New Moon Old Magick

Hello dears!

Blessed Beltaine!  May this holiday bring you love and joy as you gather with your dear ones to celebrate the full blossoming of Spring.

Shrub Rose

There are some disagreements about exactly when Beltaine should be celebrated.  This is one of the four bonfire holidays, or fire festivals.  Currently, we are between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice.  Beltaine celebrates the stepping thru from the otherworld into life.  It is the joining of male and female forces into conception and birth.

Some urban (and suburban) witches choose to celebrate this holiday on April 30, the night before May 1.  In most modern neo-pagan traditions it’s become fixed there, because of our contemporary dependence upon the fixed calendar.  One traditional witch I know tells me that in some circles, Beltaine is a week long holiday, a gathering of the tribes, as it were.

With my astrological bent, I focus on a bit of a different anchor for this holiday.  I was told many many years ago, and I personally agree with this, that originally the long gathering of the Beltaine celebration peaked when the Sun hit 15 degrees of the sign we associate with this holiday – Taurus.  There is a beautiful and symmetrical logic to this view, if you will but look.

Traditionally, the four bonfire festivals occur in the ‘fixed’ sign attributed to one of the four elements.  If you look at the wheel of the year, with it’s twelve signs, there are three signs in each of four elements: cardinal, fixed, and mutable.  And each of these three phases of the elements is a different expression of that element.  Beltaine is celebrated in Taurus, the fixed sign of earth.  Another example is it’s polar opposite Samhain, or Halloween to you muggles, which is celebrated in Scorpio, the fixed sign of water.

Why fixed?  And why 15 degrees?  Well, the fixed sign of an element is the fullest expression of that element.  Taurus is earth.  It is a force of fertility and creativity, and yet it is also firm in it’s grounding and manifestation.  If the water element harkens to potentialities and the impulse to create, the attraction of polarities, and coming together in love, then earth is conception, pregnancy, and birth.  It is definitely here and now, and we can ignore the earth element only by proceeding with our eyes closed, risking running into the stone wall right in front of us.  However the earth also provides us with the path supporting our feet, and soft moss upon which to rest, as well as the trees that cover and shelter us.

15 degrees of Taurus is the exact center of the sign.  It is the fullest expression of the most fixed of the earth signs.  In rock language, that would be granite.  It is at this moment that we are able to manifest that which we would bring into our lives.  It is traditional on Beltaine to jump over the bonfire for luck in the coming year, and to bring your wishes into manifestation.  It is also a night in some traditions when men and women would pair off after a certain amount of celebration, Beltaine ale, dancing, and bonfire jumping, and other miscellaneous partying, and vanish into the night woods or countryside.  Any child of that celebration night would be considered a holy or sacred babe, a lucky child.

Flower Child

Historically, May Day is another incarnation of this holiday, the May Pole, with its maidens dancing with ribbons and wrapping the pole, and its unashamedly phallic symbolism, is in itself enough of a description of what this celebration is all about.

A word to you wand-makers, this is your holiday!  Take your wand out and bring it to your Beltaine parties.  Put it on the celebration altar for blessing, and carry it with you over the bonfire.  If you are celebrating by yourself, forgo the bonfire jumping and use a candle in a jar or one in a cauldron for safety’s sake.  If you haven’t yet chosen or applied your decorations to your wand, it does not matter in the least!  This is an ongoing project that may last quite a while until you feel it is done.  But now is the time to wake the current in the wand that was sleeping when you cut it and claimed it for your own. Wake it with chanting, dancing and drumming.  Wake it with song and blessing.  Wake it and enjoy!

This year, the Sun will reach 15 degrees of Taurus in the small hours of the morning on May 5th at Greenwich, UK.  That will mean 10:25pm on May 4th, 2012 on the East Coast of the US. You can calculate from there to your own time zone.  This is the time of peak Earth for the year, folks.  I highly recommend doing some sort of ritual to bring your desires to fruition. If nothing else, plant something that will bear fruit into fertile earth, feed and water it well, and as you do so, pour your desires into it.  Allow it to carry the energy of that which you wish to bring in for yourself and your own life.  Remember, this is not a time to try to manipulate other’s lives, or to apply destructive force to something you do not want.  This is a time to celebrate and pull into being that which is good.  I will return in a day or two with a peak Beltaine ritual for the night of the 4th, if you so choose to use this manifestation energy!  May your efforts be blessed.

Thank you for reading my blog this past season, my friends.  I wish for many more posts that they may be of use to you for your enjoyment and edification! Blessed be.

Marie Angeli

Hello my dears!

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working working working to edit Magick 101 the free e-pamphlet that I’ve promised my readers.

You see, I got a bit carried away while I was writing it.  I planned and structured and wrote, and then wrote some more, and then some more.  I ended up with enough material for a series of about 10 ebooks!  My intention has always been to introduce my readers to the different avenues and ways of magick as I have learned it.  There’s a LOT out there, and everyone’s way is different.  But I’ve thought that if I shared what I personally have learned over the years that I’ve been working on this practice of magick, that it might possibly help students to find their own way.  If I could share something that I know, that helps you in turn realize what you already know, or figure something out for yourself, or learn something new, then I’ve done what I committed to do.

That is the Great Work, as the secret lodges have taught for hundreds of years.  It is written over the gateway of the Oracle at Delphi.  Know thyself.  Practice your magick, and live the life that is yours and yours alone.

So anyway, here I am up to my neck in material, all of which will become books in time.  But of all this stuff, what should I introduce people to first?  What are the most immediate concerns or the most pressing questions that the majority of my readers have?  What do you really want to know, dearies?  I’ve come to the conclusion that I have only one real choice.

I want you to tell me.

Either respond to this post in the comments section, or send me an email directly via the Contact Marie Angeli link to the side of this page, or send an email to Me!

  If you’ve opted into the Newsletter list at the bottom of the page, I will also send an email out to you and you can respond directly to that, if you choose.  Answer one question or all of them, it’s up to you.  I will listen very gratefully to what you have to say.

Here’s what I’d like to know:

FIRST
•    If I were to write an introductory pamphlet on Magick just for you personally, what would you most be interested in?
•     What is the aspect of magick that you personally are most curious about?
•   What is your level of practice, and what things would you like to see discussed about the how-to of ritual?

NEXT
•    What are you most afraid of in approaching a magickal ritual?
•    What are you most frustrated by in your own magick?

LASTLY, and this one is very important to me…
•    What is your magickal goal for yourself?

Please when you write, also tell me a little about yourself and your practice, where you are metaphysically and geographically (country or city or in-between), and anything else you’d like me to know about you.

The primary reason I’m doing this is because I took my vows and initiations as one dedicated to service.  I want to write something for you that will be of use to you.  This is my job.

Yes, I can certainly take my written drafts and lock myself in a closet somewhere and kick out several magickal tomes.  I can post them on Amazon and the smile and walk away, and not think another thing about them.  I can do that.  But it is far more important to me to make sure that what I do write is useful to the people who will read it.  That’s really been my goal all along.

So I’m asking for your help with this.

And I look forward to hearing from you.

Blessed Be!
Marie Angeli