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ON MAY DAY morning, before the sun rose, women used to wash their faces in the dew.
Not for vanity, but for clarity and good luck. For a kind of brightness that wasn’t about youth, but about seeing. You’d walk barefoot through the grass — wet, wild, alive — and you’d know, if only briefly, what it felt like to belong to the earth instead of owning it.
People tied red ribbons and flowers around cattle for protection. They lit fires not just for spectacle but to call in the summer, to purify the herd, to keep illness at bay. It wasn’t quaint. It was fierce. Tenderness and survival are intertwined.
Some said it was the season of butter stealing - that come Bealtaine, the veil thinned not only between worlds, but between hands — what was yours might not stay yours. The churn might turn hollow. The cow might dry up. A neighbour’s glance could curdle cream. The land, newly green and trembling with promise, was also thick with risk.
We often speak of May Day as a festival of flowers, of fertility, of warmth returning to the land. But we forget how closely joy was braided with fear. That same May morning when bonfires blazed on hilltops and young people leapt the flames for luck, doors were bolted, fires watched, and wells guarded like treasure chests — not for what they held, but for what they might lose.
In the stories passed down, those suspected of butter theft were almost always women. Poor, widowed, solitary or simply somehow deemed ‘odd’. A woman who asked for coal or a cup of milk on May morning might be enough to draw suspicion. “Don’t give anything away,” people said. “No fire, no milk, no water, no gifts.”
And so, in some parts, the countryside became a landscape of vigilance.
There were tales of old women dragging spancels — straw ropes used for cattle — through the dew of a neighbour’s field, stealing milk with each slow sweep. Of hares spotted suckling on cows’ udders at dawn. Of men chasing them with dogs, only to find, later, an injured woman behind a bolted door.
Giraldus Cambrensis, writing in the 12th century, tells of such transformations: women becoming hares, slipping through fences, stealing sustenance with teeth and tongue.
Shape-shifting, in these stories, is rarely a gift.
It is almost always a crime.
There was the threat of the well being “burned” by cinders dropped into it, a kind of curse cast by a visitor who came too early and left too fast. If the wrong person took the first water of the day, it could rob the community of its milk profit for the whole year. In response, families rose early. Some stayed up all night to guard the well. Others fetched the “flower of the well” before dawn and fed it to their cattle as protection.
These rituals of defence were intricate and intimate. Rowan branches and yellow primroses were strung over doorways. Butter churns were chained. Bonfire smoke was gathered in bowls and carried back to the hearth. Holy water was sprinkled on animals. Some struck their cows with a quicker-berry switch to drive out the invisible.
It would be easy now to dismiss these practices as quaint or backwards. But they weren’t just stories. They were systems of care. Memory-maps for surviving hunger, illness, isolation. And yes, they were also tools for control. For identifying enemies. For managing fear.
These customs also remind us of how gender, vulnerability, and power are deeply entangled. The accused were never random. They were women who lived alone. Women who owned little. Women who asked questions or offered herbs. Women whose usefulness had run out — or who refused to be used at all.
That logic is alive and well today.
We see it in the return of far-right rhetoric. In attacks on reproductive rights. In the demonisation of migrants. In how queerness, difference, dissent and refusal are once again made to stand trial in the court of public opinion. We see it in the algorithms. In the microphones of men who want women quiet and borders hard. In every politician who claims neutrality is outdated, as though peace were a luxury, not a commitment.
Here in Ireland, the debate around potential changes to our neutrality is one of the clearest signs of this erosion. For decades, our military neutrality rested on the principle that any deployment required the approval of the UN Security Council, the government and the Dáil. The Triple Lock has now been loosened. We are told it is pragmatic. Strategic. And yes, admittedly, we have a determined warmonger in Russia’s Putin at the doors of Europe. The world is changing, and we have to acknowledge that. But this does signal a profound shift: from protection to participation. From principled caution to silent complicity.
Bealtaine, if we let it, can help us ask better questions. Lora O’Brien and Jon O’Sullivan remind us that Bealtaine is not just about flowers and fire. They see it as a time to renew our commitment to protection, both practical and sacred. In their teachings, they urge us to walk the boundaries, to gather yellow blossoms, to cleanse our thresholds — not just with smoke or water, but with intention. Most importantly, they ask us to reflect on: What are we protecting? What needs to change? These are not abstract reflections, but urgent political questions. Around us, wars rage. Genocides unfold in real time. Governments fail or actively harm. Climate collapse accelerates. The bonfire on the hill cannot shield us from this. But it can still remind us of who we are when we gather around it.
