The Flower Moon is full at 9:53am today. I suspect in lunisolar calendars like that of the Irish and Cymri, this full moon after the hawthorn bloomed would have marked Beltaine. Or perhaps Beltaine, the beginning of summer, was set to the seventh full moon after Samhaine, the end of summer — which was also likely determined by the moon, not the sun. In any case, it may be that what I (and The Old Farmer’s Almanac among many others) call the full Flower Moon is the ancient holiday of Beltaine, the advent of the summer. Or at least the beginning of the upland grazing season.
I don’t think Beltaine is a day so much as it is a season, for precisely the reason that it is very difficult to tie Beltaine to a day. It was certainly not May 1st in the Irish calendars that observed Beltaine. The one preserved calendar that we have from a Celtic-language culture, the Coligny Calendar, did not contain May, nor even an equivalent. In the Coligny Calendar, months hung on the solar cycle in an elegant cycle of 62 months every five years. There were 12 months in each year, with an intercalary month added every 2.5 years to prevent seasonal drift. Now, this calendar was created by Roman citizens, the elites of Gaul, and yet they refused to adhere to Roman time. So I think it’s rather unlikely that the wild Hibernians well beyond the pale marked time with the Roman calendar, the one we inherited and still use today, the one that has a May 1st. It is far more likely that they marked time by the moon and by seasonal events.
Beltaine, the beginning of summer, was naturally when summer weather showed up. A simple determination of summer weather is when the Green World trusts the temperatures enough to put out their delicate blossoms. And, in fact, the Celtic cultures of Britain and Ireland have many traditions of summer a’coming in when the hawthorn bloomed. There is one word for both “May” and “hawthorn” in Cymraeg (Welsh). Similarly, the hawthorn in full blossom is so central to so many Beltaine customs, there would be little celebration if the “may” failed to bloom, which is all too likely if the bush had to follow the secular calendar, regardless of the year’s weather.
Now, it may be that the holiday was simply observed whenever the buds opened. But since the moon ruled time in this culture — as in most human cultures, past and present — it makes sense to me that the season of summer would be formally ushered in by the full moon closest to the blooming hawthorn. Which is probably why the Cymri call this whole month Mai, Hawthorn.
There are interesting threads connecting the hawthorn, the summer, the Green Man, and Arthurian legend. Because, of course, Arthur was Celtic. Romanized, for sure, but if he existed at all, he was born in Tintagel Castle in Cornwall. He had a Cornish mother. He may have spoken Latin, maybe even some of the barbaric German languages, but his native tongue was Cornish, a language that was carried across the English Channel to put down its roots around the Brocéliande Forest of Brittany. This forest is, not coincidentally, where much of the Matter of Britain plays out.
Arthur is sometimes called a summer lord, except… he’s really not. He might have been the golden boy of the Britains, but he died a cuckhold at the hand of a younger man who might have been both nephew and son, depending on the storyteller. Arthur has more in common with the Winter Kings, who take the hand of the Land Goddess when she is resting in her somnolent, chthonic state, when she is not in her full productive capacity. When she awakens to walk in the Green World, she turns from the Winter King to the Summer Lord.
Guinevere turns from Arthur repeatedly. Sometimes she is “abducted”. Sometimes she seems to become two or three women of the same name — a common enough theme in many European cultures — all queen in different castles — a rather uncommon plot device. But we mostly remember that she betrayed Arthur with Arthur’s closest companion, Lancelot. And here we might find summer.
Lancelot’s name may be derived from words relating to the javelin, casting Lancelot as the weapon in the king’s hand. It could also be L’Ancelot (it is written this way in many stories), which means “the servant” — or perhaps The Servant, again, the hand of the king. But the name can also be derived from the mythological hero and sometime deity, Llew Llaw Gyffes. These derivations seem a bit tortuous, but I understand the urge to reach. Lance shares too many characteristics with Llew to not be related in some fashion. They are both born of Faerie mothers who apparently believed in tough love. They both are ambivalent characters in their own right, ageless and, apart from a disastrous dalliance with the Flower Maiden, generally genderless. They are both fierce warriors that spend quite a lot of time in positions of weakness, largely voluntarily. They are also both also nearly silent in all the stories.
Llew seems to be a puppet in the hands of his powerful shamanic uncle. He hardly utters a word in the entirety of his story until he is compelled to tell his young wife, the Flower Maiden, the only way he can be killed — which turns out not to be strictly true, since he does not die but flies off in the shape of an ailing eagle. Lancelot says absolutely nothing for most of his story. It is not until he is driven mad and living far from courtly society that he begins to talk. Llew and Lance are not characters; they are tools in the hands of the shadowy Winter King. They may be the young Summer Lord. They both seem summery. They, at least, win the heart of the Land Goddess… for a time.
