u/Plenty-Climate2272

While it may seem strange to us today, especially those of us in the Pagan community, who grow up thinking of May as a spring-summer time of growth and fertility and life, the Romans did not see things that way. A preoccupation with death, the spirits of the dead, and the more insidious aspects thereof, predominated in the month.

Today marks the end of the Lemuralia (or Lemuria), a Roman festival of the dead held on three non-consecutive days on the 9th, 11th, and 13th of May. It was an ancestral feast held more in the privacy of the home than in the public square, to appease the vengeful or angry spirits of one's dead ancestors and family.

At midnight on the 9th, the head of the household would go through the house barefoot and toss beans behind him, saying, "With these cast, I redeem me and mine". The others in the house would clash bronze pots together, saying "spirits of my ancestors, begone!" This was done to exorcise malevolent or angry ancestral spirits, or other ghosts of the home. A class of the dead termed lemurae and or larvae became a part of folklore, restless or angry spirits. Sometimes a bowl could be left out for this on these three nights, filled with flour, salt, olive oil, or perhaps a coin, something to appease them. Unlike other dead, this was not done to cultivate their presence but to bribe them, after a fashion. To give them what they needed so that they would go on their way. The Vestal priestesses would, it is said, conduct similar rites in their temple to propitiate the founders of the city itself.

A myth developed, which Ovid relates, that the festival originated from Romulus conducting rites to appease the vengeful spirit of his brother Remus. Ovid was of the opinion that the Lemuralia was originally the Remuralia, though this almost certainly a flight of fancy on Ovid's part.

This exorcism of the dead left a dark mark across the whole month, and the Romans considered May to be an unlucky and gloomy month for certain kinds of endeavors to be started. In particular, marriages were seen as ill-omened if they began after May 9th.

The Lemuralia, for such an intimately domestic Roman festival, has a long legacy and cultural reach. The Christians appropriated certain Roman customs as they became, bit by bit, integrated into mainstream Roman society and the dominant religion in the Roman Empire as the 4th century rolled on. Among this was an observation of a day of the dead in early-to-mid May; Saint Ephrem is attested as having celebrated a festival to the dead Saints on 13 May among his Syrian congregants in the mid-300s.

In 609, the Pantheon temple in Rome was rededicated as a church to St Mary and All the Martyrs, in which Pope Boniface IV placed relics of the martyrs on 13 May, the final day of the ancient Lemuria, following in established tradition of attending to the souls of the dead. From this, we have the foundations of All Saint's Day, and the accompanying Allhallowtide.

In the 730s, Pope Gregory moved the feast day to early November. In that time, a plague or fever was coursing its way through Rome, and the summer months were usually the worst. To avert a major public health crisis, the festival was moved to a later, cooler month in anticipation of the large numbers of pilgrims. In the British Isles this change coincided with existing local festivals, resulting in a unique form of the Allhallowtide festivity and All Hallow's Eve in particular. From that we get Halloween as we know of it.

Image is an image from a Pompeii mosaic, speculatively named "the Skull and the Level". It is a kind of memento mori, a reminder of mortality and death.

I originally posted this on the Hellenism subreddit, which I co-moderate. When I figure this might be appreciated here due to its subject matter being May Day and its history.

Today is May Day, reckoned not only as the king of the month of May, but traditionally as the beginning of the summer season. It came to mark the turning of the seasons from the rains and liminality of spring, and to the warm growing season, as well as the migration of flocks into summer pastures. There is perhaps no other country more associated with the diverse May traditions than Britain, which due to its status as the cradle of Modern Paganism, has engendered an appreciation for May Day within the wider Modern Pagan movement, including among Anglo and American Hellenists. But where does it come from? And why is it so evocative?

May Day has its roots in several disparate celebrations of the start of summer. The British Isles have always been a melting pot for Northern Europe, and there are traces of Celtic, Mediterranean, Saxon, Norse, and French influences in many aspects of its culture. So we'll have to dig into quite a few geographically widespread roots to get to the bottom of this. The earliest known festivities that resemble May Day are the Greco-Syrian Maiuma and the Roman Floralia.