From the Hill of Uisneach right across Ireland to Dingle town, Bealtaine is still celebrated, and regional traditions are embraced. The Uisneach Fire Festival brings people together to honour the sacred centre of Ireland, where flames are lit and rituals shared — part resistance, part renewal. In Dingle, where the Atlantic meets myth, Bealtaine is marked with seaside blessings, floral garlands and community walks that call in the season through joy and care.
In Killorglin, the Bealtaine festival founded by the late Conor Browne continues to grow, bringing together art, ritual, music and politics in ways that honour both ancestral memory and urgent present-day solidarities between people, land and the spirit of collective care. Folklorists and historians like Shelly Mooney in Wexford and Billy Mag Fhloinn in Kerry have worked to recover and reimagine these traditions for new generations. MagFhlionn’s contributions to Féile na Bealtaine in Dingle bring a theatrical and communal energy to contemporary celebrations, bridging folklore and embodied practice in vivid, provocative ways, most notably through the Pagan Rave Project.
These revivals matter because they resist the hollowing out of seasonal knowledge and communal time. They hold open a space where slowness is not failure, where repetition is not redundancy, but remembrance. They remind us that ritual can still be a form of resistance — a way to insist on presence in a world that demands acceleration, distraction, forgetting.
To gather, to light a fire, to walk the bounds of your place: these acts are quiet refusals. Of extraction. Of disposability. Of the myth that we are separate from the land, or from one another.
And yet, even as these festivals flourish, they do so in tension with a broader landscape of loss — ecological, spiritual, civic. A world where the weather is stranger, the soil more tired, the commons ever more divided. Where the rituals may survive, but the conditions they once protected against now roar louder than ever.
And now somehow the dew is harder to find. The grass is fenced off, chemically treated, bought up by developers who speak of land as “assets” and rain as “risk.” The bonfires still burn — but now they’re surrounded by hazard tape, or else condemned entirely.
What we once did to honour the season, to mark our kinship with soil and seed, we now outsource to corporations who sponsor tree-planting drives while cutting down forests elsewhere.
But still. Still, the impulse remains. In the rise of community gardens on vacant plots. In the school strike signs that say there is no planet B, and the fierce clarity in young faces. In people standing between bulldozers and bogland. In the quiet refusals — the ones who walk the canal instead of shopping, who repair instead of replace, who share instead of hoard. In the faces of the young, and the brilliant students I am privileged to teach at DCU, who ask sharp questions, who volunteer, who understand advocacy and activism, who imagine better ways of living together, even when the news tells them not to. In students across Ireland and the world who refuse despair, and make solidarity into practice.
Bealtaine was never about passive celebration. It was a reckoning. A refusal to surrender to coldness. A flare to say: life matters here. And we will guard it, if we must, with flame. And flame, of course, is never singular.
There is the fire that razes, that bombs, that incinerates. But there is also the fire of communion. Of bonfires lit not just to warm, but to warn. To gather. To signal across distance. To hold space. There is the fire of protest. Of workers who walk out. Of marches that clog streets with possibility. Of vigils, songs, fists — not only lifted in fury, but in collective clarity.
This, too, is May Day.
Because May Day belongs not only to the land, but to those who labour upon it, and beyond it. To the ones who rise up when the land is hoarded, when care is undervalued, when work is invisibilised. It is the day of garment workers and carers, dockers and teachers, farmhands and freelancers. It is etched in union banners and whispered at kitchen tables. It reminds us that labour isn’t just what’s waged — it’s what’s required for any of us to survive.
May Day insists that these labours, too, are sacred. That fire isn’t only for mourning or warning, but for insisting: another way is possible. So yes, Bealtaine is about butter and blossoms — but also about barricades. About collective bargaining. About housing that doesn’t break us. About reproductive autonomy. About climate justice. About rights—rights not as theory, but as breath. As bone.
And so, yes. It’s easy now to say the world is on fire and mean it literally. Australia, the US and Greece. The Amazon. Gaza. Khartoum. Our housing systems. Our summers. The temperature rises like a pulse, like the rage we’ve tried too long to suppress.
And yes, despite everything that’s been stolen — butter, land, futures — we still gather. Still tend. Still leap the flames. Not because we are untouched by grief, but because grief has taught us how to protect what remains.
The rituals may have shifted shape, but their core still holds.
We face the thresholds together — barefoot, trembling, bright with defiance — lit by what we still carry: the courage to imagine otherwise.
Dr Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist based in the School of Applied Language & Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University.
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