EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter VI: The Wheel of the Year

Beltane: History, Folklore and Modern Pagan Celebration

Beltane explained: the Gaelic May festival of fires and cattle in Irish sources, Scottish folk customs, English maypoles, May Eve witches and modern Wicca.

8 min read 1,800 words Updated

Beltane is the Gaelic festival of 1 May, which marked the beginning of summer in medieval Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man and was famous for its fires, lit to protect cattle as they went out to summer pasture. Its customs blended with the wider European May Day, with maypoles, garlands and May queens, and with the belief that witches and fairies were especially active on May Eve. Modern Pagans and Wiccans celebrate Beltane as one of the eight sabbats of the Wheel of the Year, usually as a festival of fertility, union and the flowering of summer.

The Name and Date of Beltane§

The festival appears in Old Irish as Beltaine or Belltaine, in modern Irish as Bealtaine (also the name of the month of May), in Scottish Gaelic as Bealltainn and in Manx as Boaldyn. The second element is generally linked with tene, fire. The first is less certain: medieval glossators took it to mean "bright" or "lucky", and later writers connected it with the Gaulish god Belenus or even the Semitic Baal. Linguists treat the Belenus link as possible but unproven and the Baal theory as fanciful.

Beltaine was one of the four quarter days of the Gaelic year, with Samain (1 November), Imbolc (1 February) and Lugnasad (1 August). In a cattle-raising society it marked the moment when herds were moved to upland summer pastures, a time of vulnerability for the animals on which wealth and survival depended. Like Samhain, the festival framed the pastoral year, and both are described within the wider Wheel of the Year.

Beltaine in Early Irish Sources and Cormac's Glossary§

The most quoted early description comes from Sanas Cormaic, the glossary attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennáin, king-bishop of Cashel (died 908). It explains the name as "lucky fire" and says that druids made two fires with great incantations and drove cattle between them as a safeguard against the diseases of the year. The entry was written by a Christian scholar centuries after the conversion, and it may describe a contemporary farming custom, a memory of pagan ritual, or a learned guess, but it established the image of Beltane as a fire festival.

Other medieval Irish texts mention Beltaine as a date in the year, for example in the list of seasonal festivals in The Wooing of Emer. The seventeenth-century historian Geoffrey Keating wrote that a great fire was lit at Uisneach, the symbolic centre of Ireland, at Beltaine, and that offerings were made there. His account draws on earlier tradition but is late, and archaeologists have not confirmed a Beltaine assembly at the site. As with Samhain, scholars caution against reading too much ancient religion into sources compiled by medieval and early modern Christians. The broader picture is surveyed in Celtic religion.

Beltane Fires and Folk Customs in Scotland, Ireland and Man§

From the eighteenth century, travellers, ministers and folklorists recorded Beltane customs in the Scottish Highlands, Ireland and the Isle of Man. The details vary by place, but common elements include:

  • Bonfires on hills. Fires were lit on May Eve or May Day; people walked or danced around them and sometimes leapt over the embers, and cattle were driven past or between fires. In some places all household fires were put out and relit from a "need-fire" made by friction.
  • Beltane bannocks. Thomas Pennant, touring the Highlands in 1769, described herdsmen in Perthshire preparing a caudle of eggs, butter, oatmeal and milk and an oatcake with nine raised knobs, each offered to a being that protected the flocks or to an animal that threatened them.
  • The "devoted" person. An account of Callander parish in the 1790s describes a cake divided among the company, one piece blackened with charcoal; whoever drew it had to leap through the fire three times. James Frazer saw this as the relic of human sacrifice, a reading most modern historians consider speculative.
  • Protection of cattle and dairy. Rowan sprigs and red thread were tied to cattle and over byre doors, and Irish households guarded their fire, water and butter on May morning, since anyone who took a coal or skimmed the "luck" from a neighbour's well was suspected of stealing the farm's prosperity for the year.
  • May dew and blessings. Washing in the dew of May morning was believed to bring beauty and health, and Gaelic blessings for the herds at Beltane were collected by Alexander Carmichael in Carmina Gadelica.

Many of these rites were essentially protective magic for the farming year, of a kind discussed in protective magic. A Highland example of the rowan charm is described in the spellbook entry rowan and red thread.

