We celebrated Beltane at Neskaya last night, with some dances and the winding of the maypole. We celebrated on May 2 instead of May 1, because our usual time to dance is on Sunday. The “correct” date for Beltane is an interesting question. In some traditions, it is the first of May, in others it is the thirteenth. In Stonehenge Decoded, Gerald Hawkins shows that the diagonal of the rectangle formed by the Station Stones points to the moon’s minor standstill. The standstills of the moon were in a sense rediscovered by Gerald Hawkins when he did his computer study of Stonehenge. They are observational phenomena occurring on the horizon, and changing as the moon’s orbit changes. The Major Standstill is when the moon travels its lowest path through the sky. For each standstill of the sun (“solstice” means “sun stands still”), there are two standstills of the moon.
The major standstill is in a place the sun never gets to, the minor standstill occurs in two places on the horizon where the sun rises four times a year. These times are the cross quarter days of the Celtic Sacred Calendar, Beltane at the beginning of May, Lammas in early August, Samhain on November 1, and Imbolc at the beginning of February. For more complete information see Sacred Year.
this is the season of beltane, the intersection of worlds, when the living green emerges again out of the land of the dead, when we leave behind our homes, the secure constructs in which we lived our winter, and venture out on the great plains, following the herds, following our animal instincts, following the paths of the mother through the grass, following the flow of energy through the earth’s magnetic web. now we construct the bon fire, the bone fire, the need fire, of nine kinds of wood and the ritual spark struck from no flint, using no metal. now we burn the remnants of the past, the clinging the hoarding, the resentments, the guilt. now the worlds intersect, what was opaque becomes transparent, what was solid is exposed as transitory. we sit at the sea’s edge, we sit on solid rock, we watch the patterns form and dissolve in the foam as the swells lift and break — and the shifting and everchanging sea is just as it was a hundred million years ago, and the rock, once crystallizing in the depths of the mountains, is now exposed to the sky and crumbling away to sand. this morning, at stonehenge, the sun rose in the arch of the moon’s minor standstill, the gates stand open between the worlds, ghosts walk the earth, and mortals awake in the land of the fairies.
From The Feminine of History is Mystery, lefthand page facing righthand page 15