It had been ten years since I last went to Beltane in Edinburgh but I had so many treasured, if somewhat blurred, memories of my times up Calton Hill, that it was impossible to believe that it had been that long.
My memories are those of colour. Swirling Celtic circles of colour, and light and fire. The sharp child hood haunted tang of wood-smoke and nose tickle of paraffin. The exhilarating conviction that I somehow stood for one night on some conjured bridge between the imagined past and the enduring present. Of being swept up and along some mighty temporal river, bridged and buoyed by the savage and beautiful performers on the Hill, celebrating the anticipated return of summer.
So what if the actual spectacle might be somewhat less than accurate in a historical sense? For me it was the Festival of Fire, it was the spirit of Beltane and always rang true in its archaic and anarchic blasting of horns, its heart beat thunder of drums and the shrill dancing rave whistles.
During Beltane, human beings gathered together under assorted skies, involved in that most human and transcendental of pursuits – storytelling – taking the yearly turning of the seasons, turning them into an ongoing narrative of death and renewal, and transporting them via joy, exuberance, delight and rapture from the specific to the universal, from cold science to hot flame of human imagination.
And of course there was also the whisky, both home made and store bought, the sweet fragrance of herbs of negotiable value, the happy cakes passed from campfire to campfire, and the various shadowy forms in the bushes engaged in their own brief ritual celebration. It was fantastic.
This year on Calton Hill, I saw an old man sitting weary on the one of the grey path stones, and before this sounds like a Nik Kershaw song, there was no river nearby, but the Firth of Forth in all its majesty did shine off to one side. He held in his aged hand a thick wooden walking stick, gnarled and splintered at the tip. His skin was parchment thin, with that strange delicate softness that always reminds me chamois leather. Even his kilt looked old, the buckles were worn, the hem was somewhat frayed. He looked at me looking at him, and smiled.
“Blessings on the Goddess.” he said, and turned his face back towards the Parthenon where the young and rowdy crowd waited impatiently for the darkness and the fires.
I gave him some whisky.
In the gathering gloom the faces of the crowd were pale shadows, the sky was that strange Scottish luminous seashell mix of blue and pink. The clouds were touched with gold, and over the Forth there hung a swathes of blackness as the rain clouds hovered, dour and muttering, waiting their turn at the celebration.
Against the dusky gloaming the yellow uniforms of the security guards were luminous, much clearer than the shadowy faces above them, as they stood still and unsmiling. The gorse flowered around the hill, throwing its yellow challenge into the night, outshining the vests of the guards.
.
There was an air of expectation as the bright sky faded, the fleeing light melting the painted faces of the Beltane performers into a facet of reality, a fey mixture of theatre and spirit. As it became impossible to make out faces in the gloom people became people shaped shadows, as each figure’s individuality melted away into the gloom, imagination came to the fore.
The Parthenon was dark, its Athenian bulk silhouetted against the rain threatening sky and my decanted Tobermory, sloshing in its coca-cola bottle cloak, is doing a grand job of keeping out the chill.
A concession stand sells beltane-burgers; next to it another temporary eatery offers more health conscious options. I suspect vegetarians or, God forbid, vegans, are in the mix
The darkness is stitched with fire fly camera flashes, shutter speed lightning flashes, illuminating the stoic, brooding outline of the centuries old unfinished replica of the Greek acropolis. The air smells of fuel, and of the toffee-honey-sweet yellow gorse flowers that bloom exuberantly all around the hill, the first riot wave of colour that greets you as you start to climb upwards from the grey stone streets of Edinburgh towards the luminous sky. Sharp thorns though, you gotta be careful.
In the crowd, demons are walking. Painted and gilded, red and blue figures are wandering amongst the parka-ed and be-jeaned. Skin and teeth gleam in the shadowy dusky darkened air. They are beautiful, these black-cloaked avatars, walking midway between imagination and porn. It is Beltane, and the doors between the worlds are starting to swing open, in each staid and modern person the fires are rising.
