A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

Bealtaine, 30th April
The Sabbats
The Sabbats and Rites for Birth, Marriage and Death

In the Celtic tradition, the two greatest festivals of all are Bealtaine and Samhain — the beginning of Summer and the beginning of Winter. To the Celts, as to all pastoral peoples, the year had two seasons, not four; subtler divisions concerned crop-raisers rather than cattle-raisers. Beltane, the anglicized form, corresponds to the modern Irish Gaelic word Bealtaine (pronounced ’b’yol-tinnuh’, approximately rhyming with ’winner’), the name of the month of May, and to the Scottish Gaelic word Bealtuinn (pronounced ’b’yal-ten’, with the ’n’ like ’ni’ in ’onion’), meaning May Day.

The original meaning is ’Bel-fire’ — the fire of the Celtic or proto-Celtic god variously known as Bel, Beli, Balar, Balor or the latinized Belenus — names traceable back to the Middle Eastern Baal, which simply means ’Lord’.¹ Some people have suggested that Bel is the British-Celtic equivalent of the Gaulish-Celtic Cernunnos; that may be true in the sense that both are archetypal male-principle deities, mates of the Great Mother, but we feel that the evidence points to their being different aspects of that principle. Cernunnos is always represented as the Horned God; he is above all a nature deity, the god of animals, the Celtic Pan. (Herne the Hunter, who haunts Windsor Great Park with his Wild Hunt, is a later English Cernunnos, as his name suggests.) He is also sometimes seen as a chthonic (underworld) deity, the Celtic Pluto. Originally, the Horned God was doubtless the tribal totem animal, whose mating with the Great Mother would have been the key fertility ritual of the totemic period. (See Lethbridge’s Witches; Investigating an Ancient Religion.)

Bel, on the other hand, was ’the Bright One’, god of light and fire. He had Sun-like qualities (classical writers equated him with Apollo) but he was not, strictly speaking, a Sun-God; as we have pointed out, the Celts were not solar-oriented. No people who worshipped the Sun as a god would give it a feminine name — and grian (Irish and Scottish Gaelic for ’Sun’) is a feminine noun. So is Mór, a personalized Irish name for the Sun, as in the greeting ’Mór dhuit’ — ’May the Sun bless you.’ It may seem a subtle difference, but a god-symbol is not always regarded as the same thing as the god himself by his worshippers. Christians do not worship a lamb or a dove, nor did ancient Egyptians worship a baboon or a hawk; yet the first two are symbols of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the second two of Thoth and Horus. To some people the Sun was a god, but not to the Celts with their feminine Sun, even though Bel/Balor, Oghma, Lugh and Llew had solar attributes. A traditional Scottish Gaelic folk-prayer (see Kenneth Jackson’s Celtic Miscellany, item 34) addresses the Sun as “happy mother of the stars”, rising “like a young queen in flower”. (For further evidence that the pagan Celts’ ritual calendar was oriented to the natural vegetation year and herd-raising, and not to the solar year and agriculture, see Frazer’s Golden Bough.)

Symbolically, both the Cernunnos aspect and the Bel aspect can be seen as ways of visualizing the Great Father who impregnates the Great Mother.² And these are the two themes which dominate the May Eve/May Day festival throughout Celtic and British folklore: fertility and fire.

The Bel-fires were lit on the hilltops to celebrate the return of life and fertility to the world. In the Scottish Highlands as late as the eighteenth century, Robert Graves tells us (The White Goddess), fire was kindled by drilling an oak-plank, “but only in the kindling of the Beltane need-fire, to which miraculous virtue was ascribed…. It originally culminated in the sacrifice of a man representing the Oak-god.” (It is interesting that in Rome the Vestal Virgins, guardians of the sacred fire, used to throw manikins made of rushes into the River Tiber at the May full moon as symbolic human sacrifices.)

In pagan Ireland no one could light a Bealtaine fire until the Ard Ri, the High King, had lit the first one on Tara Hill. In AD 433, St Patrick showed an acute understanding of symbolism when he lit a fire on Slane Hill, ten miles from Tara, before the High King Laoghaire lit his; he could not have made a more dramatic claim to the usurpation of spiritual leadership over the whole island. St David made a similar historic gesture in Wales in the following century.

