A Beltane Re-Birth Memory

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I was going to write about Walpurgisnacht, but when I started to research it, everything sounded familiar. That’s because I wrote about it last year. You can read about it at https://ritualabuse.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/walpurgisnacht/

I found I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. I couldn’t focus: my brain wandered from one thing to the next. When I asked myself why, the answer was “because of Beltane.” Then I could focus again.

I told you-all that a memory was trying to surface. It made it! It is of an initiation ritual, being “born again” into Satanism at the age of four.

At Beltane that year, I was in a clearing in the woods at my grandfather’s country home in the Adirondacks. The carcass of a deer was brought in and I was shoved, naked, into the cavity. It was loosely sewn up so that I could breathe, the requisite words were spoken or chanted in unison, and then they started pushing me forwards by pressing on the deer skin. I came out, head first, born into the world of evil around me. I was then officially old enough to attend rituals.

I don’t remember what happened next. I do have a body memory of pressure around the top of my head, pressure from the deer skin. I may get more of the memory when that pressure passes.

I believe this is not a Beltane ritual at all, but one that is supposed to occur on the equinox. Beltane is about sex and conception, not birth, and the equinox is when lambs and calves are born. But since I lived in New York City, it was difficult, to say the least, to obtain a whole cow or a whole deer. My “birth” was therefore postponed until somebody could go shoot a female deer.

My mind wandered and I imagined transporting a cow carcass through the streets of New York. Too big to shove into a taxi, so they must have used a truck. Certainly it wasn’t delivered during the day, but there are still enough people around at night that somebody might have seen that. The city that never sleeps!

What explanation could they possibly have given? At least with a deer they could say they were taking it to a taxidermist and it was being prepared for the Museum of Natural History. Then they wouldn’t have to sneak around at night – unless the ritual called for a midnight delivery.

The cult I was born into was stingy and not  very imaginative. They wouldn’t have been happy shelling out money for a deer and trucking it into the city, all for a ritual for a measly four year old. And they didn’t like to take risks, either. So it would have been more expedient to postpone the ritual until May.

When I am half into a memory, I get to Googling things. I learned that the deer season in New York from 1940 to 1942 was November 1 – 30 and the limit was one antlered (male) animal per licensed hunter. And I learned that the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Alison Miller, Valerie Sinason, and Walter Bowart all mention this ritual but none discuss it at length. Also that daffodils bloom in mid May in the Adirondacks but there is much variation depending on when the snow fall melts and the ground warms. I Googled this because I have a photo of myself picking daffodils that year.

Okay, I feel a little better now that I have that information. I feel that I “always knew” that had happened to me. Certainly I have known about that birth-into-evil- ritual for decades and it is unlikely I read about it, since I have never read the Book of the Dead and neither Bowart, Sinason, nor Miller had written about it by the early ’90’s.

I wish I could trust that “always knew” feeling, or at least notice when I seem to know something that others don’t. Sometimes I trust it, other times I don’t. This time I didn’t even notice it for over twenty years. I hate to think what else I haven’t noticed…and how long it will take me to remember.

 

Upcoming Holidays
April
4/30 Walpurgisnacht/May Eve
May
5/1 Beltane/May Day/ Labour Day in Europe
5/13 Mothers’ Day
5/28 Memorial Day
5/29 Full moon
June
6/17 Fathers’ Day
6/21 Summer Solstice
6/23 Midsummer’s Eve
6/23 St John’s Eve
6/28 Full moon

Dates important to Neo-Nazi groups
5/8 V-E Day: Victory in Europe, WW2
6/6 D-Day: invasion of France in WW2
(Some groups also mark Candlemas, Beltane, Lamas, Halloween, solstices, equinoxes, and full moons.)