Beltane (as profilic as one should expect in its spellings and derivations) is the season we celebrate sex. As the bluebells thrust through the leaf litter and the sun is already long in setting (at least in the British Isles). This is the time of May dances, of showers of blossom and the earnest buzzing of the bees.

Our evening of Purple magick, fortuitously coinciding with the waxing half-moon, began with a round of greetings and a banishing ritual.

Our South American Sister brings a guided visualisation. In this we strip back the blockages, imagined as a layer of slime on the skin, and emerge into our new selves. We honour what we have emerged from for it too is part of our story. In my imagination the discarded puddle of restriction is absorbed into the earth, composting into rich soil.

Sexy slime

Following this practice is An Annointing for The Lover, each participant performing a nyasa style placement of the bija mantras into each chakra. Marking each point with perfumed oil. A simple but powerful practice to acknowledge the sacred as expressed through our bodies.

Having thus prepared ourselves it’s time for The Ardhanarishvara Brain Re-wiring Rite. Using the dual form of Shiva-Shakti we each create sigil from that divine name and these are installed into out non-dominant hemispheres. In order to prevent unpleasantly weird physiological effects (experienced by the developer during the alpha test of the ritual) a horizontal double-ended Shiva trident is visualised, connecting both hemispheres of the brain. We dance the sigil into our nervous systems, connecting the masculine and feminine aspects of ourselves and bringing these into unity.

The Polymorphous Elvis Transformer Ritual is next. This rides on the gnosis of the millions of orgasms which are happening across the planet right now. Moving our hips in the transgressive motion of The King and imagining the paparazzi flash-bulbs of erotic ecstacy all around us we:

“…key into the energy waves that are being generated, regenerated and amplified even as we sit here now. This ritual is also a tribute to Genesis Breyer P. Orridge who introduced me to the ideas of Sex Magick via the Temple of Psychick Youth and continues to break gender and push ideas of sexuality into new areas.”  TP808

Our sexuality, like everything else in the universe, is a flow rather than a static thing. For the closing ritual each person gets to fill in a form (and, frankly, how sexy is that?). By doing so they are reflecting on how their sexuality emerges in that moment. This is done using the sexuality play spectrum HERE. We share these with each other, taking an intimate and funny moment together to disclose our (current) sexual identity in a safe space.

We sit together, silently acknowledge this intimacy, this trust. Then it’s time to get up and dance (to tunes HERE), laughing and joking we step outside and light the Beltane fire, burning up the forms, the fixed notion of who we are. Realising the ebb and flow, of on and off, is a continuous process, like sex itself; always mixing things up, stirring the genetic cauldron. And though sex can make us think of dualities – God and Goddess, male and female, chalice and cup – it is actually much closer to a cloud of possibility. The erotic can, as Susan Sontag observes, erupt in a bewildering variety of expressions. Our own indentities flux and flow and even down at the genetic level things X and Y chromosones can morph and shift, responding to hormones in different ways, and expressing themselves in a wide varities of forms.

Perhaps this is an axiom of a ‘Baphometic Witchcraft’; rather than a simple polarity model of sex we acknowledge that we are all, at different times and different degrees, in the flow of sexuality. Like Baphomet we are cut-up entities manifesting sex in a muliplicity of forms (including asexuality). Thus we free ourselves from the simplistic (apparently) fixed duality of forms and become something rich and strange. Our morality becomes rooted in a sensitivity to issues of consent and coercion, not in a priori stereotypes of what men or women should or should not do to express their sexual nature.

Hardcore mollusc action

The plant sex organs that are the apple blossom envelop the penetrating sisterhood of hungry honey bees. Dandelions proliferate through kinky apomixis. Horned and hermaphroditic, snails stab love darts into each others’ flesh – everything, as Austin Spare would say, fornicates all the time.

JV