Beltane Full Moon 2016 has arrived just a couple of days after the Sun reached Taurus this year. We have barely released the Martian heat and soothed the burns of the Aries fire Sun month and welcomed in the sensual, calmer (unless riled), earthy Taurean vibrations, when immediately we are being called to face and find a balance with the deeply emotional, wild and transformational energies of the Scorpio Full Moon.
This is the Moon when we have been known to be running naked through forests, jumping over fires and surrendering to the erotic call of the Horned One, right? How many of us are feeling like that right now I wonder? Tonight I feel the world is filled with tears and sense of loss, while at the same time there is rejoicing in the life and art of Prince, and for many in the UK, comedienne Victoria Wood, who have both unexpectedly exited the world stage left: there is a rich mix of emotion in the air. Taurus celebration and Scorpionic release. Full Moon impact felt on a global scale. And the beautiful thing is that this Scorpio Moon is going to cleanse our emotional bodies, purge and renew them. The going may be tough but the result could be awesome.
While Taurus deals with matter, personal values, material goods, possessions, and security, Scorpio rules the destruction of form, shared possessions, change, and transformation. The Sun in Taurus wants us to be happy with the simple, tangible things in life, while the Scorpio Moon draws our attention to complexities, intangibles, and mysteries. This Full Moon is opening the gates to a Beltane period that can bring us renewal, rebalancing, strength and increased awareness.
During the Spring the element of Air is the ruling power, underlying the seasonal energy, bringing us freshness, light, new ideas, communications…. and encouraging us to open and expand our minds – to let in the fresh air and sunlight. During the first month of Spring the Air combines with Fire element of Aries Sun, giving us a very charged period when life forges ahead after the Winter. The Fire spirit has been extra strong this year as so many other planets in Fire zones too. When the Sun arrived in Taurus we entered a month where Air combines with Earth, bringing calmer vibrations, sensual times, a sense of slowing and relaxing into the season. This slow down also boosted by Mars and Pluto having just started their retrograde periods. Their stationing some days ago brought sudden jolts, sudden shifts into a lot of our lives, and perhaps much frustration at the sudden sense of enforced slow-down.
Taurus brings Beltane, the festival of fertility and sexuality, and the message that through pleasure can be found healing and transformation. That is one of the key truths of the magical reality that we call life, one that has been largely hidden and denied by western ‘civilisation’ for a very long time. At first the Church repressed sexual pleasure.. Then science claims that pleasure has no spiritual function. But the lids have been coming off the pleasure valve since the 1960s. Beltane is a good time to rip them off, let go of any remaining shame and guilt around the body and sensual enjoyment. All Acts of Love and Pleasure are the rituals of the Divine Feminine.
In our journey to greater awareness, light and inspiration this Spring we might also remind ourselves that western culture has also, to massive destructive effect. forgotten that…
- Consciousness/Life is a Unity. We have it within ourselves the tools and technology to experience this directly, alongside and complementary to our individuality. Scientific materialist culture has convinced everyone they exist separately and temporarily. The opposite is the truth we need to inhabit as a species now.
- The Earth is a living organism. She is like a Mother to us and we are treating her terribly. She speaks to us through the cycles of nature, through the elements, the animals, plants and minerals. We have forgotten how to listen to her. We have forgotten her cycles, which means we have forgotten our own cycles.. so more and more people are falling into mental illness. Spiritual illness is even more widespread but not talked about at all. We can come into relationship and harmony with her by humbling ourselves, stepping down from the heights of our ‘great civilisation’, and returning to the simple, core elemental facets of existence, returning to relationship with the elements, with the spirit, and with each other in new tribal formations where Oneness and Love are the founding stones of human community.
- The role of LGBTQI+ people is one of connecting peoples, connecting worlds, bridging genders and bringing a rainbow age of peace and joyful celebration of the Spirit that we all are, beyond the shallow differences of race, religion, gender, sexuality. Queer beings were once healers, shamans, wisemen and women in cultures across the world, on every continent – we performed sacred functions for the tribes because the balance of masculine and feminine within us brought us into close communion with the holy spirit. (And in the West the Christian churches are full of gay clergy despite their avowed doctrinal stances). The current drug related dramas affecting so many gay men are a symptom of this need for queer people to embrace the spiritual within themselves, to get in touch with something much more ancient and poweful than the patriarchal religons that have shaped human society and moulded human minds for so long. Their rejection of us is a signal to us to go to Spirit directly, for that way we will remember why we are here in the first place.
At Radical Faerie gatherings around the world Beltane is celebrated each May amongst ever expanding groups of queers and their allies. The Oneness is celebrated. The Earth is celebrated. The cycles are honoured. The genders are bended and blended. The Queer Ones reclaim their roles for the humans. The Goddess returns.
rainbow messenger 