ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ritual performance of the Beltane Fire Festival, which occurs annually on 30 April on Calton Hill, Edinburgh. The Beltane Fire Festival is a contemporary reinterpretation of an ancient Celtic festival celebrating the passage of the seasons. It is a spring festival marking the end of winter and the beginning of summer. As such, the underlying symbolism of the Beltane Fire Festival is renewal and rebirth, given the relationship to the passage of the seasons and, furthermore, fertility of people, land and livestock (BFS 2007; Frazer 1922). The contemporary Beltane Fire Festival is an interesting context as, while it is based on a traditional agrarian and calendrical rite of passage celebrating the passage of a season, it also embodies life-crises style rites of passage for many of the performers in its modern reinterpretation as a liminoid experience (Turner 1975). The contemporary Beltane Fire Festival also symbolises a subversion and transgression from social norms as it contains features of Bakhtin’s (1965) carnivalesque (see Matheson and Tinsley forthcoming).
