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Minneapolis, MN

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to publicly celebrate a pagan holiday in a pagan city, Bealtaine 2019 may be your last chance to find out.

Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater in Minneapolis announced yesterday that this year's May Day Parade and Celebration, the 45^th, will be the last.

For 45 years, people of every religion and ethnicity have danced down Bloomington Avenue on the first Sunday in May to celebrate the end of Winter and the Coming of the Sun. It has become one of the signature celebrations of our year, to Minneapolis what Mardi Gras is to New Orleans.

For 45 years, May Day has been the one day a year when everyone becomes an honorary pagan.

Yule morning. A friend and I are driving back from singing up the Sun out of the Mississippi River valley.

Each year, as we have for decades, on Yule morning we sing the Sun up from a bridge once dyed red with the blood of a poet.

Surely such a bridge must stand forever.

My friend gets a text from his partner, who has decided to forgo the annual cold and discomfort of the river valley's microclimate, and instead has proceeded directly to the Sunrise brunch location towards which we're currently heading.

“Where is everyone?” she writes.

In fact, the singing was particularly good this year, and we lingered long to savor it. You could feel our songs calling up the Sun out of darkness. You could feel us calling the trees into bud, the apples into blooming and fruiting, all in their own proper season.

“'Minneapolis Bridge Collapses, Coven Killed,'” I intone in my best self-important banner-headline tone.

We riff off of this scenario for a few minutes, laughing.

“They'd still be telling stories about us a hundred years from now,” I say.

I hear the procession before I see it.

They enter in at the front gate, with rattle and drum. I join them, and together we wind around the house and back to the garden.

All summer the little goddess has presided over the growth of tomatoes, eggplant, beans, beets, kale, and collards, sunk to her knees in the ground.

Now we stand her instead in a bowl of wheat grains, wheat that we will eat (cooked in almond milk, sweetened with honey, perfumed with rosewater) on the year's longest night. We garland her with harvest marigolds.

Lastly, we cover her over with the same veil of night-blue silk that will enwrap her through her winter slumber in the pantry. We're about to process her down a public street, on which she will duly bestow her blessing, but this is, after all, a goddess: not everyone is privileged to see her.

The procession reforms. I walk this street every day of my life; tonight it becomes a sacred route, a processional way. People arriving for choir rehearsal at the corner church stop to watch.

Minneapolis, MN

Well, it was a beautiful late summer day at one of the great local beauty spots, so there were plenty of non-pagans at Minnehaha Falls regional park yesterday, too.

Even so, pagans turned out in such numbers for the 17^th annual Twin Cities Pagan Pride celebration on Saturday, September 8, that the only food vendor in attendance had run out of food by mid-afternoon, leaving behind plenty of hungry pagans.

Numerous merchants reported record sales.

Reportedly, Pagan Pride organizers had originally contacted a second food vendor, who had declined to participate on the grounds that such an event would not generate a large enough turn-out to be financially worthwhile.

Moral: Pagans turn out. Pagans like to eat. Pagans spend money.

Bealtaine 2008, Hidden Falls Park.

Maybe 100 people are gathered in two concentric circles. The Great Man-Woman Dance is about to begin.

Our coven kid, of course, wanted to be in the midst of all the excitement, but at three he was a little small for the dancing, and I didn't want him to get tromped.

As it happens, I was standing in the middle of the circles, leading the singing, so I scooped him up and set him on my shoulders. There he sang along happily, drumming on my chest with his heels, and watched the wheeling of the Men's and Women's Circles, their parting and their coming together.

Afterward, over the food, we discussed.

“The presiding priest spent much of the ritual with a child sitting on his shoulders,” air-reviewed my friend Sparky T. Rabbit.

He laughed, then added:

Alley scene in Paganistan.

Warning with enforcement clause.

Have you ever Gone Back and Entered Into a particular ritual?

They say that when it wasn't safe to attend the Sabbat physically, this is exactly what they used to do, with or without benefit of flying ointment.

Some years back, I was priest at the May Eve celebration of one of the local Wiccan churches. It's the custom hereabouts to observe Beltane with the Great Rite, and we'd designed the ritual so that three symbolic Great Rites were enacted simultaneously: Male-Female, Female-Female, Male-Male.

I was on blade, John on (drinking) horn. At the moment of Union, there was this funny little extra zing to it, a soupçon of je ne sais quoi which, at the time, I couldn't quite figure out.