It’s amazing that Beltane does not suffer the same backlash as Saint Valentine’s Day. By all rights, it should. In some ways, it’s worse: the entire holiday celebrates a couple enjoying sex. At least Valentine’s allows couples to maintain some illusion of what the Western world considers chastity.
Oh Beltane, sexy, sexy Beltane that sets the hearts and loins of so many Pagans ablaze, much to the irritation of those feeling less than sparky. By May 1st (or October 31st) your influence spreads everywhere a Pagan eye might look: in Pagan book shops, in the gossip of your Pagan meeting, spreading itself around in the high pollen counts that accompany blossoming trees. Online, it gets worse—social media feeds fill up with the eroticized, overidealized, imagined bodies of God and Goddess, and people post erotic poems or vague giggling status updates about how they celebrated. Attending a public sabbat, depending on where you live, could feel like a warped visit to Noah’s Ark—seemingly, everyone arrives at a Beltane sabbat in pairs. As if the constant imagery isn’t enough, Pagan-oriented blog feeds and magazine articles fill up with love spells and related admonitions about how to fix being single or how to get the most out of your partner.
This unconscious nonacceptance of those living with neither sex nor partner is a social malady instilled post–World War II. Many, many communities faced severe drop-offs in available sexual partners during that war, and part of the subterranean troubles of the 1950s was about re-establishing all that was considered “normal” before the war. Valentine’s Day became the popular expression of romantic normalization, although Pagans, often unaware how much mainstream culture still affects them, also transferred many of the meanings associated with Valentine’s Day, about the importance of coupling, to Beltane.
The twenty-first century result is the unwitting simultaneous stigmatization and elevation of the single. You’re single? That’s wonderful! You’re sexually available! You’re single? That’s awful! You’re sexually available!
Even Pagans, for all their bohemian influences, sometimes fail to understand people wanting, let alone enjoying, life without a romantic partner. Pagans soaking up the sexiness of Beltane are not to blame—sex positivity does the world a lot of good by destigmatizing sexual orientation and killing misogyny one double-standard confrontation at a time. Accepting, even embracing, the decision not to pursue sex and relationships is an advanced step toward sex positivity that most people don’t even know they need to reach. For those who prefer no partner, who are in a healthy situation where dealing with a partner’s sexual needs is too much, or who are wanting a rest break between relationships, it’s important to internalize the following messages:
You are not spiritually deficient because you lack a romantic or sexual partner. Having no interest in romance, sex, etc., is not a moral failing. You need not muster up sexual interest for the sake of a holiday. Most animals have a mating season. As the French playwright P. A. Caron de Beaumarchais pointed out, “We drink when we are not thirsty and make love at any time, Madam. These are the only things which distinguish us from other animals.” You can also refuse to make love at any time, and this right is sacrosanct. While the biological underpinnings of desire can move us toward or away from human appetites, ultimately we can overcome, or at least manage, desire. In cases of severe health issues, such as cancer treatment, the lack of interest isn’t just understandable, it’s possibly necessary.
Preferring to celebrate Beltane without involving sex does not make you a bad Pagan.
Beltane energy fertilizes much more than the human body and the land. You can draw on the energy of that fire to fuel relationships and endeavors that have nothing to do with sex.
The only way to counter those Pagans who push coupling the hardest, especially at Beltane, is to set an eroticism-free celebratory example. Rather than sit on the sidelines and feel sorry for yourself while you watch couples pair off to jump a bonfire, consider some different ways to tap into that energy for your own benefit. To do this requires a rethink of Beltane and its associated energies. There are purposes for seeking new friends and enhancing glamour and power that have nothing to do with sex.
Drawing Friendship
Since the Internet came along, more people than ever now know that face-to-face friendships take work. This has become a larger part of cultural consciousness since the Internet allowed people to stay home in lieu of socializing. For a select few, it improved their social lives: those that could not afford to visit clubs, drink, or join bowling leagues might hop on a chat room. It definitely transformed the Pagan world, with those unable to visit occult shops or afford festivals finally able to make their voice heard loud enough that others identifying as Pagans could find them. Yet as society transforms again, new technologies have shifted us back toward contact with people we have met in the physical world. Phones allow people to maintain Internet contacts while retaining mobility, and social media connects us to people we initially met offline. Yet finding and keeping friends is harder than ever before. If you, like many other people, dove too hard into online life, you may need to work some magic to cultivate more local connections.
Personal Mystique
In addition to drawing compatible friends, Beltane energy lends itself to personal enhancement. Many of the same spells and ingredients used to add sexual allure may be mitigated into milder expressions of that energy. For instance, catnip, typically used as a come-hither ingredient, can help you exude a more affable form of attractiveness. Beltane is a good time to work on making yourself seem more charming to people in general, and for reasons far beyond seeking a mate.
