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Beltaine : May Day of Sex Drugs & Rock-n-Roll
Beltaine : May Day of Sex Drugs & Rock-n-Roll
By High Priestess Stephanie Donald
No doubt most people reading this have celebrated Beltaine. The celebration, although known by many different names throughout the world, has a universal observation in many cultures.
Throughout Europe, Great Britain and Scandinavia it is usually observed on or around May 1 and consists of the phallic maypole dance. While the Maypole is still an active part of the celebrations, there are few who understand the symbolism of it anymore. To many it’s just “cute” to dance around a pole with ribbons and interweave those ribbons so they braid down the pole.
The significance of the Maypole centers on love and fertility or mating. It’s generally regarded as a celebration of the male penis and its contribution to a woman becoming pregnant. That it happens in late spring is a testament to the power of the resurrection of life to Mother Gaia and her power to inspire people to find and fall in love with each other.
Many people don't know about the ancient traditions of the Spartan and Early Greek and Roman cultures. Since these were primarily warrior cultures and men would hardly ever be around long enough to act as a parent to a child because of their certain death in some ridiculous war, many women developed cultural traditions of their own that negated the “father” figure in raising children and in many traditions where Artemis or Diana were the guiding Goddesses of these communities of women, men were little more than a means to impregnate the women so they might have children at all.
Socrates told of the ancient traditions of women on the Island of Crete that used the young warrior/guards of their kingdom in a May ritual involving the Priestesses of the community gathering the young women of the realm together and they would drug the men into near unconsciousness and then basically rape the men over and over, moving from one man to the next to ensure impregnation and also so that they would never be sure which man was actually the father of their child so no emotional attachment would be formed.
After the children were born they were basically raised by all the women of the village or city and once a certain age had been reached, the male children were given to the adult men for training to become warriors and the female children were given in service to the temple of Artemis as handmaidens where they would eventually participate in the May ritual of drugging and raping the men to continue the cycle.
While most of us can't condone rape no matter who is doing the raping there is certain logic to developing a culture where no emotional attachment to men might be desirable. For instance, in today’s world where many men are seeming to reclaim the supposed superiority of being male (scoff!) a recent Master’s & Johnson survey has shown that 7 out of 10 women under the age of 45 claim to be at least bisexual if not forsaking men altogether and being lesbian.
Perhaps this is necessary in order to reshuffle society into women changing the attitudes and priorities of men so that a balance toward equality takes place. For most women who have called themselves heterosexual and endured an endless stream of quasi-Christian overtones to society, the forsaking of the male species isn't hard to imagine. I can't think of a single woman I know who is married to a man who hasn't felt at one time or another that they have been treated badly by their mate just because they are female.
Perhaps this attitude is also being somehow primordially and subconsciously generated within women in order to curb the out of control growth of the population as well. It’s possible that the men, by acting immaturely and with ultra-machismo, are driving women from them subconsciously in response to the overpopulation of Mother Gaia.
Perhaps Mother Gaia has a sense of humor and we have really have no idea what the grand design for the human race really is.
Whatever the overall plan of the universe is, it’s about time we as followers of the Wiccan/Pagan faith should examine ourselves and our interrelations and actions with each other before we push forward in some futile stupidity that results in our extinction.
Men need to learn unconditional equality of the Goddess and the women need to learn how to teach this to them and show the patience the Goddess gave us in order to help change our society from a brutal patriarchy into a shared society where all are responsible for making decisions and we all take equal responsibility for ourselves and each other if we truly want a world based on love and not hate, distrust and self-loathing.
The recent U.S. Presidential elections made the hatred of the feminine apparent when society was faced with two extremes of bigotry; racial and misogyny, and decided that racial bigotry meant less to them overall than their hatred of the feminine.
As a society in general even though supposedly women’s liberation has advanced over the past several decades, it’s still apparent that not only does misogyny exist strongly in the male population but sadly it is extremely strong in the female population as well.
So during this Beltaine celebration, instead of celebrating the phallus, it might be a better idea of we celebrated both the masculine and feminine equally in keeping step with the changes we need to effect upon ourselves before we can effect the rest of society.
From Down The Lane, Volume 11, Issue 1.
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