May Carob Smoothie

In 2025, Easter and May Day are unusually close together. Just as I wrapped up my Easter menu, my thoughts turned to recipes suitable for May Day. One simple recipe I created on Easter Saturday fits perfectly — a carob smoothie.

Ingredients:

• 1 ripe (brown) banana (approx. 125g)
• 200 ml (half a can) of coconut milk
• 1 litre of oat milk
• 60 g (three heaping tablespoons) of carob powder
• 100 g of date paste

Preparation:

Date Paste: Date paste is a fantastic sweetener for desserts, smoothies, and more. It’s simple to make: soak pitted dates in hot water, just enough to cover them. Once cooled, blend the dates with the soaking water. Use minimal water to keep the paste thick.

Smoothie: Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.

Variations:

You can enhance the basic recipe with spices like ginger, cardamom, anise, cinnamon, or nutmeg. Feel free to substitute oat milk with another plant-based milk, which will alter the taste and texture slightly. If you prefer cocoa over carob, remember that cocoa is more bitter. Start with one tablespoon of cocoa and consider increasing the amount of date paste to balance the bitterness.

Notes:

While you can sweeten the smoothie with other sweeteners, even plain sugar, date paste offers more than just sweetness — it provides fiber, which supports liver health. Using sugar or various syrups like maple syrup adds only simple carbohydrates, potentially increasing the risk of diabetes and insulin resistance. I advocate for a “harm reduction” approach, akin to drug policy: instead of strict, often unrealistic diets eliminating sugar, simple carbs, fat, and flavor, opt for desserts with less sugar but added protein and fiber, maintaining or even enhancing the pleasure of eating.

Serving:

Best enjoyed immediately after preparation, using chilled ingredients.

As the Earth rotated on its axis and dawn reached city after city, village after village, homestead after homestead, mountain and valley alike, it became evident that May 1st would be a bright and sunny day across much of the world. In Athens, a scholar of antiquity, waking in a small cell where he had landed due to certain Platonic views, greeted Helios with a sudden burst of optimism, reciting a flowing speech of Sappho through the bars: “Brodadaktylos Eos!” Birds, startled by his exclamation, took flight from the prison yard, filling the air with the flutter of wings; guards arrived and told him to be quiet. “Polyphloisbos thalassas!” he replied joyfully. “You’ve taken everything from me, but no one can take old Homer away!”

In Paris, communists under the red banner and anarchists under the black were preparing for the annual International Workers’ Day celebrations, which, as usual, would be marked by sectarianism and factionalism, revealing a complete lack of solidarity among the working people. In London, Berlin, and a thousand other cities, red and black flags were set to wave, tongues of their adherents already wagging; once again, the age-old yearning for a classless society would come to the fore. In these same cities, an even older name and an even older reason for celebration would be honored, monastery by monastery, school by school, in the words of a song (far older than Christianity) in praise of the Virgin Mary:

“Queen of Angels, Queen of May.”

We don’t really know the exact origins of May Day (May Night, also known by some as Walpurgis Night, and by others as Hexennacht). It’s amusing when neopagans confidently assert the pre-Christian origins of the holiday, naming it after a Christian saint who, among other things, fought against remnants of paganism in Germany. 

A pagan festival celebrated around this time was Beltane, but it was an Irish (Gaelic) festival, and there’s no evidence it was celebrated in Germanic or Slavic countries. According to Robert Fraser, it’s quite clear that Beltane and its associated rituals (Beltane fires) were linked to a social structure (development of means of production) based on transhumant pastoralism, meaning semi-nomadic herding, intended to ensure the safety of animals driven to pasture and their herders. Therefore, in areas dominated by settled agriculture, where such herding wasn’t feasible due to a lack of suitable grazing land, there was no reason to celebrate such festivals — for example, in Germany or Poland.

However, from Robert Graves to Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, revived paganism is more a poetic-mystical creation than a revival of ancient transmission lines or a natural evolution of belief systems.

This doesn’t diminish the significance of this revival. If we don’t treat religion as revealed truth (nomen omen) but as a map, a model of reality, true to the extent that it’s useful — a metaphorical story about our nature, psychology, or archetypes — then the basic symbols and rituals associated with May Day and the way it’s celebrated become key.

