The Maypole Cultural War

The Maypole and the festivities that happen around it ignited the

first cultural war in early colonial America, a cultural war that, in

many ways, persists to the present day.



The tradition of the Maypole happens in places influenced by the

German Mythology. In this mythology the Maypole is

Yggdrasil, the tree of life, which brings together, connects many

worlds and realms. It connects the underworld with the middle world

(our world) with the heavens. It connects the mortal realm with the

realm of the gods and the immortals, it connects the realms of death

with the realms of life. And it connects the male with the female.



The first explorers and settlers of Anglo-America came from

Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare's England, Merry Old England.

It was Merry Old England because of its tradition of holidays, and

folk festivals which unabashedly remained essentially pagan, such as

the Maypole festival.


Merry Old England's calendar is similar to Merry Colorado's calendar

in that both are marked by seasonal celebrations which are also free

spirited, unruly musical festivals such as Telluride, Rocky Grass,

Yarmony Grass, Nedfest.



The Maypole ceremony derives from prehistoric phallic worship and

sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic is about the belief that like

produces like, that a festival that is about free and open sexuality,

music and dance will result in a spirit of fertility that will bring

an abundant increase in food crops, livestock as well as Human

fertility.



England's King James I who reigned from 1603-1625 as Cromwell and the

Roundheads began to rise, revived and supported Maypole festivals to win support

among rural common folk, to entertain his court, and to mock the

Roundheads.



Roundhead Phillip Stubbes wrote a description of an English Maypole

festival in the early 1600's: "... all the young men and maids, old

men and wives, run gadding over night to the woods, groves, hills, and

mountains, where they spend all night in pleasant pastimes.... The

chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they

bring home with great veneration.... And thus being reared up with

handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top...they fall to dance about

it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the Idols....

Of forty, three-score, or a hundred maids going to the wood

over-night, there have scarcely the third part of them returned home

again undefiled....



Stubbes was sure that the "grand captain of all mischief" the one that

was called "my Lord of Misrule" was Satan himself. He called the

Maypole festival an exercise in "heathenry, deviltry, whoredom,

drunkenness, pride and what not".



In 1644, when Cromwell and the Roundheads took power,

the Maypole Festival was banned, prohibited throughout England.

Yet Maypole festivals continued as a symbol of resistance to Cromwell and

his so-called Republic which was really a dictatorial theocracy.



The earliest erection of a Maypole in America occurred in 1628 in what

is now Quincy, MA., not too far from the Roundhead colony of Plymouth

Plantation. It was erected while Charles I still ruled.



Fifes, horns, fiddles, Indian drums and Indian flutes played as the

Maypole was raised to celebrate the return of life and the freedom and tolerance of

the new multi-cultural, multi-racial community.



The incident is described by Roundhead William Bradford, governor

of New Plymouth:



"They set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing about it for several days

at a time, inviting the Indian women for their consorts, dancing and

frisking together like so many fairies, – or furies rather, – to say

nothing of worse practices. It was as if they had revived the

celebrated feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices

of the mad Bacchanalians... They changed the name of the place, and

instead of calling it Mount Wollaston, they called it Merry Mount, as

if the jollity would last forever. But it did not continue long...



The Governor of Merry Mount, the erector of the Maypole, and noteable

Elizabethan was Thomas Morton.



He was an influential, socially connected lawyer and social reformer. He defended the

poor and oppressed from the rich and powerful. He rubbed elbows with

the likes of Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, and he was a life-long friend and

drinking buddy of Elizabethan playwright Ben Johnson.



In 1622 he visited the Plymouth colony and was disgusted by the

intolerance of the Roundheads towards all who in any way differed from

them. He was revolted by the Roundheads genocide of the American

Indians.


He called the Roundheads the "Lords of Limbo".


He returned to America in 1624 and established a colony and fur

trading post on a spit of land in what is now Boston Harbor. He

initiated a warm, amiable relationship with the American Indians, whom he loved and

respected.


As a result the Indians traded their furs with

Morton and the free colonists of the community which was eventually

named Merry Mount - and did not trade with the Roundheads. As a result

Merry Mount became the fastest growing and most prosperous English

colony in the Americas.



In 1628 the colonists erected an 80 ft. Maypole, topped with

deer antlers. Around this Maypole the mostly male English

colonists danced with and courted American Indian women.



This provoked a Roundhead crusade.



The Roundheads under Myles Standish raided and occupied Merry Mount the

following month (June). They chopped down the Maypole and arrested

Morton. He was put in stocks in Plymouth,

given a kangaroo trial and marooned on a desert island off the coast of

New Hampshire.



The only thing that saved Morton from the Roundheads' gallows and dungeons was

his social connections back in England.



He was left on the island without food or tools and the Roundheads

hoped that he would starve to death. But he was supplied with an

abundance of food by his American Indian friends and allies who

eventually assisted him in escaping the island, and returning to

England.



Merrymount survived without Morton for another year. But was

continually embattled by the Roundheads who called the colony Dagon,

after the 'evil' Semitic Sea God. They eventually razed the colony to

the ground.



In England Morton began a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay

Company, the political power behind the Roundheads' colonization of New England.


Morton gained influential backing for his cause. Charles I, who was eventually

beheaded by the Roundheads, backed Morton and revoked the Massachusetts Bay

Company's

charter. As a result the Plymouth Plantation was isolated, and the

Roundheads were no longer supplied by England and other English

colonies making Plymouth "a place of woe." Many colonists left

Massachusetts for the relative safety of Connecticut.



In 1637 Morton published 'New English Canaan' a scathing denunciation

of the Roundheads' colonization of New England. He called for the

creation of a multicultural America along the lines of Merry Mount.



Morton's victory was short-lived. Soon after the book's publication the Roundheads

began the English Civil War.



In 1642 Morton fled England and Cromwell's theocratic tyranny and

went to Maine.



But in the end Morton couldn't help himself. He went to Plymouth Colony to confront and denounce his mortal enemies.



He was arrested and accused of being a Royalist “agitator”, and put on

trial for his role in the revocation of the colony's charter, as well

as charges of sedition. He was imprisoned in Boston.



The Roundheads kept delaying his trial until Morton's health failed in the dank

dungeon. Only when he was broken, and mortally ill was he released. Morton's life

ended among the West Country planters of Maine. He died at the age of 71 in 1647.



In Morton's war with the Roundheads the Maypole not only became the symbol of

Yggdrasil. The Maypole became the symbol of the then unrealized possibility that

Anglo-America could be a free,

tolerant, multi-cultural, multi-racial society.



In the Roundheads' war with Morton the whipping post and the

hangman's gallows became the symbols of the America that was created

by the Roundheads after their apparent victory over Morton and the

multi-cultural, multi-racial community of Merrymount.



And yet in these United States of America, non-Hispanic whites will

soon be a minority, and our multi-cultural multi-racial reality could

be more like Merry Mount than the Plymouth Plantation.