The History of Modern Beltane Traditions
Most Beltane guides list the same several customs: bonfires, May dew, flower crowns, the maypole, the May Queen and Green Man, handfasting, and the sacred union of God and Goddess. They’re usually presented as ancient Celtic traditions that have been handed down more or less intact.
Some of these customs have real Irish or Celtic roots. Some come from English May Day traditions that got folded in over centuries. One (the Green Man) was coined in 1939. And one of the most popular “Celtic” wedding rituals turns out to be Old Norse in origin.
None of this means your practice is wrong or needs to change. But if you’re drawn to Bealtaine, it’s worth knowing what parts of your ritual or celebration connect to which traditions.
This article focuses on the Irish record, because Bealtaine is an Irish festival. The main sources are Sanas Cormaic (a ninth-century Irish glossary), Kevin Danaher’s The Year in Ireland (1972), the Dúchas Schools’ Collection, and Ronald Hutton’s The Stations of the Sun (1996). For more on the protective customs of Bealtaine, see Irish folk traditions for Bealtaine.
The Bonfire: Old, But Not as Old as It’s Often Claimed
The bonfire is the oldest documented part of Irish Bealtaine. But “oldest” here means around 900 CE; still a genuinely old tradition, but not the ancient prehistory it’s often claimed to be.
The source for it is Sanas Cormaic, a glossary of Irish words attributed to Cormac mac Cuilennáin, a bishop and king of Munster. Under the entry for Belltaine, it describes “two fires which Druids used to make with great incantations” and says cattle were driven toward those fires. The famous detail about cattle being driven between two fires comes from a note added to one manuscript later, not from the main text.
The glossary also gives two contradictory origins for the word “Beltane” — “lucky fire” in one place, “fire of Bil, an idol god” in another. In a 2005 article in Studia Celtica, scholar Éimear Williams argued that these entries are word-origin guesses, not records of actual practice. The glossary’s writer was speculating, not documenting.
The 17th-century historian Geoffrey Keating describes elaborate May Day assemblies with bonfires, but Ronald Hutton warns that Keating may have combined the glossary’s speculation with other sources to create “a piece of pseudo-history.” Hutton, 1996
The evidence becomes solid in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1838, a Leinster farmer named Humphrey O'Sullivan wrote in his diary about driving cattle between two fires on May Eve as a matter of course. Sir William Wilde, writing in 1852, described people leaping the flames before journeys or weddings, and carrying embers home to relight their hearths. Danaher documents the custom well into the 20th century, with the last survivals in Waterford, Kilkenny, and Tipperary.
The fire custom is real and Irish. The 18th and 19th-century evidence is strong. The medieval evidence is thin. Danaher also notes that May Eve fire customs overlap heavily with Midsummer (St. John’s Eve) customs, many of the same practices appear at both dates, so claiming the fire as exclusively a Bealtaine thing is harder than it looks.
Modern Beltane keeps the bonfire and the jumping of flames. The meaning has shifted from protecting livestock to celebrating joy and renewal, but the fire itself stands on solid historical, if not ancient, traditions.
May Dew: Real, But Not Uniquely Irish
Gathering dew before sunrise on May morning is well documented in Ireland. The beliefs were specific: washing your face in May dew gave a fair complexion.duchas.ie Washing the feet and face was thought to protect the washer from illness for the year. duchas.ie A man who washed his hands in it would gain skill with knots and locks duchas.ie. Danaher confirms the custom was known across Ireland into the 20th century.
The earliest Irish documentation on May Day dew is Gerard Boate’s Natural History of Ireland (1652) and Lady Wilde’s Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages (1890).
The custom also isn’t distinctively Irish. Samuel Pepys recorded his wife going out to gather May dew in London in 1667 and again in 1669. Hugh Plat’s Delightes for Ladies (c. 1600) recommends May dew for sore eyes. The tradition also appears across Germany, Romania, and Scandinavia in the same period.
Of the seven customs covered here, this one travels most cleanly from the historical record into contemporary practice.
Flowers: Scattered for Protection, Not Worn as Crowns
Gathering yellow flowers on May Eve or May morning is a genuinely Irish practice. Camden’s Britannia (1610) records it. Sir Henry Piers described it in 1682. The Dúchas Schools’ Collection from the 1930s is full of accounts of children collecting primroses, cowslips, buttercups, and furze-blossoms before dawn (learn more about that practice).
In the Irish record, though, the flowers were used for protection, not decoration. They were scattered on doorsteps, thresholds, and windowsills, laid around wells, and tied to cows’ tails and horses’ bridles. The Dúchas accounts put it plainly: “no fairy can pass over primroses.” The idea was that fairies and malicious neighbors couldn’t cross a threshold scattered with certain flowers.
Flower crowns worn on the head aren’t part of the Irish Bealtaine record. They come from English May Day traditions with roots in the Roman festival of Floralia. The Catholic “Queen of the May” crowning custom, a girl crowned with flowers in honor of Mary, is a 19th-century devotional practice promoted by Pope Gregory XVI from 1837.
The Maypole: English, Brought to Ireland by Settlers
The earliest documented maypole appears in a mid-14th-century Welsh poem by Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd. By 1350–1400, the custom was well established across southern Britain, in both Welsh-speaking and English-speaking areas. Hutton, 1996
In Ireland, maypoles were brought by English and Scottish settlers after the Plantations of the 16th and 17th centuries. They never became common in rural Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish maypole is at Holywood, County Down, on a 1620 map. Others appear in towns with strong English connections: Harold’s Cross, Kilkenny, Mountmellick, Downpatrick. Danaher says plainly: “The May pole was unknown in the country districts, and was probably introduced into the towns by the English.” In 1812, an Englishwoman at Rathkeale in County Limerick set up a maypole and encouraged locals to dance around it. The novelty wore off, and the experiment failed.