Incidentally, much of the symbolism of Tara as the spiritual focus of ancient Ireland is immediately recognizable to anyone who has worked in a Magic Circle. Tara is in Meath (Midhe, ’centre’) and was the seat of the High Kings; its ground-plan is still visible as great twin circular earthworks. Tara’s ritual Banqueting Hall had a central hall for the High King himself, surrounded by four inward-facing halls which were allotted to the four provincial kingdoms: to the North for Ulster, to the East for Leinster, to the South for Munster, and to the West for Connacht. That is why the four provinces are traditionally known as ’fifths’, because of the vital Centre which completes them, as Spirit completes and integrates Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Even the elemental ritual tools are represented, in the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann: the Stone of Fál (Destiny) which cried aloud when the rightful High King sat on it, the Sword and Spear of Lugh, and the Cauldron of the Dagda (the Father God).

All four were male symbols, as one might expect in a warrior society; but the archetypal matrilinear foundations still shone through at the inauguration of a lesser king, ruler of a tuath or tribe. This was “a symbolic marriage with Sovereignty, a fertility rite for which the technical term was banais rígi ’royal wedding’ “. The same used to be true of the High Kings: “The legendary Queen Medb, whose name means ’intoxication’, was originally a personification of sovereignty, for we are told that she was the wife of nine kings of Ireland, and elsewhere that only one who was mated with her could be king. Of King Cormac it was said … ’until Medb slept with the lad, Cormac was not king of Ireland.’“ (Dillon and Chadwick, The Celtic Realms.)

It is easy to see, then, why Tara had to be the igniting-point for the community’s regenerative Bel-fire; and the same would have been true of the corresponding spiritual foci in other lands. Ireland merely happens to be the country where the details of the tradition have been most clearly preserved.

(On the whole complex symbolism of Tara, the Reeses’ Celtic Heritage makes fascinating reading for witches and occultists.)

A feature of the Bealtaine fire festival in many lands was jumping over the fire. (We say ’was’, but in discussing seasonal folk-customs the past tense seldom proves to be entirely justified.) Young people jumped it to bring themselves husbands or wives; intending travellers to ensure a safe journey; pregnant women to ensure an easy delivery, and so on. Cattle were driven through its ashes — or between two such fires — to ensure a good milk-yield. The magical properties of the festival fire form a persistent belief, as we shall also see under Midsummer, Samhain and Yule. (Both Scottish and Irish Gaelic, incidentally, have a saying ’caught between two Bealtaine fires’, meaning ’caught in a dilemma’.)

Talking of cattle — next day, 1st May, was an important one in old Ireland. On that day the women, children and herdsmen took the cattle off to the summer pastures, or ’booleys’ (buaile or buailte), until Samhain. The same thing still happens, on the same dates, in the Alps and other parts of Europe. Another Irish (and Scottish) Gaelic word for summer pasture is áiridh; and Doreen Valiente suggests (Witchcraft for Tomorrow) that “there is just a chance that the name ’Aradia’ is Celtic in origin,” connected with this word. In North Italian witchcraft, which, as Leland (see Bibliography) has shown, derives from Etruscan roots, Aradia is the daughter of Diana (or, as the Etruscans themselves called her, Aritimi, a variant of the Greek Artemis). The Etruscans flourished in Tuscany from about the eighth to the fourth century BC, till the Romans conquered the last of their city-states, Volsinii, in 280 BC. From the fifth century onwards, they had much contact with the Gaulish Celts, sometimes as enemies and sometimes as allies; so it may very well be that the Celts brought Aradia there. ’Daughter’, in the development of pantheons, often means ’later version’ — and in the Aradia legend, Aradia learned much of her wisdom from her mother, which would tally with the undoubted fact that the brilliant Etruscan civilization was admired and envied by their Celtic neighbours. It is interesting that, in both Irish and Scottish, áiridh or a slight variant of it also means ’worth, merit’.

And in case anyone thinks that Aradia reached Britain only through Leland’s nineteenth-century researches — in the form ’Herodias’, she appears as an English witch-goddess name in the tenth-century Canon Episcopi.

Back to Bealtaine itself. Oak is the tree of the God of the Waxing Year; hawthorn, at this season, is a tree of the White Goddess. The strong folklore taboo on breaking hawthorn branches or bringing them into the house is traditionally lifted on May Eve, when sprigs of it may be cut for the Goddess’s festival. (Irish farmers, and even earth-moving roadbuilders, are still reluctant to cut down lone hawthorns; a ’fairy’ hawthorn stood by itself in the middle of a pasture of the farm we lived on at Ferns, County Wexford, and similar respected examples can be seen all over the country.)

