Bealtaine in the Wildwood: A Story

I want to write about Beltaine. I have to do this by falling into story.

The knife gleams in the firelight. The fire has been lit with at least nine woods. Woods of some of our ancestors carried here by colonisation and woods of this place we have spent years in communion with, deeply listening and asking and waiting. The woods of the fire each bringing a thread of power to this working.

The fire manifests the quickening of the land. The fire manifests the burning power of the sun here. The fire is a reminder - be very careful, bush fires threaten. I am reminded not of moving cattle to summer pastures but of the precarious and terrifying heat that - seeking to participate in ancient pacts with the fire forests here - may rage, lost and confused, swallowing homes and lives. We pray that the fires be these fires before us now, these carefully tended but bright cauldron and bonfires. But we know that the wheel has spun off its axis and that the hinges of the year are scattered, broken apart more and more. We gather to retrieve the fragments. Our Year has always been a Spirit, a Story Being, whose life force is sacrificed to itself, as are we.

I watch the flames thinking of my not long ago Irish ancestors - and those from the island called Britain or Albion - who lit these Bealtaine fires and sained and purified the cattle and crops. I’m thinking of how people could finally release the weight and worries of winter - the season of precarity, loss, and danger in those lands - and open to joy and celebration, to feasting, but also to work. These are pastoral and agricultural societies, after all. I’m thinking of the society I live in now. How subcultural we are; how strange and anachronistic our rites are in the midst of secularism and religions who dismiss or deride us… and yet witches and pagans still light the fires. Each a candle to the sun and stars. And in the fires our traditions are renewed each year.

A Bealtaine fire is special. It says, welcome the strong sun, we honour you. She sings out, blessings to the Shining Ones who bless this place. The Bealtaine fires are in the name: Bealtaine almost certainly bears the old Irish word for fire, the word teine. The utterance of that word resounding like a spark thrown from the flames and the burning wood. And bel! A God? Shining? Lucky? Holy? All of the above. I like to think so.

These words are ancient and yet still in the calendar - Samhain means November, Bealtaine means May - for the modern Irish whose diaspora is wide and far-flung. The Celts are often romanticised and yet the truth is, the Celtic cultures still exist and so I nod to them and my own ancestors and remind myself I’m a wild witch whose customs are forged of syncretic and serpentine senses held by an ivy like grip on the mysterious. Witch magic and witch custom is always different, unusual, something else besides.

My beloveds begin chanting, drumming, and we are invoking now. Through the fire we call out to the Lady, our Queen, of witches and of the shining ones at this time. But when we gathered last, at the equinox, we marked Her rising. And She marked us. Whispering words of wonder around the circle as priestess after priestess felt filled by Her luminous and lustful presence.

We call to Her for we desire to mark the mysteries of Her marriage with the Prince of Paradise.

If She is the longing soulfulness of all things, the echo of being resounding throughout, then He-They-She-That is the hungry and desirous power that breaks apart the mould, hits the ground like lightning, and gathers a furious momentum to take us on our way. We celebrate here the marriage of the ways of Truth, Wisdom, and Love, with the dare of Beauty. If She is the triangle and the circle and the shimmering blade and point of Truth then the Prince is the arrow sent forth that splits creation in twain, infinitely, and roars with wonder and terror at the bizarreness of things. If She is all roses and ravens, all crescents and crowns, then the Prince is all roaring and hooves, all tines, horns, and challenges. It’s why we don’t mind calling Him the Devil. If that word - that has defined this One for centuries - has kept one away from Their wonders, then the person has not yet become the witch who dares to break open, and to break through the histories of empire sold to us. These deceptions cover up so much, the Devil actively confronts and corrodes them.

It is said the word devil comes from diabolos - slanderer or accuser - and even the so-called Gnostics knew that the serpent on the tree was reminding us of our own divinity, choice, and agency - of sovereignty. That we belong to ourselves and the ground of being, that we are related, all, intimately. A furious kiss of worlds colliding.

And so sometimes we call Them the Lucifer, the light bearer who starts things. A Promethean Pan who not only steals fire, but is fire! That fire brought itself, that fire wanted to be found. And all of humankind has been dealing with the consequences ever since. And each culture has grappled with this. This spirit of fire.

The witches, friends of blessed darkness, have long tried to remind the people gathered around the fire to not get too close, to not get burnt. And yet they burnt the witches anyway, in that same fire we were all forged by. Or at least, they tried to burn the idea of witchcraft. But witchcraft comes from fire and the darkness that the flames emblazon forth from and within. We will always be here, in this ring of firelight, dancing at the edgeless edges where royal darkness presides.

All these thoughts and memories swirl in me as we leap over fires and brooms, as hands are tied together, fast in friendship and in love. There is medicine here. If Samhain, that Hallowed holy day, says - be still in the gathering dark, remember whom you come from and to whom you go - then Bealtaine sings, be of colour and sound, let the drums and the fires remind you why you live! Drink from that same cup of mystery and be renewed.

The old ways have never died, they live in the cycles and seasons themselves, we simply have to partake in them. Bealtaine is our wedding each year to the wish and dare of life. A kiss from the Gods. They are here, the Gods are among us. She looks directly at me through the shimmering eyes of the priestex who vessels for Her - carries Her and She carries this witch - and She has sent the arrow of the Prince right through my heart.

I am quaking with Her, with Them, and I feel my flow in the fate of things, Grandmother and Grandfather are the effulgent unfolding of this moment in and as all my threads and breaths.

At the end we chant,
Pass the power through the hands
Merging, crossing many lands
Mother Earth receive this gift
As we send this light adrift.

These are the same words we spoke at my initiation into this Wildwood covenant years ago. These words live in me forever, vibrate and form worlds. The power is passed through the hands and all lands touch here, we send our spells sincerely through the web. Spells of love, of wonder, need, desire, and spells of daring. Spells of remembering who we really are.

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