May and Midsummer

"Lady Smocks all silver-white / Do paint the meadows with delight" (Shakespeare)

A Pagan Movement Archive item from Tony Kelly:

Maytime is a time of brightening days, of flowers and insects and new green leaves. All life seems to be bursting out anew, birdsong is exuberant and we're abundantly aware of the fertility of it all. It's a feeling of joy in your soul which won't be gainsaid.

Yet, it can also be approached in a quantitative scientific way. Some years ago, when we were touring the whole land here every week and noting each new species of flower to appear, we were able, at the end of the year, to construct a graph showing week by week the number of new species of flower appearing for the first time that year. The graph was down at zero in Yule and for a month or two thereafter; the first flowers began to appear in their ones and twos, and gradually the pace increased. As the weeks went by, each new week brought a greater abundance of new species into bloom to add to those already in flower. After a time, these increments began to become smaller again. They still added to the flowers already in bloom, making them even more abundant, but the actual increases began to get smaller. When we drew the curve, the peak was in Midsummer, but the steepest slope was in Mid-May; it was in Mid-May that the Goddess was unfolding all her finery the fastest. And May in the modern Gregorian calendar is very close indeed to Mayday in the old Julian reckoning.

We did the same thing for the appearance of each new species of moth at our windows, and again we got a curve of the same kind, and again the steepest slope was in Mid-May (and we used a book to confirm the picture for the beetles). May is the month of acceleration as Midsummer is the season of abundance. In May the flowers, the moths and butterflies and the other insects and the green leaves are arriving fastest; in Midsummer they're most abundant.

MAY QUEEN

I went out to the wild places to see where the Spring had come, and where she was still biding her time in the closed bud's seclusion, and guarding warmth yet beneath the folded petals. The Earth was soft in the wooded cwm and I stood on a rock in the rushing stream while the waters flowed around me. To one side the bank was full of bright green leaves of wood-garlic, on the other the grey rock was piled high and clothed with a hundred shades of green and yellow from the many mosses that grow there - as beautiful and exotic a garden as one could wish for. Back on the bank I saw a single flower of wood-anemone showing bright yellow stamens in the white petals though the leaves were still unfolded. And yellow was the colour that speckled the green of the roadside verges, with coltsfoot in the gravelly place and daffodils by the garden paths and dandelion and celandine under the bare twigs on the hedges.

Now the day has come when the banks are brighted with as much yellow as there is green and primroses grace the woodland floor and the trees are a rustle of wind-blown leaves. So I watched for a while over the wood and my heart called out again to go to the place of trees: to see my lady there. Her green cowl about her brown hair, she walks through the grey woods. She treads a path of ragged leaves and petals open as she goes, yellow buds unfold on every green stem. She casts her green cloak over the brown land and the woods come alive to look upon her. Her dewy skin as soft as lady-fern leaves, and moist like a buttercup looks in the morning grass. The Wind sighs as her scent sails on the morning air.

May

So it is Mayday, an appropriate time to begin this project: the month when the faerie hosts ride through the woods and all the dryads, naiads and nymphs, all the elves of standing lakes and groves, the denizens of the ferny hollows where the trysting place is, emerge into the greening shade of the greening forest. 

Then the Horned One walks a path that takes him across the fording place of the stream and stops a while to play a little on his pipe as he tastes a scent on the air.  

And then there is only one path through the greenwood that he would follow as he plays a tune for his Lady who comes in splendour through the trees as the gates of the Otherworld open.