Sabbat
Fire on the hill and cattle walked between it — the old summer door, opened with smoke.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Beltane is old and well recorded. Cormac's Glossary, around 900, explains the name by two fires which druids made, and cattle driven between them against the diseases of the year. Frazer, a thousand years later, collected Highland versions still kept within living memory of his sources: the hill fire, the cake divided by lot, the blackened piece nobody wanted.
May customs in Britain — dew gathered on May morning, greenery cut and carried, garlands, the pole — are separately documented and not straightforwardly Gaelic. Several are late medieval or later, and some of the more theatrical ones Victorian. Keeping them is fine. Calling them immemorial Celtic survivals is not.
Practically it is a fire festival for beginnings you mean to be loud about: vitality, desire, protection of animals and thresholds, hand-fastings. Anyone without a hilltop uses one candle and walks between two of anything — closer to the original logic than it looks. In the southern hemisphere it falls around 1 November, opposite Samhain.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890)
Frazer describes the Highland Beltane cake broken up and drawn blind, one piece charred black; whoever took it was called the devoted, and had to leap three times through the flames. He argues, cautiously, that the game preserves the shape of something once considerably less playful.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Two candles set apart and the working walked between them — cattle being in short supply. The gesture is a threshold, and thresholds are the part of the festival that survived best.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.