Suzanne Ress
Beltane, opposite to Samhain in the Wheel of the Year, is a major fire festival celebrated traditionally from the eve of April 30 through May 1. Great magical restorative bonfires meant to cleanse, purify, and render fertile the earth, domestic animals, and humans alike were lit as evening fell.
Beltane is also a solar festival celebrating fertility, birth, motherhood, and the blossoming forth of all new life. In ancient times, Beltane was when the Great Mother got together with the sun god (sometimes known as the Green Man) and, following their lead, human couples also united sexually, perhaps playfully in the shadows beyond the bonfire or in the woods after the traditional maypole dance.
It is believed that the earth’s reproductive and sexual energies are at their peak at Beltane, and with Beltane, the light half of the year begins. Beltane Eve is a likely time for fairies to be seen, and one of the preferred foods of fairies is the wild strawberry (Fragaria vesca), which is abundant from mid-April to mid-June, and especially sweet and luscious at Beltane.
Bees, bumblebees, and butterflies pollinate the little white flowers of wild strawberry plants when there isn’t too much else in bloom to satisfy their pollen and nectar needs. When these small, ripe red heart-shaped berries come, with their lovely sweet scent and juicy flavor, they are a perfect representative fruit for Beltane.
It is not only fairies who love wild strawberries; hedgehogs do too! Yes, hedgehogs will gorge on them, and so will field mice, foxes and their kits, and many other wild mammals and birds. Whether cooled by night dew or warmed in the midday sun, these little morsels are beloved by many, including humans. Wild strawberries have been eaten by humans since at least the middle Paleolithic era (Lemmers).
In case you are not familiar with wild strawberries, they are a lot smaller than cultivated strawberries—about as big as red currants—but with a much sweeter, intense strawberry flavor. These are not to be confused with false wild strawberries, or Indian mock strawberries (Potentilla or Duchesnea indica), which produce yellow rather than white flowers and a tasteless non-poisonous red fruit easily confused by non-experts with real wild strawberries. The real ones are unmistakable because when you walk near them you will smell a strongly luscious, sweet strawberry perfume.
Wild strawberries grow by above ground runners and rhizomes, and, given the right soil, light, and moisture conditions, will spread rapidly to cover large areas of ground.
For hundreds of thousands of years, wild strawberries were prized as a spring treat by humans and were foraged by people all over Europe and the Americas until, around the Middle Ages, monks and other people with gardens started transplanting them into their herb and kitchen gardens. The wild strawberry’s qualities remained the same until the 1700s in France when the first cultivar was created. That was the Fragaria x ananassa, the same one most people are accustomed to finding nowadays in the supermarket, often year-round. The cultivated strawberry is much larger, smells great, and is juicy, but is generally not nearly as sweet and flavorful as the wild strawberry.
From the original cultivated strawberry came hundreds more cultivated varieties: small ones, large ones, late-producing, early-producing, long-producing, deep ruby red, white, yellow, purple, you name it. One well-known special strawberry cultivar is the Little Scarlet (an offshoot of Fragaria virginiana, which was originally the North American wild strawberry). It was brought to Essex, England, from North America by the Wilkin family in the early 1900s and is grown only at the Wilkin family’s Tiptree Estate to be made into preserves by Wilkin & Sons.
Another notable cultivar is the pineberry strawberry. This is a white strawberry with red seeds and a pineapple-like taste. White strawberries are considered to be alright for people with a strawberry allergy to eat. White Alpines, another white strawberry good for allergy sufferers, are small, like wild strawberries, but, of course, white.
Strawberry Mythology
Some Native American Indian tribes have long associated wild strawberries with spring and rebirth, as they are the first wild fruits to ripen. They used them mixed with cornmeal to make strawberry bread, which white settlers then transformed to strawberry shortcake, a traditional Memorial Day weekend dessert.
During medieval times, the strawberry signified perfection and righteousness and strawberry fruits also symbolized esteem, love, purity, passion, health, and perfection, and were a popular embroidery motif. In heraldry, depictions of strawberry leaves were sometimes used to denote rank.
Strawberries are one of Venus’s symbols, due to their red heart shape. Frigga, the Norse marriage goddess, was believed to smuggle dead children to heaven by hiding them in strawberry patches. Both Freya, the Norse goddess of love, and the Christian Virgin Mary have been associated with strawberries.
Dutch early surrealist artist Hieronymus Bosch painted one of his most famous works, the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in the fifteenth century. It is now housed at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain, and, if you are unfamiliar with Bosch’s work, it is wonderfully strange. The center panel, which represents a lustful earthly paradise, features many oversized strawberries. At the bottom right are two human-sized strawberries, one bursting open to emit round blue balls, and the other being used as an exercise ball by a naked woman. Further up on the right side of the same panel is a forest glade scene depicting a group of naked men surrounding one seated naked woman. One of the men is offering the woman a strawberry as big as a melon. Another giant strawberry, with fairy wings, rides on the back of a naked man, a spiny tail emerging from a slit on its side.
About thirteen years ago, my husband and I purchased our small farm. At the time, it was not yet a farm but merely a partially built abandoned house on a large parcel of hilly agricultural land. In May, when we first came to look at it, the “lawn” around the shell of the house consisted of overgrown wormwood, plantain, stinging nettles, dandelions, and many other greens and grasses. There was one low-growing large swathe, a carpet of wild strawberries, in front of the house, which, when we walked across it, gave off such a strong, sweet perfume that it seemed we had entered a jam factory.
