypole was both a phallic representation and an indication of tree worship. (Only Tree can make a god?)

In THE GOLDEN BOUGH, Fraser has many references to the May Day fertility rites which were common to Eurasia, the British Isles, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and India.

Some scholars and archeologists believe that aeons ago, the Aryan tribes migrating West, South and Southeast from the Lower Volga and Carpathian Steppes brought the celebrations with them. The weight of opinion at the present, however, is that the Aryans, a patriarchal culture overcame the matriarchal where they invaded. Patriarchy conquered matriarchy but the chthonian and enduring power of the female fertility goddess could neither be erased nor dismissed.

In England, the Morris Dancers are an entertaining sight. I’ve watched them perform in parades and in the market square in Cambridge. The Morris Dancers have origins in the May Day rituals. Dancing men, dressed in white with kerchiefs around their necks and bells on their legs re-enact (whether they know it or not) the rites of a dying-rising Pagan god who has revived after death, symbolic of new growth in the fields in Spring. In pre-historic days a central figure was “oss-Oss,” a witch doctor wearing a mask like a horse head – the origin of “hobby-horse.” The Morris (“Moorish”) dancers chanted their May Day song, beat drums, and acted out the prancing and stamping of the horse.

One reference to the Morris Dancers indicates that some of their customs related to the Robin Hood legends. Again recalling the May Day procession of my childhood, other than the May King and Queen, we wore paper hats shaped much like the caps worn by Robin Hood and his Merry Men that you have seen in the several Robin Hood movies.

There are probably May Day echoes in New Orleans Mardi Gras and Rio Carnivale – both Spring bashes of wild partying and flamboyant parades.

May Day, minus the public promiscuity I suppose, became a nation-wide holiday in Medieval and Tudor England. If you have Robert Herrick’s poems, you'll find a good example of the tone of those times. He lived from 1591-1674. His poem, “Corinna’s Going A-Maying,” has both a lyrical idyllic quality and an unmistakable, if delicate eroticism.

May Day celebrations migrated to Massachusetts, much to the dismay of the Pilgrims at Plymouth.

In 1625, a vessel commanded by Captain Wollaston arrived in what we now know as Quincy Bay, with a company, most of whom were indentured servants. Captain Wollaston did not find the riches there he had expected, so after a couple of years he sailed for Virginia. That area of Quincy is still known as Wollaston.

But remaining there was Thomas Morton, a fascinating if “shady” character. He had been a lawyer, possibly educated at Oxford, a Latin scholar and an aristocratic rake. He may have been a swindler, too, because he had married a widow for her money and dropped out of sight when her sons called for an accounting of her estate.

Morton renamed Wollaston “Merry Mount” and staged unrestrained parties. A pine tree was trimmed to serve as an 80 foot Maypole. With beer a-plenty, the whole neighborhood was invited to the May day celebration, including Indians. The Plymouth Pilgrims were scandalized, not only because of the trespass on “their” territory, but also because of the wild parties around the Maypole. Plymouth Governor Bradford was not amused. He condemned the merry-making, “the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora or ye beastly practices of ye madd Bacchanalians.” Governor Bradford lashed out at Morton and his men, “pouring out themselves into all profanes ... inviting Indian women for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many faeries, or furies rather, and worse practices.”

Morton composed a long poem for the Maypole festivities which intensified the anger of the Biblically stern Pilgrims. The following verse is an example of the erotic tone of his poem:

“Drinke and be merry, merry, merry, boyes;
Let all your delight be in Hymen’s joyes;
Iô to Hymen, now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a roome.
...
Give to the Nymphe that’s free from scorne,
No Irish; stuffe nor Scotch over-worne,
Lasses in beaver coats, come away,
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day

Then drinke and be merry, merry, merry, boyes;
Let all your delight be in Hymen’s joyes...”

In 1934, Howard Hansen composed an opera, “Merry Mount,” which I would have liked to have seen performed.

Morton defied the Pilgrims, so Capt. Myles Standish and a small company were dispatched to Merry Mount to put a stop to the activities. The Battle of Merry Mount remains obscure because there are contradictory accounts, but Morton was captured, his reveling men tamed.