But there is one other Summer Lord in the Matter of Britain, Gawain, Gwalchmai, The Hawk of May. Or the Hawk of the Hawthorn. In the stories, Gawain is the young nephew of Arthur, but Gwalchmai may be older than Arthur. His story was certainly recorded long before Chretien got ahold of the Arthurian myth cycle. In all the stories, Gawain is perpetually young and strong and not particularly brilliant, but fiercely loyal and true. In Monmouth’s version of Lancelot’s betrayal of Arthur, it is Gawain who tells the king and who then entraps the lovers — not because of any enmity toward either the queen or Lancelot, but because it is the right thing to do in spite of the pain it causes.
It is never explicitly said, but I have always felt that Gawain and Lancelot were actually closer than either’s relationship with the king. They seem to be the same age, or maybe the same agelessness. Gawain’s mother is Morgaine, or Morgause — one of Arthur’s faerie-witch sisters anyway — so both Gawain and Lancelot tend to be something other than human. They are both Knights who fight for the king, servants and swords. They also are both strangely fatherless. In a story cycle built around men, they are cut off from male parentage. Gawain’s father, King Lot of Orkney, is a dark blot on the edge of Gawain’s tale. Gawain stands by his uncle and one gets the sense that he would not willingly return to Orkney, if Orkney is a place in this world at all, which is not a given. Lot is portrayed as powerful but insular, cold and dark like the land he rules. He is decidedly Plutonic, perhaps even a king of the dead. Similarly, Lancelot’s father, King Ban, is a shadow. It seems that the mythographers were compelled to explain why Lance is raised by women in the mists, so he is styled an orphan from a lost kingdom. The result is that both King Lot and King Ban are distant and, if not dead, then certainly deathly.
(Incidentally, Ban and his “brother” Bors were two of the original Knights before there was a Round Table, and before Arthur was king. Ban, whose name might be eponymous with the name of his land, Benioc or Benwick, fought alongside the brilliant Roman tactician who held back the Saxon invasion for a time. That legionary became Arthur, and Ban became the lost father of Lancelot.)
So Lancelot and Gawain have faerie mothers and underworld fathers. But remember that Lancelot might also be derived from Llew whose totem animal is the eagle, or more accurately, a large bird of prey, like a hawk. And note that Gawain’s name is actually Hawk of May. The Hawk’thorn. Here we have the Summer Lord. It seems to me that Lance and Gawain are two versions of Summer. And they are both as ancient and young as the blooming hawthorn under the Full Flower Moon.
I am not inordinately fond of anthropomorphizing the world, but I do love stories and this story of the complex Summer Lord, the youthful bright elder who comes from darkness and recedes into darkness but does not die — this seems a very good description of the Green World. In my personal mythography, I call this archetype the Green Man, but I could easily call them The Forest. Perhaps Brocéliande. Or the Green Mountains. Today, the Green Man is dancing over the hills around me, full of exuberant growth and bright blossom. It is all potential today. Summer is a’coming in.
But summer is short and potentials often fail. So take today to hail what may be in this season of passionate growth.
Because soon enough the Land will turn from the Summer Lord to return to her dark Winter King, and another Green Summer will fade away into the faerie mists.
Ancient Rome celebrated the festival of Rosalia, also called Rosaria, on one or more days from early May to the middle of July. The Oxford Book of Days claims the Rosalia fell on 23 May, so that’s what I recorded in my calendar — though it is unusual to see a rose blooming in May in either Oxford’s England or my New England. I rarely had rose blossoms before June even in New Mexico. Yet though Rome is far north of Albuquerque and much closer to the latitude of my current home in central Vermont, the Mediterranean Sea surrounding the Italian peninsula moderates the climate to such an extent that it is likely roses were blooming in abundance by late May in Roman villas.
The Rosalia was a day of the dead, a dies rosationis, a day of rose-adornment, a commemorative festival that goes back to the earliest Greek cultures. The day of adornment could also be celebrated with violets, both flowers being erotically scented and colored the rich, warm hue of blood. Violets, in particular, were associated with the blood of gods and deified mortals. Adonis, beloved of Venus, was gored by a wild bore. The blood that dripped from his wounds sprang up from the ground as blooming violets. Similarly, in the much older story of Attis and Cybele, blood flowing from the mortal injury of Attis became a garland of violets which Cybele draped on the sacred evergreen fir-tree in memory of her lost lover. This winter tree decked in bright flowers is one of many origins of the Christmas tree.
Roses, too, were closely associated with the dead, and especially those who were mortally wounded. After Achilles abused the corpse of Hector in the gruesome tantrum that followed the death of Achilles’ lover Patroclus, Aphrodite bathed the desecrated body in roses, restoring it before Hector’s grieving family came out to retrieve his corpse. Bright roses were thought to bloom eternally in the dim Elysian Fields of the dead, and being pricked with a rose thorn was a common euphemism for deep wounding — sometimes with the bronze and iron of the battlefield, sometimes with the darts of love. The Latin purpureus was applied to the bloody color range of roses and violets, marking them as flowers of death. Etymologically, purpureus is akin to Greek porphyreos, which described the coloring of skin by bruising or wounding. Warriors dying in battle were often poetically associated with blown roses in deep shades of red. Sacrifice to the dead frequently included garlands of roses and violets or libations of red wine in lieu of blood, and graves were decked in these bloody flowers at many times throughout the year. Hothouse flowers were a major Roman industry, with most going to adorn graves.
