15 Beltane RITUAL ACTS

BROWSE THROUGH these 15 ritual acts performed by ancient Celts at Beltane, to get ideas for your own Beltane festival or ceremony this year: 

1.  Kindle a bonfire, on a hill.

2.  Kindle a fire beneath a sacred tree. 

3.  Deck out a pole in greenery and surround it by fire.

4.  Dance sunwise around fire.

5.  Race through fields with burning branches (to imitate the course of the sun).

6.  Decorate houses with boughs (to give them protection by the spirit of vegetation).

7.  Find a May queen and king to symbolize the spirits of vegetation and fertility.

8.  Roll Beltane cakes down a slope (a magical act imitating the course of the sun, and helping it stay on course).

9.  Toss part of a cake over your shoulder and say, "This I give to thee, preserve my horses; this to thee, preserve my sheep; this to thee, O fox, preserve my lambs; this to thee, O hooded crow; this to thee, O eagle."

10.  Break up a Beltane cake and hand out the pieces; the person who gets the black piece is the Beltane "carline" or "devoted."

11.  Pretend to throw the Beltane carline into the fire; speak of the carline as "dead" during the festival. 

12.  Trek to a sacred spring.  Perform a ceremony with its water (maybe sprinkle it over your Beltane tree -- to promote rainfall for vegetation).

13.  Roll in the grass (probably connected with magical rites in which moisture played an important part).

14.  Hold “mimic combats” between Summer and Winter.   

15.  Give women big things to do (“The persistent place given the May queen over the king suggests an earlier prominence of women and of female spirits of fertility, or of a great Mother-goddess in Beltane rites.”)

From The Religion of the Ancient Celts, 1911, J.A. Macculloch, Edinburgh: T. & T.CLARK,

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Thnx much to Gwenhwyfar28 for the art.  Go HERE to see more of her work.  

MOTHER men

Oh, com’on!~  We all know the world’s a sorry mess. 

A big part of the problem: men have been swindled into thinking that to become men they have to reject their mothers. 

Fact is, genuinely powerful men are genuinely close to their moms. 

We all need to be Mothers -- men, kids, childless women -- all of us. 

Even some mothers need to learn to be Mothers.

Recipe for Being a Mother: 1 cup unconditional love; 3 cups of being -- when necessary -- unpopular.  Mix well.  Serve piping hot.

HIKETTY Piketty, BIG FAT HEN

You know the runaway best-selling nursery rhyme:

Hiketty, Piketty, 


My big fat hen, 


She lays eggs 


For gentlemen; 


Sometimes nine, 


And sometimes ten, 


Hiketty, Pikkety, 

My big fat hen! 

Well, a Mr. Thomas Piketty has lately written a runaway bestseller about how the rich are big fat Pigs pushing the rest of us into the poor house.

As no. 1 on Amazon.com, Mr. P's book is so popular it’s sold out. 

It's so hot you can't even buy a copy. 

From a review of Mr. Piketty’s book (which goes by the unbelievably boring title Capital in the Twenty-first Century): 

“... it was only the unique circumstances between 1930 and 1975 that allowed capitalism’s natural drift toward inequality to be reversed. These circumstances included two world wars, a global depression and an outbreak of debt-fueled recession, all of which conspired to destroy vast amounts of wealth....

 [TRANSLATION: "Pure" capitalism stinks like a skunk*.  It was only a fluke that it didn’t in the 1900s, when most of us were growing up.] 

“... in the United States [today] ... inequality in the distribution of both wealth and income surpasses that of class-bound Europe of 1900." 

[TRANSLATION: Unless you are a billionaire, you are the equivalent of a 1910 Dalton-Abbey footman, floor-scrubber or human fly-swatter]

“... corporate executives and Wall Street financiers: ... their soaring compensation cannot be adequately explained simply by superior education or performance....”

 [TRANSLATION: While you split a gut working your hair off 24/7, lazy dumb dudes wallow in wealth they've barely worked for – and how fair is that?]  

