Abstract
May Day, a holiday rich in allegorical landscape rituals, has a complex and multifarious history. Now after millennia of various interpretations and celebrations, May Day at last seems to be entering obsolescence. But its ruins, embedded in society, are still widely recognized, and the staging of landscape festivals is still fundamental to the cultivation of community. The first part of this essay traces May Day's historical development, applying to it theories of festival and carnival, and highlighting points where it has been appropriated and reborn with new significance. The second part attaches to May Day's surviving rituals a new allegorical meaning relevant to current conditions of society and landscape. The essay proposes a revival of May Day which takes form as a festival sited at a land reclamation earthwork in the Pacific Northwest. The May Day event creates a site-specific point of mutuality, or community, in the debate regarding the use of the regional landscape as an industrial resource versus the preservation of its fertility.
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