The best known contemporary public Beltane event, the Beltane Fire Festival held on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, was launched in 1988 by a group of local arts and performance organisers drawing loosely on the Gaelic Bealtaine and the neopagan Sabbat rather than continuing any unbroken civic tradition, and it has grown since into a large annual procession and fire performance involving hundreds of participants and drawing large public audiences, run today by a dedicated arts organisation rather than by any religious body.
The event sits in a deliberately ambiguous space between religious observance, community arts practice and tourist spectacle, and its organisers have generally described it in cultural and artistic rather than strictly religious terms even though its imagery, the May Queen, the Green Man, ritual fire, draws directly on the same Wiccan and Pagan symbolism described in this entry's first article, making it a useful example of how a modern reconstructed festival can take on a public civic life of its own well beyond the specific religious communities that originated its symbolism.
A related debate runs through Southern Hemisphere Wiccan and Pagan communities, where the Wheel of the Year was devised for the Northern Hemisphere's seasons: some practitioners in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa keep Beltane on the traditional 1 May regardless of their own autumn climate, holding the date and its symbolism as fixed, while others invert the calendar entirely and mark Beltane's fertility themes around 1 November instead, when spring is actually arriving where they live. Neither convention has become universal, and Southern Hemisphere pagan publications continue to carry both practices side by side.