The plaited-ribbon dance that most people picture today is even more recent. Hutton traces it to a romantic drama called Richard Plantagenet, performed at the Victoria Theatre in London in 1836. That was the first known instance of dancers holding ribbons from the top of a pole and weaving them in a pattern. The custom spread from there to village fetes and school events across England through the 1840s and 1880s.
One more thing: the idea that the maypole is a phallic symbol has no historical basis. Hutton writes that there’s “no sign that the people who used maypoles thought that they were phallic.” That reading came from Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century and was amplified by 19th-century psychoanalytic interpretations of folk custom.
The May Queen and the Green Man: Victorian and 1939
These two figures are usually treated as a pair, but they have entirely separate histories, and both are younger than many think.
An English tradition of a “Lord and Lady of the May” presiding over May Day festivities goes back to London diarist Henry Machyn in 1557. Over time the paired figures became a single girl. But the May Queen in her familiar form (a girl in white, crowned with flowers, leading a solemn procession) is largely a Victorian invention. Hutton, 1996
Tennyson’s popular poem “The May Queen” appeared in 1830. Hutton documents how scenes of May Queens, maypoles, and morris dancing reached their peak in London theatres and fetes in the 1840s. In 1881, art critic John Ruskin joined forces with J.P. Faunthorpe, principal of Whitelands teacher-training college, to design a formal May Queen ceremony. As Whitelands graduates spread the custom to schools across the country, the college eventually claimed to be “the fostering mother of all May Days.”
There’s no equivalent figure in Irish Bealtaine. The Dúchas record shows Irish May Day as communal and often boisterous: bonfires, the May Bush, music, neighbors competing over the best-decorated bush. Where a May King or Queen appears in Irish accounts, Danaher notes it’s in English-influenced towns. In rural Ireland, the ritual role was often played by a young man dressed as a woman, quite different from the solemnly crowned girl of modern Beltane.
The term “Green Man” was coined in a single article published in 1939 in the journal Folklore, by Lady Julia Raglan. Drawing on James George Frazer’s ideas about vegetation spirits, she argued that foliage-covered faces carved in medieval churches, the “Jack in the Green” figure from English May Day processions, and the Green Man pub sign were all versions of the same ancient pagan god. She borrowed the name from the pub sign.
Later scholarship took each part of this apart. Kathleen Basford’s The Green Man (1978) traced foliate heads to classical Roman decorative art, passed through manuscript traditions, and found the motif originally had a demonic quality — not spring renewal. Roy Judge’s The Jack-in-the-Green (1979) traced the Jack figure to an 1775 report in the Morning Chronicle about London chimney sweeps’ May Day parades, which had grown out of 17th-century milkmaid garland processions. Hutton concluded in a 2023 Gresham College lecture that “none of the three things had anything to do with each other or with a pagan god.” Library of Congress
Handfasting: Old Norse in Origin, More Complicated Than It Seems
The word “handfasting” comes from Old Norse handfesta, meaning to strike a bargain by joining hands. There’s no Irish version of the word.
In medieval Scotland, “handfasting” meant betrothal: a formal, legally binding engagement, not a trial marriage.
Sir Walter Scott made the idea famous. In his 1820 novel The Monastery, a fictional character declares: “We take our wives, like our horses, upon trial. When we are handfasted, as we term it, we are man and wife for a year and a day.” From there it entered popular writing and eventually academic work as a supposed ancient Celtic custom.
In Ireland, the early Irish marriage law text Cáin Lánamna (c. 700 CE) recognizes many types of union but says nothing about handfasting, cord-binding, or seasonal marriage customs. If any Irish festival had a historical link to matchmaking, it was Lughnasadh. The Tailteann games historically included marriage arrangements. Marriage in May was actually considered unlucky in Irish folk tradition.
The cord-binding ceremony itself, with hands tied together with ribbons or cords, has no precedent before the mid-20th century. It was developed within Wicca in the 1940s and 1950s.
The Sacred Union: The Irish Precedent Beltane Didn’t Inherit
Ireland does have a concept of a sacred marriage. The banais ríghi, which means “wedding feast of kingship,” describes the symbolic union between a new king and the goddess of the land he would rule. The king’s right to rule depended on the land-goddess accepting him. Under a good king she flourished; under a bad one, the land suffered. This appears in medieval annals, law texts, and mythology. Figures like Ériu, Medb, and Flaithius function as sovereignty figures in these stories. Máire Herbert examined this directly in her 1992 paper “Goddess and King: The Sacred Marriage in Early Ireland,” published in Women and Sovereignty (Edinburgh University Press).
However banais ríghi is most closely linked to Samhain, not Bealtaine. No early Irish source connects the sacred marriage of king and land to May 1.
The modern Beltane sacred union — the God and Goddess whose marriage drives the Wheel of the Year — comes from a different lineage. James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915) proposed that ancient religions centered on a dying-and-rising god whose sacred marriage to an earth goddess drove the seasons. Gerald Gardner drew on Frazer’s ideas, along with Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis (which has since been disproven) and ceremonial magic, to build Wicca in the 1940s and 1950s.
Knowing where these customs actually come from doesn’t mean you have to practice differently. Modern Beltane is its own tradition at this point, built from a years of borrowing, revival, and reinvention. But knowing which parts are Irish, which are English, which are Victorian, and which were invented last century gives you context to work with.
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