The drums start to beat with that ancient heart beat rhythm. It is a sound that beckons, and your body reacts instinctively to the pounding, you sway in time, and the sound of your own heart seems to grow louder. The two rhythms synchronise, or perhaps that is only your imagination. Who cares? If it is a dream then it is a good one.
Faces turn towards the stone columns. Dark figures are crouched at their base. Sparks can be seen as they call forth fire. They look very small next to the soaring stone. I am transfixed by the sight, and mentally willing the tinder to catch. It’s important and you don’t know why. With every firelorn strike of flint, the crowd sighs, a ripple of disappointment from thousands of throats. When it catches, the crowd roars. Fire lights up the darkness, turning the grey stone columns to blazing gold.
The vanguard of the May Queen appears, warrior women, like marble statues brought to life. Blinding white, their faces unreadable behind their concealing mask of chalky pigment, the deep crimson around their necks, and the green ivy twined in their hair seems to bleed colour into the red burnished fire-lit air. They are ideals of purity now manifest, the arterial red on white cloth like blood on snow; the green ivy leaves are life springing eternal. Layers of meaning, or just incredibly beautiful to watch. My perception shifts just slightly.
They bow, and she appears, as white-frost cold as her handmaiden guards but with glowing flowers trailing at her feet, and wrapped tight round her waist. On her dark head wreaths of green ivy and jewel-hued blossoms rise up skywards to form a crown. Her face is empty, a Grecian mask, and like those masks, the audience sees what they want to see in her carefully blank eyes. She is not human for this night, for this night she is the Lady of the Flowers, she is the May Queen, she is the forces of life and death, renewal and decay. Her consort, the Green Man, grown verdant and hoary with age, waits for her. The procession starts, slow walking around the hill towards the Fire Arch with its cleansing flames, the place of sacrifice and the Beltane Bonfire…that is where it starts to go wrong.
The path to the Fire Arch is lined with iron, metal barriers keep the crowds back as the May Queen walks slowly, the blue men thrashing their twig-bundle whips on the ground to clear the way but it is a crowd of observers that line the May Queen’s path, not celebrants.
The security guards in their fluorescent vests stand between the watching crowd and the impassive walking figures. A tall red-skinned demon, dread haired and shaggy legged, walks with one bare-breasted, they posture and gesture to the crowds, faces smile snarling, beckoning from some Otherworld.
“Tits!” a laughing face shouts, spraying lager. She glowers and turns to face the flames. The Otherworld retreats.
The procession is passing under the arch of flame; it’s hard to see what is happening. The drums are still beating, the twig bundle whips still slashing at the ground. No one in the crowd passes under the Beltane fires. The guards and the iron barriers make sure of that. People stand behind their metal fences and watch as the procession disappears into the night.
I feel a little confused. Present events are clashing with my memories of the past. Surely Beltane was not a spectator sport? It was an experience, a shared experience. I remember following the revived ancient ritual around a nightscape made strange and otherworldly by creatures that came from dreams. Demons touched flesh as fire lit up the darkness. Eyes grew wide, bodies swayed, drums heart-beated from the shadows. It was not religion; it was not theatre. It was definitely not being corralled by iron while the ritual passed through catcalls, and confusion. It was celebration. It was colour and shared emotion. It was energy passing from person to person, regardless of ritual knowledge. It was Fire.
Now the ritual performance seemed just that, performed. Staged. Enclosed and excluding. It was watched, not felt. There were no drums heart-beating from the shadows. No little glowing oasis campfires making circles of amber gold light on the dark hillside. No baying energy shining from the procession out into the darkness to heat quiet blood, burn away convention, ignite passions, and return to the May Queen Court, stoked higher and hotter by the crowd. Bottles were not passed from stranger to stranger; fragrant smoke did not mix with the burnt wood attar of Bel Fires. Faces did not blaze, touched by effulgent fingers of fire. Eyes did not shine, gazing into imagination. For me the doors between the worlds stayed firmly shut.
