Beltane/May Day

atheopaganism.org/2018/04/22/hows-that-maypole…

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S4E15 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one, mark.

Yucca: and today we have another holiday episode, so welcome to the next spring holiday for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.

Mark: Yeah, and of course we're gonna talk about all the different things we might call that holiday. But this, this episode will drop on May day. Which is May 1st and is kind of the traditional day for celebrating this. As always, we view these holidays as more of like, kind of a week window, you know, seven days, give or take.

So if you have to do it on a Sunday or on a Saturday, that's all fine. Don't have to be super, super precise about it.

Yucca: Right. There's no, you know, cosmic being with a clipboard, keeping track of how on time you were. So, yeah. So, yeah, let's talk about names. So Mayday Beltane is another very common name for it.

Mark: Which is a Scottish derivation of what was originally an Irish language word, which is

Yucca: Which is the month of May, I

Mark: Yes. It's the month of May.

Yucca: yeah. So it's the beginning of the celebration of going into, into May what do you call it, mark?

Mark: Well, I call it mayday unless you're talking about in the summer, i in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case calling a day in November, mayday is probably counterintuitive. What I call it then instead is

oh, I think it was summer Tide. I think that was it.

Yucca: Some are tied. Okay, so you live in the Northern Hemisphere, but if you were in the Southern Hemisphere, that's the name that, that sounds like it

Mark: would, that I would use. Yeah. Because obviously it's pretty weird to call something in November, may day.

Yucca: I have.

Mark: And the reason that I do that is that I try to avoid all of the cultural names for. The holidays. And the reason for that is that when crafting atheopagan, I deliberately wanted it not to be rooted in any particular cultural tradition.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: I wanted it to be something that was modern and belongs to everybody who chooses to practice it. And that didn't have any cultural appropriation in it.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: that's,

Yucca: And of

Mark: why I went that way.

Yucca: there are plenty of folks who are atheopagan who do have a really strong tie. To a particular culture and do then apply some of the traditional names from their culture to that. But when you were creating it, you didn't have that tie right. And you wanted to make it so that it was, that it was welcome to everybody, right.

That

Mark: Right, and well, and, and you need to bear in mind that when I was creating it, I was only creating it for myself.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It, it, the, the whole idea that this was gonna turn into a movement was really a surprise to me. And I don't have a strong feeling of cultural derivation from anywhere. My antecedents came here 400 years ago, and any englishness that they had has long since been lost.

So I just feel like an American settler who doesn't have a claim to being indigenous to this land. But has a primary relationship with this land anyway. So I didn't want to use words like Beltane and SA and those kinds of words because they're derived from other places that I didn't have a, a connection with.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So I call it mayday. And then there are the, the variations of beta or bina. Are there any other names that you're familiar with?

Yucca: Were you second spring? Yeah, but I haven't, it's not like some of the other holidays that have, you know, 15 different names. Usually I just hear either Mayday or Beltane. Those are the ones that are pretty common. And I'll end up using those. I'm not a particularly verbal person. Right. So I don't really associate the holidays in a strong way with a name.

The, I will use names to communicate with other people, but when I'm thinking about it inside of me, I don't think in words. So it, it isn't, it doesn't have that, which is funny because I talk and I write for a living, but, but inside it's, it, none of it is attached to words. It's attached to feelings and to smells and experiences.

It's a, it's a very different ex interior experience and it's but it's really about, it's, it's spring is what it really is for me. Right. There's different, we split the year up into eight seasons in my family instead of four seasons. It's really more like, well, there's different ways. There's also, we also split it into two seasons, right?

There's summer and winter. There's the, the the hots and the light side of the year, and the cold and the dark side of the year, and then there's the official four seasons of the calendar. But those don't really match with what's happening in our environment. But the eight seem to work a little bit better.

And this is sort of the, the midpoint of the second spring, which really is more like the spring that, that most people would picture for a spring. The spring where you have warm days, but little bits of chili nights and the flowers are coming back and the, there's insects. The hummingbirds have just arrived back.

Right. So it, it feels very spring now for us.

Mark: Great.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I, when it comes to, to seasons, I mean there we have something similar here. We have the gold time and the green time from about July through December is the golden time when all of the hills turned gold because all of the grasses have gone to sea, then died off, and then. When the rains come in the winter everything turns emerald green and it stays that way until about June.

Yucca: How beautiful. Mm.

Mark: so there's the golden time and the green time. That's one way of dividing the year. And then there's the dark side, dark half and the light half, which. They're sort of offset from the gold time and the the green time. When it comes to four seasons, I really prefer the way that they count them in Ireland, which is that this holiday is the beginning of summer.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Rather than being the middle of spring, which is how it's figured in the official calendar of the United States. And the main reason for that is that there's all this wonderful early music about May and, and the beginning of summer because that apparently is how it was calculated back in the 16th century and earlier.

And I just love singing that stuff.

Yucca: And that's what works for that climate too, right? For he here. It really doesn't make sense to say it's the beginning of summer because it's still freezing at night. Right?

Mark: Well, and, and for you, I mean, summer is something that's unimaginable in Ireland. It's, it's so much hotter and so much drier than anyone who's never left Ireland has ever seen.

Yucca: Yes. I mean, we we're not too bad in terms of the heat, but compared to what, what they experience, it's a completely, it might as well be a different planet.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. Just in terms of how different climates are

Mark: So all of this goes to one of the principles, well, no, I won't say principles cuz we've got official 13 principles, blah, blah, blah. One of the ideas that, one of the concepts that that we have in atheopagan, which is adapting your own wheel of the year. I mean, you're, you're hearing from just me and Yucca and tho those are two of, you know, millions of possible different ways of parsing the year, depending on where you live and what's happening in the natural world.

So in

Yucca: are important to you? Right. Which of those things do you focus on and which things don't matter as much?

Mark: Exactly, exactly. So and so, really encourage listeners, you know, if you're in the process of organizing your practice and kind of figuring out how you want to do what you're doing you know, be thinking about that for …