Beltane

Here are some thoughts during my time as may king, being chosen at Beltane 2001 Beltane camp. During this time I went to visit some friends of mine in Shropshire when we where chatting away and the conversation turned to Beltane and the question was asked did I believe that Beltane felt sexual, after a rather good discussion I felt compelled to look in to Beltane a bit further to see if what was written about Beltane matched the knowledge that I had from working in agriculture, as Beltane is part of the agricultural wheel year and traditionally in modern druidry Beltane time is supposed to make us sexual this being stimulated by spring flowers and the feel of spring, especially the scent of the may blossom.

When I looked at Beltane the first thing that I noticed was that it seemed to be out of sync with the rest of nature. We where seeing freshly calved cows and as a tribe we where being persuaded that this was a sexual time of year. Something seemed out of balance but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I worked out that if a woman conceived at Beltane then she would give birth in January. Now in this day and age I don’t think anybody would find this strange at all, it is only when you consider the tribe during perhaps the bronze age period that we would start to find difficulties such as no powdered baby milk products available, food was possibly very scarce and a good balanced diet was an impossible thought. As I looked further, it seemed to be less likely that Beltane had anything to do with sex, but more to do with birth, I then looked at the stories that druidry is built upon - the very core of druid tradition - and to my surprise these stories didn’t mention sex at Beltane but instead birth. Taliesin was born just before Beltane and found in a coracle trapped in a salmon weir on may eve, Riannon’s child in the Mabinogian was stolen just to be returned to the apparent world on may eve. Looking at this from a psychological point of view a lot of animals have sex in the autumn like deer for instance. As the amount of day light gets shorter these animals become more sexually active and in the case of the deer it is the start of the rutting season and it has been proven that the amount of daylight has an effect on the fertility of these animals ,this giving a direct link between the sun and sex and the effect it has on the breeding cycle of the female. There has already been alot writern about how the moon effects women but in modern druidry the sun has always appeared as masculine. The question is were we ever involved in this natural cycle and over time and evolution, have we evolvolved to form a separate cycle and do women have a balance between lunar and solar instead of modern druid-pagan thinking that men are solar and women are lunar? With the advent of electric light and imported out of season vegetables it isn’t to hard to see how the natural balance has been affected.

We can only see a fragment of our past tradition like the importance of salmon at Beltane in stories like Finn macCumhail and the salmon of wisdom and the poetry associated with him which was dedicated to the may time of year. The salmon was caught at this time of year when the rivers traditionally form pools and the salmon stop swimming up river to spawn as the water levels drop during may. Looking at Beltane in physical terms the chances are that Beltane as a sexual celebration which was physically celebrated by the tribe never ever existed: if it was celebrated then it was done on a magical or esoteric level. Only the conception would have taken place between an otherworldly woman and possibly a man of human origin. The child would be conceived at Beltane and then take nine months, so that the birth of their son would happen at the same time as the birth of the sun hence the Mabon being born at the winter solstice and it is possible that the Mabon would have been born in December and not January if the original Julian calendar had not been replaced by the Gregorian one. I understand the importance in modern druidry of body awareness and the naturist lifestyle which seems to be promoted more at Beltane than any other time of the year I feel that in today’s hectic world we spend too much time in in our minds and not enough time with our bodies. One of the positive things at Beltane is to be able to be feel the freedom of being naked just like our Celtic bronze age ancestors before us, reconnecting not only to the tribe but to the land it self.

Richard Eaton