Bealtaine, also Anglicized as Beltane, is Gaelic name for the month of May. It is also the name of the feast or festival historically celebrated on and around the first of May up until the present day in parts of Scotland and Ireland. And it is ancient. The surviving mythical and historical texts, written in Middle Irish around 1,000 years ago, remember the festival in ancient times, most significantly as the date of arrival of the different waves of peoples to Ireland.
There is so much to unpack with Bealtaine. Who were the people of Bealtaine? Why is it so significant that it has survived several periods of extreme oppression? What parts of it are romanticized revivals and which are authentic traditions? And does that matter? What is the mythic origin of Bealtaine and how can we make it relevant to the post-/present- colonial existence we live in?
Bealtaine is Celtic - and more specifically, it is Q-Celtic or Goidelic
Bealtaine is the name for the month of May in Irish. In Scots Gaelic, it is Bealltainn and in Manx, it is Boaldyn. These languages are all descendants of Old Irish, a member of a branch of Celtic languages called Q-Celtic, as opposed to the P-Celtic branch that includes Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and Gaulish languages.
Besides Ireland and Scotland, Q-Celtic languages were also spoken by Celtiberians in what is now Galicia and Portugal and surrounding areas in the Iberian peninsula. Incidentally, Bealtaine is the date given in the Book of Invasions for the arrival of the Gaels, or Milesians, to Ireland from what is now Galicia.
The Celtic languages, descended from Proto-Indo European, were spoken by one of the earliest westward waves of pastoral, herding tribes whose ancestors were a migratory patriarchal people originally from what is now the Ukraine and Russian Steppes, that many scholars believe were the Yamnaya. They began dispersing across Eurasia around 5,000 years ago and are the linguistic ancestors of most European cultures as well as those of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Northern India.
Bealtaine is all about a great big fire
While the source of the word has not been proven, there is traditional agreement that it is a compound of Celtic "belo" and "te(p)ina"/"tanos", meaning "bright" and "fire", respectively. Through the centuries, great bonfires were lit at Bealtaine. There is evidence that a great fire was lit on the Hill of Uisnech in central Ireland every year at Bealtaine. The Rees brothers and other scholars and folklorists state that all persons in Ireland were compelled to put out their hearth fires and join the ritual in order to bring back embers to relight their hearths. In this way, all members of the tribe were united by one fire.
Bealtaine is a portal from the wet, cold season to the warm, dry season
Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man are temperate and rainy. But beginning in late April and early May, these regions begin to warm up. According to scholars of Celtic Studies, the Celts maintained a binary view of space and time. There is a dark, cool, and watery half, and a bright, warm, and dry half.
There is night followed by day; the new moon followed by the full moon; and winter followed by summer. The dark halves are associated with the Otherworlds of the ancestors, spirits, and gods; and the brighter halves, the physical world of human beings and their affairs. Bealtaine marks the beginning of the brighter half of the year.
But this concept of time and space is not a mundane division. It was important to the Celtic ancestors. and the short times between were especially significant. Both Bealtaine and its counterpart, Samhain, as well as dawn and dusk, were moments when there were no secure boundaries between this binary. In the Lebor Gabala Eirenn, each of the five kindreds that arrives in (or invades) Ireland do so on Bealtaine. They come into being from the Otherworld - similar to birthing from the dark womb into the world of light. These were also times when beings from both worlds could cross over to the other, creating mischief and chaos. So, Bealtaine is a moment of transmigration from the dark, wet half of the year and all its mysteries into the light, dryer half of the year.
The Bealtaine fire cleans us from the forces of Chaos (or evil or just imbalance)
Among Celtic cultures both present and past, during the time of both Samhain and Bealtaine, as well as twilight at dusk and dawn, mischief runs rampant. Halloween is abundant with traditions of celebrants performing tricks, deceptions, dressing as devils, goblins, pucas, etc. In the past, Bealtaine was too. This is a tradition of play that represents our own tendencies toward crossing the boundaries of acceptable behavior. It also represents the scourge of sickness and death that is often associated with the winter months.
Until only the last century, country folk in the British Isles would drive their livestock between twin Bealtaine fires to purify and bless them as they move on to sunny pastures of summer. Likewise, there were traditions of people leaping over the fire for its protective power.
Bealtaine is associated with sacrifice and loosely with the Wickerman
As the energy of winter's dormancy, hunger, sickness, and death wains, Bealtaine is a time when farmers make sacrificial offerings of food and items to the ancestors, faery folk, and other spirits of the Otherworld to appease their grip on humanity. It is the inverse of Samhain, in which the energy of light and growth return. But those energies of chaos still threaten to steal life from the physical world as the seasons change.
