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After a quick look at Yahoo!'s May Day category and a consultation with Compton's Encyclopedia, we feel confident in telling you that the origins of the May Pole lie forever hidden in an impenetrable mist of pagan rituals and pre-Christian history. Nevertheless, a few interesting facts have emerged from the darkness. May poles are phallic symbols. Yep, it's true. They were used in British fertility rites to usher in spring and ensure fecundity in crops and livestock. Villagers would go out into the forest, cut down an appropriately sized tree, and decorate it in the town square with ribbons and flowers. The Britons may have inherited
this festival from the Romans, who threw some legendary spring bashes of their own. The Romans ruled the British Isles well into the fifth century A.D. They celebrated Flora, the goddess of plants and flowers. These fertility rites fitted snugly with the agricultural rituals of the pre-Christian Britons. In the sixteenth century, May poles were actually banned as heathenistic totems. In 1583 a fellow named Phillip Stubbs wrote disapprovingly of May poles, "But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-Pole, which they have bring home with great veneration And this being reared up...then fall they to daunce about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols."
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