The Maiuma, despite the name, doesn't directly refer to the month of May, but rather is a Semitic word likely meaning "water-carrying", though other etymologies abound. It was a festival, especially fanciful in Antioch, celebrating the sacred marriage of Dionysus and Aphrodite, and came to be celebrated on May 1st. It comprised both secretive nocturnal and possibly orgiastic rites, as well as daytime rituals of theatrical performances, mumming, and aquatic games. However, despite its Syrian origins, it seems to have spread all over the Roman East, with written record of it in Nicaea, Tyre, Gerasa, and Aphrodisias; it expanded even into Italy, with celebrations noted in Ostia and Rome.

It may have began as a hybridization of the Dionysian Anthesteria with a local fertility festival of Astarte or Atargatis, but it quickly developed a life of its own. Even after Christianization, it was still celebrated in the Byzantine Empire, decoupled from its religious meaning and instead taking the role of a cultural festivity. Even as late as the 770s, some form of it was celebrated by emperors as ritual bathing after military victory. Despite this prolific presence in Mediterranean polytheism, the Maiuma \*probably\* didn't exert a strong influence on May Day is it came to develop in Western Europe, being more of an Eastern phenomenon and only came as far west as Rome because that was the metropole. And yet, the consistent association with fertility and vegetation gods is a tantalizing connection, especially if it is linked to other Greek flower festivals.

The Floralia is likewise an ancient festival, taking place in late April and early May, generally April 28th to May 2nd or 3rd, in honor of the goddess Flora. While sometimes equated with the Greek nymph Chloris, Flora was one of the oldest Roman goddesses, possibly of Sabine origin, and her festival was of considerable importance. In the Floral rites, people of all classes and backgrounds could join in, wearing brightly-colored garments in parades and dances and feasts, with even prostitutes and slaves allowed to take part. The formal start of it is traced to the 240s BCE with the founding of a temple of Flora, but it contains many archaisms that imply much older roots.

In contrast to the rites to Ceres earlier in April, wherein celebrants wore white garments, Floral celebrants wore colourful clothing and were decked in garlands of flowers, and occasionally went around nude. Carousing, drinking, public feasts, games, and burlesque theatrical performances filled what became a week-long affair, culminating in a hunt for goats and hares. It was one of the few public festivals were prostitutes were included; usually, sex workers were (like actors and musicians) outcast from civil society. Most prostitutes were slaves, but even free ones were not protected the same way as citizens. But in the Vinalia and Floralia festivals, they participated in mock gladiator games, and danced in ecstatic parades.

The Gaels celebrated Bealtaine (also spelled Beltane) when the hawthorn flowers bloomed, as a fire festival celebrating the start of summer. This typically occurred close to the end of April, so when they adopted the Roman calendar, it was normalized to being on May 1st. Great bonfires were lit, and livestock were driven between fires on hillsides, as a kind of purification rite. This was a ritualized re-enacting of the taking of livestock down to the summer pastures, making sure to cleanse and bless them.

Even into the 18th century, cattle would be made to jump over fires for luck, and people would join in as well. A bull would be sacrificed and burned in the bonfire, a practice that continued into the Early Modern period in spite of Christianization. We have archaeological of this from evidence at Uisneach Hill in Westmeath, Ireland. Widespread folk belief held that fairies were especially active on the eve of Beltane, as they would be on the eve of Samhain six months later, and people were particularly susceptible to being carried away by the fair folk.

Various explanations for the similarity between Floralia and Beltaine have been considered: an early cultural transmission between La Tene people (commonly thought of as the archetypal continental Celts) and the Italic tribes; a common Indo-European cultural artefact given its presence across Europe; or, rather simply, a coincidence arising from climatic similarities that Italy holds with Transalpine Europe. It is also equally possible that these Northern European festivals were influenced by the Roman Floralia instead of the other way around, given Rome's widespread cultural imperialism.

