I recently learned about, from the book, The Wheel of the Year: An Illustrated Guide to Nature’s Rhythms by Fiona Cook and Jessica Roux, the Celtic holiday Beltane. I’m a little surprised and disappointed in myself that I am just now learning about this. It is celebrated on May 1st, or halfway between the vernal equinox and summer solstice, and so is the beginning of summer. According to the book,
Farmers would lead their cattle around the fires in a ritual that was meant to protect their animals from disease. Then they would move their livestock into fresh Summer pastures.
Wikipedia reports something similar:
Also known as Cétshamhain (‘first of summer’), it marked the beginning of summer and was when cattle were driven out to the summer pastures. Rituals were performed to protect cattle, people and crops, and to encourage growth. Special bonfires were kindled, whose flames, smoke and ashes were deemed to have protective powers. The people and their cattle would walk around or between bonfires, and sometimes leap over the flames or embers.
Reading this, especially the part about leading cattle around fires and moving them to summer pastures, reminded me of several passages from Thoreau discussing his delight at seeing cows reclaim their wildness or otherwise behave in unexpected ways.
As if Nature could support but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and who, which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! it depends on how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.
Walden, Conclusion
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?
Walking
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,—Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
Walking
In the first passage from Walden he is comparing his desire to adequately express truth to cows who escape their enclosures—their domesticity—and are then unbounded. In order to express the truth he has come to believe he must experience life in all its extravagance and abundance and overwhelming fecundity, life beyond its normal bounds, much like the cow that escapes its bounds. This is different than the buffalo who, not having been confined and domesticated like the cow, continually seek out newer already unbounded pastures. Thoreau is describing, made clearer in the passages from Walking, the reassertion of a wildness tamed, much like he describes himself and crab apples in Wild Apples:
Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.
Like seeds in the earth, seeds which by May have begun to leaf out, this wild instinct reasserts itself this time of year, in humans and cattle alike.How many of us have stored up our knowledge and remained in the barn eating last year’s hay instead of going to the summer fields to eat the new grass? Should we not, like cattle, kick the milking pail and jump the fence to reach our summer pastures?
What I find especially intriguing about this is the way Thoreau connects this reassertion of our wild instincts with ignorance. Knowledge, especially knowledge limited to the human realm, is what keeps us in the barn year round, like the unnatural farmer. It is a bit odd that Thoreau admires cattle and domestic livestock as a model for wildness, though it is important to note that when Thoreau was alive all the ‘wild’ animals had been extirpated. In Natural History of Massachusetts he says,
“The bear, wolf, lynx, wildcat, deer, beaver, and marten, have disappeared from this vicinity; the otter is rarely if ever seen here at present; and the mink is less common than formerly.”
But beyond the fact that ‘wilder’ animals weren’t around the domesticated animals who still retained their instincts were more appropriate analogs to him and his contemporaries. It makes sense then that livestock jumping their enclosures and feeding in the summer pastures would serve as a model for humans—our wilder instincts are also like seeds, waiting to germinate and fruit, waiting for us to jump our fences and feed on the summer grasses.