{"id":129,"date":"2011-05-05T10:22:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-05T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.wordpress.com\/2011\/05\/05\/a-darker-shade-of-beltane"},"modified":"2011-05-05T10:22:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-05T15:22:00","slug":"a-darker-shade-of-beltane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/2011\/05\/05\/a-darker-shade-of-beltane\/","title":{"rendered":"A Darker Shade of Beltane"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past weekend was Beltane.\u00a0 Aradia and I celebrated out at Camp Gaea<\/a> with all the madness that usually entails, and a little bit extra besides.\u00a0 Last year, Beltane (along with Heartland Pagan Festival, 28 days later) coincided with a Full Moon.\u00a0 This year the Moon was Dark, and the differences were \u2026 interesting.<\/p>\n

<\/a> <\/p>\n

Beyond the sacred\/ritual nature of the entire weekend,Aradia and I participated in four distinct rituals:\u00a0 the public ritual, a ritual toast, an underworld journey, and our ultimate ritual with Pasiphae and Aidan.\u00a0 Each was stylistically and thematically distinct.\u00a0 Half of them were purgative.\u00a0 By the end of the weekend, each of us \u2013 myself, Aradia, Pasiphae, and Aidan \u2013 had injured ourselves in some way.<\/p>\n

The first ritual was the public one on Saturday night.\u00a0 More than two dozen people gathered in the Old Way ritual space – several entire families were present, and at least a half-dozen children.\u00a0 Aradia and I were there early, of course, and volunteered to light the torches.\u00a0 In the process, we also cast the first layer of the circle.\u00a0 (We\u2019ve gotten very good at that.)\u00a0 The ritual itself was done in two parts.\u00a0 In the first part, the children raised energy by running in circles, then channeled that energy into a chalice full of seeds to be planted on a newly rebuilt berm and led out of the circle to do so.\u00a0 The second part of the ritual was for the grownups.\u00a0 We talked a little about our passions and art, then raised energy by singing tones.\u00a0 I wish I\u2019d brought my drum.\u00a0 Then, without a closing of any kind, we were sent out in the world to \u201cdo something\u201d with that energy \u2013 the ritual leader warned us, though, that she wouldn\u2019t be held responsible for any consequences of that action.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Why, yes, I did go promptly drop that lust-bomb on the unsuspecting Cauldron.\u00a0 Did you even have to ask?\u00a0\u00a0 Dionysos and Pan are very good friends, and it is for very good reason I have been more than once accused of serving the latter. I also charged my thyrsos with it and saved a lot of it for later use.<\/p>\n

The second ritual was the ritual toast \u2013 a blot<\/a> (trigger warning for rugged masculinity and associated memes) \u2013 performed at the behest of an Asatru gentleman we met while unpacking Friday night.\u00a0 The rite was simple and straightforward: each participant makes an offering to the sky and to the earth, then makes a toast; the others repeat the toast, then each offers their own toast (shared by the others) in turn.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The Asatru gentleman offered his toast to his mother, who had recently passed, and later returned to our camp with a bewildered look on his face.\u00a0 \u201cI think that blot was the whole reason I needed to come out here,\u201d he told us.\u00a0 He had fallen off his practice and his gods were calling him back.\u00a0 Though I did not particularly like him \u2013 he was the sort of person you might expect a self-identified redneck, knife-dealing, kinkster to be \u2013 I was honored to have served him in that fashion.\u00a0 If I am to serve the neo-Pagan community in the ways I envision \u2013 helping with rites, putting on traditions as masks for solitaries and disconnected traditionalists, among other things \u2013 I must be prepared to answer to individuals and traditions that make me uncomfortable, so long as they do not outright violate my ethics.<\/p>\n

The underworld journey was semi-spontaneous.\u00a0 I had planned on doing one over the weekend, but when I felt called while watching the post-ritual fire and dancing in the Old Way, I also invited the nearby folks from the KU Cauldron to join me.<\/p>\n

To my surprise, six of us wandered down to Thoth\u2019s Grove (after nearly getting lost in Key Pass).\u00a0 We started by casting the circle in near-silence, hand-to-hand.\u00a0 \u201cVisualize East,\u201d I told them.\u00a0 There was a struggle, briefly, as everyone tried to find the \u201csame\u201d east, but once we chose it, all the other points were synchronized.\u00a0 The circle cast, I opened a portal to the underworld and introducing them all to the World Tree.\u00a0 My own journey was \u2026 fruitful, but I did not find what I was looking for.\u00a0 Most of the Cauldron didn\u2019t speak of what they saw, but I was later told that they had all found the experience to be meaningful.<\/p>\n

The fourth and final ritual was performed with our regular ritual partners, Pasiphae and Aidan, who were only able to make it out for that one night.\u00a0 We had two major ritual goals we wanted to accomplish: I wanted to dedicate my Kouros figure, the male half of the goddess\/god duo I have been experimenting with; and to purge ourselves of our accumulating troubles, symbolized by the too-old\u00a0 and unlabled herbs from our magical pantry.\u00a0 The first went well:\u00a0 I felt Him awake with a sort of quiet humor.\u00a0 The second went even better, evolving spontaneously into a shouted litany of \u201cFuck you!\u201ds as we pounded an ounce or so of whole cloves into dust in Pasiphae\u2019s iron cauldron\/mortar.\u00a0 Each of us ended up taking a second turn, and a new Beltane tradition was born.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned at the beginning, the Dark Moon Beltane was of a somewhat different character than the Full Moon.\u00a0 Besides the purgative rituals and underworld journeys, everyone in my intimate circle ended up giving flesh to Gaea.\u00a0 I was bitten by a blackthorn branch I never managed to find, and reinjured my shin while hobbling about camp.\u00a0 Despite her best efforts, Aradia got a vicious sunburn, numerous bugbites, and reinjured the foot she wounded while traipsing about Nashville and Chicago with me last month.\u00a0 Pasiphae and Aidan were both attacked by the fire \u2013 he burned his hand, and an ember landed right under her eye.<\/p>\n

Finally, though it didn\u2019t play as significant a role in this years rituals as it did last year, I cannot leave out the mead.\u00a0 I bottled last years a week or so ago, as you may recall.\u00a0 We drank most of it over the holiday.\u00a0 It was awesome.\u00a0 I started another gallon for next year.\u00a0 It, too, will be awesome.<\/p>\n

Despite the unintended blood-sacrifices, I declare the festivities a resounding success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend was Beltane.\u00a0 Aradia and I celebrated out at Camp Gaea with all the madness that usually entails, and a little bit extra besides.\u00a0 Last year, Beltane (along with Heartland Pagan Festival, 28 days later) coincided with a Full Moon.\u00a0 This year the Moon was Dark, and the differences were \u2026 interesting. Beyond … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[31,134,220,225],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hedonism","category-witchcraft","tag-beltaine","tag-keeping-score","tag-rites-of-passage","tag-sabbats"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-25","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}