In England, Germanic cultural influences predominated. While May Day took some elements from Beltane and the related, Welsh festival of Calan Mai, as well as likely residual elements from the Roman flower-festival, several key features of it had no clear origin in Celtic or Roman celebrations. The erecting of a maypole in the village square, the crowning of a May Queen to lead festivities, and hobby-horse riding are all peculiarities that share some elements with May celebrations in continental Germany.

Now, May 1st was also celebrated by Medieval Christians as both a feast day to St Walburga, and as a day of devotion to the Virgin Mary. But these festivities do not seem to reflect the spirit of the saints' feast days, as Walburga's festival was focused on the miraculous properties of her tomb, and Mary is viewed by Catholics as an icon of purity. By contrast, May Day festivities had a licentious and sexual character, a carnivalesque fair in the village green replete with suggestive innuendo and merriment. In fact, we can see similar celebrations on Walpurgis Night, the eve of May, in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and mainland Central Europe.

All of this seems to point to a Germanic background to these May Day celebrations, perhaps recalling pre-Christian traditions. But it could also point to an enduring Roman influence, as the Germanic May Day might have roots in the Floralia as celebrated in the Rhine frontier by communities of Roman soldiers. While Roman culture did not penetrate very far into the heart of ancient Germany, one might imagine that the situation was very different in the murky frontier; and when the Germanic tribes finally crossed the Rhine in the great migrations, they Romanized fairly quickly. The cultural customs may have merged prior to its spread across other parts of Europe, before things were written down about it. We may never know. The peculiar character of May Eve and May Day celebrations were sufficiently startling to compel its banning by Puritans in England in the 1650s, though it was revived during the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

By the late 18th century, most of these customs had waned in the face of changing climate and changing technology. A gradually industrializing Europe, a climatically colder Europe, placed less importance on May as a celebration of spring's transformation into summer. But in the late 19th century, things changed; the Romantic revival in folklore, and the Modern interest in comparative religion and the pagan roots of Western civilization, led to revivals of folk customs and ancient festivals. May Day and Beltane were among those. These same pressures and influences also led to the nascent Pagan revival, an attempt by some to revive and restore pre-Christian spirituality, worldviews, and beliefs in the Modern world.

Some of the early figures in this revival, such as Gerald Gardner (founder of Wicca) and Ross Nichols (founder of Neodruidism) frequently corresponded in an attempt to find some common ground and develop some core practices and an ethos. Among these was an eight-pointed ritual calendar, which held May Eve as a holy day. The Druids named it Beltane, after the Celtic fire festival, though the Wiccans retained its English name well into the 1970s. It really took until about 1980 for Beltane to become standardized across the Neopagan horizon.

But the Neopagan conception of Beltane adopted a lot of imagery from the more Anglo-Saxon May Day, such as the May Queen (and King), the Maypole, and the emphasis on sexuality as opposed to agricultural or pastoral concerns. The Neopagan Beltane has since taken on a strongly sexual element, almost entirely framed as a fertility festival, which has been controversial in various circles for different reasons. Christians obviously dislike the licentiousness of it.

Some Pagans, playing at respectability politics, have downplayed the sexual side of their religion in order to make it more presentable; still others critique it for its overbearing heteronormativity, feeling that it excludes LGBTQ+ pagans in the process of hewing towards a fertility tradition. This is the unforeseen consequence of a small mystery religion developing into the largest sect in Modern Paganism, becoming something it was never really intended to be. And aside from these criticisms, there are polytheistic reconstructionists whose approach is more historically-based, and attempt to find the original roots of Beltane or May Day, bypassing the Neopagan interpretations entirely.

And around all of this swirls a melange of misinformation, readily spread on the internet by well-meaning but ignorant people. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some of what I've typed contains some inaccuracies, especially as it relates to fairy folklore, which I am not an expert on– for that, I recommend Morgan Daimler.

All that to say, modern Beltane/May Day is a bit of a mess.

