Now, I have been to glastonbury a LOT in the last decade – more than 30 times.
It’s my spiritual home, the place I come back to again and again to remember who I am and feel like a normal regular person again. I trained as a Priestess here, first discovered my true heart love for belly dance here. It’s been the heart of my passion and life’s work for the last 15 years.
But my experience and perception of it has shifted HUGELY in that time as I have settled into who I am as a person and as a priestess.
So I am so happy to share part of my Beltane pilgrimage with you and share with you what Glastonbury is to me now.
What is Beltane like in Glastonbury?
I arrived in Glastonbury on Sunday Afternoon on Beltane weekend.
Beltane in Glastonbury is a town wide celebration. There are two days of events, ceremonies and parties, culminating with a Beltane bonfire and a dragon procession through the town!
On Sunday, the celebrants were up at 7am to walk up the Glastonbury Tor, the sacred hill that overshadows the town, to welcome in the sun. There were three (three!) maypole ceremonies in town, and the sacred feminine and sacred masculine joined together to celebrate the goddess in the landscape. Folks jumped over bonfires holding hands to commit to their love for a year, they drummed in the valleys and paraded with pride down the streets.
So by the time I got there at 3:30pm, safe to say that the whole town was a little sleepy from such an early start!
Arriving at Chalice Well
I checked into my residence, the Chalice Well Retreat.
At the moment when I visit Glastonbury I like to stay at the Chalice Well, the beautiful peace garden deep in the feminine valley of Glastonbury Tor. This garden is the birthplace of the Red Spring, and although the gardens are super popular, not may people know that you can stay here in the retreat houses. You have to be a friend of Chalice Well to stay here (it’s like a membership that gives you free entry to the Chalice Well gardens for a year, it costs you £30) but if you visit Glasto often and like hiding at the Well like I do, it’s totally worth it.
The benefit of staying at Chalice Well is that you get to visit the gardens all day and all night long. You get private (well, almost private! you have to share it with your retreat house buddies!) time in the gardens in the mornings and evenings, and a lovely kitchen to cook your meals in. My favourite thing is walking through the gardens at night time in the summer, drinking in the peace of the gardens and listening to the echo of drums in the hills.
It’s a retreat centre, so that means no laptops and no phones.
My intent for the weekend here was to connect in with my goddess Morgan le Fay, get some spiritual work done, and relax in the green beauty of Glastonbury.
As usual, I did nothing I intended to do!
On the first night I spent time wandering the gardens of Chalice Well. Beltane is before the roses bloom, and the garden is filled with beautiful blue faery flowers. It’s such a privilege to be here alone in the gardens.
It was a wet weekend, Glastonbury had spent Beltane being showered with the soft rain of the lover goddess, very seasonally appropriate but it did mean that it was jumper weather…
… and as usual, there were lots of people gathering at the White Spring across the road.
The White Spring
In Glastonbury, there is a valley between two hills – Chalice Hill, where the Chalice Well Gardens live, and the Tor, out of which the White Spring is birthed. There is a little country road that leads up the valley, and on one side is the Red Spring, the other the White.
There is often a crowd of people hanging outside the White Spring even when it’s closed. Folks gather to drum and talk about spiritual stuff – it’s a real barefoot hippy hangout.
The building the spring is housed within – an old victorian stone reservoir turned temple – is usually closed. The White Spring is staffed by volunteers and it’s open when they fancy opening it, very much it running on Glastonbury Time. It’s often pure luck if the White Spring is open while you are visiting.
This time, at 8pm at night, I looked over the fence of Chalice Well and saw the Spring doors were open.
I’d never seen the Spring open so late.
I ran over there.
In my opinion the White Spring is the true pagan temple of Glastonbury.
You have the Goddess Temple and the new Temple of Avalon, but the White Spring is the pulsing living unrefined heart of it.
It’s a dark candlelit building echoing with the sound of rushing water. Many pools of flowing water lie in the temple, filled with the cold clear water of the White Spring of Glastonbury, so named because the water leaves a white mineral deposit over time.
There is a large knee-height pool, and a series of deeper pools at the side where you can immerse your whole body in the healing springs.
There are altars within the temple building – an area dedicated to the Horned God, another to Brigit and the Goddess, another to the Black Madonna.
It is Beltane, so folks have offered roses to the pools and the petals swirl in the waters.
And the acoustics in here – oh my.
This is the true sacred temple of Avalon. People come here and connect with the Gods and the elements in the way they wish. They sing, or drum, or bathe in the waters. People regularly strip all their clothes of and wade in the pools – this is a pagan temple, nudity is welcome here. Little naked kiddies play in the waters, and people ritually immerse themselves in the pools, all at once.
It’s a living temple. A true pagan temple – everyone finds their own connection to the divine here.
It’s a phenomenal place. I hope you get to visit one day.
Here’s the thing about me and Glastonbury.
In the last few years, whenever I come back to Glastonbury I connect with my Pussy Witch of Avalon power. It wasn’t always this way (not at all!), but it is now and this is the current that Glastonbury relaxes and opens me into every time that I visit.
It’s a place of sexual energy, of kundalini rising and pure wild shakti life force and when I come here, even if I didn’t mean to, I come to anoint my pussy and connect with my ecstatic priestess nature.
I want to lie on the earth and receive the energy into my womb. I want to wear no knickers and sit on the land, I want to be as naked as I possibly can so the earth and sky can kiss my skin.
She makes me want to dance, to create, to move my body and laugh!
So this Beltane in the White Spring there I am, in my cowboy boots, leggings and body warmer (cos it’s cold this weekend) singing and harmonising into the spring.
There is a wall in the white spring where I see the outline of the Magdalene traced in the rivers of water seeping through the walls, and I sing to her, Magdalene-Morgana.
And I know I need to anoint my pussy in the sacred waters.
I’m not going to do the full naked thing – did I tell you it was cold?! – but I take off my leggings and hitch up my skirts and stand in the waters, with the rose flowers around me and the drums of the temple echoing around me.
The icy waters sting for a moment, and then they are fine. My body adjusts, and I can wade in the waters for hours.
And I dance. I sing. I honour the roses. I am free to DANCE in honour of the sacred in a way that happens at temple spaces I visit.
It is heavenly.
After this I go back home to Chalice Well, cook dinner and connect with the lovely folk staying here, and I feel alive. I feel full energy, my biggest fullest self.
I go to my room, do a yoni steam using herbs I plucked in the gardens (lavender, calendula, rosemary, apple blossom) and go to bed reading The Magdalene Manuscript, a book about the sex magic of Isis.
The sexual energy of Avalon at Beltane welcomed me home.
Next time I will tell you about the goddess temple, the town and visiting the Tor in the mists!
Did you catch my article about my Beltane adventure to Avebury? Read it here!
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