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https://atheopaganism.org/2018/04/22/hows-that-maypole-thing-work/\n\xa0\nRemember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.\nS4E15 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\n\xa0\n\xa0\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your host Yucca,\nMark: And I'm the other one, mark.\nYucca: and today we have another holiday episode, so welcome to the next spring holiday for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.\nMark: Yeah, and of course we're gonna talk about all the different things we might call that holiday. But this, this episode will drop on May day. Which is May 1st and is kind of the traditional day for celebrating this. As always, we view these holidays as more of like, kind of a week window, you know, seven days, give or take.\nSo if you have to do it on a Sunday or on a Saturday, that's all fine. Don't have to be super, super precise about it.\nYucca: Right. There's no, you know, cosmic being with a clipboard, keeping track of how on time you were. So, yeah. So, yeah, let's talk about names. So Mayday Beltane is another very common name for it.\nMark: Which is a Scottish derivation of what was originally an Irish language word, which is\nYucca: Which is the month of May, I\nMark: Yes. It's the month of May.\nYucca: yeah. So it's the beginning of the celebration of going into, into May what do you call it, mark?\nMark: Well, I call it mayday unless you're talking about in the summer, i in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case calling a day in November, mayday is probably counterintuitive. What I call it then instead is\xa0\noh, I think it was summer Tide. I think that was it.\nYucca: Some are tied. Okay, so you live in the Northern Hemisphere, but if you were in the Southern Hemisphere, that's the name that, that sounds like it\nMark: would, that I would use. Yeah. Because obviously it's pretty weird to call something in November, may day.\xa0\nYucca: I have.\nMark: And the reason that I do that is that I try to avoid all of the cultural names for. The holidays. And the reason for that is that when crafting atheopagan, I deliberately wanted it not to be rooted in any particular cultural tradition.\nYucca: Mm-hmm.\nMark: I wanted it to be something that was modern and belongs to everybody who chooses to practice it. And that didn't have any cultural appropriation in it.\nYucca: Right.\nMark: that's,\nYucca: And of\nMark: why I went that way.\nYucca: there are plenty of folks who are atheopagan who do have a really strong tie. To a particular culture and do then apply some of the traditional names from their culture to that. But when you were creating it, you didn't have that tie right. And you wanted to make it so that it was, that it was welcome to everybody, right.\nThat\nMark: Right, and well, and, and you need to bear in mind that when I was creating it, I was only creating it for myself.\nYucca: Yeah.\nMark: It, it, the, the whole idea that this was gonna turn into a movement was really a surprise to me. And I don't have a strong feeling of cultural derivation from anywhere. My antecedents came here 400 years ago, and any englishness that they had has long since been lost.\nSo I just feel like an American settler who doesn't have a claim to being indigenous to this land. But has a primary relationship with this land anyway. So I didn't want to use words like Beltane and SA and those kinds of words because they're derived from other places that I didn't have a, a connection with.\nYucca: Right.\nMark: So I call it mayday. And then there are the, the variations of beta or bina. Are there any other names that you're familiar with?\nYucca: Were you second spring? Yeah, but I haven't, it's not like some of the other holidays that have, you know, 15 different names. Usually I just hear either Mayday or Beltane. Those are the ones that are pretty common. And I'll end up using those. I'm not a particularly verbal person. Right. So I don't really associate the holidays in a strong way with a name.\nThe, I w