May Day in England: Maypoles, Garlands and Puritan Opposition§

In England and lowland Britain, where the Gaelic name was not used, 1 May was celebrated as May Day. From the late Middle Ages, records describe young people "bringing in the May", going out at dawn to gather hawthorn blossom and greenery; maypoles set up in villages and towns; May games with a summer lord and lady; and Robin Hood plays. Ronald Hutton's research in parish accounts shows these customs flourishing especially in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, often as fund-raisers for the parish church.

Protestant reformers came to see them as disorderly and superstitious. The pamphleteer Philip Stubbes, in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583), denounced the maypole as a "stinking idol" and claimed that young people who spent May night in the woods returned less virtuous than they left. Parliament ordered maypoles taken down in 1644, and they returned with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, when a celebrated pole was raised in the Strand in London.

The Victorians reinvented May Day as a festival of innocence, with crowned May queens, children's garlands and ribbon-plaiting around the maypole, a dance popularised in the nineteenth century. Regional customs such as the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss in Cornwall and the Jack-in-the-Green of chimney-sweeps' processions also date in their known form from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Folklorists of Frazer's generation interpreted all these customs as survivals of pagan tree worship and fertility rites, an interpretation that later historians have treated with much more caution.

May Eve, Witches and Walpurgis Night§

Across northern Europe, the night before May Day was regarded as dangerous. In Ireland and Scotland witches were believed to steal milk and butter "luck" on May morning, and the fairies were thought to move house, as at Samhain. In Germany and Scandinavia the eve of 1 May is Walpurgis Night, named after St Walburga, an eighth-century English abbess whose feast fell on 1 May. German popular belief held that witches flew on this night to assemble on the Brocken, the highest summit of the Harz mountains, a tradition made famous by the Walpurgis Night scene in Goethe's Faust (1808).

These beliefs belong to the history of the witches' sabbath and of popular counter-magic rather than to any surviving witch religion. Margaret Murray nevertheless listed May Eve among the four great sabbats of her supposed witch-cult, and that claim passed into the calendar of modern witchcraft (see the Murray thesis). Bonfires are still lit on Walpurgis Night in Sweden and Finland as a spring festival.

Beltane in Modern Paganism and Wicca§

Gerald Gardner's coven kept Murray's four "great sabbats" of Candlemas, May Eve, Lammas and Hallowe'en, and the solstices and equinoxes were added in the late 1950s to form the eightfold Wheel of the Year. In most Wiccan traditions Beltane celebrates the fertility of the land and the union of the Goddess and the young God, sometimes enacted symbolically in the Great Rite. Covens may dance a maypole, crown a May queen, leap a small fire or decorate with hawthorn, which folk tradition otherwise forbade to bring indoors. Many Pagan handfastings, or wedding ceremonies, are held around this date. Janet and Stewart Farrar's Eight Sabbats for Witches (1981) presents a widely used Wiccan Beltane rite.

Druid orders celebrate Beltane at sacred sites such as Glastonbury and Avebury, and public events such as the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, held since 1988, have turned the old fire festival into a large-scale piece of performance art. For the god figure often honoured at Beltane, see the Horned God; for the Druid revival, see Druidry.

In the southern hemisphere many Pagans celebrate Beltane around 31 October or 1 November, when spring is turning to summer there, while Samhain is kept at the end of April.

Frequently asked questions§

What does Beltane mean?§

The second part of the name is usually linked with the Irish word for fire. The first part is uncertain: medieval scholars explained it as "bright" or "lucky", and some modern writers connect it with the Gaulish god Belenus, but this remains unproven.

When is Beltane celebrated?§

Traditionally Beltane falls on 1 May, with celebrations beginning on the evening of 30 April. Some modern Pagans celebrate it at the astronomical midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice, a few days later, and in the southern hemisphere it is kept around 1 November.

Is the maypole a pagan symbol?§

The maypole is first recorded in late medieval Britain and continental Europe as part of parish and community May celebrations. Nineteenth-century folklorists interpreted it as a pagan fertility symbol, but there is no direct evidence of maypoles in pre-Christian religion, and their meaning is debated.

Why is Beltane associated with fire?§

Early Irish sources describe fires lit at Beltaine through which cattle were driven for protection, and folk customs of bonfires on May Eve persisted in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man into the nineteenth century. Fire was believed to cleanse and protect people and animals at the start of summer.

Sources and further reading§