ASTRONOMY: The sun arrives at the moon's standstill.
Days are longer than nights, days lengthen slowly.
BELTANE: The gates open between the worlds. This is the time when
spirit fleshes itself out into material form. We celebrate incarnation
and embodiment.
beltane reading
this is the season of beltane, the intersection of worlds, when
the living green emerges again out of the land of the dead, when
we leave behind our homes, the secure constructs in which we lived
our winter, and venture out on the great plains, following the
herds, following our animal instincts, following the paths of
the mother through the grass, following the flow of energy through
the earth's magnetic web. now we construct the bonfire, the bone
fire, the need fire, of nine kinds of wood and the ritual spark
struck from no flint, using no metal. now we burn the remnants
of the past, the clinging, the hoarding, the resentments, the
guilt. now the worlds intersect, what was opaque becomes transparent,
what was solid is exposed as transitory. we sit at the sea's edge,
we sit on solid rock, we watch the patterns form and dissolve
in the foam as the swells lift and break - and the shifting and
ever-changing sea is just as it was a hundred million years ago,
and the rock, once crystallizing in the depths of the mountains,
is now exposed to the sky and crumbling away to sand. this morning,
at stonehenge, the sun rose in the arch of the moon's minor standstill,
the gates stand open between the worlds, spirits walk the earth,
and mortals awake in the land of the fairies.
From The Feminine of History is Mystery, facing page 15
This is the time when spirit creates for itself a material body. Nature weaves leaves out of sunlight, and color appears again among the bare twigs - an event we celebrate by winding colored ribbons around the Maypole.
Dances we do at this time include:
Sellinger's Round - a traditional Maypole dance
May Dance - a traditional Greek dance, Sfarlis, done to an English song to the Greek tune
Maymuki - a traditional Armenian dance
Erotis Ine - a choreography to Greek music "Love Is"
Tread Gently on the Earth, Earth Love, Back to the Earth- dances to celebrate the Earth
Ivalla - a Greek Tsamikos or "bull dance" done to celebrate the sign of Taurus