Today is Beltane, which in Gaelic means; “bright fire,” or “blazing fire.” It’s the Celtic holiday that marks the midpoint between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. It’s a cultural, human invitation to join the forces of nature in celebration of life, of love, of lust. In the Northern Hemisphere, nature is dancing her way into the light, into vitality, and into the full expression of her sensuality. Beltane is the invitation to step into that liquid fire of aliveness, and bring to the world who you are here to become.
Similar to its polar opposite on the wheel of the year, Samhain, Beltane is a time when the spirit world is said to be reaching for us from a thinner veil. Samhain is known as a time when people across many cultures connect with their ancestors. The world of the living and the world of the dead become less separate when the season transitions toward the darkness. When I think of Beltane, I think of the spirits of plants rising toward us, breaking out of soil, reaching for the sun, and offering their blossoms and greenery for the world to sensually engage in.
The fragrance of flowers. The sweet attractive flavor of nectar. The power of pollen to stick to the body of an insect and spread onto another blossom. The beauty with which plants shine in the light of the sun. The potency of leafy medicine. The poetry of plants that we can sometimes hear but can’t always fully understand. A world of sensuality is bursting open with desire to be experienced.
When the Hawthorn Tree blooms it means Beltane is here. This tree is associated with magic, with the fairy realm, with fertility and new beginnings, and it is said to be the transition between the world of spirits and the physical world.
Beltane is a festival of courtship, seduction, and mating. It is, like the Hawthorn Tree, a moment of transition from the ethereal realms of the unformed (spirit) into physical existence. Mating brings a new being into the process of becoming. It’s the conception of new life. From the vastness of formlessness, a spark of form is ignited.
And so if you’re not mating at the moment, if you’re not making a baby right now, Beltane might be about the conception of ideas, beginning to form flesh around a spark of the imagination, starting to shape a reality that was only a dream before.
This video has more about Beltane for you, with a short mantra and mudra meditation practice.
The fire of Beltane is the flame of passion, of desire, of lust. It’s a force that pulses within us, calling us toward something, toward someone, toward an experience that includes more than our own selves. And it’s also a force within us that pushes something or someone we’ve generated within us out and into the world.
What aspects of your life are you courting? What parts of you are you calling into a deepening of connection?
These are difficult times. It’s not easy to find hope or to feel empowered. Beltane is the energy of movement. It’s the reminder that no matter how stuck we may feel, change is at the core of existence. Nature is moving toward life’s unfolding. But in the Southern Hemisphere, death and decay, deterioration and decomposition are the moves that nature makes now. Either way, change is constant. And so our creative capacities are ringing the bells that call the fairies into our world, to show up as sparks of inspiration, as the wildness of the imagination, as the spirit of the plants luring us into connection.
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Fire rituals are at the core of Beltane celebrations. The ashes from those fires are said to be the most fertilizing for the soil and for the life that grows through it. The tradition was to scatter the ashes of the fire in the fields the morning after the festival.
Wherever you are right now, whatever you are dealing with, you can invite yourself to relate and to collaborate with the energy of fertility that saturates this phase in the season.
For me, Beltane, like all the other pagan holidays that celebrate the wheel of the year and the seasonal shifts, is a phase rather than a one day thing. You can take your time with the symbols and the rituals. You can move through it over the course of a few days or a couple of weeks. Lunar Beltane is celebrated on the full moon in Scorpio. This year (2025) it’s on May 12th. You have time to be in touch with the spirit of the plants, with the faeries in the garden of your imagination, with your lust for life, with the fire of your creativity.
What will you transform in the blazing fire of Beltane? What will the ashes fertilize?
Spread the magic and share this piece with your loved ones. I would appreciate that so much! Thank you!
Much love,
Hagar
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