However, if you want blossoms for your ritual (for example, as chaplets in the women witches’ hair), you cannot be certain of finding hawthorn in flower as early as May Eve, and you will probably have to be content with the young leaves. Our own solution is to use blackthorn, whose flowers appear in April, ahead of the leaves. Blackthorn (sloe) is also a Goddess tree at this season — but it belongs to the Goddess in her dark, devouring aspect, as the bitterness of its autumn fruit would suggest. It used to be regarded as ’the witches’ tree’ — in the malevolent sense — and unlucky. But to fear the dark aspect of the Goddess is to miss the truth that she consumes only to give new birth. If the Mysteries could be summed up in one sentence, it might be this: “At the core of the Bright Mother is the Dark Mother, and at the core of the Dark Mother is the Bright Mother.” The sacrifice-and-rebirth theme of our Bealtaine ritual reflects this truth, so, to symbolize the two aspects in balance, our women wear hawthorn in leaf and blackthorn in blossom, intertwined.

Another taboo lifted on May Eve was the early British one on hunting the hare. The hare, as well as being a Moon animal, has a fine reputation for randiness and fecundity; so has the goat, and both figure in the sacrificial aspect of the May Day fertility traditions. The Love Chase is a widespread form of this tradition; it underlies the Lady Godiva legend and that of the Teutonic goddess Eostre or Ostara after whom Easter is named, as well as such folk-festivals as the May Day ’Obby Oss’ ceremony in Padstow, Cornwall. (On the alluring and mysterious figure of the love-chase woman “neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with nor without a gift”, who is “easily recognized as the May-Eve aspect of the Love-and-Death goddess,” see Graves, The White Goddess.)

But apart from — or rather, in amplification of — the enactment of these Goddess and God-King mysteries, Bealtaine for ordinary people was a festival of unashamed human sexuality and fertility. Maypole, nuts and ’the gown of green’ were frank symbols of penis, testicles and the covering of a woman by a man. Dancing round the maypole, hunting for nuts in the woods, ’greenwood marriages’ and staying up all night to watch the May sun rise, were unequivocal activities, which is why the Puritans suppressed them with such pious horror. (Parliament made maypoles illegal in 1644, but they came back with the Restoration; in 1661 a 134-foot maypole was set up in the Strand.)

Robin Hood, Maid Marian and Little John played a big part in May Day folklore; and many people with surnames such as Hodson, Robinson, Jenkinson, Johnson and Godkin owe their ancestry to some distant May Eve in the woods.

Branches and flowers used to be brought back from the woods on May morning to decorate the village’s doors and windows, and young people would carry garlands in procession, singing. The garlands were usually of intersecting hoops. Sir J. G. Frazer wrote at the beginning of this century: “It appears that a hoop wreathed with rowan and marsh marigold, and bearing suspended within it two balls, is still carried on May Day by villagers in some parts of Ireland. The balls, which are sometimes covered with gold and silver paper, are said to have originally represented the sun and moon.” (The Golden Bough) Maybe — but Frazer, splendid pioneer though he was, often seemed to be (or, in the climate of his time, discreetly pretended to be) blind to sexual symbolism.

Another May morning custom in Ireland was ’skimming the wells’. You went to the well of a prosperous neighbour (presumably before he was up and about) and skimmed the surface of the water, to acquire his luck for yourself. In another variant of this custom, you skimmed your own well, to ensure a good butter-yield for the year — and also, one may guess, to forestall any neighbour who was after your luck.

Folk-memory survives in curious ways. A Dublin friend — a good Catholic in his fifties — tells us that when he was a boy in north County Longford, his father and mother used to take the children out at midnight on May Eve, and the whole family would dance naked in the young crops. The explanation the children were given was that this would protect them against catching colds for the next twelve months; but it would be interesting to know whether the parents themselves believed this to be the true reason or were really concerned with the fertility of the crops and were giving the children a ’respectable’ explanation in case they talked — particularly in the priest’s hearing. Our friend also tells us that the crops were always sown by 25th March to ensure a good harvest; and 25th March used to be regarded as the Spring Equinox (compare 25th December for Christmas instead of the astronomically exact solstice).

“One of the most widespread superstitions in England held that washing the face in May morning dew would beautify the skin,” the Encyclopaedia Britannica says. “Pepys alludes to the practice in his Diary, and as late as 1791 a London newspaper reported that ’yesterday, being the first of May, a number of persons went into the fields and bathed their faces with the dew on the grass with the idea that it would render them beautiful.’“ Ireland has the same tradition.

But to return to the greenwood. Today, over-population and not under-population is humanity’s problem; and more enlightened attitudes to sexual relationships (though still developing unevenly) would hardly be compatible with the greenwood-orgy method of producing a new crop of Hodsons and Godkins. But both the cheerful frankness and the dark mystery can and should be expressed. That is what the Sabbats are all about.

