Beltane Celebrations in Devon: Traditions & Isolation during Pandemic, Exercises of Dance

Download Beltane Celebrations in Devon: Traditions & Isolation during Pandemic and more Exercises Dance in PDF only on Docsity! FIDDLER’S GREEN 2020 is certainly the weirdest Beltane i have experi- enced in forty years, and i expect it is for everyone else, too. i have to say that living in lockdown and self-isolating in a tiny village in east Devon with a garden and plenty of deserted rural foot- paths has not caused me much hardship. We are all looking out for each other here; kindly neighbours shopping for those of us who can’t do the six-mile journey to the nearest shop, and all of us borrowing, lending, and swapping whatever is needed. compared to fellow witches and pagans in cities with no access to outdoor space, i feel very privi- leged. nature is recovering from human abuse, for a while at least. How clean the air feels, how qui- et it is without traffic and aircraft. At dusk, bats flit over the stream and the otters seem bolder than usual. i am woken every morning by the dawn chorus. all in all, i have been feeling very lucky. then at Beltane, it really did hit me. For those of us down here in the West, in the bottom left hand corner, Beltane — or May Day as most of us still pre- fer to call it in our old-fashioned way — is probably the biggest day of the year. it’s the day when almost everyone in Devon, corn- wall, and somerset turns pagan for the day, when people go out in the streets to dance and sing and a kind of wild, infectious collective joy takes over. During the day, we are likely to be found joining in with one of the Obby Oss or maypole customs, or some other form of dancing and carousing. then, as the sun sets, the fires are lit in gardens and woods and moors, and on hill- tops and we make our circles and celebrate the marriage of goddess and god. all of it is wild, erotic, and glorious. it’s our day and ev- eryone knows it. you know how it works. We are a necessary part of the process. We are part of it, not separate. the gods need us Beltane in Lockdown ∙ Circling the Maypole in Our Plague Year by Levannah Morgan