It was an honor and a privilege to receive this original piece of writing from Raven Kaldera. Raven is a Northern Tradition thaumaturgist (someone who works with the spirits/gods of a tradition) who happens to be transgender and intersex. Yarrow considers themselves an acolyte of his and owns several of his books. Enjoy!
Multigender Mayday
Raven Kaldera
Every year, around mid-April, I go shopping for multicolored cotton fabric, a yard of each color, to be cut into strips, hemmed, and turned into ribbons for our big Maypole. I’ve done it for so many years now that the young woman behind the counter in the fabric place sees me coming in mid-April and says, “Maypole ribbon time again, eh?” I also shop for more decorations for the big Maypole wreath, which gets redecorated yearly and rebuilt out of grapevines from my back yard about every six years or so. On a weekend before or after actual Beltane (which always seems to be on a Wednesday or thereabouts), we hold our big Beltane ceremony, inviting anyone who wants to come.
In the early morning, my wife of twenty-eight years, a transwoman, goes out with two of her transwoman friends, and they take the Maypole from the basement wall where it lives all winter and hide it in the woods. Them hiding the pole started out as a joke, but now it’s tradition, something they do proudly. When the Beltaners arrive, four are decked out in colorful tabards and poles with bright banners to call the elements. We all process to the back field, a clearing in my woods the size of a football field which was the selling point for my wife and myself when we first saw our twenty-acre property. There’s a Cretan labyrinth in the middle of the field with shoulder-high boulders set around it at the solar points of the year—solstices, equinoxes, cross-quarters, true and magnetic north and south. The Maypole goes into the middle of that labyrinth, and stays until just before Samhain when we all go out and take it down.
Then we divide into the gender teams. People who identify as women follow my adult daughter to the hole in the middle of the field, where they remove the large rocks and make a number of sacred offerings into it—bread for nourishment, an egg for new beginnings, etc. Those who identify as men go into the woods and look for the pole. Some years they find it quickly, some years it takes them a while and there is a lot of good-natured catcalling from the women—“They don’t seem to have any trouble finding their own poles!”
Everyone else—those who identify as something other than male or female—clusters around the table where I’ve laid the Maypole wreath, and we all put on the loose decorations together. The men come back with the pole and carry it, chanting, three times around the labyrinth. The women chant a counterpoint. The third group stands and hovers with the wreath and the ribbons—the latter take at least three people to keep them off the ground, as they are longer than our fifteen-foot pole. My transman partner of two decades—I am polyamorous and have two primary partners—wears his fancy Beltane harlequin dress and dances around with a comical stuffed penis on a pole. It’s his job to line up the Maypole dancers and show them how to do the slightly complex over-under-over-under which wraps the pole so beautifully.
When the three circles are made, the in-between folks all join hands and make a human chain. One end grabs the hand of a woman, the other a man, and we bring them together. It is a conscious magical act of creating understanding and reconciliation between the two far ends of male and female, as important as the heterosexual breeding couple dressed as the Green Man and the May Queen who have joined the two ends-of-the-spectrum teams, and who will chase each other around the pole after it is wrapped, join in a kiss, and go off to the tent-bower we’ve set up privately in the woods for them to finish enacting the rite together.
We have so many queer and trans and third gender and non-binary people in our group, not to mention at least to intersex people who also fall into some of the above categories as well (and I am one of those) that some years it’s hard to find our Green Man and May Queen. These days, having long ago run through all our straight couples, we start looking to neighboring Pagan groups months in advance. (At least one couple in our Pagan church will point at their eight-year-old son and say gaily to newcomers, “Product of the Maypole!”) People come to our ritual and have various reactions to it. Some are end-of-spectrum genders and used to binary Wicca Beltanes, and are taken aback. Some are non-binary and sometimes accost me later and ask why I don’t take gender and reproduction out of the entire ritual.
But this is the way our Pagan church has been doing Beltane since 1994, and we aren’t stopping now. It’s ingrained now. Children have grown up in our church and, during their teen years, rotated between groups to see where it felt right. We didn’t argue—anyone can be in any group so long as they are willing to go along with the job and honor Nature’s manifestation of that. I think it’s rare that adolescents get a chance to ritually try out different points on the gender spectrum as part of their religious upbringing, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to give generations of teens that gift.
After the Maypole is danced and bound, and the rest of the ritual goes by, we get the bonfire ready for our Pagan church choir to sing around it, and for the evening fire ritual. Queers I know hear how we organize our Beltane, and they say, “You’re lucky.” No. It has nothing to do with luck. My wife and I built this group, from the beginning. We started out holding rituals when there were only three or four people coming. Sometimes no one came but us. We held them anyway. Now, decades later, what we do has become tradition. It’s not new, not here. It’s how things are, how they should be. Everyone would be upset if we changed the Maypole ritual, because of course it should be that way. Isn’t this about the fertility of Nature, and how Nature comes in such diversity?
It’s not that hard. You just have to stick it out, year after year, and keep doing it, as people come and go. You just have to become a fixture, a standing stone in the earth which Pagans depend upon to be there, and who—of course—knows the right way to do things, and that the right way is one of diversity. You’re not doing it this way because you are queer or trans or intersex; you’re doing it because it describes the world. That’s what you say, and eventually a bunch of people will absorb it—even the straight ones. Then, in thirty years, someone who has just heard about these standing stones will tell you how lucky you are that such things mysteriously appear every year. That’s the nature of magic.