Lá Lárbhliana

I don’t celebrate the Irish Holidays quite like everyone else. So while the community was celebrating Bealltainn last month, I was patiently waiting for June 1st to roll around. And what a better way to celebrate that than a post dedicated to it?

As of January 2019 all individual posts about any holidays I celebrate are out of date and will be getting getting redone as soon as I can manage it with my health.

Bealltainn is one of the four major holidays that are present within Early Irish practice; according to Tairis, it:

[…] marks the beginning of the summer season and it traditionally heralded the start of grazing the cattle and sheep on the fresh grass in the hill pastures; from a long, dark winter spent mostly indoors, the beginning of summer marked the start of outdoor activities, looking after sheep that roamed the hills, herding and milking the cows, making butter and cheeses and so on.

In Tochmarc Emire, the holiday is mentioned as being “Summer’s Beginning”. This is interesting to me, because it’s in direct contrast to Samhain– which is considered “Summer’s End”; the winter season itself is clearly described as stretching from Samhain until the next Bealltainn. While that may not be an important juxtaposition to most, for me it sticks out.

Samhain (which becomes Lá Deiridh in my practice, and falls on the meteorological winter) is, very clearly, a celebration of death and the ancestors. By juxtaposing it against Bealltainn this way in the Tochmarc Emire, it sets it up as its counterpart and opposite; the celebration of life, and of the living. This is fantastically in line, too, with the ways in which Bealltainn was traditionally celebrated- and the purpose behind the holiday’s traditions.

We see a focus on the liminal spaces here, too; like Samhain, Bealltainn has its own significant aspects of protection- particularly surrounding doors, windows, or other entryways to the house. But where Samhain‘s practices are believed to safeguard the family and its health, Bealltainn focuses on the family and its prosperity.

If you infer context from the practices surrounding the cattle driving, this aspect of protection extends to the community by proxy; as Tairis points out:

The festivities were generally aimed at protecting and ensuring a plentiful supply of milk, butter and cheese for the coming year […] Unlike today (in a large part of the western world, at least), the failure of the crops or milk supply in any community would have had a very serious and immediate impact indeed; the failure of the crops, disease of livestock or failure of the milk to come would have been devastating either in combination or on their own. Famine was a very real threat […] As in Scotland, Ireland, and Man, the communal fires that were lit on the hills served the purpose of purifying and protecting the people and their herds from sickness and misfortune.

Bealltainn also shares significant elements with the holiday of Lùnastal, which I celebrate as Lá Fhómhairna in September; like Lùnastal, Bealltainn was also a time to pay the rents.

This is an odd association to most, probably, for what’s usually considered a form of fertility festival… But less odd when you realize that Lùnastal was the beginning of the harvest, and Bealltainn the beginning of the grazing. And that’s significant because the Irish model, from what we can gather, wasn’t a traditional worship system. It was one of reciprocity.

Irish faith and practice wasn’t a relationship between parent and child, or beloved and worshiper… But a relationship between Tenant and Landlord; we don’t own this land, we’re just renters here. The land belongs to them– not to us– and there is a contract that must be upheld... That agreement says “you pay the rents at Bealltainn and Lùnastal, and we keep your crops good, your people safe, and your livestock healthy- and if you’re really lucky, no one gets carried away by the Aos Sí in the middle of the night”.

When viewed in that context, paying the rents at suddenly makes sense; if Lùnastal was the beginning of the harvest, and Bealltainn the beginning of the grazing, and our relationship is that of Tenant and Landlord… Then why wouldn’t you pay the rent at the two times of the year that are arguably the most integral for the health and prosperity of self, family, and community?

But Imbolq (or Lá Céadamh, as I celebrate it) isn’t left out, either… Here we see the familiar connection to water and the holy wells; as James Mackinlay recounts from Rv. Dr. Gregor in Folklore of Scottish Lochs and Springs, about the Fergan Well in particular:

The first Sunday of May, and Easter Sunday, were the principle Sundays for visiting it […] The hour of arrival was twelve o’clock at night, and the drinking of the water and the washing of the diseased part took place before or at sunrise. A quantity of the water was carried home for future use. Pilgrimages were made up to the end of September, by which time the healing virtues of the water had become less.

And again concerning Helen’s Well in Kirkpatrick-Fleming parish:

It was much resorted to on May Day for the eure of sickly children.

It was so ingrained that he records that, in 1629, “crowds of people were in the habit of making a pilgrimage on May Day to Christ’s Well in Menteith, where they performed certain superstitious rites“.

Contrasting that is, obviously, the age old tradition of fires- which, at this point, is so much the focus of the holiday in modern culture that it requires little (if any) explanation; is was used to purify, to protect, and so much more, and was perhaps the central element of celebrations.

Lá Lárbhliana is what I have chosen to call the Holiday which has replaced Bealltainn on my calendar. The new name roughly means “center day of the year”- or at least it should, provided I got things correct… Simple, though, right? Accurate, and straight to the point.

Like the rest of the holidays, too, I’ve chosen to shift the date of its celebration- moving it from May 1st (May Day), to June 1st in accordance with the start of the meteorological summer… Especially since, at least here, anything before June is still very much spring in terms of climate (and rain… So much rain).

As for practices, for the most part I’ve kept my practice of Bealltainn relatively close to the original; there’s so little that really requires changing, here. But the biggest differences come largely in the connotations and themes of the holiday for me.

With such a clear juxtaposition of elements (between life and death, fire and water), Lá Lárbhliana takes on a significant emphasis on balance in my eyes. For that reason, balance and the cycle become central- as opposed to the elements of protection that are clearly more traditional… After all, I have no livestock to take to pasture. No animals that must be safeguarded. No need to stave off hunger, or famine.

Which actually brings up an interesting point: If you have none of this, does the holiday and its practices become meaningless? I don’t think so, no; regardless of whether I have cattle to drive, I still have a family and community that bears protecting… And so the rents are still paid. The ceremonial fires are still lit. The doorways are still marked. The house is still decorated with summer wildflowers. And everything is purified and blessed for the season.

What seems the most central to many of these practices in my mind, however, is the act of pilgrimage; the women drive the livestock to pasture. Men leave for summer fishing. The sickly migrate to the wells for healing- and everyone returns at the end of the season.

This is something I want to incorporate more heavily into the holiday as I celebrate it. And yet again, there are no cattle. But I do have something: Camping- specifically, near a lake… And the Bealltainn season generally coincides with camping season for us.

For that reason, I want to incorporate camping as an integral part of the holiday- or, at minimum, the season itself. Not only for its representation of the pilgrimages made, but for its emphasis on nature. To me it seems a way of reconnecting with responsibility- and of celebrating community. After all, hardly anyone camps alone. It’s generally seen as a communal act. A gathering- whether or friends, families, or strangers.

Outside of that, I’ll likely pull many of the additional practices I participate in from both Lá Céadamh and Lá Fhómhairna– albeit with a few changes; the juxtapositions and similarities there are too relevant for me to ignore.

This, of course, is my own personal way of celebrating the holidays in the best way that I am able. You may feel free to draw inspiration from it or completely disagree with it if you wish (and I do welcome discussion and critique of it).