Not Your Parents' Maypole Parade...

Playing with fire is a pretty conspicuous and ubiquitous pastime in Scotland. If it’s not fireworks, it’s torchlight parades; if not that, then full blown fire festivals, such as the annual Beltane Festival, a fun little get-together invented by pagans as a celebration of summer involving drums, body paint, lots of fire and little clothing. Gotta love the pagans.

Of course we couldn’t pass up this premier hippy festival. We can’t afford to go to the expensive long-weekend music festivals that are starting to blossom throughout Europe, entrances starting at 50 pounds a pop, including camping. But a chance to play with fire with a bunch of uninhibited druids for 5 pounds? We just had to go. Plus, with spring actually feeling like it’s on the way in this mono-seasonal country, we needed to celebrate.

Admittedly, there is something very sensual about big drums and constant drum rhythms. I guess that was the point. The “ruins” of the British acropolis on top of Calton Hill provided a fitting backdrop for the pagan festivities, and it lit up eerily as the fire spread. Across the hill were various items of natural green to burn in honor of summer, the air damp and thick and enfolding the audience in a chilly nightgown of fog and smoke. The drums kept a continuous pulse through the rain and chill and huddling masses, and the unconscious swaying of our bodies to the rhythm kept us warm as we waited for the parade of painted, feathered, and mostly naked performers (believers?) that weaved its way from fire to fire, dancing, chanting, riling up emotions and intoxicated revelations. The colder it got, the louder the drums seemed and the greater our urge to dance became. As the rain began to sprinkle, then fall, then pour, the bestiary of actors, dancers, musicians pranced, slithered, danced their way into the circle of onlookers.

The reenactment that followed was something out of Dionysian ravage, women dressed provocatively in white gowns symbolically tearing apart a man, covered in vegetation and green paint and little else, who then rose as a sacrifice to the summer fertility, wine, and nature spirits. The thick torrents tumbling down on the scene left little to the imagination as white became transparent and paint became flesh. Reds, blues, greens, feathers, kettle drums, flowery body emebelishments became a mix of light and dark and fire and rain. The chilly air became a frigid wet, and the skies opened up as the drums culminated in a frantic embodiment of all that is pagan and hippy, and actors and crowd alike scattered back to the recesses from which we escaped for a night in the wild.

All flowery rhetoric aside, the Beltane Festival was dramatically sensual and violent and passionate, everything I would expect from a pagan fire festival in honor of the coming summer. Soaked to the bone and trying in vain to protect our cameras, we sloshed home. On the way, I got stuck in some mud, felt an uncanny and very distinctive ^pop^ in my ankle, and today I am stuck on the couch with an ankle bone that is about 4-times the size of my other, uninjured one. A caution from the gods? Enjoy summer, but remember to do your thesis…. Yes, I’m pretty sure pagan ritual is extremely concerned with my thesis work…