BELTANE

Rite Recap: Solitary Beltane rite, 5/3/08
Location: My Living Room

My ADF Beltane ritual was simply a repeat of my usual devotional rite with an added prayer for the High Day. Since that's a little boring (and not so different from many of the solitary rites I've already written about!), and to show that I have at least passing familiarity with a few non-ADF Pagan traditions, I will write about another rite I performed at Beltane.

At the time I was exploring the possibility of entering training in the Minoan tradition, one of the British Traditional Witchcraft family of traditions and one which was created to celebrate gay mysteries. I had written an outer court solitary rite for Beltane, which this tradition refers to as the "Festival of the Earth", celebrating an aspect of its Goddess that is personified in the outer court by the goddess Artemis. I had sent it to my prospective teacher to get his approval, and I performed it a few days after the actual date of Beltane as that was when I had privacy enough to do it. The Outer Court material is obviously not oathbound and bears a strong resemblance to "standard eclectic Wicca", if there could be said to be such a thing. I have replaced a few deity names with asterisks as I'm not sure how widely the particular names used in the outer court are meant to be circulated; none of the widely available "rudimentary information" available about the tradition seems to list them, so I'm going to play it safe and leave them out of this account.

I set my altar up in the only available floor space I had, in the manner prescribed by the outer court tradition, and I cast the circle. The circle-casting was standard Traditional Wicca, involving purification of the space with salt, water, and incense, and then the establishment of an energetic spherical barrier using the magical tool par excellence of Wicca, the athame. This is followed by the invocation of guardian spirits into the circle to witness and ward the ceremony. It had been years since I last cast a circle this way, and it felt a little odd to do so again! I have become so used to the ADF conception of sacred space that working in a different idiom felt as unnatural as ADF had felt to me when I first found it as a practicing Wiccan.

The main invocation I'd written was as follows:

O Great Goddess, ******!
Sweet Goddess of the Earth,
beginning to burgeon with the bounty of the reviving land;
Mountain Mother, wild and free,
Untamed One, Queen of the Beasts and Huntress divine,
Laughing with your children as they frolic in the green:
Has your beloved bullish boy ******, too, disappeared for the night,
hidden away in the darkness with a man aroused to ecstacy in his embrace,
the passionate heat of ruddy youth reflecting the fires on the hilltops?
Likewise, grant your Special Children the joys of love and lust unleashed,
a sacred power for healing and renewal on this, your holy Festival.

The central act of the Sabbat ritual in the outer court is a libation offering; the Minoan tradition does seem to include a model of sacrifice lacking in much eclectic Wicca, although I think the theology of reciprocal sacrifice has been elucidated far more thoroughly in ADF than in at least this tradition of Witchcraft. My prayer of sacrifice at the libation was something like:

****** our Mother,
Mountain Mistress, Earth Mother, Lady of the Wild Things;
We give honor to your myriad names,
(there was a short litany of Huntress/Beast Mistress names inserted here):
Artemis, accept this libation!

After the libation I spent some time meditating on what my script referred to as "the Bountiful Wild" and on Artemis herself.

As its last act before winding down the ritual, there is prescribed a "cakes and wine" rite that functions similarly to our concept of the return flow; a cup of wine is consecrated and some of it is offered to the deities; a bit of the wine is used to bless the cakes (one of which is also offered) and the remainder is then consumed by the participants along with the cakes to receive the blessings of the Goddess and God.

The rite was ended by the dissolution of the sacred space, thanking the elemental beings that had been called to witness the ceremony and "un-casting" the circle with the athame.

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