Strengthening and Calibrating Friendships
Never take the friends you already have for granted. Plenty of Pagans work spells with an eye toward maintaining and adjusting romantic relationships, especially at Beltane. Relatively few apply similar work for strengthening platonic friendships.
Love, even platonic love, needs feeding. Beltane kindles all types of love. This is an excellent time to take stock of who in your life takes up too much energy in exchange for too little, and, while anathema to those who romanticize friendships as lifelong relationships, root out those who have had too much of a negative impact on you. If you have people in your life who put you in dangerous situations, who start fights with you during crucial professional or creative turning points in your life on a regular basis, or who take pleasure in making you feel bad, cut them out and use Beltane fire energy to cauterize those wounds. The same spells used for smooth romantic breakups also apply to smooth friendship breakups. Beltane, as a harbinger for summer, also wets the ground, making it easy to weed out the choking growth.
Family
Familial love can also need a little magical adjustment. While genetics can bond us, a little magic to make those bonds of joy instead of obligation can go a long way toward creating happiness. If your family will cooperate, introduce ways to turn conflict into transformative communication instead of avoidance. Work healing magic on wounded relationships. In modern times it’s less discussed than it once was, but the veil that thins at Samhain also thins at Beltane, though not to as dramatic a degree. If you know of generational trauma that passes down family lines, this season of a thinned veil is an opportune time to invoke your ancestors for help in healing old hurts and breaking generational chains. If you live with a family blessed with freedom from such traumas, use this time to work some harmony magic for everyone in a shared household.
Business Networking
We live in an age where the newspaper classifieds no longer lead to a career. Beltane’s extroverted energy can help overcome the obstacles inherent in job networking. A little Beltane-energized magic can help you cut through the sea of people to the ones who share goals and projects compatible to your own. Some of this comes from blending attraction magic with prosperity magic: think catnip and high john as a replacement for more erotic draws like musk and jasmine. In turn, you can use all that Beltane fertility energy to bring the right customers to your business while weeding out the customers who game the system and drain resources.
Healing Magic
In between people who want the sexual energy of Beltane for sex and those who prefer to abstain from it are people passing through a healing phase. Often men and women in treatment for cancer have no desire. Also, people dealing with recent family loss may experience a nadir in the libido. Healing workings at Beltane may not result in a “ready for love” outlook although it might—it depends on the nature of the psychic injury. Fertility energy, while popularly used to make new plants and new babies, can assist a doctor trying to healing already existent illness.
General Health
The fertility energy of Beltane well suits healing needs from people suffering physical problems. The energy of Beltane best serves people who need greater strength to heal, who need to see cell growth happen in their ailment, or who need to be harmoniously readjusted to nature.
For example, if someone has a common cold hit right around Beltane, that person might drink tea, take cold medications, and visit a doctor if it lasts more than three days. With the addition of Beltane energy, you might charge a green candle and call upon the energy of the Lord and Lady’s union when you light it to infuse the sick person with refreshed energy and health.
Healing the Heart
Beltane can give a person going through emotional difficulties significant renewal. Beltane’s energy allows for a balance of the masculine and feminine wisdom. This is a time to observe how couples in your life interact, starting with your parents and moving outward to the people you spend the most time with. Who seems the happiest? Who seems the unhappiest? Notice how the happy ones take their disagreements to one another. This is also a good time to meditate on past relationships. While the High Fidelity scenario (from the classic film starring John Cusack and Jack Black) where you interview all of your exes is usually not feasible and definitely not wise, you could benefit from digging out old diaries, emails, and texts to look at what attracted you to those people and how that went wrong. As you identify the negative traits that attracted and ultimately repelled you from people, you can establish magical practices to help you undo those bad emotional habits and establish new emotional habits to replace them.
Healing the Earth with Targeted Treatment
In the Northern Hemisphere, Beltane’s proximity to Earth Day sometimes influences the former holiday’s celebrations. Some groups may raise a great deal of energy and then push it into the soil, commanding the energy to “heal the earth.” The sentiment is lovely. The practice itself, however, could benefit from tweaking. Beltane is an excellent time to try a few adjustments for environmental magic. After all, the earth isn’t dying—it just might kill everyone as a byproduct of the way we treat its resources. Rather than awns generic healing energy, pick a specific cause to work magic on. For instance, you might want to send the energy raised at Beltane outward and upward to seed the possibility for cleaner air all over the world. You may use the fire energy to kindle new ideas to make environmental innovation affordable. You might pour libations and add fertility and prosperity herbs to the offering such as carrots, cucumbers, and rosemary. You can direct that work toward clean, potable free water, recycling materials, and making world leaders more conscious of how their decisions affect resources. Magic, like charity donations, has the most effect if you pick one cause and concentrate on that.
Being single at Beltane does not mean you need to drum up a date or interest in a date. It gives you a way to find a new angle on the energy of the season, and to apply that energy toward love, healing, and connectivity beyond common conception.