With Beltane coming up, I thought this might be of interest.
Last year at this time, I had the pleasure of watching my granddaughter in an amateur production of Peter Pan, and the climax was when the audience had to shout, as one, “I believe in fairies!!”. This was in order to resurrect the dying Tinkerbell ~ but the event could not have been better timed. For we’d just reached the point on the Wheel of the Year known as Beltane.
But what is Beltane, and why is it so important and …. well, what does it all mean? First, the etymology …
The word Beltane is the anglicised form of the Old Irish Beltain and Scottish Gaelic Bealltainn, and it is thought to be derived from the belo-te(p)niā, meaning “bright fire”, or “bale fire”, which means “white and shining”.
It falls on what’s known as a Celtic quarter day. Some have tried to link these old Celtic quarter days to the midpoint between the equinoxes and the solstices, but actually that doesn’t work astronomically, because Beltane would then need to be on 5th May.
In fact, the timing of Beltane comes from a much older strata of astronomical lore than that of the solar priesthood that built Stonehenge ~ a time much earlier than that of the Celts. It comes from those whose calendars were lunar rather than solar, and whose lives were dictated by stellar and planetary movements.
Beltane marks the time when the white and shining constellation of the Pleiades begins to rise above the horizon. It’s sister fire festival in November, Samhain, takes place when the Pleiades begin to set.
The Pleiades by Corina Chirila of Korinna’s Universe
In Ireland, and increasingly now in Scotland, these great stellar fire festivals are being revived. This photo shows the illustrious and upstanding members of the Beltane Fire Society celebrating on Calton Hill in Edinburgh, Scotland.
But apart from making a change from the usual Friday night pub crawl, why else would you start channelling Arthur Brown on Beltane? These ancient first settlers to these Isles believed that fire had a purificatory function, and protected you from malign influences. Even today, this is understood by magicians, alchemists and shamans alike.
It is said that Beltane is also a threshold or portal time. This is when the liminal walls between the dimensions are at their thinnest and we are more likely to encounter the Fae, otherwise known as the Tuatha de Danann, the Sidhe or the one I prefer, the Gentry.
Some people call them fairies, but according to those that have seen them, they’re not the least like sweet little Tinkerbell. The tiny delicate winged flower fairy in gossamer dress was a Victorian confection which took its inspiration from Christian angels, but has no grounding in ancient lore. R J Stewart in his book The Living World of Faery says that some of the Fae are really enormous, like giants. Others are the same size as us. They’re also unlikely to have wings.
They are the spirits of the Land ~ they maintain the ferility of the Land, which to them, is sacred, and I believe, although I can't be certain, it is these Land spirits who are probably responsible for the crop circles ~ and not Beings from Outer Space.
The Riders of the Sidhe, by John Duncan
The king of the Fae is said to be the great fertility god Pan —rumours of whose death, it now turns out, were grossly exaggerated.
The great god, Pan
So I do believe in faeries. But do you?