As we come together on this joyous Beltane to welcome spring and celebrate the turning of the great wheel of the year with our wonderful community, it is important that we remember the delicate nature of the natural cycles. The effects of climate change are showing themselves to those who are paying close attention, causing a mismatch between the timings of flowers and pollinators, and failures in the timings of birth and bloom, of sap and seed.  This phenomenon is called phenological mismatch and is the central theme of this year’s ritual.  

The May Queen, our living embodiment of the Goddess of spring is also an evolutionary biologist in her non-Beltane life (if there is such a thing?).  As her work with bees has shown, these cycles being out of sync is deeply concerning.  As spiritual leader of the ritual enactment of the ancient fire festival, she has put her focus on correcting these cyclic mismatches.  As the Green Man, representing the relationship between the kingdoms of life, plant, animal, fungal and more, my job is to facilitate this realignment and bring about the balance we both seek.

One part of the Green Man’s ritual journey this year will be a change from previous years.  This year is more about sustainability than simply sex and fertility.  Beltane will always be a deeply symbolic festival of fecundity and fruitfulness, but this year the May Queen and the Green Man will be working together with a common goal – to harmonise the natural world and the human world, to bring healing to the world and bring in a spring filled with wonder, beauty and a sense of personal agency in tackling the climate crisis together as a community.  

As a musician, I think of cycles and alignment in musical terms.  The idea of several rhythms interacting can be chaotic, but also can be expressed as a polyrhythm.  Two tones in slight misalignment lead to an audible “beating” and this can be a beautiful effect, very important in Balinese ritual music where it is called ombok.  The crazy mishmash of tones and overtones that are created by some instruments, like shakers and cymbals can create a sonic space where the spirits can whisper to us.  The careful use of tones and rhythms in alignment and misalignment is a fundamental skill for a ritual musician.  To represent in a very real way, the deliberate manipulation of cycles of rhythm and harmonic alignment I will be relying on my soundsphere, a group embodying forest spirits, who will help to create a sound bubble around me, at 220hz which is called the “song of increase”.  This is the most joyful emanation produced by a colony of bees. It indicates that the hive is flourishing and the bees are happy in its abundance.  As I go around the elemental points, I will complete each interaction with a harmonic alignment using a side blown animal horn, beginning slightly flat and controlling the audible beating effect until rising to exact harmonic matching of the tone, and the feeling of connection and completion this inspires.

The story of the Green Man goes way back through prehistory, with ancient civilisations honouring vegetative gods in the form of Osiris, Dionysus,Pan, Cernunnos, Dagda, John Barleycorn, Jack in the Green and so many other names and forms.  He is an ancient God, but also very much a modern deity, only relatively recently elevated from carvings on old churches and hidden places, to full blown Neo-Pagan deity.  He has become symbolic of our spiritual reconnection with nature and emblematic of the wisdom in listening to nature and respecting the solutions that traditional cultures and biological communities have to offer.  His story is one of death and rebirth, of self sacrifice and abundant vitality.  He must die to complete the cycle and keep the great wheel turning.  However this death is usually at the end of the growing season, not the beginning.  This misalignment in telling his story likely happened due to the difficulty in showing this vital part of his story when the Beltane Fire Society only had one event per year, and needed to shift his death to spring for storytelling purposes.  The idea of the goddess of spring, my beloved Queen and Goddess being the agent of death, at the beautiful beginning of spring just seems out of alignment.  

This year instead, in the tradition of many gods of nature and the underworld, I will  use the opportunity, when first touched by the goddess, to undertake a shamanic journey to the underworld, to speak to the old gods, the fungal gods, who preceded all other life.  They who created the conditions by which all other life can survive, who keep the wheel turning by recycling all life, who facilitate communication through the wood wide web, who brought culture and civilisation through yeast for bread and brew.  They are the ones I will seek out for blessings.  I will ask them for healing, both for ourselves and for our relationships with all life.  I will ask to bring back something to help the May Queen in her great quest to bring about a harmonious new year.  I will ask them to bless the seeds I will ritually plant at the high point of the ceremony.  To go on this journey I will need the help, not only from the May Queen, but also from my animal totems.  You may have guessed, from my name, what one such totem is, but another vital ally is the humble frog.

