Beltane - High Spring: Meaning, Dates & Rituals
The Lovers from the Motherpeace Tarot Deck
Beltane: Calling In the Fire
There's a moment every year, somewhere around the start of November, when the air changes. The light stretches longer, the garden gets a bit reckless, and something in you wants to move rather than sit still. That's Beltane knocking.
What Beltane Actually Is
Beltane is one of the four great fire festivals of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, sitting opposite Samhain on the wheel and marking the midpoint between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere it falls around the 1st of May — hence all those old paintings of maypoles and May Queens — but here in Australia we honour it as the seasons actually move for us, in early November, as spring tips fully into its high, blossoming point before summer takes over.
Traditionally it was a fire festival in the truest sense. Communities lit great bonfires, drove livestock between them for blessing and protection, and gathered to celebrate the land's fertility — not just of crops and animals, but of ideas, relationships, and creative work too. It's the festival of the Green Man and the May Queen, of union and vitality, of things coming properly, visibly alive.
The Energy of This Sabbat
If Imbolc is the first flicker of light and Lammas is the pause to take stock, Beltane is neither quiet nor cautious. It's full-bodied like a good red wine. It asks : what wants to bloom in you right now? Not what you're planning to grow eventually, but what's already pushing up through the soil of your life, ready or not.
This is a season for passion in the broadest sense — creative passion, romantic passion, the simple aliveness of being in a body that wants to move, dance, make things, and say “yes” - which makes me think about that movie, Yes Man. It's also, honestly, a season that can feel confronting if you've spent the darker months turned inward. Beltane doesn't really do inward. It wants you outside, embodied, and a little bit unguarded.
A Tarot Card for Beltane
If I had to choose just one Tarot card for Beltane, it would be The Lovers — sacred union, the choice to give yourself fully to what you desire, the Green Man and May Queen meeting at the height of spring.
If you're working with your own deck this season, try pulling a single card and asking: what union — with a person, a project, or a part of myself — is asking to be chosen fully this season?
Let the Season In
You don't need a big ritual to mark this one — Beltane is more interested in whether you're actually paying attention than whether you've got the right props. Step outside if you can. Notice what's blooming, what's loud with life, what wants to be looked at rather than managed. Let one ordinary moment this week be a little more indulgent than it needs to be - just because you can.
A Few Questions to Sit With
Where does spring feel a bit reckless in my own life right now?
What have I been quietly holding back from, without really deciding to?
What's one thing I've been playing safe with that I'm ready to stop playing safe with?"
Bring It Into Circle
These questions are really just the doorway. If this is the kind of seasonal work that speaks to you, there's a lot more waiting on the other side — guided Tarot spreads, deeper ritual and reflection, and a full morning of it held with a small group rather than worked through alone on the page. My Beltane, High Spring Retreat is where all of that lives. Details and booking are here if you'd like to come play with the fire this season.
Wherever you are on the earth this Beltane, I trust that something special in you gets to bloom.
Warmest to You,
Karen