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In other years I’ve been sunburned at Beltain. I’ve been overwhelmed by the heat and had to hide in the shade of the trees. I’ve had to worry about not de-hydrating during rituals. It’s a festival whose traditions include young couples going off into the woods at night.

I’m writing this blog post while wearing a winter jumper, the windows are shut because it’s too cold to have them open. Right now, there is sun outside, but most of the day has been cold and wet. May the first was cold and wet, at the end of a cold, late spring and a winter that seemed to go on forever. It’s years like this when you can start to see why our ancestors might have felt the need to do dramatic things to persuade the sun to come back.

 Hurray, hurray, the First of May:

outdoor f**king begins today.

Imagine: you live, in what is essentially a one-room house, along with your spouse, your kids, your parents, grandma, and an unmarried sibling or two.

Maybe even the cow.

All winter long you've been stuck in there with them all.

The whole smokey, stinky, crowded winter, with nary a moment of privacy.

Finally, after all those months, it's—almost—warm enough to slip off to the woods for some long-awaited quality time and a little surreptitious love-making.

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So the wrangler for this hop was me.  Here's what I asked.

Since Beltaine is a holiday of coming together, I thought it would be fun to answer this question: "Do you combine Tarot with any other divination system? Why or why not?" That's it. Short and sweet. Simple. You can answer it however you like.

Yes, I absolutely do combine Tarot with other divination systems. Tarot already has an association with astrology and numerology. That, for me, is a given. I do a weekly Tarotscopes offering on YouTube so that's a done deal for me. :D I interpret a weekly Tarot reading as well as Oracle reading for all twelve signs. Please subscribe if you enjoy so you can be notified each week.

For many years I didn't do anything other than a straightforward Tarot reading. I used one deck and only one deck. Then I had an opportunity to read for two people. They wanted a relationship reading. I decided to use not one, not two but three decks. I used one deck for person A, one for person B while the third deck was used for the relationship. It took a few hours to do. :D Yeah, I might have bit off more than I could chew at that time.

Is the festival Beltane named for an Irish god Bel?

Short answer: probably not.

The Keltic peoples of the Continent knew of a god Belenos (attested in various spellings) who, during the Roman period, was identified with Apollo.

Belenos clearly = *bel-, “shining, bright” + infixed -n-, (denotes lordship, mastery, or preeminence) + -os, (masculine singular ending). The “mastery infix,” interestingly, features in the names of a number of Keltic deities: among them Cernunnos, “Horned Lord” or “Preeminently Horned” and Epona, “Lady Horse” or “Preeminent Horse.” So Belenos is “Bright Lord” or “the Preeminently Bright.”

Did the Keltic-speaking peoples of Britain know such a god?

If so, the evidence is minimal, and there's none whatsoever that the Irish knew him. ('Beltane' is an Irish word in origin.) We cannot assume that the Insular Kelts worshiped every god that their Continental kin did.

So alas, Beltane is probably not “Bel's fire.”

I am more naturally conscious of ancestry around Beltain than I am at Samhain. Partly because there are so many traditional songs that start with someone roving out on a bright May morning. Usually to get laid, or to indulge in the kind of voyeurism intrinsic to folk music. And partly because of my grandmother, who loved the bluebells.

My grandmother was a keen walker for much of her life, having grown up with a mother who went walking on Sundays in preference to going to church. In old age, she could no longer climb the hills each spring to go looking for bluebells, and so this time of year became a source of grief to her. I have never driven a car, I was never able to take her out, but others did, and I’m not the only one to think of her when the bluebells are flowering.