Beltane · Little Almanac

Beltaine is the third of the four Gaelic quarter-days in the Old Irish list ¹, opening summer, and it is the only one of the four for which a medieval Irish source describes an actual rite. That single description carries an enormous load in the later literature, so it needs close reading and careful grading.

Provenance

First attested: Medieval Irish literature, where Beltaine is the third of the four quarter-days and opens summer. A tenth-century glossary describes a fire made with incantations, between two instances of which cattle were driven against disease.
Earliest evidence of the practice as now performed: Fire ceremonies and the driving of cattle between fires are described in Scottish and Irish accounts from the early modern period onward, with detailed eighteenth and nineteenth-century reports.
Name in current use: Beltane — An anglicised spelling of Irish Bealtaine and Scottish Gaelic Bealltainn; not a coinage, date not established
What is attested: A quarter-day opening summer; a fire rite with cattle driven against disease, described in one tenth-century source; and a large, well-recorded body of early modern fire custom in Scotland and Ireland.
What is reconstruction: A god named Bel or Belenus behind the name; the maypole, which belongs to an English and Germanic tradition of the later Middle Ages; and the ritual sexual licence that later writers supplied.
Continuity: Plausible but undemonstrated
Evidence grade: C Insider writing from after a break in transmission
Grade C for the medieval Irish notice, which is a tenth-century glossator writing after conversion. Grade D, and abundant, for the Scottish and Irish fire and cattle customs recorded by travellers and folklorists from the eighteenth century onward.

The one description

A tenth-century Irish glossary, compiled under the name of a king-bishop of Cashel, has an entry on Beltaine. It explains the name as a lucky fire, and says that two fires were made with great incantations, and that cattle were driven between them each year as a safeguard against disease ².

That is a specific, practical and agriculturally intelligible claim, and it is the only ritual content the early Irish material supplies for any of the four stations. It is also a tenth-century Christian scholar’s etymological entry, written down at least four centuries after conversion, in a work whose derivations elsewhere can be shown to be invented ³. Whether the two fires preserve a memory or supply a plausible origin for a word cannot be decided from the entry itself.

What raises the confidence a little is the later record. Fire ceremonies at the opening of May, including the driving of cattle between or around fires, are described in Scotland and Ireland in the early modern period and in detail by eighteenth and nineteenth-century observers ⁴. The gap between the tenth century and the eighteenth is long, and the parallel does not close it; it does mean the glossary is describing something that people in the same region later did.

Correction

Commonly saidBeltane was the festival of the god Bel or Belenus, and the maypole is its central rite.

Two separate claims, and they fail in different ways.

The god first. The name’s first element has been derived several ways and the derivations do not agree with one another. None of them requires a deity, and no Irish source names a god Bel in connection with the festival. The Romano-Celtic god Belenus is attested, in inscriptions, in Gaul and northern Italy; connecting him to an Irish festival name is an inference across a language branch, several centuries and a sea, and it is not one the evidence supports ⁵.

The maypole second, and this is the more useful correction. The maypole is a real, splendid and thoroughly documented custom. It belongs to England and to Germanic-speaking Europe, it is recorded from the later Middle Ages, and it has its own rich history of civic sponsorship, Puritan suppression and Victorian revival ⁴. It is not Irish, not Gaelic and not attached to Beltaine in any source. Filing it under Beltaine takes an English tradition with several centuries of records, treated at The maypole, and hides it inside an Irish one that has a single paragraph.

Beltaine and Calan Mai

Welsh has Calan Mai, the first of May, which pairs in position with Beltaine as Calan Gaeaf pairs with Samain. The positional parallel across the two Celtic language branches is worth something, and it is the strongest reason to think the pairing of a summer-opening and a winter-opening station is older than the Irish texts that record it.

It counts for exactly that much. The Welsh material has no Imbolc and no Lughnasadh, so the fourfold scheme itself is Gaelic rather than Celtic, and the Gaulish calendar evidence does not show the four either. Two matching stations are a parallel; four are a system, and only Ireland has the system. See The Coligny Calendar.

The station in the modern year

Beltane is one of the four cross-quarter stations of the modern eightfold year, and one of the four Gardner’s early practice already observed before the solstices and equinoxes were added to it ⁴. Its modern observance draws on the Scottish and Irish fire custom, which is a defensible thing to draw on: that custom is recorded, dated and local, and it is the part of the Beltaine complex with the most evidence behind it.

For the three defensible datings of this station in a given year, see Cross-Quarter Days. For the sibling stations, see Samhain and Imbolc.

Gap in the evidence

The relationship between the tenth-century fire description and the early modern fire customs is not established. They may be one continuous practice, they may be two independent responses to the same agricultural problem, or the later one may have been shaped by literate people who had read the earlier notice. Nothing in the record between them settles it, and this entry does not pretend to.

The one description

Beltaine and Calan Mai

The station in the modern year

References