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Sumer is icomen in, Lhude sing cuccu
Given at the Unitarian Universalist
Fellowship of New Bern North Carolina, May 2, 2004 by Ilona Forgeng
A Tree Song - Rudyard Kipling
OF ALL the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!
Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But—we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
And we bring you news by word of mouth—
Good news for cattle and corn—
Now is the Sun come up from the South,
With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!
SERMON
Yesterday was May First, Mayday, Beltane, the first day of summer in the old Celtic calendar. Yet in the US we hardly acknowledge this festival that marks such a powerful seasonal transition in Europe and the British Isles even today. The mountains of North Carolina were settled by Celts, the Scots Irish, yet even in the mountains of North Carolina there is no celebration of Mayday, no “conjuring summer in” ceremony. Why didn’t this festival immigrate along with the Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish?
Christianity, of course, took over many of the old Pagan festivals. Winter Solstice became Christmas, the spring fertility festival became Easter, and Saturnalia became New Year’s. Celtic Samhain became All Saints Day. Halloween, All Saints, is a remnant of the most important of the Celtic celebrations, the Celtic New Years, when the seen and unseen worlds touched. In the US we have kept the old Celtic tradition of witches and devils and ghosts at Halloween. This Celtic holiday of Samhain made the Atlantic crossing with the colonists, in its original pagan form.
But the second most important festival was left behind. After Samhain, the holiest time for the Celts was Beltane, May First, celebrated as the true beginning of Summer. Beltane was observed in the countryside of the British Isles until well after the American Revolution. As late as 1800 they were still lighting the Beltane fires on the hills of Scotland, and even in the 1920’s there were remnants of the old festivals in isolated villages of England, with Morris Dancing, the Hobby Horse, Robin Hood and Maid Marian and the burning of the straw man. But this holiday, this celebration of the return of summer and flowers and greenery and fertility never became important in the Americas. I think we are missing something. As Rudyard Kipling said, Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight, or he would call it a sin, but we’ve been out in the woods all night, a-conjuring Summer in. What more important event of the year than the return of Summer.
Sumer is icomen in,
Lhude sing cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu:
Bulluc sterteth
bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!
Image what life was like in Celtic England. Summer comes late there. Being a farmer in England meant living on the edge. The growing season is short, the need for rain and a good harvest was a matter of life and death. A drought, a late summer or an early winter, and the village would starve. Their land was covered with thick oak forests. The forests were heavy and dark and full of dangers. Although it has a climate similar to New England’s due to the Gulf Stream, we forget that England actually lies much further north, about at the latitude of Hudson’s Bay. The winters are dark and gloomy and wet and long. The winters are full of disease and death.
And now the summer arrives. The sun is back, the trees are green, the flowers are blooming, the cattle are calving and lambing and grazing in the meadow. Of course you would celebrate making it through the last winter and pray for a summer fertile enough to see you through the next.
Uplands in May - Carl Sandburg
WONDER as of old things
Fresh and fair come back
Hangs over pasture and road.
Lush in the lowland grasses rise
And upland beckons to upland.
Mayday ushers in the month named for Maia, the most beautiful of the Pleiades. May is the month of planting. May is the month the Pleiades disappear from the night sky. Navaho tradition says that you should never let the Pleiades see you plant: Seeds should be sown when the Pleiades set before the sun is down. The Carolina Cherokee, too, wait for the Pleiades to set before planting.
Mayday conjured summer in. Beltane represents the triumph of life over death, of summer over winter, fertility over barrenness. Bring in the flowers, the green branches. Celebrate the fact that you have made it through another winter. The village is still there. Death, disease and disaster are held at bay for another season.
All over Europe there were ceremonies for carrying Death out of the village and bringing Summer in. Often a straw man representing death would be carried out of the village and burned, while the children would bring green branches and flowers in. Sometimes a puppet was burned at the foot of a sacred tree. Obviously, many of these ceremonies had vestiges of ancient real sacrifice, with humans and animals hung from sacred trees or ritually sacrificed as an offering to the Gods. We are in the hands of the gods. Let them know we care. Burn the fires. Burn the dead wood. Add the strength of the light and the heat of the fire to the light and the heat of the sun. The huge fires lit on the hilltops, were themselves lit anew from a spinning wheel of sacred oak, and the people doused the fires in their homes and relit them from the Beltane fires. Conjure summer, conjure protection, conjure fertility.
There are sacred woods and sacred groves and sacred trees all over the world. The forests were a place of strange goings on, the wild hunt, bands of outlaws, fairy people and the green man. We’ve been out in the woods all night, a conjuring summer in. The oldest Germanic words for temple are related to the words for forest grove. The Latin word for sanctuary was the word for grove or glade.
The Celts held many trees sacred and able to give life and protection to those who used them. Sing Oak and ash and thorn, good sirs. The Eddas talked of a “World Tree” at the center of creation, and the World tree was an ash. According to the Norse, the first man was created from an ash log.
Oak was sacred to nearly every culture, but it was held in special esteem by the Celts. The oak is associated with Gods of thunder and lightening, perhaps because even when hit by lightening, the oak survives. The Beltane fires were lit from an oak wheel.
And the rowan, that we know as mountain ash, was a major part of the summer festival, branches were brought into the village and hung over the doorways and cattle pens for protection.
