Beltane

May 1 is Beltane, the pagan fire holiday dedicated to creativity, passion, and fertility. Like Samhain (also known as Halloween), Beltane is a liminal holiday, halfway through the year, a celebration of the time when the veil between this world and the next is thin. At Beltane, all boundaries dissolve (between this world and the faerie world, this world and the world of the dead, the turning point between the buds of spring and the bloom of summer). Pagans used to bless their fields with orgies, naked dancing in the woods or around a phallic Maypole.

The magic of Beltane promises fertility, inspiration, and creative growth, symbolized by The Green Man, a god of virility and nature, winning the hand of the Goddess and impregnating her as she gives birth in the second half of the year to a bountiful harvest.

Beltane is about fun, sexuality, passion, and creative expression, but let's be honest: all of these things feel a little far away right now, don't they? Fun feels like a distant memory, something I recall only in pieces – like remembering a few lines from my high school production of Guys and Dolls.

It's really hard to have fun right now. Every day brings some fresh horror – they're gutting cancer research, bringing salmonella and measles back, disobeying court orders and deporting US citizens, jailing students for peaceful protest, encouraging conversion therapy for trans kids, and all the while, the world spins on, and summer approaches. Our bodies long for the familiar, and I know that I feel the summer coming on as a sense of anticipation, a long-awaited rest, a time for relaxation and laughter. My body senses the approach of summer, but my brain rattles with the friction and rage of this moment.

In Los Angeles, the weather is all doom and gloom – overcast skies and just enough rain to depress you, but not enough to protect us from wildfires or drought. It certainly doesn't feel like the time to dance around a pole in a flower crown.

But May 1 brings other promises of growth. Throughout the world, May Day is a celebration of unions, labor, and solidarity, celebrating the gains made by workers fighting together for a common cause. May Day is an acknowledgement of the powerful magic of many voices speaking together as one.

In the United States, May Day began as a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, a violent confrontation between police and workers in Chicago in 1886. The police were called to protect strikebreakers (aka SCABS) and ended up killing a striking worker and injuring many others. The Haymarket strike was in coordination with labor movements across the country to demand an eight hour work day. You can read all about it here.

The magic of union solidarity is, in fact, so powerful that Grover Cleveland established Labor Day in September to create distance between Americans and the socialist and revolutionary underpinnings of May Day.

May Day's association with the liminal pagan fire festival of Beltane makes sense. As boundaries dissolve, people are able to focus not on their differences but on what unites them – a desire for freedom, autonomy, and prosperity. The common enemy becomes, not each other, but the powerful forces that separate us, that make scapegoats of immigrants to distract from the real enemy – unmitigated greed, sociopathic corporations, and self-interested oligarchs. The thinning of the veil provides a glimpse at another path – a path of solidarity and community action. There are far more of us than there are billionaires. There's a reason the Trump administration is trying to create a bogey man out of trans people and immigrants – they need us distracted so they can plunder and pillage with impunity.

So how should we celebrate Beltane in modern times? Well, if you're up for it, you can host an orgy, and I encourage that type of freedom (even if I'm way too self conscious and vanilla to partake). You can meditate and leave offerings for The Green Man or the faeries at the foot of your favorite tree. You can light a bonfire and burn your intentions (I encourage the burning of intentions as often as you'd like, but liminal holidays like Beltane and Samhain offer particularly powerful generative magic).

As always, you can make an altar with fresh flowers, fertility symbols, fire/candles, and photographs of ancestors who you call upon for strength (ancestors can be from your family tree or not – striking workers in 1886 are ancestors of the labor movement for example, Marsha P Johnson is an ancestor of all who fight for LGBTQ rights).

Call your representatives, demanding that they fight back against Trump. Make it clear that there is a political price to pay for acting like things are business as usual. I, for one, will never vote for Gavin Newsom ever again. If anything good comes out of Trump's tyrannical regime, it'll be the continued revelation that our system is irreparably flawed, that the scales are tipped always in favor of the rich, and that a new type of politics is required to fight back against this existential threat and restore democracy to the will of the people. If you're not willing to fight, get out of the fucking way.

I recommend Alex Gibney's new HBO documentary, The Dark Money Game, about the Supreme Court decision known as Citizens United, which paved the way for our current depraved oligarchy. It'll make you super fucking angry, but we need that right now. Anger precedes action.

I don't have the energy for a party right now, which is saying something, because this bitch loves to host.

Instead, I spent some time this weekend with my bare feet on the earth. I watched the West Coast episode of The Americas with my kids, and did some cooking and some writing and collaging. I listened to my body when it begged me for rest (on Friday night I got about eleven hours of sleep for the first time since I had kids). Tonight, the kids and I will burn some intentions as we look forward to the summer, and I'll pull some tarot cards as a road map for the coming months.

Here's my Beltane Tarot spread if you'd like to pull some cards for yourself.

Shuffle your deck and choose six cards.

Card 1 - Where is pleasure missing from your life?

Card 2 - In what area of your life should you seek out pleasure?

Card 3 - What obstacles are holding you back from pleasure?

Card 4 - What your body wants to focus on right now

Card 5 - What your mind wants to focus on right now

Card 6 - What your spirit wants to focus on right now

Share your Beltane spread in the comments and our little coven can help interpret if you've got questions!