Beltane fell in mid October on the Southern Wheel of the Year.
The Southern Wheel applies to the Southern Hemisphere, including Australia. It is based on the European Wheel of the Year. (See Wheel links below or in the side-bar.)
Due to issues following deaths in the family in 2007, I have made it to only one circle in Sydney since and there are none that I have found locally.
My private celebrations have all been very low-key. Though this is partly due to my concentrating on understanding the essential meaning of each festival rather than putting most of my efforts into its outward expression as I have in the past.
This year, to understand Beltane better, I looked at what happens when Beltane doesn’t happen.
In the modern western world we are largely isolated from the effects of famine. If our crops fail and we run out of stored food, we can fly in food and seed for next year from places in the world unaffected by famine. The price of those foods and seeds would be enormous but we would not starve. When we see reports on the news about famine in Africa and other places in the Third World, it can be hard to comprehend. It’s so far away and there are some big differences between our snug mechanised worlds and their very unsafe, under-developed worlds.
So I looked at a big famine in the western world, an historical famine but set in a place more readily understood, the Great Famine of 1315–1317.
In 1315, an unusually cold summer caused widespread crop failures through-out Northern Europe, including the British Isles, northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, and western Poland.
This meant that the crops did not ripen, there was little or nothing to eat or to feed the farm animals and few seeds to plant the following year. The unusually cold and wet weather continued and what crops could be planted failed for another two years and, due to the tiny amounts of seeds available for planting over the following years, food supplies did not get back to normal until 1325.
Starvation was widespread. 95% of the human population was affected. Many adults starved in order that their children and grandchildren could eat, diseases spread quickly through communities weakened by hunger, some children were abandoned to fend for themselves and there were incidences of cannibalism. Life expectancy dropped to 35.28 years.
It was as though Beltane had not happened in those years. That really drove home for me the essential meaning of Beltane: continuation of life. Of course all the big festivals on the Wheel are about the continuation of life but I focussed specifically on Beltane by looking at what happened when it went wrong.
On a lighter note, I sang a Beltane filk called Dance the Maypole. It’s a sexy and humorous song with Beltane lyrics by TJ Scott to the tune of the Beatles’ Come Together.
Great Famine of 1315–1317
Dance the Maypole filk
Southern Wheel of the Year
Wuruma Wheel of the Year (NSW Central Coast natural seasons)
The next festival on the Southern Wheel was Summer Solstice on the 22nd of December.