IN THE eyes of Goddess, we're all monstrously lovable.  In Her eyes it's an abomination for one child to slurp food off solid-gold plates while another goes stick-thin hungry from starvation.

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* And you never want to smell like a skunk or settle near anything that does.  I know.  Several weeks ago my Akita Cassandra altercated with a skunk , and she (Cassandra) and I still aren't on the best of terms.  

MOTHER GOOSE, MOTHER GODDESS 2

On July 26 and 27 of 2005, I threw on this blog two posts about Mother Goose and Mother Goddess.

I also threw on pictures of regal, proud and dignified goddesses flying gooseback, and “silly, inconsequential” Mother Gooses, also flying gooseback. 

 

I suggested Mother Goose might be a disguise for getting the Goddess through the long, dark night of the European Middle Ages (when even to mention the word “goddess” was tantamount to getting roasted over a slow Medieval fire).    

Back in 2005, some of you thought Mother Goose might be the Crone aspect of the Triple Goddess. 

So which is it?  Is Mother Goose the Crone Goddess?  Or a disguise to help the

Great Mother slip through those dark and ugly days unscathed? 

Or, could it be both? 

To find out, get your hands on a copy of Breaking the Mother Goose Code: How a Fairy Tale Character Fooled the World for 300 Years.  It’s coming this fall to an online bookstore near you.  

HEARD IT THRU THE grapevine

Through the grapevine recently I heard it is super uncool now for Pagans to say things like “Mother Goddess”,  “Holy Goddess” -- or “goddess” at all.

In some Pagan circles apparently, anything female is totally un-PC.   (YAWN.  What else is new in our 6000-year-old tussle with the Patriarchy?  That same old Stuff still stomping all over us!  When are we going to pitch it for good onto the garbage heaps?)

Apparently, among some Pagan groups deity is:

1.  All male, 

2.  A combination of male/female, or,

3.  An It (i.e., sexless). 

Let’s stop, take a deep breath, and drop our Logic Hats onto our heads. 

Are Pagans all about Nature?  Yes.  

Does Nature produce panda cubs out of male pandas, hermaphroditic pandas, or sexless pandas?  Poodle pups out of male poodles, hermaphroditic poodles, or sexless poodles?  No. 

Nature is a Woman, babies, a Woman.  Understand it.  Soak it in.  Breathe it in through your pores, never be bamboozled into thinking otherwise. 

It’s the female body AND the female body alone, with its magnificent, mysterious, magical holy powers, that manufactures life. 

Nature is Goddess, is Female, is Creation, is Life. 
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P.S. Thnx to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) for the pic of Astarte Syriaca.

fixing THE BEJESUS OUT OF THINGS

I’d be remiss if I didn’t report this. 

After asking, in yesterday’s post, for clues about how to save Mother Earth, I stumbled almost immediately across a film called  "A Machine to Die For: The Quest for Free Energy.” 

It’s about  “perpetual-motion” and “anti-gravity” machines, stuff I’d never heard of before.  How to make energy out of nothing -- no more electric bills, no more heating bills. 

“Doo-doo doo-doo, doo-doo doo-doo.”  [Athana singing the theme from The Twilight Zone]

How do you think this might hit the Koch Brothers? So-called “conspiracy theorists” suggest the Kochs and their ilk have already smashed and smothered several workable Free-Energy machines. 

Warning: This film includes a few kooky cookies.  If you watch it, try to overlook the cookies and think about this: How, for crying out loud, did the ancients build the Sphinx -- something our best and brightest couldn’t do today with all our precious modern technology?  Obviously science in the year 2014 doesn’t know all.  

Also:  the film has a very low rating.  All the "real" scientists panned the stuffing out of it.  

However, if it could be lassoed and corralled, “Free energy” would mean no more Mother-Earth-killing emissions from fossil-fuel burning. 

I’m not even sure why I watched this film, but I did.  So of course I have to wonder if this was Mother Earth’s answer to my request for clues about how to save Her.