TWH – While it can’t really be said that the pandemic has abated in the U.K., despite the currently high rates of infection, the U.K. has been opening up substantially since the winter and Pagan celebrations have been no exception. After two years in abeyance, Beltane celebrations have been taking place across the country throughout the month of May, from Hastings on the South Coast to Edinburgh in Scotland. Here’s a retrospective look at some of these festivities.
In Hastings, the Jack in the Green festival has been a Maytide celebration for many years – despite not being very ancient. I attended it myself in the 1990s, but it began in 1983. It is one of a number of similar festivals (Jack in the Greens appear in Oxford, Knutsford, Evercreech, and several other towns), which began in England in the 1700s and which emerged from an earlier sequence of parades in which milkmaids carried pails festooned with flowers and greenery.
Samuel Pepys records watching one of these in his diary: the milkmaids danced behind a fiddler. In 1712 The Spectator magazine referred to “the ruddy Milk-Maid exerting herself in a most sprightly style under a Pyramid of Silver Tankards.”
In addition to the milkmaids, chimney sweep parades in which sweeps sometimes cross-dressed were popular, although the sweeps generally did not carry garlands, and eventually the two seem to have merged together into the Jack in the Green celebrations. There is very little evidence that this was any kind of Pagan custom (however, it is now!).
Hastings’ Jack in the Green lasts for four days across the May Bank Holiday weekend. The main event takes place on the Bank Holiday Monday in which Jack is ‘released.’ He has a retinue of Bogies, Black Sal, the Fat Man, plus Mad Jack’s Morris, dancers, giants, drummers and other Morris sides. The procession proceeds through the town and ends on the West Hill where Jack is “slain” to “release the spirit of summer.”
Hedgepriestess Jacqueline Durban remembers her own part in previous festivities:
“It feels like a lifetime and more since I walked every year in the Bank Holiday Monday procession at the Hastings Jack-in-the-Green festival, but I still remember the anticipation of waiting for the Jack to be released from the fishermens’ huts in the Old Town, to a rousing and rippling cry of “Jack’s alive!”, before processing through the town and up to the castle to be symbolically slain with much merrymaking and good-spirited mayhem.
I was part of the procession with the Raven Drummers for ten years and it was a sacred joy. I loved the feeling of gathering community, and one of my favourite, and most sacred, moments of the year was when I bowed to the Jack as he passed by, knowing that he walked out as a willing sacrifice to the pulse of Life and all that’s good. One year he bowed back to me and I still haven’t quite recovered. In that moment it was absolutely real; the Jack was, and is, the Spirit of the Land walking…
…We live in a culture where the pull is to celebrate pomp and war, rather than the lives and traditions, and the resistance, of the common people. The Hastings Jack, and others like him, are symbols of that resistance, reborn each year. So many of our May Day traditions are born out of a determination to reconnect to a land and a way of being that had been in many ways lost/stolen from us when we sold ourselves into the lie of prosperity in the towns and cities during the Industrial Revolution, just as carvings of the Greenman may have developed as a protest against Norman oppression 800 years before that. Jack-in-the-Green reminds us that we were not born to be slaves.
And so this is a reminder that every year, on the West Hill of Hastings at around half past three on May Bank Holiday Monday, the Jack-in-the-Green is symbolically slain and the Spirit of Summer is released to dance through every leaf and branch, every petal and root, every wing, paw, and fin, every heart, mind, and voice, every mycelial thread and shimmering web, every stagnant corner where power is undeservedly and cruelly held, every place where injustice seeks to take root.”
On the Welsh Borders, May celebrations are also held.
“Clun is a town in the Shropshire Hills that has held the battle between winter and summer for many years. I’ve no idea how long it’s been going. There is a general village festival feel about it. It is a time for fun and celebration,” Druid Elaine Gregory told TWH.
The Green Man and Frosty the Snow Queen battle over the coming of spring to Clun. After his victory, the Green Man lead a garland-festooned parade to the grounds of Clun Castle. Usually, this takes place on Clun bridge, but the festival was moved this year and will resume at its usual place in 2023.
The Edinburgh Beltane celebrations have also returned. On the evening of 30 April, several thousand people congregated at Calton Hill in the centre of Edinburgh.
The Beltane Fire Festival involves around three hundred voluntary performers, marking the end of the Scottish winter and, the organisers say, including the May Queen and the Green Man, plus “some seriously exciting drumming, fire displays, acrobatics, body paint, some nudity and hordes of otherworldly creatures including Beastie Drummers and Red Men exhibiting ‘uninhibited behaviour’.”
Like Hastings, this festival dates from the 1980s: a period of revival in folklore customs across the UK and one which takes its inspiration directly from our ideas about how our ancient ancestors celebrated Beltane.
Butser Ancient Farm on the edge of South Downs National Park, north of Portsmith also resumed its annual Beltane celebration, complete with the burning of a massive wicker man.
With celebrations across the country, including Glastonbury, Bristol, London, Rochester, Padstow, and the Helston Flora Day, May Day and Beltane celebrations in the U.K. are back up to full strength.
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