The Gift of the Bees: an Inclusive Beltaine

[arethinn]

The Gift of the Bees: an Inclusive Beltaine

I love Beltaine. I love flowers. I love early summer. I love sex. I love fertility and fruitfulness. What’s not to love?

Weeeeeell, if you’re a queer person in Pagan community, Beltaine can be fraught with conflict and ambivalence. Simplistic understandings of Maypoles, Bael Fires, and related ceremonies leave us with heterosexist, patriarchal ideas of what the holiday is about.

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One ritual revisioning Beltaine fertility happened at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary’s Beltaine Main Ceremony, May 2006. This ceremony used bees and flowers, rather than human beings of any gender, as the model for fertility and love. ... The ceremony reminded participants of everything that bees make possible. We symbolized their powerful place in ecosystems around the world through the symbolic use of bee pollen (East), a beeswax candle (South), mead (West), and honey (North). In the repetition of “the gift of the bees!” we reminded ourselves and one another of our dependence on beneficial pollinators, particularly bees.

Comments

[contrarywise]

Thanks for the link, that's a very cool ritual concept for Beltaine. Most of the more inclusive Beltaine rituals I've attended allow people to self-select ritual roles outside of physically-determined casting, may use different terms for the participant roles, and often include additional roles that have different or no particular gender-based concepts behind them. It's a step in the right direction of being more inclusive and less gender-essentialist, while retaining the Traditional Doo-Dah of the Maypole.

I like that this ritual steps fully away from the Maypole imagery and gender polarity-based ritual concepts to embrace imagery that's still fully grounded in Nature and observable mechanisms of literal fertility. Those prone to thinking in gender-essentialist terms can and probably will still overlay gendered concepts on that ritual, but it's more removed from the expected metaphor of the holiday, which is a refreshing change.

[zeeth_kyrah]

That's beautiful. I salute the author and the concept.