Despite its tangled history, the First of May is easily one of the most widely-celebrated Pagan holidays, and evokes a strong sense of wild nature and the liberated human spirit, no matter the form it takes.

Image is of the painting "Queen Guinevere's Maying" by the painter John Collier, painted in 1900 and currently stored at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, England.

Today is May Day, reckoned not only as the beginning of the month of May, but traditionally as the beginning of the summer season. It came to mark the turning of the seasons from the rains and liminality of spring, and to the warm growing season, as well as the migration of flocks into summer pastures. There is perhaps no other country more associated with the diverse May traditions than Britain, which due to its status as the cradle of Modern Paganism, has engendered an appreciation for May Day within the wider Modern Pagan movement, including among Anglo and American Hellenists. But where does it come from? And why is it so evocative?

May Day has its roots in several disparate celebrations of the start of summer. The British Isles have always been a melting pot for Northern Europe, and there are traces of Celtic, Mediterranean, Saxon, Norse, and French influences in many aspects of its culture. So we'll have to dig into quite a few geographically widespread roots to get to the bottom of this. The earliest known festivities that resemble May Day are the Greco-Syrian Maiuma and the Roman Floralia.

The Maiuma, despite the name, doesn't directly refer to the month of May, but rather is a Semitic word likely meaning "water-carrying", though other etymologies abound. It was a festival, especially fanciful in Antioch, celebrating the sacred marriage of Dionysus and Aphrodite, and came to be celebrated on May 1st. It comprised both secretive nocturnal and possibly orgiastic rites, as well as daytime rituals of theatrical performances, mumming, and aquatic games. However, despite its Syrian origins, it seems to have spread all over the Roman East, with written record of it in Nicaea, Tyre, Gerasa, and Aphrodisias; it expanded even into Italy, with celebrations noted in Ostia and Rome.

It may have began as a hybridization of the Dionysian Anthesteria with a local fertility festival of Astarte or Atargatis, but it quickly developed a life of its own. Even after Christianization, it was still celebrated in the Byzantine Empire, decoupled from its religious meaning and instead taking the role of a cultural festivity. Even as late as the 770s, some form of it was celebrated by emperors as ritual bathing after military victory. Despite this prolific presence in Mediterranean polytheism, the Maiuma *probably* didn't exert a strong influence on May Day is it came to develop in Western Europe, being more of an Eastern phenomenon and only came as far west as Rome because that was the metropole. And yet, the consistent association with fertility and vegetation gods is a tantalizing connection, especially if it is linked to other Greek flower festivals.

The Floralia is likewise an ancient festival, taking place in late April and early May, generally April 28th to May 2nd or 3rd, in honor of the goddess Flora. While sometimes equated with the Greek nymph Chloris, Flora was one of the oldest Roman goddesses, possibly of Sabine origin, and her festival was of considerable importance. In the Floral rites, people of all classes and backgrounds could join in, wearing brightly-colored garments in parades and dances and feasts, with even prostitutes and slaves allowed to take part. The formal start of it is traced to the 240s BCE with the founding of a temple of Flora, but it contains many archaisms that imply much older roots.

In contrast to the rites to Ceres earlier in April, wherein celebrants wore white garments, Floral celebrants wore colourful clothing and were decked in garlands of flowers, and occasionally went around nude. Carousing, drinking, public feasts, games, and burlesque theatrical performances filled what became a week-long affair, culminating in a hunt for goats and hares. It was one of the few public festivals were prostitutes were included; usually, sex workers were (like actors and musicians) outcast from civil society. Most prostitutes were slaves, but even free ones were not protected the same way as citizens. But in the Vinalia and Floralia festivals, they participated in mock gladiator games, and danced in ecstatic parades.

The Gaels celebrated Bealtaine (also spelled Beltane) when the hawthorn flowers bloomed, as a fire festival celebrating the start of summer. This typically occurred close to the end of April, so when they adopted the Roman calendar, it was normalized to being on May 1st. Great bonfires were lit, and livestock were driven between fires on hillsides, as a kind of purification rite. This was a ritualized re-enacting of the taking of livestock down to the summer pastures, making sure to cleanse and bless them.