Maybe because of this eternal life-in-death association, the rose, in particular, also became associated with royalty, feasting, erotic love and passion. The rose was a symbol of goddesses from Astarte to Venus and continued its association with the Divine Feminine right into the Christian age. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the native Mexican avatar of the Virgin Mary, revealed herself through a bouquet of wine-dark roses blooming in December. Roses represented both sides of the English succession wars — white York and red Lancaster — and the Tudors used the two flowers combined into one to metaphorically proclaim the hard-won unity of the new royal line. Roses have long been given to sweethearts on Valentine’s Day and have been worn by brides and bridegrooms since ancient times. In fact, in Rome it was more common for the groom, the embodiment of the family bloodline, to wear a crown of roses than for the bride to be so bedight. Similarly, when the Emperor went abroad in the city, he wore a rose and laurel crown and his route was garlanded with rose-laden vines. The probably apocryphal Emperor Heliogabalus (his name is a fusion of the names of the Greek sun deity, Helios, and the Syrian sun god, Elagabalus) once buried and asphyxiated an entire hall of banquet guests in an avalanche of rose petals. It is thought that this grotesque story was derived from the tradition of showering victorious athletes and newly wedded couples with leaves and petals — a custom called phylloboliain Greece — but Victorians reputedly became quite enthralled by the concept of suffocation by roses.
Though there was a deep association between deity and the rose in ancient times, the flower was not explicitly tied to any one pagan god. So the rose’s favored status continued through the Christian era to today. Catholics still count prayers with beads named for the Roman funereal garland of roses, the rosarium, what is now called the rosary. Some rosaries include beads made from pressed rose petals or porous beads that are infused with attar of roses. Globally today, the rose accounts for over a third of the cut flowers sold in any given year, and, as in Rome, hothouse flowers are still a major industry; the perennial demand for roses extends well beyond the growing season. Roses and lilies are still the principle flowers in bouquets and garlands for both wedding celebrations and funerals. And we give roses to our mothers in May while naming many of our infant daughters Rose.
We used to garland the graves of fallen soldiers in roses on Garland Sunday, the holiday that has morphed into Memorial Day in our culture. But in our culture, we do not celebrate the rose-adornment as enthusiastically as our ancestors once did. We do not honor our ancestors as they honored their dead. We are too afraid of the transformations of time and the un-making of the self to fix our gaze on those who have gone before us. Death and the dead are hidden away in forgotten corners and cold crypts. Funerals mark the end of relationship with those who have died. We still give roses to sweethearts and we make lavish arrangements of flowers to surround caskets, but we forget that the rose is the symbol of sacrificed life-blood, the death-in-life and life-in-death, the end of one cycle so that life can carry on to the next.
Still, there are many stories of the duplicitous nature of the rose even in our culture. Snow White originally had a sister, Rose Red, in the much Grimm-er version of the story; and the pathos of Perrault’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ begins with a plucked rose. Roses are equally symbolic of horror — what vampire does not wear the damask rose? — and benign comfort — fairy roses ramble over every cozy cottage in our folktales. A yellow rose is the sign of eternal friendship, white is purity, pink is innocence, but red is power, passion, lust and death as well as perdurable love. In the folklore of the rose, even in its most Disney-fied princessy pink, there is a grave undercurrent, a whiff of putrescence in the heavenly scent, the hint of spilled blood in a dewdrop falling from rosy thorns. Even as death-averse as we are, we see death in the rose and embrace it. Maybe the rose is our scapegoat, the embodiment and repository of our promise to the future, our tacit acknowledgement that death is both necessary and beautiful, though terrifying and as odious as a rotting flower left too long in the vase. I see shadows of sacrifice in the rose, the ephemeral nature of all life — and particularly of beauty — and the agreement to abide by the limits of individual existence — so that existence may continue without limits.
Maybe that’s too poetical for the analytical Greek and the practical Roman, but there was undoubtedly weighty magic behind the rose even in Mediterranean cultures. As we are the heirs to those cultures, it’s not inconceivable that we find subliminal traces of that magic in the stories we tell ourselves. I think that even in our death-denying culture, we see our death and the continuance of life in the fragile allure of the claret rose. And in spite of its thorns and its finicky culture, the rose still grows ubiquitously in our gardens and we still give its blooms to those we love best.
So this week, take your roses and weave garlands of hope and remembrance. And if a few drops of blood fall on the flowers, take that as a symbol of the life you will gladly lay down so that you may be ancestral to the future.
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
By My Solitary Hearth 
This is a delightfully fascinating read!
LikeLiked by 1 person