Bealtaine has long been thought to be associated with Belo, the dis-pater of the continental Celts. The problem is that it is not clear that the Goidelic cultures had an equivalent, unless it was Bilé, which is the name used for ancient sacred trees. Peter Beresford Ellis has attempted to reconstruct a Celtic creation myth based on the sacrifice of Bilé by fire, which then nourishes the earth and allows life to flourish.
The Celtic tradition of burning a large effigy made of wickerwork was observed by Julius Caesar, Strabo, and probably Poseidonius. Those writers described the Wickerman as being packed with human and animals for sacrifice, though there is only scant evidence for this. In modern Celtic neo-pagan revivals of Bealtaine, the Wickerman has been reintroduced, without sacrifice. But in the Celtic regions of Northern Portugal, a Wickerman is still burned at the conclusion of Carnaval each year in an unbroken tradition that spans back to pre-Christian antiquity.
The Wickerman is likely a uniquely Celtic rendition of the oldest creation myth of our Yamnaya ancestors, the story of the twins, Manu and Yemo
The practice of sacrificing a human effigy is not uncommon across Proto-Indo-European cultures. In fact, this practice seems to have direct roots in the Proto-Indo-European creation myth of Manu and Yemo. In this story, Manu, the semi-divine ancestor of humanity, sacrifices his twin brother, Yemo, in order to create the physical world and ward off the forces of chaos. In the Vedic tradition, Yemo became Yama who in turn became the sacrificial Purusa - a human effigy of clay that the Brahmins would build and destroy each year. Manu and Yemo are represented in Roman mythology as the brothers Romulus and Remus (Remus = Yemo). In Norse mythology, Yemo becomes Ymir. And in Irish mythology, the death of Emer Donn leads to the ability of the Gaels to land their ships on Erin. Sometimes, Yemo is either androgynous as is the case of Ymir, or is a two-fold character with a male aspect and a twin female aspect.
Crucially, many Indo-European mythic traditions equate the origins of natural elements with the body parts of Yemo: bones are the mountains, flesh is the earth, blood is the sea, breath is the wind, etc. This is its function as a creation myth. In Irish mythology this is represented when Emer Donn's brother, Amergin the Poet, proclaims this embodiment of the earth in song as soon as he steps onto the shores of Erin. "I am wind on the sea | I am wave on the ocean | I am the roar of the surf | I am the stag of seven tines... the fairest of herbs... the salmon in the pool... the lake on the plain..."
In most of these mythologies, Yemo himself comes to represent either Death or the forces of Chaos. Emer Donn becomes the chief of the Land of the Dead. Yama becomes the god of death and the Underworld. The Caretos in Northern Portugal are devilish characters of chaos and mischief and the giant effigy that is burned is in the same image.
Bealtaine and the wickerman are a ritual renewal of the covenant between the human body and the earth
While it seems true that the Yamnaya cultures were quite patriarchal*, having been the proponents of a pantheon of mostly male sky gods, with the Sky All Father (Zeus, Deus, Dis Pater, Jupiter, Tue, Tyr, Odin, Dagda, etc.) as their chief, I think we can learn something from this ancient mythic cycle.
As white people begin to reconcile and grapple with their collective role in the colonization and destruction of Native lands across the globe, one of the first recommendations to heal is to rekindle a visceral connection with the land. One of the key delusions of whiteness and colonialism stems from a disconnection from the land and from others peoples. Instead of viewing nature as a collection of relatives, our modern culture views it as resources to be owned and extracted.
So the practice of sacrificing ourselves, in whole or in part, to nurture the world around us and the story of our natural environment as body parts of an ancestor can help us to reconnect. It represents a communion with or an embodiment of nature. This visceral relationship with the land can have the effect of cultivating animistic understandings of all the beings in our surroundings, deepening this relationship. This is only the first step in healing, but it is perhaps fundamental.
*The Yamnaya cultures were the original colonizers, colonizing all of Europe and much of Central and south Asia. Europe's matriarchal heritage comes from the Early European Farmers, who seem to have spread across Europe (and supplanted the indigenous European hunter gatherers) much earlier from what we now call the Middle East - the area of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. These matriarchal cultures are represented in mythology by farming gods like Dionysus and Demeter in Greece, the Vanir among the Norse, and probably Ceasair of the Irish.
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