Beltane Waxing Flower Moon
Beltane marks the beginning of the growing season so fertility is the essence of the celebration. In a pre-refrigeration, pre-food preservative (except salt and drying) culture fertility during the growing season carried with it survival, for animals and humans. Thus, anything to encourage the land and to safeguard the animals that could be done, would be done.
This holiday, Beltane, used to separate the Celtic year into halves, the other half coming six months later at Samhain, or Summer’s End. Later the Celts adopted the solstice and equinox celebrations of other peoples and added Imbolc and Lugnasa to make an 8 holiday year.
Beltane, Lugnasa, Samhain and Imbolc are cross-quarter holidays. They occur between the quarter year events of Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox–Imbolc, between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice–Beltane, between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox–Lugnasa and between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice–Samhain. The cross quarter days were the occasion for markets, festivals/fairs and certain seasonally observed matters like short term weddings, labor contracts and preparation for winter.
The fire jumping and making love in the fields at night preserved and magnified fertility. The May pole which you may have gaily stomped around as a child in elementary school symbolizes the male aspect of fertility while the young maidens with May baskets symbolize the feminine.
The choosing of a May queen carries over the honoring of the goddess in her maiden form, when she can become pregnant and bear children. This tradition has almost died out in this country and I don’t know whether the selection of a mate for the May queen ever crossed the pond. At certain points in Celtic history the May Queen’s mate was king for a year and a day. Over the course of the year and a day the king received all the honors and trappings of royalty. After the year finished, however, the king died at the hands of his people. His blood fertilized the soil.
Today we have much less feel, if any, for this holiday. It has faint impressions on our culture with May Day celebrations, sometimes with construction paper baskets for paper flowers.
As we have distanced ourselves from the land and the processes that bring us food, we have also distanced ourselves from the celebrations that mark seasonal change. We can let Beltane pass by with no bonfires, no cattle purified, no holiday related love making in the fields.
It may not seem like much, this cultural dementia, at worst a mild symptom. It might, though, reveal a more severe underlying affliction. As we forget the world of fields and cattle, the oceans and their wild fish, cattle ranches and dairy farms, the subtle body may die of starvation or dehydration. The subtle body links us into the natural world from which we come and to which we return. If it dies, we become techno-dependent, alienated from the literal ground of our being.
This does not worry some who contend that it is the nature of humanity to cast off from the near shore for voyages far away. This journeying, pilgrim spirit of the human animal does define us. We have wandered from our ancient homeland in Africa, spread out upon the continents of the world. We have even left the atmosphere and now live for short periods of time among the stars. In the future we may travel further, beyond the planets and beyond the influence of Sol, our true god.
However. Until the science fiction biologists splice our DNA into that of other life forms or create us anew, until then we will have the most intimate of threads, a helix doubled, that binds us tight to the development of all life here on this planet Earth. Until that day we will always bear the fleshly imprint of earth’s vast teaming life explosion, an imprint we carry even at the level of individual cells.
To my mind, then, it is folly to forget. This culture dementia is not a mild symptom, but a denial of our very essence, a turning away from the context which made us and for which we share ultimate and co-creative responsibility.
It does not seem to me that 8 holidays a year are too many to celebrate that connection.
