Lighting the Beltane Fire
Tonight is Beltane, the Spring Fire Sabbat.
In celebration of the sun’s return in spring, Beltane is named for the god, Belinos. A festival with agrarian roots, it is a time to honour the earth and to celebrate fertility. Joinings in many forms define Beltane: marriages and sexual unions. Traditionally, couples held hands and jumped the bonfire or spent the night cavorting in the hills.
In The White Goddess, poet Robert Graves explains that at Beltane, The reigning Oak King mates with the Goddess (the earth) to fertilize the land. Like Cernunnos, the Oak King is an aspect of the Horned God seen here on the Gundestrup Cauldron. Found in Denmark, the cauldron is over 2,000 years old and tells the story of an ancient people.
Read about the Ancient Celebration of Beltane in Ireland here.
But what does all of this mean for us?
To celebrate Beltane is to remember where we come from and how we continue to survive. It is a time to remember our mother, the Earth, and our ancestors.
And I remember that it was on Beltane, nine years ago, my own mother passed over into spirit. And so tonight I fire gaze for Grace for my creative flame continues to burn because of her.
Blessings ~Charra
Stephen King and Me
Reading Stephen King’s 1991 article “The Symbolic Language of Dreams” blissed out my writer’s spirit–that seed deep in my soul that ruptures occasionally when watered with goose-bumping truth. This phenomenon occurs too rarely and signalled that the man had something to tell me. Stephen King.
I remember reading Salem’s Lot in the late 1970′s. It was the book that turned me off horror–not because it was bad. Because it was mesmerizingly sinister. We were living in rural southern Ontario at the time, and my husband, a musician, was on the road three weeks out of four. Our farm, set well back from the road, was a staggering breath away from Salem Road and a friend of mine dug graves less than a mile up that road at Salem Cemetery.
And so, I closed King’s books. Ironically, I’ve watched movie versions of those books over the years: Misery, Hearts in Atlantis, Carrie, Stand by Me, The Green Mile, Dolores Claiborne; and I love Haven so much I’m ready to relocate clear across the country.
But books are different. Perhaps because the images emerge from our own imagination … words perch at your fingertips, thirsting for a stream of blood, an opening where absorbed through the flesh and synapse, they can become real.
Stephen King had something to tell me, to teach me. So I opened the cover of Salem’s Lot and began again. And what did I learn from the Master?
pacing: keep the reader in a slow pant so by the time you hit the climax they’re craving it like a drug
detail: slow it all down by painting graphic pictures with your words
heroes are not always leading men. In Salem’s Lot, the unlikely four who take on Barlow, the vampire, are an elderly English teacher, a young novelist, a doctor, and a twelve year old boy who makes models of monsters
allow your eccentric beliefs to emerge and flourish. The following dialogue from Salem’s Lot reflects a personal belief I use in To Sleep With Stones; that nonhuman objects can take on the emotions of human’s actions and certain people who are sensitively tuned can feel it:
“Probably I was so keyed up that I hallucinated the whole thing. On the other hand, there may be some truth in that idea that houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them, that they hold a kind of… dry charge. Perhaps the right personality, that of an imaginative boy, for instance, could act as a catalyst on that dry charge, and cause it to produce an active manifestation of … of something. I’m not talking about ghosts, precisely. I’m talking about a kind of psychic television in three dimensions. Perhaps even something alive. A monster, if you like” (42).
Joseph Campbell, another writing mentor of mine, said that if you are attracted to a writer, read everything they’ve ever written, for therein lies a secret worth realizing. Next up: Stephen King, On Writing–A Memoir of the Craft.
The Megalithic Portal
This is one of my favorite research sites. If you’re intrigued by megaliths, archaeology, or prehistory, this is a site to join.
My first book featured megalithic sites on the west coast of Ireland and in the Boyne Valley (Tara and Newgrange). The sequel features Kilmartin Glen, a region in Argyll, Scotland rippling with prehistoric sites.
Many thanks to the builders and contributors of this site.