Even into the 18th century, cattle would be made to jump over fires for luck, and people would join in as well. A bull would be sacrificed and burned in the bonfire, a practice that continued into the Early Modern period in spite of Christianization. We have archaeological of this from evidence at Uisneach Hill in Westmeath, Ireland. Widespread folk belief held that fairies were especially active on the eve of Beltane, as they would be on the eve of Samhain six months later, and people were particularly susceptible to being carried away by the fair folk.

Various explanations for the similarity between Floralia and Beltaine have been considered: an early cultural transmission between La Tene people (commonly thought of as the archetypal continental Celts) and the Italic tribes; a common Indo-European cultural artefact given its presence across Europe; or, rather simply, a coincidence arising from climatic similarities that Italy holds with Transalpine Europe. It is also equally possible that these Northern European festivals were influenced by the Roman Floralia instead of the other way around, given Rome's widespread cultural imperialism.

In England, Germanic cultural influences predominated. While May Day took some elements from Beltane and the related, Welsh festival of Calan Mai, as well as likely residual elements from the Roman flower-festival, several key features of it had no clear origin in Celtic or Roman celebrations. The erecting of a maypole in the village square, the crowning of a May Queen to lead festivities, and hobby-horse riding are all peculiarities that share some elements with May celebrations in continental Germany.

Now, May 1st was also celebrated by Medieval Christians as both a feast day to St Walburga, and as a day of devotion to the Virgin Mary. But these festivities do not seem to reflect the spirit of the saints' feast days, as Walburga's festival was focused on the miraculous properties of her tomb, and Mary is viewed by Catholics as an icon of purity. By contrast, May Day festivities had a licentious and sexual character, a carnivalesque fair in the village green replete with suggestive innuendo and merriment. In fact, we can see similar celebrations on Walpurgis Night, the eve of May, in Scandinavia, the Baltics, and mainland Central Europe.

All of this seems to point to a Germanic background to these May Day celebrations, perhaps recalling pre-Christian traditions. But it could also point to an enduring Roman influence, as the Germanic May Day might have roots in the Floralia as celebrated in the Rhine frontier by communities of Roman soldiers. While Roman culture did not penetrate very far into the heart of ancient Germany, one might imagine that the situation was very different in the murky frontier; and when the Germanic tribes finally crossed the Rhine in the great migrations, they Romanized fairly quickly. The cultural customs may have merged prior to its spread across other parts of Europe, before things were written down about it. We may never know. The peculiar character of May Eve and May Day celebrations were sufficiently startling to compel its banning by Puritans in England in the 1650s, though it was revived during the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.

By the late 18th century, most of these customs had waned in the face of changing climate and changing technology. A gradually industrializing Europe, a climatically colder Europe, placed less importance on May as a celebration of spring's transformation into summer. But in the late 19th century, things changed; the Romantic revival in folklore, and the Modern interest in comparative religion and the pagan roots of Western civilization, led to revivals of folk customs and ancient festivals. May Day and Beltane were among those. These same pressures and influences also led to the nascent Pagan revival, an attempt by some to revive and restore pre-Christian spirituality, worldviews, and beliefs in the Modern world.

Some of the early figures in this revival, such as Gerald Gardner (founder of Wicca) and Ross Nichols (founder of Neodruidism) frequently corresponded in an attempt to find some common ground and develop some core practices and an ethos. Among these was an eight-pointed ritual calendar, which held May Eve as a holy day. The Druids named it Beltane, after the Celtic fire festival, though the Wiccans retained its English name well into the 1970s. It really took until about 1980 for Beltane to become standardized across the Neopagan horizon.

