Today, 5/1, is May Day. I, like most people I know, don’t know jack shit about May Day, except that “Mayday!” is the thing you’re supposed to shout into your intercom when your WWII fighter jet gets shot down. So I’ve decided to do a little investigating for educational purposes while I sift through SonicBids bands all hoping for a spot on our Band of the Day post.

As it turns out, May Day is about the most burly awesome pagan holiday ever. For the Irish Gaelics and Ancient Celts, May Day is also known as Beltane, a Fertility Rites of Spring Festival/Orgy.

I actually tried to spark a Beltane ritual a few years back at the Oregon Country Fair….despite it being July and two months past its time. I ended up with 3rd degree burns on my feet after taking mushrooms and fire walking. True story. Wrote a song about it. Look into that shit, you might get a few hippie chicks to do some fun pagan stuff with you.

Anyway, so I know what I’m planning on doing tonight, after my eight hour work day, thanks to International Workers Day, which also corresponds with 5/1.

From Wikipedia:

The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian Europe, as in the Celtic celebration of Beltane, and the Walpurgis Night of the Germanic countries. Many pre-Christian indigenous celebrations were eventually banned or Christianized during the process of Christianization in Europe. As a result, a more secular version of the holiday continued to be observed in the schools and churches of Europe well into the 20th century. In this form, May Day may be best known for its tradition of dancing the Maypole and crowning of the Queen of the May. Today various Neopagan groups celebrate reconstructed (to varying degrees) versions of these customs on 1 May.

The day was a traditional summer holiday in many pre-Christian European pagan cultures. While February 1 was the first day of Spring, May 1 was the first day of summer; hence, the summer solstice on June 25 (now June 21) was Midsummer. In the Roman Catholic tradition, May is observed as Mary’s month, and in these circles May Day is usually a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this connection, in works of art, school skits, and so forth, Mary’s head will often be adorned with flowers. Fading in popularity since the late 20th century is the giving of “May baskets,” small baskets of sweets and/or flowers, usually left anonymously on neighbors’ doorsteps.[2]

I have a penpal. The good ol’ fashioned kind. We don’t even TYPE our letters, we write them. By hand. He writes me wonderful things about atheism and pagans and life in a Texas prison. Yup, he’s in tha slamma. He’s a cool dude, tho. Here’s the latest from him… it’s a lovely letter and I encourage you to read it…

I know what you’re asking, “There was a first wave?” Yeah, I’m kind of fuzzy on that too. I remember hearing of a band a few years back, Skyforger, out of Latvia that combined crushing black metal intensity with traditional folk instrumentation (check out “Tumsa Un Sala” on their MySpace page — it’s rifftastic). That group formed in 1995, so maybe they’re the first wave.

I didn’t really get hip to this stuff until last year when Finnish pagan folk metal group Finntroll released Ur Jordens Djup. Despite being rooted in ancient folklore and brandishing an unrelentingly heavy sound, the album had a wild party sort of vibe that reminded me more of Gogol Bordello than what you’d expect to hear from a metal band, especially with the track “Korpens Saga.” The album has been dancing around the digital bonfire that is my iTunes play list ever since it first crossed my desk. Here’s a video for their song “Nedgang,” and it’s almost as cool as Krull.

This leads us to Eluveitie, who are hailed in their press release as “the leaders of a new movement, which has been capturing the imaginations of listeners worldwide.” I hesitate to call anyone the leader of anything, but I’m definitely hooked. Eluveitie, hailing from Switzerland, are much more melodic (think In Flames) and heavier on the folk instruments than Finntroll, but bring the same level of heat. Tomorrow will see the release of their third full-length Slania for Nuclear Blast. Juggling both jangly acoustic passages with full bore metal, Slania moves at a cinematic pace and would be perfectly suited as the musical accompaniment to a Braveheart-sized medieval battle epic.

Eluveitie has already been featured on MySpace Metal (though I’m not sure how such a thing would be viewed by people who are really into metal), and in addition to the new album the group will be a part of Pagan Fest USA, which will bring Eluveitie to the US and Canada along with like-minded groups such as Tyr, Turisas, Ensefirum and Suidakra. Dates are below.

Nudity’s okay to look at at work as long as it’s National Geographic. Go on, get yourself some culture.