Blog
Beltane - May festival of collective renewal
Tuesday 12th May 2026
Mike Mullins
First of May, Beltane and it's a full moon, a hare moon. Everywhere I look the leaves on trees have finally opened. They've taken their time. Initially tightly furled against the winter cold but now with May warmth in the air, trees are greening.
Last October whilst recovering from a knee replacement operation I planted a large rowan sapling in our south London front garden. Now over 12 ft high with spindly branches its leaves and delicate white flowers are out waving in the May breeze.
Among the Irish and Scots rowan gave protection from harmful spirits and defined the boundary between worlds. Linked to poetic inspiration and second sight, eating rowan berries granted wisdom. If you’re looking for poetic inspiration though I wouldn’t recommend eating the red berries raw! They cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. If you cook, dry, or freeze them they’re fine to eat and you can make a “poet’s jam” from them!
Winter mating is over and fox cubs are emerging from their dens and playing with their siblings outside in the evenings and early mornings on our estate. As I cycle, or drive round, I’m often confronted with fox cubs lying, chilled out, in the middle of a road. Its quietly reassuring. They feel safe here with us.
In the twilight badger cubs too are playing outside their setts while their parents’ forage. May is definitely family time. Outside our back door in the evening bats are beginning to zig zag their way over our street’s back gardens.
Hawthorn, one of the most common trees in English hedgerows, is now everywhere covered in a froth of abundant blossom, swathes of tiny white five petalled flowers. Also known as the may, or faery tree it symbolises the Celtic fire festival of Beltane at the beginning of May. A symbol of male and female energies hawthorn played a big part in May day celebrations in my rural infant school in Wroughton Wiltshire back in the early seventies. Doors were decorated with hawthorn blossom and our elected school May queen wore a hawthorn blossom crown. I’m guessing our teachers did this in an echo of old memories of fertility and good luck rites for households and newlyweds. Of course, at the age of five dancing round the maypole with gangly legs in shorts, I had no idea what it was all about !
In my ancestral home, Ireland, Hawthorn tree is associated on with the Aes Sídhe (pronounced roughly ees shee), or for us English, fairies, the people of the mounds or the other world. These are not the twee, tiny, winged fairies of English folklore. They are ancient, powerful, liminal beings often understood as the faded divine race of the Tuatha Dé Danann, (the People of the goddess Danu) who retreated beneath the hills after Ireland was taken by the ancestors of contemporary Irish.
There are many kinds of Irish Aes Sidhe beings and spirits. Some are beautiful and dangerous, others mournful, helpful, wild, or terrifying. It was said in Ireland that if you slept beneath a hawthorn tree, you'd be kidnapped by the Aes Sidhe. You might be held for three hours in Aes Sídhe time, but when you returned to human time you’d discover you’d been gone forty years and your friends and family had forgotten you, or passed on.
Hawthorn leaves flowers and berries apparently expand the arteries helping the cardiovascular system supply blood. They are also believed to soothe a broken heart and relieve anxiety. So, if you’re anxious or broken hearted join the Aes Sidhe and sit with them at the foot of a hawthorn tree with your back against the trunk and let the holy tree heal you. But try not to sleep !
Dew gathered on Beltane morning was believed to carry blessing and beauty. Washing the face in May dew was said to preserve youthfulness and vitality. Fires lit from a communal sacred flame symbolised the renewal of social and spiritual bonds. Sometimes all household fires would be extinguished and rekindled from the Beltane fire, representing collective renewal. Spiritually, Beltane speaks of reunion. The meeting of earth and sky, body and soul, human life and the living world. Life is not only something to manage, or survive but something to participate in fully. After the restraint and inwardness of winter, Beltane invites us back into relationship with nature, with desire, with creativity, with community, with the wild parts of ourselves.
In an echo of nature, I too find myself oscillating between my “winter self”, of defended contraction and my “May self” of renewed participation in life. My work as a consultant requires competence, insight, leadership, output, sales and emotional constraint. Yet in my heart’s core I'm finished with self-reliance. I yearn for connection, mutuality, truthful gentleness. May is the month when things become relational again. People gather outdoors, the senses come alive and memories become more vivid. I find myself looking to shed my old identity, to move from control, to surrender, intellect to embodiment, from loneliness to connection, exhaustion to renewal and achievement to soul.
So, Beltane asks us:
• Where in your life is the fire wanting to return?
• What wants to blossom now that fear and frost are loosening?
• What would it mean not merely to observe the living world but to be part of it again?