Beltane fires, bonfires lit on May Night, were the most characteristic sign of this festival among the Celts. This custom lasted until the second half of the 19th century and has been revived in modern times not only in neopagan celebrations (sometimes amusingly, when Slavs celebrate Walpurgis Night) but also, and perhaps primarily, in events like the Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill in Scotland — a loud, joyful celebration with dancing, drugs, and fucking.

For 135 years, this pre-Christian ritual has taken on a new form. In addition to neopagan celebrations, artistic and folk festivals, May 1st is also marked by working-class demonstrations, which in their early days were often very violent, involving clashes with the police and fatalities, and to this day are associated with picnics and revelry.

The second symbol of this holiday is the German and Polish Maypole. And it’s no coincidence that the previous sentence mentioned “fucking,” because the Maypole, the tree of the world, Yggdrasil, Axis Mundi, is nothing other than a fully erect cock. 

Driving the Maypole into the Earth is a metaphor for the sexual act, intended to ensure fertility, that is, abundant harvests, as a remembrance of the ritual copulation of the One-Year King with the Priestess-Goddess. Remnants of this are also the figures of the May King and May Queen. The symbolic significance becomes particularly interesting in this context when considering the selection of gay poet Allen Ginsberg as the May King during the Prague Spring of ’68. 

According to some, it wasn’t just the king and priestess who copulated, but everyone with everyone, with the intention not only of ensuring crops but also of maintaining the order of the universe. All in all, such a religion would suit me quite well: we all need to fuck a lot, or else the sky will fall on our heads. After such an orgy, everyone would be hungry, so I’d prepare them that nutritious cocktail and the entire catering.

Various entertainments, vulgarities, and debaucheries were certainly part of the Roman Floralia, multi-day festivities in honor of the goddess of flowers, Flora. According to the poet Juvenal, it was, among other things, a festival of prostitutes, so lewdness and orgies were not lacking. So that pole-cock has something to do with it. 

And rituals like these dances around the axis of the world — the cock — on May Day are very important and necessary, without delving into whether they are symbolic, psychological ways of organizing the universe and life, or whether they refer to some objectively and truly existing deities.

Without delving into the necessary and more important discussion of what “objective,” “real,” and “deity” mean. Such words relate even more than to the table to the famous story about how Korzybski, starting a lecture, banged his fist on the table and shouted, “Whatever this is, it is not a table.”

As a cook, I would sum up these problems with words that are so often heard in the kitchen: it’s all the same fuck!

Because religion or spirituality is like vodka, like doing drugs — it’s not supposed to taste good, it’s not supposed to be “real,” it’s supposed to mess you up. That’s why you drink vodka — to get messed up, and that’s why you practice religion — to get messed up, ultimately, that is, to be stripped of your ego.

One could simplify and say that this can be achieved through deprivation as well as through overload. That is, on one hand, prayers, meditations, and similar activities, and the other, through orgies (in the original Greek sense of “όργιον,” which were religious rites), overexertion (working in the kitchen seems to be an ideal spiritual path here), an excess of stimuli, or psychoactive substances.

There is also, of course, the social aspect of religion, so essential in May Day, whose essence is the COMMON celebration. 

A very important aspect of any religion. And just as with Carl Schmitt, for whom the form of political governance should correspond to the form of religion, here the specific form of holidays corresponds to the organization of society. In pastoral societies, there were Beltane fires; in agricultural societies, the Maypole. That is, ensuring the safety of animals and shepherds, or ensuring abundant harvests. However, Carl Schmitt, like any idealist, did not understand social processes. Both the political form, the religious form, and the organization of social relations are derivatives of the development of productive forces. 

However, this does not make rituals or religious holidays and religion itself untrue or less significant. It’s like a translation into another language. Just as a book translated into other languages is the same book by the same author. Of course, a translation is never one-to-one, but the original is also never a one-to-one representation of the author’s idea (Korzybski nods).

This process is perfectly visible in Buddhism, which, each time it reached new regions, “rewrote itself” into the language of the local culture. Buddhism is an important example here due to its non-sectarian approach in this regard — Buddhism in Chinese is neither better nor worse than in Tibetan, Hindi, or English. 

And if anyone had any doubts, then yes, this is a synthesis of Marxism and mysticism.

And of course, it is only the aforementioned map, an attempt at a certain model of religious phenomena, and my personal attempt to resolve the dissonance that torments me between dialectical materialism and the sphere of mysticism.

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