Happy Beltane blessings from this crone witch and multigenerational healer and intuitive to you and yours.
There is so much energy swirling around since the spring equinox bringing up lots of old wounds to be healed or released, healing ancestral lines and reclaiming lost or stolen parts of ourselves and our ancestors.
Heck it is a dragon year to boot and so far, 2024 has not failed to disappoint us in forcing us to level up.
Are you feeling this too?
Well Beltane is another celebration on the Pagan wheel to consider honoring and celebrating if you do not already.
What is Beltane?
Beltane is the Gaelic May Day festival, a quarter holiday between the spring and summer equinoxes in the northern hemisphere on May 1st which marks the beginning of summer.
For the Irish, it is usually called Lá Bealtaine (“day of Beltane”), while the month of May is Mí Bhealtaine (“month of Beltane”). For many modern pagans, witches, Irish, and Celts, it is a day for bonfires, rituals, and celebrations such as dancing around the maypole.
Beltane is mentioned in the earliest Irish literature and is associated with important events in Irish mythology. It was also known as Cétshamhain (‘first of summer’).
Beltane Historically?
This was a time when fires were lit in the local community. Like many other indigenous spiritual practices, the fire, smoke, and ash from these fires were considered cleansing, purifying and healing and deemed to have some sort of protective powers.
The cattle were driven out to the summer pastures through this smoke as one of many rituals performed to protect cattle, people and crops, and to encourage growth.
These gatherings would be accompanied by a feast, and some of the food, drink would be offered to the aos sí, holy wells visited, flower wreaths worn, songs sung, and folks danced around the maypole.
Beltane Today and How I Am Celebrating
As I prepare for to lead a small intimate pilgrimage to Ireland on May 16th, I am witnessing such beauty in the desire to heal ancestral lines and reclaim parts of ourselves stolen as a result of systemic oppression by the colonizers of Britain and Rome as well church and religious persecution and indoctrination to the indigenous Irish.
I have been sitting with some of the Irish sovereignty goddesses, Queen Maeve, The Morrigan, and Brigid over the last year on a more intensive devotion in preparation of this pilgrimage.
If you have ever worked with the Morrigan, she is NO joke. She will hold your arssss accountable and will request tasks to do as a steward. That’s all I will say about that in a blog post hahahaha.
When in proper relationship and devotion, it is amazing how much the nature spirits – the tree spirits, the water spirits, the fire spirits, the earth spirits – have come more alive, and many of which are not wanting me to share some of the magic I have been privileged to experience and befriend.
I have always been connected to these spirits, but there is something so profound that gets amplified when you are setting intentions before a powerful pilgrimage on sacred lands in Ireland.
I recently sat in with a group of wise indigenous Irish women talking about language as a tool for healing. We forget that until Christianity was imported into Ireland, the indigenous Irish were an oral community very much similar to the Japanese when Buddhism was imported.
In Japan, I was taught how words created spiritual power, and it is a topic most Americans I think struggle to truly understand and comprehend unless we see it from a negative such aspect as gaslighting.
It is not just what you say, but the energy, frequency, and vibration behind the words that has the ability to create what many would call, magic.
Being in ceremony with these powerful women in Ireland (me virtual), I learned a lot about my struggles with language – from being able to learn a foreign language (even though English was not the native tongue of my ancestors) to bizarre physical issues in the throat that causes me to choke on saliva and water with a root scabbed over wound of physical domestic violence and the silencing of my voice by family courts when seeking safety for me and my children from abuse.
I had that lightbulb moment where I recognized this is one area I have been struggling for most of the last 15+ years in a different light that what I already knew, and it will be interesting to see what surfaces when I get to the motherland of my Irish ancestors in a few weeks.
For now, I will celebrate Beltane at home in the quiet with a fire, ceremony, offerings, intentions, prayers, and more that will not be publicized to keep the sacredness in the container leading up to the pilgrimage to Ireland clear and devotional in as pure of way possible.
Traditions that still remain today that I might still do too if called is to put out cut flowers on your front stoop to ward off evil or malevolent spirits. This is a custom still practiced today by some indigenous Irish I know from the Western part of Ireland.
How will you celebrate Beltane?
Is this something calling you home from your ancestors?
Are you an admirer of anything pagan or animistic and reclaiming the indigenous ways of what is now Europe and UK?
Share in the comments. I am curious.
