Months of the Year

May

Spring Months

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "May." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/months-of-the-year/may.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). May. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/months-of-the-year/may

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-may,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {May},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/months-of-the-year/may},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

May is the fifth month of the Gregorian civil year, thirty one days long. Ovid himself offered three derivations for its Latin name, Maius, from the goddess Maia, from the maiores or elders, or from Maiestas, and declined to choose among them. The month holds Beltane on its first day, the Buddhist festival of Vesak at its full moon in most years, the Marian devotions of the Catholic May, and the Baha'i Declaration of the Bab on the twenty third.

Facts

Disputed

Origin of the Name

Ovid's Fasti, book five (Loeb Classical Library edition, 1931), stages the derivation of Maius, the Latin name behind May, as an open contest rather than settling it: the poet has three separate speakers propose the goddess Maia, the maiores or elders of Roman society, and Maiestas, the personification of majesty, as the name's origin, and Ovid himself declines to decide among the three, leaving the question exactly as unresolved in his own poem as it remains in modern philology. 2

The rival derivations are ancient themselves rather than a modern dispute layered onto Ovid's account; Ovid stages Maia, the maiores and Maiestas as competing claimants in his own poem, and modern philology has not closed the question he left open.

Identity

Position

5 of 12 1

Observance

Observance Note

Beltane on 1 May, Our Lady of Fatima on 13 May and the Declaration of the Bab on 23 May are fixed; Vesak falls at the full moon, within May in most years 1

Correspondences

Season Correspondence

Late spring in the northern hemisphere and late autumn in the southern; the calendar's customary seasonal labels follow the northern convention 1

Learn More

A Name Ovid Left Open

When Ovid reached the fifth month in the Fasti he did something unusual for a poet explaining a calendar: he set out three derivations for the name Maius and refused to pick one. The month might belong to Maiestas, divine majesty; it might belong to Maia, mother of Mercury by Jupiter, whose sacrifice fell on the first of May; or it might honour the maiores, the elders of the community, with the following month answering it for the iuniores, the young. Each account had its advocates in his day, and modern scholarship has not closed the question either, so May stands beside April and June among the Roman spring months whose names were already contested when the poets set out to explain them.

Roman May had a shadowed side. The Lemuria, kept on the ninth, eleventh and thirteenth, was the season when the restless dead walked, and the head of a household rose at midnight to cast black beans over his shoulder nine times, buying the ghosts out of the house. On the fourteenth or fifteenth the pontiffs and Vestals threw rush figures called Argei from the Sacred Bridge into the Tiber, a rite whose meaning was already obscure to the Romans who performed it. Between the ghosts and the cleansing of the temple of Vesta that followed in June, the stretch of late May and early June was held unlucky for marriage, a superstition Ovid records and one that outlived the religion that made it.

The Bona Dea rites of the first of May, closed entirely to men, opened the month with a secrecy that later made them a byword.

Vesak, Beltane and the Month of Mary

May opens with Beltane, the Gaelic fire festival that marked the turn to summer, when cattle were driven between paired bonfires for protection before the move to summer pasture. Modern Pagans keep it as one of the four great cross quarter stations of the Wheel of the Year, and its eve survives across northern Europe as Walpurgis Night, a bonfire night that German folklore filled with witches on the Brocken.

The full moon of the month is Vesak for most of the Buddhist world, the single day on which Theravada tradition places the birth, the awakening and the final passing of the Buddha. Homes and temples are lit with lanterns, the infant Buddha image is bathed with sweet tea or scented water, and since 1999 the United Nations has formally recognised the day, which falls in May in most years and occasionally in early June. The same lunar reckoning usually brings Lag BaOmer, the bonfire break in the Jewish counting of the Omer, into May as well.

For Catholics the whole month belongs to Mary. May devotions fill parish churches, statues are crowned with flowers in the rite popularly called the May crowning, and the month holds Our Lady of Fatima on the thirteenth, the anniversary of the first apparition reported by three shepherd children at Fatima in Portugal in 1917. The Baha'i calendar adds one of its holiest days near the month's end: the Declaration of the Bab on the twenty third of May, marking the evening in Shiraz in 1844 when the Bab announced his mission, the moment from which the Baha'i era is counted.

Sources Celtic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch (ed.) with The Buddhist World of Southeast AsiaDonald K. Swearer, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)

Cross-Tradition Connections