The frog is a symbol of vulnerability and is very sensitive to toxic environments.  It is often used to detect changes in the environment, listening to changes in their calls can be a crucial tool for detection of habitat damage.  Frog is the archetypal shapeshifter, a dweller in two worlds, water and land.  Creatures of the night and moon, their songs are said to bring the rain, and their calls are often the first sign of spring.  Frogs are great communicators and use sound in nearly everything they do.  Frog sings songs of love and longing, of territory and connection to place, of joy and of warning.  

Frog faces all obstacles with a matter of fact, git-er-done approach that can be sometimes reckless but always very direct.  Some frogs defend themselves with some of the most toxic chemicals on earth, others have absolutely no defence other than enormous numbers.  Frogs are sometimes used in magical practices to carry away disease, the witch or shaman may place a frog or toad into the mouth of the afflicted, where the disease is transferred to them and they are subsequently released.  Medieval ideas associated them with poison, disease and the devil.  They were commonly thought of as the witch’s familiar.  

In the east, frogs visible abundance is linked to wealth and prosperity.  This ties into the connection with underworld gods like  Cernunnos, Pluto, Hades, Mercury, Teutates, Veles, etc. who preside over the riches found below the ground.  When the cold comes, frog can burrow into the ground and go into a deep meditation, shutting down nearly all life processes and even freezing solid, before the sun returns and calls them from their reverie.

And of course, frogs are a symbol of fertility, and in their innocent and playful way, remind me so much of the Reds.

Frogs are facing a new threat, again linked to climate change, in the chytrid fungus.  Frogs and toadstools have had a happy relationship for most of history, and this is reflected in their mythologies.  But the environmental impact of human activities has opened the door to this deadly fungal disease which is spreading rapidly and threatens many amphibians with extinction.  This is an example of the healing needed, and will be part of my request when I undertake my underworld journey.  Just as the gift of the fungus through the form of penicillin saved countless human lives, so I will ask, may they again provide us with the healing we so urgently need.

Frogs and mushrooms share a commonality with the Green Man, in that they straddle several worlds, Earth and Water, plant and animal, and as such they are sometimes considered to be aligned with LGBTQ identities.  Frogs,(toads) and mushrooms also are capable of producing powerful compounds that can alter consciousness and provide mind expanding and healing possibilities to help address some of the growing mental health crisis.  The sixties were fuelled by fungus through ergot and psilocybin, to push for cultural changes in civil rights, freedom and world peace.  Fungus likely played a role in human evolution and language development (see Terrence McKenna and the “stoned ape” hypothesis). The powerful experiences brought about by these molecules have played a huge role in cultural development and have inspired an integrated spiritual perspective that has inspired art and politics. These substances like 5-meo dmt from the Sonoran desert toad, and psilocybin from various mushroom species are sometimes referred to as entheogens, when used in the context of religious, magical, shamanic and other spiritual ceremonies.  The word derives from the Greek entheos, meaning divinely inspired or possessed, and is the root of the word “enthusiasm “.  These divine molecules offer a glimpse into other worlds and the deeper nature of our own world.

Mutualism describes relationships like the symbiosis of algae and fungi to form lichens.  It is now thought that mutualism is key to the origin of eukaryotic cells and multicellular life.  Many biologists now believe that nearly every species on Earth, aquatic or terrestrial, is involved directly or indirectly in mutualism.  These relationships have lead some to question where individual life forms begin and end.  Could it be more useful to conceive of a forest as a super-organism , or even the entire biosphere as Gaia, the great world Goddess?  

If we consider the fungal realm as the circulatory, nervous and digestive systems of Gaia, then the diseases we are facing on a global scale will need to be addressed with healing modalities on a similar scale.  

Science and society face challenges that nature has sometimes already faced before and we need to investigate with an appropriately respectful approach, the solutions that organisms and traditional cultures may have already found.  There is a developing movement for environmentally grounded spirituality, often referred to as Neo-Paganism.  This form of spiritual expression seeks to connect with the best of science and ancient wisdom, while rejecting outmoded ideas that no longer serve us.  Scientists like Merlin Sheldrake are inspiring many to incorporate the best of evidence based science into modern spiritual practices.  I would highly recommend going deeper down this particular rabbit hole, as the world is revealed for the wonderland that it truly is. 

So I’d like to wish you all, the most wonderful, beautiful, joyous, bountiful, and blessed Spring.  

Happy Beltane from your Green Man!