Beltaine x

We’re in the backyard of the house I grew up in, the house I spent 12 years of my life until Fate propelled me to move to so-called Brisbane, an hour and a half east towards the Pacific Ocean. There is a heaviness to the evening as we gaze into the orchard of fruit trees in this yard: peaches, mangoes, oranges, a banana tree my mum tried to transplant that never really worked out, and a mighty avocado tree who gives so much fruit. It is 2005, so I’m in Year 12 and I am 17 years old. My friend Deborah and I have been doing magic together for three or so years now. We were in a group of 14-15-16 year old witches for 9 months together. That early experienced helped clarify to us the kind of witchcraft we desired to practice; I guess a hot-house (my beloved Wildwood Priestess Kate once called a coven a ‘hot-house’ of witches) can do that.

Deborah lived between Toowoomba and the capital city of our settler-colonial state. And there she studied with a Druid Priestess who I met on several occasions. She passed to us several brilliant techniques I still use and helped to show me how one can ‘pull the power’ and step into the ritual with gravitas and grace. She also showed us how we may invoke the essences of spirits and beings into wine or water and drink them in.

Deborah was a few years older than me. She was of Scottish and Italian descent and her witchcraft was wild and fierce. In later years she would end up observing a form of restorationist Christianity, but she never fully left her witchery and magic behind. She seethed it. Deborah’s ritual style was powerful and confident and I learnt a lot from watching her.

To return to the story at hand however, Deborah had asked my help to create a Beltaine ritual in which we would help her fall pregnant. She desperately wanted to do this and several doctors had told her there were issues with her reproductive health that would likely make it very difficult to do so. We took the broomstick my friend had brought back for me as a gift in Year 8 from the Woodford Folk Festival and we enchanted it with the powers of Beltaine. At the time I venerated very specifically named deities and spirits (I still do) but Deborah wanted to call the Old Witch Gods who are too old for Names and she was always very effective at doing so. She asked me to help her.

We called out to the Lord of the Greenwood and the Lady of Flowers. We called to the Riders on the Winds. We called to the Powers allied with the Good Neighbours. Out of nowhere it seemed, a storm spiralled (yes, in a spiral) around us and the wind suddenly became intensely dramatic. It seemed to spiral only around my backyard, covering everything in brilliant violet-blue light as lightning flashed all around us. I had witnessed this before when we did magic together in various parts of the so-called Darling Downs. We invoked and we enchanted the broomstick with all of these powers. I held up the broomstick and when Deborah was ready, she leapt over it with her desire to conceive a child potent and focused within. She very quickly did conceive a child. By the next year we converged at my mother’s house - me, my boyfriend at the time, Deborah, and her new-born child - and we did a baby-blessing together in that same backyard.

The Beltaine after this was the first Beltaine of the Coven of the Wildwood which I had been initiated into six months earlier, at Samhain. Many of these influences and threads, many uncanny, synchronous, strange, and old things poured their rivers into that coven. It was a heady and holy time in my life. There were only four of us in that forest together that year, on that day. We raised a stang in the centre of the circle dressed in greenery and we welcomed our Witch-Wreathed Gods with passion and poetry. Trance possession and mediumship has always been an important phenomenon in my father’s family and at the heart of the witchcraft of the Wildwood Tradition. That Beltaine ritual was no different. A very specific fae being decided to come through that day. This was a deeply private and personal ritual. The very next year however, the ritual was held in broad day-light with at least 50 more people in Roma Street Parklands - where we had been holding semi-open rituals for at least 6 months - and the beginning of a very particular Meanjin (Brisbane) based Beltaine tradition began to emerge.

Beltaine has been a complex tide for me for a number of reasons over the last 15 years. The profound surging of eros and desire that can gather around this hinge of the year can be life-affirming and invigorating and it can also trigger and tie up emotion. The push and propulsion of the Scorpio Beltaine season in the southern hemisphere holds a sting and an initiatory catalytic quality that asks us to face our demons and dance with them. It is a traditionally sabbatic feast in all ways. It holds all the drama of that spiral-storm that funnelled around Deborah and me two decades ago.

My first three human-with-human witchcraft initiations each happened at Samhain-tide, but 11 years ago, just before I moved to Bali in November 2013, I did undergo another kind of initiatory experience. A beloved and I volunteered ourselves to open as vessels for the Lady and the Devil to consummate their sacred and queer marriage with one another at midnight. It was a sacred and in many ways incredibly harrowing rite that ripples through me still. There was a veil held around the Lady and the Devil and many in our beloved community gathered to witness and hold space at this midnight rite. I enacted the magic of trance possession for and with the Lady of the Wildwood, my beloved did so for and with the Prince of Paradise, who we know by many other strange names and epithets. When I make this sacred pact with a Great Spirit, my consciousness, my memories, the essence of me recedes into a quiet, dark, safe space, and the presence and potency of the Being sweeps through and expresses Themself in the here and now, in the sensual-visceral world of relating. It is one of the greatest gifts one can offer their spirits. If one practises these rites mindfully and with the support of a community who holds the protocol and tricks of the trade, it is one of the greatest gifts for the vessel. One may return feeling entirely renewed, whole in a new way, restored, and at times, holding profound insights and truths near-impossible to express.

I will never regret that I was a vessel for that midnight ritual, I am still riding the tide of it. It echoes still in me. I will never forget what the Lady let me see and feel through Her that night. What she showed me was the incredible danger - of the great mortal injury that will befall one - of being alive and being in love, of dancing with desire… that we will be utterly changed, our old selves destroyed, nothing will ever be the same, it will be different, something else will exist. There’s nothing to hold on to, She says right now as I write this. There’s only you and what is being born right before you, through you, and one either jumps into the spiralling storm, marrying it, or is destroyed and swallowed by it. Either way - in the wreaking, in the wreckage - there is an inevitable healing. Your shape and skin is different now. You have learnt something about life and you are the witch who will be marked by that incredible wonder. Those who have senses to perceive it, will see the Mark upon you. They will recognise the storm in you.

Blessed Beltaine to you beloveds. x