Beltane: Traditional Time for a Pagan Handfasting

Spring and autumn were added much later, facilitating an utterly non-magical restructuring of Roman administration. It's much easier to keep on top of data as quarterly returns. Plus more festivals could be squeezed into the new configuration, keeping all the Empire happy.

Some Pagans celebrate Beltane as New Year's Eve, contemplating a brand new beginning in the awakening of the natural world. It's an obvious time to handfast then, entering a changed life too brought about by your union.

Pagans tend to act in sympathy with the energy of the season - slowing down in winter, rushing around in summer; sowing seeds at Imbolc, looking to harvest them at Lughnasad - and Beltane as the dawning of a fresh year bodes well for a couple newly enjoined.

This is also the impetus for a Beltane wedding that you can tell your non-Pagan friends and family, if you think they'd be shocked by the reality.

It's all about fertility. You know it's about fertility. Though you could add for the muggles that Pagans marry on May Day, as the new growth and flowers look wonderful in the background of the wedding photographs. It's as good a lie as any, rooted in truth and hinting at the reasons why.

As energy goes, Beltane handfastings are practically mandatory, except for those too young or old to feel its pull.*  Sap is rising in the woods; see it in the flirting on the green. The birds and the bees are soaring; feel it flush your body in heat. Plant stems are pushing harder, higher, thrusting through the Earth, rewarded at last by experiencing that glorious burst of sunshine. Hear an invigorated passion for society and life, as people all around you make plans to meet up over the summer.

Pagans handfast at Beltane, because all instinct carries them that way. They're riding a tide much bigger than themselves. Obeying a call that has nothing to do with reason, and all to do with life and a fire burning inside.

Everything is blatant in how Beltane has traditionally been celebrated. A handfasting at least casts a mantle of respectability over proceedings, and commits the marriage more than a mere dalliance in the greenwood.

* Or the Irish. Though I should qualify that before someone sets Morrighan on my tail.  The Irish are perfectly capable of celebrating Beltane. They've have centuries of practice, not forgetting the fact that they named it.  It's more the handfasting thing that the Gaels treat with caution.

There are many Irish (Pagan or otherwise) who do not view Beltane as a good time for a wedding nor, indeed, any date in May. Those unions tend not to last very long. I did have an Irish witch explain to me that the Lord and Lady don't like the competition, and this is their big month.

Short-term handfastings (a year and a day or greenwood) are fine. They aren't meant to last anyway.

I believe that I've pretty much hammered home the point that Beltane is all about fertility (and fire). However, this is a slightly bigger deal than some goddess getting up the duff after a quickie, and causing half the world's mortal women to invest in a Baby Name Book too.

Beltane marks the moment when the Great Mother is reunited with the Great Father. As the archetypal parents of all creation, there isn't a thing alive that doesn't feel the impact of their union. This is the Great Wedding of the Goddess and the God, that completes one circle, represents another and becomes the beginning of a third.

Though circles being circles, we do have to ask ourselves whether any start or end; and if the aforementioned three aren't really just one, as seen from different angles.

Their divine love-making releases the life-force kept dormant in the Mother's womb, since late last year, when she bid her Consort farewell. This is the spark that rushes in a frenzy through all of nature, sounding the clarion call for hibernating seeds to stir and grow for summer; reinvigorating the hedgerows; and generally producing that burst of energy that brings a lot more color into the world.

Though remember that all of this IS the Great Mother too. Arising fully from Her slumber and now being utterly fertilized by Her Consort God.

For the moment we're at the very dawn of summer. It's not only the Mother and Father who have been in exile. We're all feeling the effects of a long, dreary winter and ready to shake off the cobwebs and run wild again. Beltane is our big moment to do that, when all temporary bouts of madness can be blamed on the intoxication of spring. In sheer relief at breaking on through the cold, dark months, we may lose our inhibitions with impunity.

It's only the Great Mother and Great Father working their rejuvenating magic through us. Sing, dance, laugh, shout, scream your barbaric yalp from the rooftops of the world, celebrate, party, pretend you're an aeroplane with arms outstretched, and embark upon reckless, ill-advised flings. All such behavior merely proves that you're in tune with nature.

Though, of course, if you're choosing this Sabbat to be handfast, that last one might be more ill-advised than usual. Go for another glass of mead instead.

The Goddess of Sovereignty and the King.  Only one is actually divine, though you wouldn't know it to read half of the Welsh and Irish legends.

Beltane was the traditional time for a ruler to become ritually wedded to the land. This often involved a white mare for reasons that I'm way too young to know about, let alone repeat here. Some have pointed towards this as the origin for the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss and the Welsh Mari Lwyd.

Great Mother and her Young Consort. In some ways, this is very similar to Mother Earth and Father Sky, but also vastly different. (It's the Great Wedding coupling that I was taught when I was a baby noob witch, so it's the one that I still mentally default to considering.)

The Wheel of the Year sees the Goddess changing aspect but never dying. Conversely, the God is annually born anew, lives a full life in one year and is ritually sacrificed at harvest time. It helps if you think of Him as corn, which - on some level - He is.

Right now, the God is BOTH the Horned One, running wild in the forest, hunter and hunted, AND the dormant seed ready to spring into life upon contact with the Goddess. Beltane is pretty much contact being made, vigorously.

However, that union also brings together the Divine Feminine and the Divine Masculine. This duality theme also turns up a lot in Beltane rituals, particularly in men dressed as women to represent it. All things in one - darkness/light; winter/summer; this world/Otherworld/Underworld; life/death; death/life (yes, there is a distinction) etc. - perfectly aligned.  (And duality, particularly at Beltane, also explains why Celtic fertility and death deities tend to be the same divine individuals.)

Their coupling creates more than a buzz in nature. It unleashes consciousness too. It makes all things possible, and facilitates the bringing together of new ideas. It's hope on the cusp of summer.