Everywhere fences of cold metal delineated, severing the circle of shared experience, like a music gig, when no body claps. No back and forth, no building of energy, no celebration of return of summer, no feeling of the turn of seasons. Drunks, with bottles of cider and heckling tongues, harangued. Yellow coats glistened in the rain. The procession wound through thronging drove of people, but they looked confused, rather than transported, the burger stand shone through the decidedly un-fragrant air.
All around me people milled, scurrying to catch a glimpse of the passing Beltane march. Skin covered man-stags fought confronted by silent, sneering faces, caught in a trap of iron bars. Archers moved in a stylised hunt, their chants falling tumbling onto deaf ears, falling into silence. The dead man deer on the ground twitched.
“Give us our money back,” one wag yelled. The circle of hunters ignored him, the crowd laughed. I fought the urge to punch him in the face.
“Fuck off off the Hill then,” I thought.
The drums still pounded in their rave cadence in the distance, so I climbed the hill again, pushing through assorted gap students, and howling neds, towards the circle of light. I saw the old man, still sitting on his stone.
To one side of him a stage was set square in the dip between the Acropolis and the small pine-bough bonfire waiting by the drop off.
A ripple of flame rushed down throw the dark crowds, the Red Men where invading the place of sacrifice, the forces of chaos were rushing to meet the forces of order. The White Women waited; the flowered May Queen a point of stillness in the formal protective rhythms of her handmaidens and the frenzied dance of the Red Men. The Green Man fell at her touch, to be revived and dance his joy of rebirth.
The Beltane Fire was lit, and the rain came down.
I had lost everyone that I had climbed the hill with, so at least some things stayed the same. The fire burned, the Red Men and Red Women threw themselves into orgy, the White Women were lured away from the bower of the May Queen by the promised of chaos; she lingered to entertain her newly youthful consort. Sparks lit the rain-drenched sky; the fire burned fighting the quenching water and people started to drift off, which was just as well. There was only about an hour to go before we would all be kicked off the hill anyway. This Beltane had a curfew.
There would be no washing in the May first dew for these half hearted revellers. The Bonfire would not burn throughout the night. This party would be taken indoors. Water fell from the heavens, and the fire started to go out.
I felt sad as I headed for Pivo, another first for the Beltane and me. There were hours still to go until dawn. I hoped that some of the Beltane Bestiary would be there to greet the sun. It used to be me, and hundreds of other Calton Hill warriors, but not this night. My personal flame was at low ebb, and a text told me that there was a pint waiting at the bottom of the Hill in the bohemian bar. I was done for this year.
What had made this Beltane so different? All the ingredients were there, well most of them and I actually was never really into the more extreme variety of mood changers. Whisky is usually my drug of choice. Cider at a pinch. Was it me then? Too old now, too much changed myself?
Was it the performance? But they looked amazing, as always, as they led the way to a different world, just for the one night. They danced through the old steps, they brought verve and shine and passion. They burned like fire under glass. And maybe that was the problem.
Fire is beautiful. It is wild. Fascinating. It’s as close to being a living thing, as a chemical reaction can get; not that humans are made up of chemical reactions, are we? It feeds, it breaths, it cast out heat. It whispers or roars. It provides solace and in its bright heart dreams are made corporeal. It lives on a knife-edge. It can light up the darkness or leave a trail of black, sooty choking destruction and the choice isn’t always yours. The spinning sides of the Beltane coin.
But for fire to burn it still needs three things: fuel, heat and oxygen. On the hill, the Society provided the heat, the crowds in theory had the fuel, but captured under a glass shield of increasingly strict security, the oxygen was in short supply.
And year by year as the restrictions increase, those who respect and value what the Beltane stands for are kept away either by their own aggrieved sensibilities, the change in the ethos of the crowd, or by refusing those iron bar fences. The May Queen’s pale sibylline face reflects not only yellow fire but the yellow shine of security vests, and the cameras flashes captures the distant form of the Beltane, not the summer quickening spirit. And as the glass walls separating the two worlds thicken each year, they are meeting to form an over-reaching, impregnable dome, and from within its bubble of glass-limited oxygen, how brightly can the Fire Festival be expected to burn?
