For millennia, people have marked the Beltane festival of May 1 with outdoor dancing around maypoles and lots of other affectionate carryings-on. If there was ever a day to treat yourself like a goddess, this is it! Celebrate the vivid beauty of nature in the Spring — and your own wonderful capacity for sensual pleasure — with this delicious bath, fragrant with rose petals and other skin-softening ingredients.

Emerge from this bath feeling as radiant and alive in your senses as Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty.

Ingredients
2 tablespoons fresh rose petals (1 tablespoon dried)
2 tablespoons fresh comfrey (1 tablespoon dried)
2 tablespoons fresh elderflowers (1 tablespoon dried)
2 cups boiling water

To make:
1. Place the herbs in 1-pint jar.
2. Pour boiling water over the herbs and steep, covered, for 20 minutes to 4 hours.
3. Strain the liquid for use in the bath.

To use:
1. Add the 2 cups of herbal tea to a tub half full of warm water.
2. Slip off your clothes and slip into the tub.
3. Relax in the tub for 10 to 20 minutes.
4. Rinse with tepid water.
5. Pat dry.

Yield: 1 treatment