Maypole History – A New Way of Looking at Maypole Heritage

If you had been in Rome in March of 354AD you may have been lucky enough to see a musical and dancing procession bearing rushes to a sacred building. Any self respecting morris dancer of the Lancashire tradition would have felt at home. However, this was no church, but a pre-Christian temple that was the destination. The temple that the procession was dancing towards was that of Cybele, mother goddess with warlike attendants. She had been brought from the East, in 204BC, from Phrygia in modern day Turkey, which was then outside the area of Roman control…