The maypole
The maypole has an entry because it keeps being used as evidence for something else. It is one of the best-documented calendar customs in Europe, and it is most often encountered as a supporting detail in an account of a festival it has no attested connection to.
What the records contain
A tall pole, decorated, raised in a public place in spring, is recorded across England and Germanic-speaking Europe from the later Middle Ages 1. The documentation is unusually good for a folk custom, and the reason is unglamorous: a maypole is expensive, communal and contentious, so it turns up in parish accounts, in civic records, in the complaints of people who objected to it and in the orders of authorities who removed it.
That gives the custom a paper trail of a kind most seasonal practices lack. It was sponsored by parishes and towns, suppressed under the Commonwealth, restored after 1660, and revived in the nineteenth century in a reorganised form 1.
Established
The maypole is an English and Germanic custom of the later Middle Ages and after, and no source attaches it to Beltaine.
The misfiling, and what it costs
Correction
Commonly saidThe maypole is the central rite of Beltane, the Celtic festival of May.
It is neither Celtic nor attached to Beltaine. Filing it there takes an English tradition with several centuries of records and hides it inside a Gaelic quarter-day whose own attested content is different: a fire rite with cattle driven between two fires, described in a tenth-century glossary, and a large body of early modern Scottish and Irish fire custom. See Beltane.
The better half of the trade is the record. A custom with parish accounts, prohibition orders and a Restoration behind it is more interesting than a custom asserted to be immemorial, because the records let a reader follow what happened to it: who paid, who objected, when it stopped and when it started again. Immemorial antiquity is a claim that closes an inquiry. A paper trail opens one.
The ribbons are Victorian
The image most people have of maypole dancing, dancers circling with coloured ribbons that plait down the pole, is a nineteenth-century reworking, and the older records describe the raising and the decoration of the pole rather than that choreography 1.
The fact is easily overstated in the other direction. The pole is old. The ribbon plait is not. The custom did not stop being real when somebody choreographed it, any more than a liturgy stops being real when a new hymn is added: assembling practices out of older and newer parts is what practices generally are, and the process has been described across many nineteenth-century cases that have nothing to do with seasonal custom at all 2.
Gap in the evidence
No source cited here establishes where the plaited ribbon dance was first performed, who devised it, or how it spread through English schools, which is where most people now meet it. The direction of travel is documented; the particulars are not, and this entry does not supply them.
The fertility reading
Gap in the evidence
The reading of the maypole as a phallic symbol, and of the custom as a fertility rite surviving from pre-Christian religion, is asserted very widely and is not established by anything cited here. What would be needed to support it is a source that says so, contemporary with the practice, rather than an inference from the shape of the object. That the pole is tall and the season is spring is not evidence about what anyone believed.
The position is the ordinary one on this site. A well-documented custom with a five-century record does not need an ancient pedigree to be worth attention, and the pedigree is the part nobody can produce.
References
- Ronald Hutton. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain: Oxford University Press, 1996, xx + 542 pp.. ISBN 0198205708 recordpeer reviewed
The indispensable single book on the British ritual year and its documented customs.
- Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger (ed.). The Invention of Tradition: Cambridge University Press, 1983. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
The general study of how traditions are assembled. Cited here to make the point that this is not a problem peculiar to modern Paganism: the same processes produced the Highland kilt and much of the British monarchy's ceremonial.