Approaching Beltane Concluded: The Green Candle

If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there; drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented... so that you totally become his nature... You should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.

-Carl Jung, The Red Book

Now I want to say a bit about the kindling of the new fire. One reason I am doing this is the accident of color. I purchased a green candle for the Easter altar, and am using a similar green pillar as the Beltane candle. Listening to wisdom today—and I don’t always get a change to read or to listen to as much wisdom as I would like—I learned from Mark Passio that green was the color of the heart chakra, of true love, of alchemical love, not the love that is seeking someone or something outside of itself, but the love that finds union within, and green is the middle color that joins all the things, the color at the center of the spectrum as well as the most prevalent color in nature, not just the color of spring, but the color we are always seeing. Even when you are seeing brown and almost barren earth, green is in this too. And this is the color I use for the flame of Beltane.

Going back to the simple pagan explanation, the fire kindled blesses crops and herds and gives light to the eyes and warmth to the body. It cooks the food and brings humanity, for we became human and our minds more intelligent, our lives longer, our faculties better when we learned the alchemical transformation of raw meat to cooked. This event is mythologized when Prometheus brings fire down from heaven to human beings. In kindling the Beltane fire we are remembering this gift of fire and all its use in the most practical and apparent ways, but also the inner fire, the inner spark it represents, the true and consistent alchemy which turns us from animal to human and joins the divided parts of us. In kindling the fire we are remember Agni, the Lord of Fire who carried the sacrifice and soul to the gods and joined earth to heaven. The fire is the spark of life. It is Lumen Christi at the Easter Vigil, the Risen Lord and the  Vision of the Risen Lord by Mary Magdalene. The kindling of the green fire is the moment of the Alchemical Wedding.

Another reason the kindling of the fire is the moment of the Alchemical Wedding is because the burning candle compliments something we have not yet discussed, and that is the darkness of the Vigil. At Easter this darkness and the accompanying flame is the reminder that Christ is the life of the world, but it is also just the natural circumstance of us having extinguished all lights so that we might kindle the spark again. Start all over. There is the irony of the eternal light needing to be born in time again, of the heavenly light, needing to be sparked on earth again. We are always in need or returning to that moment of first light. It is not only the light of a Christ we are spectators to in a Christian way, a Christ who will come and save us while we watch and believe on the sidelines. It is the light of Christ in us, our own birth as the anointed one, our own joining with the eternal nature to become daughters of God, and God’s sons. The spark in the darkness in the realization of the eternal God within.

The long darkness of the vigil palpably reminds us of what the dark is like. and how often we are in danger of slipping back into it, how often, in fact, we actually are in it. So often we are blind and need the light of grace to see again, to love again, to be warm and living again and denying this makes us like is the Pharisees in the Gospel of John.

Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.”

 Some Pharisees who were with him heard him say this and asked, “What? Are we blind too?”

Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.

At the Easter Vigil the Risen Jesus, Christ in all his fullness is most certainly this Light, and at Beltane this same light is attained in the Alchemical Wedding of the Beloveds, which is the moment of resurrection, recognition and return. It is the revelation of the parable, the moment Jesus calls to Mary Magdalene, the Supper at Emmaus. To ignore the state of our darkness, to be too proud to admit our coldness and even our ignorance is indeed to be left in the dark, to have our sin remain, and our sin is no good to us, not for the old Catholic reason that we will end up in hell, but because without change, without growth, without love, without light, hell is where we already are.