[Edited/updated 30 Nov 2020]
Behind that particular recent search topic, among all the other searches that my blog utilities show are made on this site, lies a whole world of wonder.
In spite of appearances — which I find myself saying a lot these days, appearances being the slippery things they are — we often have an intuitive sense of what we’re looking for. Would I recognize “Proto-Celtic song lyrics” if someone posted them online? What would they look like? What inner knowing would confirm them for me? And what melody or rhythm would I use to chant or sing them? Perhaps asking for and incubating a dream experience with them is one direction that could prove fruitful for the querent. I’ve add that to my daybook as a meditation theme for just before sleep.
Underlying these questions at least in part is a thirst for authenticity.
For a useful parallel, I returned to a Youtube video I watched recently, on the native Lakota people of the north central U.S. “When I speak Lakota I feel connected”, says a young Lakota woman around the 1:10 mark. “I feel connected to all my relatives in the previous generations … There’s nothing to compare to the feeling of being Lakota, in Lakota country, speaking Lakota”.
Language and identity are core issues for many Lakota, as they are for many tribal peoples facing challenges to their existence. Do modern Druids feel that native speakers of Welsh or Irish or Scottish Gaelic or Manx or Breton or Cornish are somehow more authentic as Druids? How much of that feeling arises from the minority status and threats to survival that the Celtic languages also face, though on a different scale than those facing the Lakota? I have no answers here, but I have a lot of questions.
The same program “Rising Voices — Hótȟaŋiŋpi — Revitalizing the Lakota Language” includes a segment at around 6:10 where a Lakota TV interviewer announces the day’s program topic as “the Lakota language” and asks several young Lakota a series of questions: “Did anybody speak the language when you were growing up? How much of the language do you need to speak to be an Indian?”
Their answers range widely: “A lot. None. I don’t know. Lots and lots …”
The interviewer keeps probing: “What if you used to speak the language, but you forgot it?”
Confused looks. Nervous smiles. Different answers.
“OK”, the interviewer continues, “what if you don’t speak the language? Are you suddenly not an Indian?”
Again, bemused answers. “I guess. No. Maybe. My tribal card says I’m an Indian, so I guess … I don’t speak it …”
“OK”, says the interviewer, “how about if you speak the language, but you also shop at Walmart, and you drive a big American truck? Are you more or less of an Indian?”
“Depends on the kind of truck” says one person, with a smile. “[You’re] maybe more” [of an Indian], says another. “[Nervous laughter.] I don’t think you’re ‘more’ or ‘less’ … [In Lakota, with subtitles: ‘I love Walmart’] …”
The interviewer pushes on. “What if you’re white and you speak Lakota really well?”
OK, you get the idea.
Many of us are instinctively reaching for a vehicle or a means or an access-point that will help us achieve the sense of deep connection that the speakers of Lakota feel and expressed above. Insofar as this can mediated through language, then learning an ancestral language may help. Or if you’re of German descent, for example, but Irish calls to you, learning Irish may be a way to show respect to a tradition you value, and one you long to understand more fully, regardless of your bloodline or ancestry. (Besides, who knows who and what and whose you were in a previous lifetime?)
Druids on other continents, where other and non-European languages have long been spoken, confront similar issues. Fortunately, from what I’ve experienced on my own journey, the spiritual world senses, values and responds well to honesty, and searches our hearts and our intentions, not just the particular language we happen to be using. We needn’t wait for fluency in our chosen ritual or spiritual language before we can live a spiritual life. But we might consider how the act of learning a language with such associations and history is itself a ritual gesture with its own consequences. To say, write, and think certain words and not others has a power we can draw on for more than we imagine.
C. is a friend of mine with a doctorate in archaeology who’s worked with many North American tribal peoples as a trained consultant and is learning Ojibwe online from a Native teacher. The class includes both Ojibwe and non-Ojibwe students. For C. it’s a worthwhile use of his time in lockdown. Over the decades he has made friends among Ojibwe speakers, he appreciates the cultural insight, and it engages him because it’s about communication, something he’s spent much of his professional career doing. He’s testified as an expert in court cases, advocated for Native rights, worked on the repatriation of cultural objects and remains, and so on.
I’ve picked up the merest handful of Ojibwe words from him during our socially-distanced breakfasts that ended with Vermont’s recent stricter pandemic policies. So when he says something in Ojibwe and explains it — often a greeting or farewell — at least I can say gidash “you too”. I may say it wrong, it may not even mean exactly what I think from my brief acquaintance with it, or it may actually be used in different contexts than how I use it, but my intention remains, nonetheless: you matter. I learned this expression from him and I use it for that reason with him, for a small moment of human solidarity.
Spiritual solidarity spreads outward from there. What language do I use to make spiritual connections? Is my heart in it?
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I value the teachings of Druidry, and appreciate the Celtic origins of many of them. But I also find myself drawn to Old English, a different “cultural stream”, though I don’t feel an equivalent draw or tug toward Anglo-Saxon Heathenry, or Asatru or anything similar. Here and there I’ve put pieces of OBOD ritual into Old English on this site, I teach Old English classes online, while I still work on a constructed form of a Celtic language, as I’ve also documented in past posts.
I wrote earlier in this post about “access-points” — portals or paths that give onto a realm where we can more easily connect to what we are seeking. While some spiritual teachings attempt this by holding out a specific sets of beliefs or a creed, Druidry and others suggest that a practice and a toolkit of techniques like an ancestral or cultural language may help in accomplishing this goal.
Thus, knowing that at least one branch of my family tree is rooted in Kingsbridge, England offers me one kind of access point, through a place and a people. Places can seem near-eternal, though anyone who’s lived to see strip malls, parking lots and new apartment buildings rise in a former pasture or woods knows how unreliable that sense can be. Still, when I encounter older versions of the town’s name in records — medieval Kyngysbrygge, Anglo-Saxon Cyningesbrycg — I know a connection to place, to where some of my ancestors are buried, though I may never set foot in it. And through the magic of the internet I even know what some of the landscape looks like, though I haven’t (yet) smelled the air or felt the earth beneath my feet.
Now that’s admittedly a tenuous and vague experience, compared to speaking an ancestral language. It can feel at times that people of European ancestry in this lifetime minimize or even disown their own ancestors, out of shame at colonialism, or simply because they’re “not interesting enough”.
Yet such experiences as tracing a family tree, and finally being able to name a place where one’s ancestors lived and died, can also be a portal, and I can use it to access much more. Names can take us far indeed. We know the power of being called by our name. Extending the principle of “as above, so below” to the same-plane version “as here, so there”, what do I imagine other beings and places experience when I know their names and use them with love and affection and a request for their wisdom and assistance? Calling a rock formation on your land Bear’s Tipi is qualitatively different from naming it Devil’s Tower, whatever language you use. If we don’t yet know that truth, it lies within our power to discover it.
In his most recent post, John Beckett writes of five of his mistakes as a Pagan. They’re instructive to reflect on, because most of us have made most of them in some form, regardless of our own unique journeys. (If I think any one of them doesn’t apply to me, I probably haven’t dug deeply enough.)
John names them like this: refusing to start at the beginning, trying to ignore the gods, waiting too long to start attending Pagan gatherings, not working more magic, and assuming other people share my vision. Or as I might paraphrase them to fit my circumstances, forgetting the foundations, ignoring spirit, resisting the gifts of community, renouncing my own power — and assuming other people share my vision.
Fortunately, “learning from my mistakes” is something we all are working on all the time. It’s one of the most magical things we can do, transforming a past mistake into a piece of wisdom for ourselves and for others. No mistakes, only ongoing projects.
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A Druid Way 