But the Neopagan conception of Beltane adopted a lot of imagery from the more Anglo-Saxon May Day, such as the May Queen (and King), the Maypole, and the emphasis on sexuality as opposed to agricultural or pastoral concerns. The Neopagan Beltane has since taken on a strongly sexual element, almost entirely framed as a fertility festival, which has been controversial in various circles for different reasons. Christians obviously dislike the licentiousness of it.

Some Pagans, playing at respectability politics, have downplayed the sexual side of their religion in order to make it more presentable; still others critique it for its overbearing heteronormativity, feeling that it excludes LGBTQ+ pagans in the process of hewing towards a fertility tradition. This is the unforeseen consequence of a small mystery religion developing into the largest sect in Modern Paganism, becoming something it was never really intended to be. And aside from these criticisms, there are polytheistic reconstructionists whose approach is more historically-based, and attempt to find the original roots of Beltane or May Day, bypassing the Neopagan interpretations entirely.

And around all of this swirls a melange of misinformation, readily spread on the internet by well-meaning but ignorant people. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if some of what I've typed contains some inaccuracies, especially as it relates to fairy folklore, which I am not an expert on– for that, I recommend Morgan Daimler.

All that to say, modern Beltane/May Day is a bit of a mess.

Despite its tangled history, the First of May is easily one of the most widely-celebrated Pagan holidays, and evokes a strong sense of wild nature and the liberated human spirit, no matter the form it takes.

Image is of the painting *Floralia* by the painter Hobbe Smith, painted in 1898.

Image here is of a Roman carving from a sarcophagus, depicting a *suoevetaurilia*, the sacrifice of a pig, a ram, and a bull, in this case to the god Mars, currently housed in the Louvre Museum. This particular kind of ritual, one the most sacred and revered in Rome, was associated with a variety of spring and early-summer festivals, with both public and private celebrations, wherein the sacrifice of the three was to cleanse and purify the fields. Similar rites were held throughout the spring, which saw many festivals of growth, renewal, purification, and protection, such as the Cerealia, the Parilia, the Floralia, and the Ambarvalia.

During the Roman Warm Period, a roughly 650-year long era of high global temperatures amenable to high crop yields in temperate climates, the month of April was suffused with the winding-down of Spring, as the year transitioned into Summer, and so many of the festivals held during the month pertained to growth, fertility, and preparing for the farming season. Spring was when most crops were planted, to be tended to and grown during the hot summer months. April in particular contained many celebrations that were framed around female deities, or deities of uncertain or fluid gender, and the ritual activity of women.

In a way, this contrasts and is a doublet with March. In the Roman mind, masculinity was associated with the active and vigorous side of nature, so March corresponded to a masculine creative impulse, predominated by a combination of agricultural and military festivals, often dedicated to Mars, as well as the rituals of renewal. March was when wheat was planted, and preparations made to begin the military campaigning season. April, by contrast, was a time of languid growth, and the attention to the religious affairs of women and with female deities meant to the Romans a focus on the passive aspects of nature. The soil, having received the seeds, incubated it so that it might grow and sprout anew. They, uh, weren't a very *subtle* people, the Romans.

A prelude to these celebrations was a sacrifice to Venus on the kalends of April, but the first major festival of the month was the Megalesia or Ludi Megalenses, beginning on April 4th. This was a week-long festival and series of public games in honor of the Great Mother goddess, heavily associated with the Graeco-Anatolian goddess Kybele, whose worship was brought from Anatolia to Rome as a deliberate reflection of cults to Kybele on Mount Ida, near the ruins of Troy. It started as the anniversary of the carrying of Kybele's cult image (a rough statue or eidolon) into the city in 204 BCE, and developed over time into a massive festival.

