"The leaves are budding across the land
on the ash and oak and hawthorn trees.
Magic rises around us in the forest
and the hedges are filled with laughter and love.
Dear Lady, we offer you a gift,
a gathering of flowers picked by our hands,
woven into the circle of endless life.
The bright colors of nature herself
blend together to honor You,
Queen of Spring,
as we give You honor this day.
Spring is here and the land is fertile,
ready to offer up gifts in Your name.
we pay you tribute, our Lady,
daughter of the Fae,
and ask Your blessing this Beltane."
- Beltane Prayers
Beltane, May Day, Arbor Day, Green Man Celebrations
Hypertext Notebook of Mike Garofalo
"Fertility rights are ceremonies of a magic-religious nature performed to ensure the perpetuation of mankind and to control the environment. Expressed as invocations, incantations, prayers, hymns, processions, dances, and sacred dramas, these liturgical endeavors were, and still are, believed to be closely connected with the mechanisms of nature. The basis for such rites is usually a belief in sympathetic magic - that is magic worked on one level to have an effect on a different level, and based on the assumption that life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, are one and indivisible. If such fertility rites could induce fertility in the animal and human worlds, then the vegetable world would also be stimulated to reproduction, resulting in an abundant harvest."
- Robert Ellison, The Solitary Druid, p. 130
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