To repeat an old pun, “It isn’t the principle of the thing, it’s the money.” While the Pilgrims were shocked by the wild antics at Merry Mount, there was an important economic motive. Morton had become serious competitor in the Beaver trade. Perhaps because he had better relations with Indian tribes. As Willison puts it, “According to Morton, one of his men made almost £1000 in the fur trade in a few years – a profit that would have paid half the Pilgrim’s debts and provided needed supplies.” Thus, putting a rival out of business as well as horror at his morals were woven into the Pilgrims’ hostile aggression toward Morton of Merry Mount.

(For a full and fascinating account, read SAINTS AND STRANGERS by George Willison – a history which Mayflower descendents detest and would have willingly banned.)

This intrusion of economics into Puritanical religion led me to another reflection. In the pre-Gorbachev, pre-perestroika years, May Day was a huge Communist political demonstration of power. You may recall the TV pictures of tanks, missiles, thousands of soldiers and workers parading through Red Square under the watchful eyes of the Soviet hierarchy on the Kremlin wall – a demonstration calculated to induce fear of Soviet might in the non-Communist world.

In the same May 2 issue of the “Ledger,” picturing Kingsford Elementary School’s “first May Day celebration,” also appeared Moscow’s May Day with radically altered message. The Russian government decided to make the event a “Spring Party.” The festival was augmented by some 400 Americans on a good-will exchange. Instead of large banners, “Workers of the World Unite!” Wayne Smith of Atlanta, speaking in Gorky Park, urged, “Friends of the World unite.”

I was curious about May Day being selected a as a day for celebrating labor movements. May 1 is Labor Day in much of Europe and South America. Were the radical workers’ movements (the I.W.W. - “Wobblies” and other groups) hitching a ride on the on the wide and deep feelings of May Day? It seemed too co-incidental to have been a random choice. Checking several sources, I did not find much. Robert Owen, the revolutionary Utopian socialist best known in this country for the communist community he founded in New Harmony, Ind., proclaimed May 1, 1833 as the “commencement of the millennium.”

A more pertinent historical clue is cited by James H. Billington in his exhaustive study of revolutionary movements, FIRE IN THE MINDS OF MEN. He writes of the origins and context of Freemasonry in the 18th century. Freemasons, then, were workers secretly organized with elaborate rituals and signs: “Masonry imparted the essential metaphor that revolutionaries used to understand their own mission down to the 19th century: that of an architect building a new and better structure for human society.”

On May 1, 1776, the Order of Illuminists was founded by Adam Weishaupt in Bavaria. With links to Masonic orders and touches of the arcane and mythological, the Illuminists co-opted some Masonic lodges for their own ends. The Illuminists faded from history before the 19th century but as Billington writes, “Illuminist ideas influenced revolutionaries, not just through left-wing proponents but also through right-wing opponents.”

Who can say whether the “Workers of the World” and the USSR deliberately chose May 1 because of Adam Weishaupt, or the ancient and wide-spread May Day rituals, or both? Co-incidences are not proofs.

These memories and reflections lead me to recognize and accept that what we see and eat as corn, wheat, fruit, had more profound depths for ancient peoples than we can ever fully understand. They ritualized, celebrated, re-enacted, in the hope for food to live on; and this was more basic to them than later sophisticated (and abstract) faiths to live by. Their source of food (life) was Mother Earth (Isis, Astarte, Eostre) for from her bosom came the nutrition that sustained human life. Earth was never Father Earth. The Father-God was sun and sky whose rays, heat and rain were needed if Mother Earth was to bud and bloom. (The Father God may have come with the invading Aryan tribes.)

Primitive religion, if you will; wild May fertility parties or not, we need not feel too superior to these our ancestors so remote in time. We do not worship the Earth – we spend its resources in profligate wastefulness and chemical poisoning. Unless we recognize and accept that without Nature’s gifts of life, our living could become an existence more miserable that that of pre-historic Celts, Gauls, Norse, Teutons.

Which reminds me – some years back, I resented questionnaires which had a space to list one’s religion. To me, that was a nosy invasion of privacy. So, imitating a friend, instead of leaving that question blank, I would write in “Druid.” Now, I wonder if that flippant response may well have been more true than ever I imagined.