Saturday, May 1, 2021

Sexy Maypoles: Euro-Pagan May Day (video)


Celebrating International May Day: Customs, Facts
(Music With Dr. Hooper, April 30, 2021) This video celebrates the older May Day, prior to it becoming International Workers Day.

One day I'll make sex respectable, Bunnies.
May 1 is a holiday rich in history and folkloric tradition, for it celebrates the return of spring, when a young man's fancy turns to "love" (which young women understand to be a euphemism for sex). There are fun traditions, from baskets to a suggestive dance around an erect piece of hard wood called the "maypole."

Spring's giant pole?
Pole size contest in Munich, Germany (Duncanogi)
In Norse paganism, cosmological views hold that the world has a "world tree" known as Yggdrasil [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] or the Bodhi tree like Buddhism's axis mundi, Mt. Sumeru.

Some observers have also proposed phallic symbolism, an idea expressed by Thomas Hobbes.

Hobbes erroneously believed that the poles dated back to the Roman worship of the Greek fertility god Priapus, whose name gives us priapism, the painful condition of an unyielding erection brought on by Viagra and similar drugs.

Red-and-white pole, UK
This notion has been supported by various figures, including sex (or libido) obsessed psychoanalyst Ziggy Freud.

But phallic symbolism was attributed to the maypole as early as the later Early Modern period.

One sexual reference is found in John Cleland's controversial erotic novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure:

"...and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw,
with wonder and surprise, what?
not the play-thing of a boy,
not the weapon of a man,
but a maypole
of so enormous a standard,
that had proportions been observ'd,
it must have belong'd to a young giant" [8]. More

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