In our Bealtaine rite, we have woven as much as we could of the traditional symbolism, short of overloading it and blunting its edge with obscurity — or, worse, taking the fun out of it. We leave it to the reader to discern the weaving. But perhaps it is worth mentioning that the High Priest’s declamation, “I am a stag of seven times,” etc., consists of those lines of the Song of Amergin which belong, according to Robert Graves’s allocation, to the seven tree-months in the Oak King’s cycle.

We have added one quite separate little rite which was suggested to us by reading Ovid’s Fasti. On 1st May, the Romans paid homage to their Lares, or household gods; and it seemed appropriate for us to do the same on the night when the Bel-fire is extinguished and rekindled. All homes, to be honest, possess objects which are in effect Lares. Ours include a foot-high Venus de Milo acquired by Stewart’s parents before he was born; slightly battered, twice broken in two and mended, she has come to be a much-loved Guardian of the Home and a true Lar. She now smiles Hellenistically down on our Bealtaine rites. Other witches may also feel that this little annual homage is a pleasant custom to adopt.

The Preparation

The cauldron is placed in the centre of the Circle, with a candle burning inside it; this represents the Bel-fire.

Sprigs of hawthorn and blackthorn decorate the altar, and chaplets of the two combined (with the thorns clipped off) are made for the women witches. (A shot of hair-spray on the blossoms beforehand will help to prevent the petals falling.) The hawthorn and blackthorn should be gathered on May Eve itself, and it is customary to apologize and explain to each tree as you cut it.

If oak leaves can be found at this season in your area, a chaplet of them is made for the High Priest, in his role as Oak King. (A permanent oak crown is a useful coven accessory — see under Yule)

A green scarf, or piece of gauze, at least a yard square, is laid by the altar.

As many wax tapers as there are people in the coven are placed close to the cauldron.

The ’cakes’ for consecration on this occasion should be a bowl of nuts.

If you are including the rite for the Guardian of the House, this (or these) are placed on the edge of the Circle near the East candle, with one or two joss-sticks in a holder ready for lighting at the appropriate moment. (If your Guardian is not movable, a symbol of it may stand in its place; for example, if it is a tree in your garden, bring in a sprig of it — again with the appropriate apology and explanation.)

The Ritual

After the Witches’ Rune, the coven spread themselves around the Circle area between the cauldron and the perimeter and start a soft, rhythmic clapping.

The High Priest picks up the green scarf, gathers it lengthwise like a rope and holds it with one end in each hand. He starts to move towards the High Priestess, making as though to throw the scarf over her shoulders and pull her to him; but she backs away from him, tantalizingly.

While the coven continue their rhythmic clapping, the High Priestess continues to elude the pursuing High Priest. She beckons to him and teases him but always steps back before he can capture her with the scarf. She weaves in and out of the coven, and the other women step in the High Priest’s way to help her elude him.

After a while, say after two or three ’laps’ of the Circle, the High Priestess allows the High Priest to capture her by throwing the scarf over her head to behind her shoulders and pulling her to him. They kiss and separate, and the High Priest hands the scarf to another man.

The other man then pursues his partner, who eludes him, beckons to him and teases him in exactly the same way; the clapping goes on all the time. (See Plate 12.) After a while she, too, allows herself to be captured and kissed.

The man then hands the scarf to another man, and the pursuit-game continues until every couple in the coven has taken part.

The last man hands the scarf back to the High Priest.

Once again the High Priest pursues the High Priestess; but this time the pace is much slower, almost stately, and her eluding and beckoning more solemn, as though she is tempting him into danger; and this time the others do not intervene. The pursuit continues until the High Priestess places herself between the cauldron and the altar, facing the altar and two or three paces from it. Then the High Priest halts with his back to the altar and captures her with the scarf.

They embrace solemnly but wholeheartedly; but after a few seconds of the kiss, the High Priest lets the scarf fall from his hands, and the High Priestess releases him and takes a step backwards.

The High Priest drops to his knees, sits back on his heels and lowers his head, chin on chest.

The High Priestess spreads her arms, signalling for the clapping to stop. She then calls forward two women by name and places them on each side of the High Priest, facing inwards, so that the three tower over him. The High Priestess picks up the scarf, and the three of them spread it between them over the High Priest. They lower it slowly and then release it, so that it covers his head like a shroud.

The High Priestess sends the two women back to their places and calls forward two men by name. She instructs them to extinguish the two altar candles (not the Earth candle), and when they have done so, she sends them back to their places.

The High Priestess then turns and kneels close to the cauldron, facing it. She gestures to the rest of the coven to kneel around the cauldron with her.

