Beltane Fire Festival
The Beltane Fire Society performed outside St Giles Cathedral on Halloween 2004, many of them dancing around covered in little else than colourful paint, in the freezing cold Autumn night.
Halloween in Scotland begins with the ancient Celtic religious celebration of Samhain (summer's end). One of the two greatest Druidic festivals (Beltane is the other), Samhain marked the end of the light half of the year and the beginning of the dark half.
Samhain is the Celtic new year celebration. Beginning on the evening of October 31 (the Celts counted their days from sunset to sunset), the festival would last three days.
As with other holidays of the Celtic year, October 31 marked a mystical time when the usual barriers between our world and the Otherworld thinned and stretched allowing contact between human beings and the fairy folk and/or the spirits of the dead.
Spooky moonlit St Giles on Halloween
Beltane girls dressed as mother nature
Beltane dancers in white witch costumes
Red flares light up the dancers on stage
Flame in the shape of a woman
