why-yuo-might-feel-a-little-messed-up-this-beltaineRight now in the Northern Hemisphere, we are enjoying the sensual season of Beltaine. Everything smells great. The plants are all soft and green and rampant. All the boy birds are following all the girl birds around, and the girl birds are going, “Look, FUCK OFF, just let me sit on this branch for a minute okay?”

Best season ever.

But although we are all focused on Beltaine-ishness – sex, fertility, ecstasy, joy, pleasure, the sensuality and physical nature of life itself – there is a shadow side to Beltaine.

Directly opposite Beltaine on the wheel of the year is Samhain, the festival of death, the festival of the dark, of transformation and fucked-upness.

I always find that lots of Samhain issues crop up at Beltaine, and lots of Beltaine ones at Samhain. Injuries. Shadow work. The shadow side of pleasure and sensuality – addiction, lack of self love, denial.

Remember that the fertile Lover Goddess of Beltaine is also the Sacred Prostitute – giving her love to all without discrimination. Orgasms for all! Remember Sheila Na Gig, the old Celtic hag of Samhain who holds open her gigantic vulva to the world, wild and raw and shameless? Here she represents taboo sexuality, and the return to the womb of the Goddess at the end of death. Her vulva, her sexuality is a portal here too.

Samhain and Beltaine are deeply connected: two dancers on opposing sides of a great wheel. Each contains an element of the other, each contains the raw power of the opposite under the surface. At the festival of new life and abundance, you open up the portal of decay and death. At the festival of death and endings, you open up the portal to rebirth. Each festival sows the seeds of the other, lives within the other.

This May, how are you experiencing the powerful shadow of Samhain in the luscious light of Beltaine?