Only the High Priest stays where he is in front of the altar, kneeling but ’dead’.

When everyone is in place, the High Priestess blows out the candle in the cauldron and is silent for a moment. Then she says:

“The Bel-fire is extinguished, and the Oak King is dead. He has embraced the Great Mother and died of his love; so has it been, year by year, since time began. Yet if the Oak King is dead — he who is the God of the Waxing Year — all is dead; the fields bear no crops, the trees bear no fruit, and the creatures of the Great Mother bear no young. What shall we do, therefore, that the Oak King may live again?”

The coven reply:

“Re-kindle the Bel-fire!”

The High Priestess says:

“So mote it be.”

The High Priestess takes a taper, rises, goes to the altar, lights the taper from the Earth candle and kneels again at the cauldron. She relights the cauldron candle with her taper. (See Plate 7.) Then she says:

“Take each of you a taper and light it from the Bel-fire.”

The coven do so; and finally the High Priestess lights a second taper for herself. Summoning the original two women to accompany her, she rises and turns to face the High Priest. She gestures to the two women to lift the scarf from the High Priest’s head; they do so (see Plate 8) and lay it on the floor.

The High Priestess sends the two women back to their places and summons the two men. She instructs them to relight the altar candles with their tapers. When they have done so, she sends them back to their places.

She then holds out one of her tapers to the High Priest (who so far has not moved) and says:

“Come back to us, Oak King, that the land may be fruitful.”

The High Priest rises, and accepts the taper. He says:

“I am a stag of seven tines;

I am a wide flood on a plain;

I am a wind on the deep waters;

I am a shining tear of the sun;

I am a hawk on a cliff;

I am fair among flowers;

I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke.”

The High Priestess and High Priest lead a ring dance around the cauldron, the rest of the coven following, all carrying their tapers. The mood becomes joyous. As they dance, they chant:

“Oh, do not tell the Priest of our Art,

Or he would call it a sin;

But we shall be out in the woods all night,

A-conjuring Summer in!

And we bring you news by word of mouth

For women, cattle and corn —

Now is the Sun come up from the South

With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!”³

They repeat “With Oak, and Ash, and Thorn” ad lib., till the High Priestess blows out her taper and lays it by the cauldron. The rest do the same. Then the entire coven link hands and circle faster and faster. Every now and then the High Priestess calls a name, or a couple’s names, and whoever is called breaks away, jumps the cauldron and rejoins the ring. When all have jumped, the High Priestess cries “Down!” and everybody sits.

That, apart from the Great Rite, is the end of the Bealtaine ritual; but if the Guardian of the House is to be honoured, it is most suitably done while the rest of the coven are relaxing. The Guardian ritual is of course performed by the couple, or individual, in whose house the Sabbat is being held — who may or may not be the High Priestess and High Priest. If it is an individual, his or her working partner will assist; if he or she is unpartnered, the High Priestess or High Priest may do so.

The couple approach the East candle, while the rest of the coven remain seated but turn to face East with them.

One of the couple lights the joss-sticks in front of the Guardian, while the other says:

“Guardian of this House, watch over it in the year to come, till again the Bel-fire is extinguished and relit. Bless this house, and be blessed by it; let all who live here, and all friends who are welcomed here, prosper under this roof. So mote it be!”

All say:

“So mote it be!”

The couple rejoin the coven.

Bealtaine and Samhain are traditional ’Mischief Nights’ — what Doreen Valiente has called “the in-between times, when the year was swinging on its hinges, the doors of the Other World were open, and anything could happen”. So when all is done, the Great Rite celebrated, and the wine and nuts shared, this is the night for forfeits. In imposing bizarre little tasks or ordeals, the High Priestess’s inventiveness may run wild — always remembering, of course, that it is the High Priest’s final privilege to devise a forfeit for her.

One final point; if you are holding your Bealtaine festival outdoors, the Bel-fire which is lit should be a bonfire. This should be laid ready with kindling which will catch quickly. But the old Bel-fire which the High Priestess extinguishes should be a candle, protected if necessary inside a lantern. It would not be practicable, unless the Sabbat were a large-scale affair, to extinguish a bonfire in the middle of the ritual.

If you live in an area where witchcraft activity is known and respected — or at least tolerated — and have the use of a hilltop, the sudden blazing up of a Bealtaine fire in the darkness may stir some interesting folk-memories.

But if you do light a bonfire — on this or any other occasion, have a fire-extinguisher ready to hand in case of emergency. Witches who start heath-fires or woodland-fires will quickly lose any local respect they may have built up; and quite right too.