Only a day delayed the beginning of the Cerealia, or Ludi Cereri, the festival and games in honor of Mother Ceres, goddess of the grain and harvest. Ceres was often conflated in poetry with the Greek goddess Demeter. However, Ceres is distinct in that her role was almost entirely pertained to the grain cycle, whereas Demeter had strong associations with divine order and law, and the civilizing power of agriculture. It is possible, though, that Ceres adopted such functions over time, as her rituals during the Cerealia reflected Demeter's rites at the Thesmophira more and more, with torchlit processions, stark all-white clothing, and acts imitative of the Demeter-Persephone myth. One archaic rite was the tying of a burning brand to a fox's tail and releasing the animal into the Circus Maximus, where it was chased and hunted. The other days of the festival were concerned with theatrical competitions.

In the midst of the Ceres festival was the Fordicidia, held on the ides of April. This holy day was framed around the sacrifice of a pregnant cow, from which the name derives: fordae caedendae, or "the cow which is to be slaughtered". In Roman myth, the sacrifice was began by the second king of Rome, the Sabine nobleman Numa Pompilius, to whom was ascribed much of the unique features of Roman law and religion. The wild god Faunus came to him in a dream and told him that a sacrifice to the Earth goddess Tellus would alleviate a recent famine. As in many prophetic statements, this was in the form of a riddle: "By the death of cattle, King, Tellus must be placated: two cows, that is. Let a single heifer yield two lives for the rites." He solved the riddle by sacrificing a pregnant cow, which provided both the heifer and the calf.

Ovid would posit that the sacrifice is symbolic and intended to be a mirror of the intentions of the rite. A growing life, the calf, was offered along with its mother to ensure the new life growing in the Earth– seeds and vegetation just coming to sprout from Mother Earth. A life for a life, as most sacrificial rituals entail. The unborn calf in particular is a liminal creature, neither alive nor dead, not a full victim but still a sacrifice. Religious ritual inherently deals with liminal spaces and things, with straddling the space between mundane and numinous. The ashes from the sacrifice would be mixed with the dried blood from the October Horse and sprinkled on the ritual bonfires at the Parilia.

The Parilia, held on the 21st, was an archaic festival with two distinct meanings. It originated as a rustic festival to honor the mysterious god Pales, a deity of unknown gender with pastoral concerns. At dawn, a shepherd would clean their animal pens, and make a bonfire out of bean straw, olive branches, laurel, and sulphur, and throw onto it the ashes of a sacrificed and burnt animal. The shepherd would jump through this flame, dragging his sheep along with him. Offerings of millet, cakes, and milk were then presented before Pales, after which the shepherd would wet his hands with dew, face the east, and repeat a prayer four times to invite Pales' protection against accidental wrongs in the coming year. Then he would drink a beverage of milk and boiled wine, then leap through the flame three times.

The urban Parilia would incorporate the ashes of the Fordicidia sacrifice and the blood of the October Horse in what was offered to the bonfire, this time cultivated by the priestesses of Vesta for the day. This represented the official citywide involvement in this rural festival, because the Romans aestheticized rural life and farming as noble pursuits of a pure people. In time, the urban Parilia came to be seen also as a celebration of the founding of Rome, a kind of Roman Independence Day. This element gradually overtook the traditional form during the middle Imperial era.

After the Parilia was the Vinalia, a wine festival on April 23rd in honor of Venus and Jupiter, saw the blessing of the previous year's vintage, and the start of its everyday use. Venus was seen as being, along with Liber and Bacchus, patron over profane wine, the kind of wind used in normal, habitual drinking. Jupiter oversaw the wine reserved for sacral use. Prostitutes, actresses, and young plebeian girls would conduct ceremonial offerings of myrtle, mint, and roses to Venus at her temple on the Capitoline hill. On the 25th was the Robigalia, a dog sacrifice to the god Robigus and corresponding goddess Robigo, to protect the wheat fields from disease.

Then on the 28th began a week-long festival to the goddess Flora, the great Floralia, which would have outsize influence on other flower festivals and spring celebrations in cultures far afield from Rome. April gave way to May, as Spring gave way to Summer, and the gods were propitiated for a bountiful life.

So, although the month is nearly over, let us nevertheless turn our attention towards those gods of growth and bounty. Let us honor them, and let us receive their blessings of prosperity, amity, good health, and happiness.