#bealtaine

Red ribbon to protect milk and butter for mí na Bealtaine!

It's an Irish folk tradition to tie a red ribbon and sometimes the twigs of specific trees to your cows tail to protect the milk and butter they will produce from theft. Especially because if someone milks your cow before you on the festival of bealtaine they will be stealing not only your milk that day but all your milk for the whole year!

Bealtaine is a traditional Irish fire celebration that marks the start of summer. This event, which takes place from sunset on April 30 to noon on May 1, is linked to the fertility, protection, and rebirth of life of nature.

When it comes to Irish folk practice and customs in particular, it's crucial to remember that Beltane is an anglicised method of "simplifying" the original Irish word, which is still used as Gaeilge for the entire month of May, to make it easier for colonisers to understand and speak.

Home and hearth protection is crucial during Bealtaine. The custom of putting yellow flowers, particularly primroses, though Dandelions are a good choice too, on thresholds before the starting sun of Bealtaine rises. These vivid flowers are more than simply attractive; they act as strong barriers against any dangerous magic that might try to enter the house, as well as any Malevolent Spirits or Aos Sidhe. My guess as to why this gives protection (besides the use of intention) is that the flowers resemble the sun and fire, which are things these malevolent beings avoid due to fear.

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.

The May Queen

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 Green Man

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.

Happy belated Beltane to everyone who celebrates!!

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I was out of town this weekend for a Celebration of Life event for a family member and was unable to reblog all of your wonderful posts ☺️

This is a photo of my Beltane altar from a couple of years ago

Here’s my analysis of Sinners that I put on Letterboxd + some additional commentary💕🩵🎶

I absolutely adored Sinners and was surprised to find so much of my own culture reflected in the film. As such I wanted to give some insight into the Irish vampire Remmick and his connection to its themes, its culture and its story.

Before I go into explaining I want to note that I live in Dublin and am a dual citizen of both the US and Ireland with family and cultural ties to both nations. It is because of my own history and culture that made me resonate and feel so seen by Coogler’s writing of Remmick, the main vampire villain of the movie.

I should also note that Remmick could be a nod to the Irish story of Abhartach, a legend about a man killed who rises from the dead demanding blood. The story has many versions such as Dearg Due, that most likely influenced the Irish writer, Bram Stoker, in writing Dracula.

From the very first scene that Remmick is in, where he is getting chased by the Choctaw vampire hunters, it is obvious the amount of research Coogler has done. For those who don’t know, the Choctaw Nation and Ireland have a very long history dating back to the Famine, a genocide against Ireland by the British. Wherein the Choctaw Nation donated $5,000 in today’s money not long after the Trail of Tears to help the country. Since then both peoples have maintained a relationship, with Ireland paying back the Choctaw Nation for their help. There’s even a memorial down in Cork to commemorate our relationship.

It felt ironic watching this scene for the first time knowing this long history but looking back it perfectly sets up the movie’s main theme surrounding Remmick. That’s because in this scene Remmick is pointedly finding safety in the house of a KKK member, the literal embodiment of white supremacy. Remmick is doing what many Irish Americans did at the time, turning their back on community in an effort to appeal to an American standard of whiteness (Irishmen hadn’t been considered white before this time period), eventually becoming that standard of whiteness themselves. Knowing this, the Choctaw men hunting him seems more like mercy kill than an actual hunting. Seeing it this way, it could even be mirroring a scene later in the film between Annie and Smoke.

I think it’s important to note that the core theme of this film is how culture and community are linked and what happens to people who’ve lost their culture and community. That is what Remmick, and what so many Irish Americans want and are cut off from. When he sees Sammy and the Juke Joint dancing with the past, present, and future spirits, he sees a tie to his own culture that he has lost. Except instead of wanting a mutual consensual connection between himself and Black Americans, he wants to take it over in a desperate attempt to get something that’s already lost.

When he sings ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’ to try and get into the Juke Joint, he is imitating a song written and sung by Black Americans, taking it over, gentrifying it, and trying to use Black American culture for his own gain.

