As is faerie lore I am having difficulty in remembering what happened last night at our second magical get-together of the Daisy Faerie Ring. I really wanted to start writing straight away, but by the time we had finished it was well past one in the morning and I could hear my bed calling me very loudly!
So where to begin? Well – our Beltaine celebration felt a little flat to tell you the truth before we ventured into it. We had meant to hold it on the Friday night of April 30th; however, Daisy had been ill and off school for most of the week and the girls had not had a chance to do any planning at all when Friday arrived. So instead of having our rite on Friday, Daisy and Alcina got together at The Mouse Hole and planned what we needed and what we would be doing. I don’t know why, but I didn’t feel that excited at the prospect of a Beltaine rite. We’d all had a rubbish week, along with one thing and another and it felt like too much effort! There was no blossom on the hawthorn yet anywhere on the island and things just felt a little under-prepared.
In-between our first rite and this one Daisy and Alcina had been model students and had written up the previous rite in their Books of Elfin. They had taken great care and attention over it and Daisy had written nine pages and Alcina three and a half. A good start to their magical apprenticeship!
Beltaine for us was postponed until the night of Saturday 1st May. Daisy arrived at The Mouse Hole at 8pm, thankfully in full bouncy-ness once more after being poorly. None of us felt particularly energetic though. We all had a cup of tea and sat around for an hour watching Psychic Sally, yawning and generally feeling lethargic. All of us mentioned from time to time how tired we felt and that we weren’t going to be doing a long rite as we were all so frazzled. I envisaged us to be in bed by 11pm – oh how wrong I could be!
Finally we busied ourselves with getting ready. Daisy and I had 3 minute showers, Alcina had her usual 15 minute shower fiasco The girls donned their faerie wings, set up the faerie altar, lit the charcoal and incense, laid out cake for the faeries and then when everything was set to go at around 10.30pm we came together and held hands to form our faerie circle. I was still envisaging myself in bed my 11pm-ish.
Then something peculiar happened. I should have known that Beltaine, Mischief Night would not have let us down. The giggling began. I can’t even remember what we were giggling about, but we couldn’t stop, from the moment that faerie circle was cast we didn’t stop giggling until we went to bed long past 1am. Daisy had learnt her words for sweeping the circle, so she did this brilliantly for the first time. After she had swept the circle, we could all feel that the energy had shifted. By the time it came for us to Call the Quarters we felt as if we were in an Aardman Animations episode of ‘Sean the Sheep’. Right outside my living room window is a small paddock reserved for ewes and their newborn lambs. Yes, I do live in the middle of a field. The Middle of Nowhere to be precise. As soon as we began to come together in our circle we had noticed the sheep were being really noisy. As Daisy began to call the East Quarter of Air we distinctly heard a sheep fart – I kid you not. This did not help the giggling situation one bit. It was then that I realised that noisy dogs and mice were absent from this rite but the sheep had taken over. There wasn’t a syllable we could utter without a sheep baa-ing or a lamb bleating loudly over the top of us. Why weren’t they all tucked up in bed with their cotton socks on by now, that’s what I wanted to know?
The casting of the circle amid baa’s and bleats continued as smoothly as could be expected until we invoked the Faerie King Oberon and Faerie Queen Mab into our circle. I suggested that we should invite Puck along too, as is customary on Beltaine. True to form he carried out Mischief Night to the letter. We Raised the Power by whispering at first and then gradually getting louder our favourite chant; I do believe in faeries, I do, I do… Nothing we could do without collapsing into giggles. We all chanted firstly with sensible whispers holding hands and dancing around in a circle. Then gradually the silly voices appeared, an opera voice or two broke through and the giggling prevailed. We were giggling our socks off (not to be confused with the sheep’s cotton ones) and by the time we reached the peak of our power raising we were all holding our sides for aching so much with laughter. It was as if we had been injected with giggle serum; triple strength. I wish we could bottle it and put it in the cupboard for emergencies.
As we hadn’t been very organised prior to our ritual we decided to celebrate Beltaine by following a pathworking. I chose The White Faerie Mare’s Spiral (page 166 of my book Faeriecraft if you would like to follow it yourself). Since before the beginning of our Daisy Faerie Ring daisies had cropped up everywhere in our lives, but especially in Daisy’s, that’s why we had had no trouble in finding a name for our faerie ring and Daisy had her magical name waiting for her too. Things had not calmed down in the daisy-department on the formation of our faerie ring and we were all continuing to discover daisies everywhere threading their way through our lives like an enchanted daisy chain leading us to the most magical experiences. The pathworking was no exception. As you will see, if you have this pathworking in front of you there are daisies in it. You are asked to make a daisy chain from the hundreds of daisies growing in the white faerie mare’s meadow and then put the chain around the mare’s neck as a gift to her for carrying you throughout the meditation.
