PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Folks, we have a problem.

It's the Eve of Beltane. The time has come to go up to the top of the Holy Mountain and enact the ancestral rites that bring Winter to an end and assure a fruitful Summer to come.

Well, but: the king has turned to the new god, and forbidden—on pain of death—the Old Gods and the Old Worship. He has sent soldiers to ring the Brocken, our Holy Mountain, and ordered them to kill anyone who attempts to ascend.

But the ancient rites must be enacted, lest the Wheel should cease to turn.

So what do we do?

This is the story that the poet laureate of German Romanticism, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), tells in his poem Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, “the First Walpurgisnacht.” Goethe's poem was later set to music by composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) in a pagan cantata of the same name (Op. 60), which premiered in 1843.

In Germany, Walpurgisnacht looks a lot like Halloween does here in the States: it's a haunted time, a night when the ghosts and monsters come out. How did it change from Holy to Haunted? That's the tale that Goethe and Mendelssohn tell in Die Erste Walpurgisnacht.

OK, so here's what we're going to do.

At an elevation of 3,743 feet, the Brocken is the highest peak of the Harz range, Northern Germany's highest mountains. At such an altitude, winter lingers long.

That's why the witches go there for Walpurgisnacht.

We go there, they say, "to dance away the snow."

An ocean and a continent away, here in the American Midwest we're in a similar situation. The maples are blooming and the redbirds are singing for all they're worth, but yet another winter storm is bearing down on us, and we could well be seeing another 8 to 12 inches of snow this weekend. The Winter that Won't Let Go has still got us in its icy grip.

You can see why here in the North, the outstanding religious obligation of Beltane is to dance barefoot on the ground. Someone's got to melt all that snow.

Every year around now we sing the Minnesota May Song.

They say that there are many paths to the top of the mountain.

Maybe so.

But in my experience, different paths lead to different places.

Some paths lead to the valley. Some paths lead to the sea.

Yes, some paths do lead to the top of the mountain.

But, of course, there are many mountains.