Of old, during the month of May, farmers passed all their livestock through a large hoop made of rowan to protect them and ensure fertility. The red berries of the rowan are symbolic of the forces of creation - blood, life, death and renewal.
Sacred trees, sacred hoops, fertility rites. And do you wonder where the maypole, blatantly phallic fertility symbol that it is came from or what it signifies? Decorated now with ribbons instead of human heads, but symbol of an ancient sacred fertility tree.
Fertility and protection and survival were what it was all about. Making the Gods happy. Conjuring rain and sun and enough food to make it through the winter. It was a time of flowers and greenery, the symbols of summer. Honor the trees, honor growth and nature and fertility.
Beltane is about the symbols of rebirth and the triumph of life over death. The world has been dead, but now is in flower again. In some areas seeds were planted in the fall and the grain that grew again in the spring would be part of the Beltane ceremony. Do you know John Barleycorn? He was the symbol of the success of life: John Barleycorn is a folklore survival of the ancient myth of the death and resurrection of the Corn God,
The symbols of Mayday and of the sacred wood and the triumph of summer are part of our heritage: Robin Goodfellow, The Green Man, John Barleycorn, Puck, Robin Hood.
The Green Knight from the Romances of King Arthur, is a green man. He is a symbol of eternal life, rebirth and resurrection. He loses his head, but rides off with it under his arm.
Islam has Al-Khidr, The Green Man, representing freshness of spirit and eternal life.
And of course, there is the most famous green man of all, who actually did make it to the US as a symbol of vegetation: The Jolly Green Giant.
Fertility, health, protection, rebirth, the return of the sun, of the rain, of the summer.
The green god of the forest disappears and returns year after year. The oak dies, but its spirit remains in the mistletoe and the oak is reborn. John Barleycorn is dead, but John Barleycorn lives.
Now, these forest deities, these green gods, lead us to our next subject, the foliate heads. These leafy, fertile heads show up all over the world, from Roman temples to Borneo to Egypt to India and Indonesia. The heads are buried in foliage, sometimes the head itself is made of leaves, sometimes the head merely pokes out of the leaves. Often there are vines sprouting from the head or the eyes or the mouth—the vine represents fertility.
Sometime around the Norman Conquest these heads began showing up in the churches and cathedrals of England and Europe. The greatest concentration of foliate heads, not surprisingly, is found where the densest forests once covered the land. Foliate heads are found on cathedral columns, they adorn the church roof bosses, they are entwined in the chapel decorations. How did these Pagan symbols come to adorn Christian churches? Was the church, perhaps, trying to use this ancient symbol of rebirth to tie the pagan tradition to the resurrection of Jesus, or were the stonemasons adding their pagan tradition to the message of the Church?
In 1939 Lady Raglan, a folklorist, looked at all these forest creatures, all these green traditions of forests and fertility and sacred woods and sacred trees, and she looked at the foliate heads in the chapels. And she looked at the “Green Man” pubs of the countryside. And she wrapped them all up together as “The Green Man.” The foliate heads, the characters of the Mayday games, the straw men, Puck, Robin, all of them, she said, must have shared the same meaning.
As many of you know, I am basically a humanist. But there are times when my Celtic roots take hold of my soul, and I am drawn to the woods and the rivers and the plants and the trees. There is something in an old, twisted oak that calls to me. Live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, White oaks dripping with mistletoe. When I die, don’t throw my ashes in the ocean, sprinkle them about the base of an oak tree. I celebrate the Winter Solstice. To me the winter solstice is the promise of spring, the hope of the resurrection. Bring in the candles, keep the fires going. Have faith. The sun WILL come back. And for me Mayday is the symbol of the fulfillment of the promise of rebirth and resurrection. Have faith. Bring in the flowers, bring in the branches, celebrate the return of life and warmth and green and flowers and fertility. However dark the night, however cold the soul, there will be a rebirth. We may go through a long, cold, dark winter, but eventually it will end. Summer will return and we can be safe and warm again.
So, here is summer, and here is the return of fertility and here is growth and protection and Summer and mayday. And here is the Green Man, symbol of Summer and the power of the forest and rain and faith. Here is the god of vegetation and of the environment.
We left the Green Man back in England, but he can rejoin us today, the rebirth of our need to tend to the environment, to heal our relationship with nature. He is the symbol of the irrepressible, uncontainable, disorderly, life of the green world. He is an image from our pagan past, but he is the symbol of the joy of renewal, regeneration and rebirth. He appeared to die, he appeared to leave us to our American drive to subdue the land and the forests. But now he can challenge us to live with and not against nature. He can lead us back to a saner and wiser relationship with life. And he can call us all back to some of the original deep meanings of our religious mythology and make our connections to the old pagan truths about nature, and death and life and faith. He can help us to reclaim our connections with the environment and with our pagan past. He can represent the return of life and light and the end of the cold, dark night of the soul.
In the closing of his book on Green Man, William Anderson reminds us that this mysterious creature has changed over time, along with our view of forests and the wilderness as we moved from an ancient relationship with nature to a position of dominion over it. He says:
Our remote ancestors said to their mother Earth, "We are yours."
Modern humanity has said to Nature, "You are mine."
The Green Man has returned as the living face of the whole earth so that through his mouth we may say to the universe, "We are one."
Welcome summer in. Happy May Day. Happy Beltane.
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