We made regular visits through the month of May to pick containers full of these wild strawberries while we waited for the building permits to be granted.
When, finally, we’d gotten the permits, contracted a construction company, and had the work of finishing the house done, a couple of years had passed. Because of all the heavy trucks driving over the “lawn,” the wonderful strawberry carpet was nothing but a field of mud.
Later, a landscaping crew arrived, plowed the dirt, planted a traditional lawn, and put up a sprinkler system. For a few years, we had a fairly normal grass lawn, but, little by little, wild plants, greens, and grasses blew in and self-sowed. Not so secretly, I was pleased to see the lawn becoming wild again and purposely mowed around the patches of daisies, mother-of-thyme, Mary’s eyes, and whatever else I liked. A couple of years ago, while mowing, I noticed a small patch of wild strawberries where once there was the carpet, and I allowed it to stay. Each time I mowed the lawn, I observed with satisfaction that the patch was spreading, becoming once again a magic Fragaria carpet.
Our neighbor’s toddler daughter, whose favorite fruit is strawberry, loves to sit down in the center of this Fragaria carpet during the Beltane month, searching for and picking the little whole strawberries to eat when she comes to visit. Of course, when she gets up, the seat of her pants is stained with spots of strawberry juice.
She gave me an idea, and one May evening I threw caution to the wind and lay myself down on the magic Fragaria carpet after dinner (and a couple glasses of wine). Fireflies twinkled all around me, and I could see the waxing half moon through the tree leaves above me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sweet fragrance deeply, feeling the cool of the strawberry leaves, listening to the last of the croaking frogs. It seemed the perfect setup for a fairy visit and, in fact, it wasn’t long before I fell into a half-sleep state. It seemed that the Fragaria carpet was lifting off the ground and hovering a foot or two above the yard, taking me with it for a magic carpet ride. Through half-closed eyes, I saw many glowing little spirits zipping about all around me on the carpet. Were they fireflies or were they fairies? Something extraordinary was going on. I lay there, amongst the fairies, being carried about, out of the yard, away from familiar territory, into a Bosch-like surreal world of lusty pleasure for a length of time I could not measure and, when I finally arose, I felt unusually revitalized, my clothes stained and perfumed with strawberry juice.
The Fairies
At Beltane, you are perhaps more likely than at any other time of the year to see, or otherwise sense, the presence of fairies. A twilit walk along a quiet woods path, a meditation in a flower garden, or just relaxing on your porch as the sun goes down and the moon rises are all good ways to increase your chance of witnessing a fairy visit.
Traditionally, some food and drink from the Beltane festival was offered to the wee folk.
In parts of Bavaria, it was traditional come springtime to tie little bags or baskets of wild strawberries to the cows’ horns to appease the fairies and elves, and to protect the cows.
Some of the fairies’ preferred gathering places at Beltane are “fairy rings”—circles of wild mushrooms; as well as circles of lawn daisies, patches of wild violets, patches of wild thyme, and, most of all, swathes of wild strawberries. It is here that groups of fairies gather to celebrate Beltane and gorge on their favorite fruit. If you would prefer that they play no tricks upon you over the course of the year, you may wish to leave them a dish of freshly whipped cream to accompany their strawberries on the eve of April 30. And if you are lucky enough to catch a glimpse of them, do not speak or move suddenly, and especially do not try to take a picture of them, as these actions startle and tend to anger them, and they will likely take revenge on you through trickery. Just stay put and, rather than gawking, close your eyes halfway—this will make them easier to see.
Once our house was mostly finished and we’d moved in, I invited several people over for a Beltane celebration on the evening of April 30.
I had created a hidden glade in the woods at the top of the hill with wooden benches, flowers and flowering bushes, an in-ground firepit, a few found garden statues, and a mosaiced chair I’d made over the winter, depicting the young buck I’d seen in those woods numerous times. I’d placed a circle of slate stepping-stones around the fire pit and planted myrtle and ivy all around it. This became a special, magical, sanctified place, and it was where our coven started to hold its celebrations and rituals.
For Beltane, I had invited a few people from outside of our coven, and among these was a male friend who had expressed interest in a female friend of mine he’d met several times at parties, so I invited her too. She arrived with an unexpected surprise—a Tupperware container of fresh strawberries and another one of whipped cream.
We went through our ritual by the light of garden torches, a little fire in the pit, and candle lanterns and, when we’d finished, it was time for cakes and ale. The group broke into smaller units and people ate and drank and conversed and had fun. I had lost sight of my male friend and the strawberry woman, but when I did see them again, she was hand-feeding him strawberries and whipped cream, and each time she gave him a finger full of whipped cream, he sucked and licked it off sensually. It wasn’t long before the two of them disappeared together somewhere, out of the visibility afforded by the flickering firelight and, shortly thereafter, they initiated a long and loving relationship. Had the Beltane fairies had something do with it? My guess is yes!
Reference
Lemmers, Nadine. “Food in the Stone Age.” Hunebed Nieuwscafe. September 2016. https://www.hunebednieuwscafe.nl/2017/01/food-in-the-stone-age/.