Beltaine and Samhain, for some of us, are what Christmas and Easter are for lax Christians. Even if you don’t go to every spiritual gathering throughout the year, there are certain holidays you really like to celebrate with your community.
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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.
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.”