Though he doesn’t just sing this song, in fact he sings two songs that I have heard my whole life and was very shocked to hear in this movie. The first is ‘Will You Go Lassie, Go?’ and it is sung to the white passing character Mary before the vampires kill her (it also has an Appalachian version called ‘The Wild Mountain Thyme’ which was brought over by Scottish & Irish immigrants). The song is an old folk song about a young man yearning for his love who has gone away. Though Scottish in origin it was reinterpreted by Francis McPeake and gifted to a woman named Maggi Pierce who left Ireland for America. In that sense it is also a mourning song for someone who is going far away, never to return. For those who don’t know, an ‘American Wake’ was a practice in Ireland for mourning someone leaving for America because they would not be able to have a funeral in their home country once they died.

When Remmick and the other vampires sing this for Mary, it is a song mourning a community already gone. He is a dead man, singing a mourning song, in a land that calls for funerals back home.

From this point on, Remmick grows his group of vampires larger and larger, trying to mimic the community they had when he wasn’t with them. They sing and preform the song ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’, a rebel song about the oppression and colonization Britain exerts over Ireland. That being said, Remmick is the only one Irish dancing, all of the other vampires are just surrounding him without any real dances of their own. I saw a few people point out that they were dancing counter clockwise which could be a reference to Irish Sidhe/Fairy Folk who trick humans into dancing forever by going counter clockwise (though this is just speculation). There is also a lack of past and future spirits with them as they are neither dead nor alive. Their connection to their community is gone and their culture too.

I've seen some Irish people say that choosing these songs is lazy because of how widely known they are, but I disagree. Remmick is a man cut off from his culture, so it makes sense that the songs he knows are a bit superficial. I also agree with casting Jack O'Connell instead of an Irish person born and raised in country because I think he has a better understanding of Irish people in the diaspora and their relationship with Irish culture.

The last song we hear from Remmick after this is ‘Pick Poor Robin Clean’ again, only this time with all the people he has taken and transformed from the Juke Joint. He is, without intending to, the embodiment of white supremacy and how it takes and takes and takes.

When he fights Sammy, he does what many Irish Americans do, use their people’s past subjection to justify their oppression and bigotry over others. They know enough about oppression to knock on the door and peek inside, but because of their willingness to assimilate into American whiteness, the only community they have left to be a part of is one founded and controlled by white supremacy.

Before, Remmick was most likely someone like Sammy, a Filí able to use music to gather community, which is why he uses it to gather more and more vampires, yet he doesn’t understand that this is doing the exact opposite of building the community he yearns for.

In As Gaeilge, the Irish language, there’s a saying, “Tír gan Teanga, Tír gan Anam” which translates to “A country without a language is a country without a soul”. At no point in the movie does Remmick even speak Irish and the rest of the time he is switching between accents whenever it seems beneficial. I see Remmick, and many people who claim to be Irish American without any actual connection to Ireland, as the embodiment of this saying. They are people who have lost their language, their culture, their people, and as such have lost their soul to hate pretending to be community.

When Remmick is finally killed by the sun and burned in a giant cauldron of fire, it may seem to some that he is being punished and sent to hell. This is not how I interpreted his death, having had prior knowledge of Irish folktales as well as just attending Bealtaine at the Hill of Uisneach in Westmeath a couple weeks ago. For those who don’t know Bealtaine is an old Irish festival celebrating the coming summer, the return of the sun and life itself. I view Remmick’s death as a reflection of this festival (& other Irish pagan festivals) and his return to his ancestors after finally embracing the sun once more (just like how Annie said vampires are cut off from this connection, he is finally free to have it once more). Below is a picture I took at Bealtaine that I think looks very similar to Remmick’s fire in the movie.

Sinners is a movie about what happens when you allow hate to walk right through your door and how it isolates you from everything you hold dear. When Mary and Stack speak with an older Sammy, Stack mentions how the music hasn’t felt ‘real’ since that night, having lost the connection that living and dying gives to the evolution of his people.

Setting aside Remmick, I still absolutely loved this film, and he is by no means it’s major highlight. The way Coogler depicts Black American culture, its beauty, tenderness, and relation to music is masterful and I sincerely hope this film gets all the awards it deserves. I won’t go deep into his depiction of Black Americans and Black American culture because it is not my culture to speak on, and this analysis is already way too long. I will say though that this film is a masterclass in how culture and community relate to characters and their motivations. I think it’ll go down as one of the best horror films of the genre and I can’t wait to see what else Ryan Coogler and everyone who worked on this film makes.