Daisy and Alcina had frantically looked up the magical and folkloric meaning of daisies when we were forming our faerie ring and what they discovered was quite revealing. A magical meaning for a daisy is ‘innocence, loyal love, I’ll never tell and purity. The girls and I all felt that these were all qualities that a teen faerie ring of faerie priestesses should aspire to and hold true. The daisy is our emblem, which in this faerie ring anyway we would like to think we strive to keep those watchwords central to everything that we do.
Serious stuff aside; Puck was playing havoc with our pathworking. Daisy was being prodded in the side by two invisible fingers, making her nearly jump out of her skin every couple of minutes. I felt someone constantly looking over my shoulder trying to put me off reading the pathworking. We all experienced mischievous prodding, poking and some of us hair pulling throughout the meditation time. This obviously led to giggling of the explosive kind as we were ticklish. Everything became funny, ridiculous and concentration was variable.
Prior to the forming of the faerie ring I had felt slightly concerned that the energy raised in a ritual setting would be too deep for young teens and that they would be jumping in too soon at the deep end. However, my fears have been unfounded as Daisy and Alcina bring along with them to the rites their own light and bubbly energy. It is a fantastic experience for me to feel a part of faeriecraft growing and emerging into the future. The energy that they bring is completely different to that of an adult faerie ring and I feel that it is faeries’ way of introducing them gently to magic of a fey kind.
Once the pathworking was complete and we all felt pretty mellow and blissed-out by now the girls had wanted to learn how to send healing. We lit a white candle for someone we knew that was really poorly and visualised golden light being sent to them. I said a few words asking this person to become weller. This sparked off a lively discussion about whether ‘weller’ was a word or not, which of course it isn’t but I was feeling particularly silly. Puck’s fault. Naturally Paul Weller cropped up a few times in my defence. Giggles prevailed. Sheep baa-ed. The situation was quickly becoming surreal. Puck’s fault again.
Then came a spell for protection. There has been a recent spate of thefts on our island concerning oil being taken from domestic oil tanks. Neither Daisy’s house or The Mouse Hole had yet been burgled of oil, so we took our chance to set up protection. We visualised a well-practised protection spell of mine by imagining our oil tanks encircled in a protective light and then elven sentries permanently marching up and down around our respective oil tanks. These protection spells can last for years and you can strengthen them now and again by re-visualising the elven sentries from time to time. Job done. It was time for cake.
Daisy and Alcina used their wands to consecrate the cakes (faerie cakes that Daisy had made with pink icing) and apple juice. You’ll not be surprised to learn that we all had another fit of the giggles. Can’t remember why. Maybe Alcina sparked it off when with a flourish of her wrist with a real sense of drama, flicked most of the contents of our wooden chalice of apple juice all over the carpet. None of us cleaned it up either; we simply sat holding our sides and tried to straighten our faces as they were hurting so much from laughing.
The time came to bid farewell to the Faerie King and Queen who went quietly with no fuss, unlike Puck who made rude protestations with his fingers, waggling them while poking his thumb up his nose as he did a silly walk out of our circle. We didn’t want him to go. It feels a long time until next Beltaine when we will invite him again.
Once our circle was banished we had hot cross buns with melted brown sugar and cinnamon with Lady Grey tea to earth ourselves after all the silly faerie giggles. We felt on a high and the giggling didn’t calm down for quite a while. We knew once we were finishing the last dregs of our tea and no one had said anything to each other for ten minutes and we were all staring into space that it really was time for bed.
2nd May 2010
As is usual after a faerie rite I slept like a log last night. We all woke up late and the day looks like it is going to be a lazy kind of one. Daisy says that Sunday is her sleeping day. Wisdom I think which should be shared. The apple juice stain still hasn’t been mopped up and Psychic Sally is on the TV again. Daisy and Alcina are calling me to come and watch it with them.
Our next faerie rite will be Saturday 29th May, so catch up with us again to hear how the next rite of the Faerie Daisy Ring unfolds. Daisy and Alcina will be meeting once a week to plan for that ritual, so I hope to give you updates from those.
Now Daisy has announced that as tomorrow is Bank Holiday Monday that is, she says opportunity for another sleeping day. Hold that thought…
