Beltane

Beltane is the Wiccan and Pagan Sabbat celebrating the height of spring and the approach of summer, kept around 1 May, at the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice; it stands opposite Samhain on the Wheel of the Year, the two marking the light and dark halves of the year. Its themes are fertility, passion and the flourishing of life at its most vigorous. In the common Wiccan myth-cycle it celebrates the union of the Goddess and the God, and the festival is joyful and openly sensual in tone.

Its name and central customs come from the Gaelic Bealtaine, a genuine medieval Irish and Scottish festival of the start of summer at which, the early sources record, great bonfires were kindled and cattle driven between or past them for protection and blessing before being taken to the summer pastures. The modern Sabbat keeps the fire, and adds customs drawn from wider European May traditions, above all the maypole, the gathering of flowers and greenery, and the crowning of a May Queen; these are not specifically Celtic in origin but were absorbed into the neopagan festival as it took shape in the twentieth century. Practitioners today light Beltane fires, dance, and celebrate out of doors, keeping a festival that joins a real Gaelic fire-festival to the broader folk observance of May.

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.