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

SPRING EQUINOX: March 20, 2012, 05:30 UT (12:30am Eastern US)

sun into 0 aries               number one               beginning of time

This evening I’d like to give you a very short walk thru the birth and development of the Sacred Spring Holiday.  This is the first of a two part post, and I’ll be back after this to post some Equinox day activities.  I know this first part will sound a bit academic, but humor me.  Smile and nod, pat me on the head, and think of England.  Here goes…

Well, like everything else in paganism – by definition the recognition of the sacred in the profane – the god in the details – the beliefs and culture of the ‘country people’ – life – it was a process.  The beginnings of this holiday were monumentally celestial!  Quite literally!  It was written in the stars.

Originally, and quite anciently, the Babylonians observed the positions of the stars and planets and associated them with certain events.   The fixed stars were associated with changes in weather and season, the turning of the cycle of life.  The rising of certain stars heralded the oncoming of certain types or periods of weather.  A good example of this is the Egyptian observance of the rising of Sirius as it was associated with the rising of the waters of the Nile.

The Babylonian observations about rising stars and seasons were adapted by the Egyptians and given sacred significance.  The Egyptians tended to do that with everything.  Every household function was associated with a god.  Everything had a divine purpose.  The Egyptians were a deeply spiritual people.  To them, the beginning of Spring was quite literally brought by the rising of Alpha Tauri, the star Aldebaran, the Eye of the Bull, the first of the four Royal Stars of the Egyptians, later represented by the Archangel Michael, the Watcher of the East from antiquity.

With the passing of time, the position of the stars drew further and further away from their original places as the watchers at the four Directions.   Now, the Fixed Stars do not move in ways visible to the naked eye (unlike the planets), hence the name FIXED stars.  But the seasons of the Earth DO change in linear time.  The axial rotation of our North Pole, in a cycle lasting 29,000 years, results in a progression of about a degree every 72 years for the positions of the stars.  Thus, these four stars that were initially observed to rise at the beginnings of the seasons, are far out of alignment by now, well into their celestial cycle.  Aldebaran is now at about 10 degrees of Gemini.

Since much of the occult philosophy of Western Ritual Magick is directly descended from Egyptians, that idea of the Four Directions, Four Seasons, Four Guardians was fed thru Greek abstract philosophy and geometry and given the attributes of the elements: air, fire, water and earth, each attributed to its proper direction, season, and guardian.  The early Greeks were the first to note that the ‘fixed’ stars were now in positions that were different from the recorded  observations of the Babylonians.  So they adopted a new way of dividing the year into it’s fourfold parts, based upon the path of the sun.  This gave us an agricultural year, based once more upon the transitions of sunlight and season.

This change of seasonal system gave us the Tropical Zodiac, the division of the plane of the ecliptic (the path that the sun, moon and planets take across the sky).  The 360 degree wheel represented the apparent path of the ecliptic around the earth (or the way it looks as you are standing on earth looking up) and was divided into the four seasons with three temperaments each, or twelve signs of 30 degrees each.  It begins with 0 degrees Aries, the point at which this ecliptic path passes thru the celestial equator.  This 0 Aries is the point at which we celebrate the Spring Equinox.  From this, you can see that this method of yearly division is based upon observations of seasonal change, and its association with signs and astrological position is no longer astronomic.  The signs no longer correspond to the constellations and star positions themselves if you are using the Tropical Zodiac.

 ADDITIONAL NOTES:  There is another system of the division of the year which is connected to the position of the stars.  This is called Sidereal Astrology and it is the main focus of Indian Astrology, as well as a revival among some Western Astrologers.  The purpose of this article is not to explain Sidereal, but to speak only to the 0 Aries point from Tropical Astrology which is the Spring Equinox.

These symbolic associations and yearly divisions were brought down thru the middle ages, thru the ceremonial influence of the medieval Christian church with it’s astrologer monks, and the dissemination of the belief system out into the pagani, the ‘country folk’.  Thus it became common for most everyone to celebrate a particular day of the year at the beginning of each season.  The celebration of spring seems inherent in us as humans as almost all cultures have some sort of Spring Fling.  Personally, I think that folks just love a good party, especially after a long hard winter.  The ceremonial nature of this particular holiday has been reinforced from the Victorian era when scholars began to document local folklore and faery beliefs, mythic tales like the Mabignogion, and to reconstruct folk magick practices.  This was usually done thru the veil of their own Christian or esoteric magickal beliefs, and so neo-paganism with its eight holidays over the wheel of the year, the combination of folk magicks with Western ritual practices, was born.

The holiday we celebrate tonight and tomorrow is the Spring Equinox.  I will be back in a few with a nice Equinox Day celebration for those of you who don’t already one on have your agenda.

Blessed Be,

Marie Angeli