Looking for a practice flexible enough for anyone to try at your upcoming Solstice event, Winter or Summer? Feeling the need to ground and center? Looking for guidance and access to your own inner wisdom?
The famous spiral stone entrance to Newgrange, Meath, Ireland/ image Wikipedia
The single most useful spiritual practice I’ve tried (and stuck with over four plus decades) is singing, chanting, whispering, etc. a sound known in many cultures. On this blog I’ve sometimes called it the “Cauldron Sound”, because it’s the central or middle sound of the awen. It’s long been known to the Sufis as hu, and religions of the inner sound current like Eckankar also give it a prominent place [link to a short description] in their practice and teachings. (Scroll to the bottom of the page and you can download a version to your phone.)
Knowledge of this sound, and more particularly of a specific pitch — 111 hertz — existed thousands of years ago, as evidenced by neolithic structures all across Europe that are tuned quite precisely to it, from Ireland to Malta and beyond.
Below is a Youtube video recorded on the Autumn Equinox in Cairn T [link to many detailed pics and descriptions of things shown only briefly in the video below], a neolithic monument from circa 3500 BCE, located in County Meath, Ireland.
A 1996 joint project with Cambridge and Princeton Universities measured the acoustic properties of numerous stone age chambers like Cairn T. [Update: original link disappeared; you can read more about similar projects here and here and here.] The article notes that
… the results fell within a very narrow band of acoustic wavelengths, between 95 Hertz and 120 Hertz, with the main proliferation between 110 Hertz and 112 Hertz. The average resonant frequency of the acoustically tested chambers was found to be 111 Hertz. Once this frequency is emitted in the chamber, the effect is to immerse the listener in sound, in this instance the sole frequency of 111 Hertz is amplified by the architecture, as it filters out other frequencies, creating an acoustic standing wave … 111 Hertz is lower male baritone in the human vocal range and can be comfortably hummed, sung or spoken.
(If the pitch is still a little too low for your voice, take it up an octave.) The benefits of immersing oneself in this sound are numerous:
This audible frequency … directly stimulates the right-hand prefrontal cortex of the brain, a problem area for autism and other emotional and development disorders such as anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. This specific frequency is also associated with endorphin release, a potential non-addictive panacea for pain relief.
It has been observed that within a few minutes of exposure to 111Hertz, Alpha state trance is induced in the listener, as neuronal activity moves within the brain from the left hand frontal lobe to the right. At that point the language centers are ‘quietened’ along with increased Theta wave activity normally associated with sleep and cell regeneration, produced solely in the right hand prefrontal cortex. The overall effect is a subtle, altered state of consciousness, with the potential to train the brain to stimulate longer-term neuronal activity in the right hand hemisphere of the brain.
As a prescription for what so many of us are experiencing today, this looks spot on. Another article, this time from 2019, “Embracing the Benefits of 111 Hertz Frequency“, adduces MRI data indicating the frequency enhances “intuition, creativity, holistic processing” — all things we need and rely on to navigate the challenges of contemporary life.
111 Hertz, as noted above, is pitched to the human voice. It also approximates within about an octave the pitch of the average didgeridoo [link to David Hudson’s excellent 9:14 demo and teaching] | Jeremy Donovan’s shorter 1:40 demonstration, another cultural source of this ancient wisdom about sound.
I invite anyone who explores these sound techniques to post a brief comment about your experiences!
My friend B’s sauna stove — fire in midwinter, fire of midsummer.
Light balancing north and south, nights and days in their interchange, sleep and waking and the opportunities during each for connection and discovery. May we hear the earth speaking, may the Ancestors alive in us show us the good paths, may each encounter give us space to practice our hard-earned wisdom.
French Visitors
A burst of over 50 views from France so far today! Bienvenus, mes amis! Que les benedictions soient! A quick comment on any post is helpful — something you’re looking for, or would like to see more about in the posts here? Please let me know!
Winter and Summer Solstices
That time again … The solstices, winter and summer, are just a little over a week away. Our solstices — let’s claim them, not as something we “possess”, but as intervals and energies that embrace and sustain us. Alban Arthan, Alban Hefin [links to short posts on the OBOD Druidry.org site], the names OBOD uses for Winter and Summer Solstices, are often rendered respectively as the “Light of Arthur” and the “Light of the Shore”.
You can find some of my previous posts on Solstice here, for both Winter and Summer seasons. First, a three-part series from last winter, December 2019: Gifts of Solstice 1 | 2 | 3.
Solitaries, ritualists, O.B.O.D.-friendly Druids and anyone interested in ritual surrounding a transition of leadership in Druid Orders may find the recent OBOD installation of Eimear Burke worth time spent with this 25-minute Youtube audio-only recording. Close your eyes as the introduction suggests to increase your attention and you may gain additional insight from that focus.
Welcome, Eimear, and blessings to Philip for his 30+ years of service and leadership.
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Holding (and returning to) the highest moment I know as a flavor for the day. Hearing the awen in the songs of birds, the rush of wind in the branches, the rumble of trucks passing down the road. Opening the door to Spirit in this moment, to welcome the transformations I long for, and have worked to manifest.
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I don’t know about you, but I need to keep grounding and centering all day long. It’s a way to show myself love, when love can seem in short supply.
The practice of “ground and center” often finds its way into ritual, as part of the “set-up” for the group, to help bring everyone together, to welcome everyone into the ritual space. It also features as part of many group exercises and workshops. A good group facilitator or group leader will include it up front, and often again at the close, to bring everyone fully back into the moment.
Often it takes the simplest form, a short reminder in words. “Let’s take a moment to ground and center”. The act of recalling the need for it becomes the practice of it — think it and you’re starting to do it.
Maybe there’s a little elaboration to guide you: “Feel your roots going into the earth, your branches rising into the air and sun.” But often we assume everyone knows what “ground and center” means, why we do it, what it’s for. Like all fundamentals and basics, it’s good to take it out and look at it from time to time. Probably our understanding of it has deepened and changed over the months and years.
At BAM Gathering preparation campout, Oct. 2018.
Do it enough, and grounding and centering (“G & C”) begins to broaden and take on new forms. A word, a brief prayer, a gesture made with intention can all help (re-)establish attention on the heart. If a ritual or exercise has taken us out of physical awareness, coming fully back to the body is grounding and centering. Stamping the foot (lightly, if you’re in a group) can help. If you practice a ritual of gesture, the opposite gesture for opening ritual space may serve to close it, and “bring you back”. Recording an experience in your journal, eating and drinking, standing up and walking around the ritual space or the room you’re in, can all serve to ground and center.
Christian worship builds in such moments of “G & C” with prayers and affirmations, songs and recitations that “tell you where you are” in the movement through the ritual of worship. The Latin Mass ends with ite, missa est “Go — (the Congregation) is dismissed”. The Wikipedia entry for mosque, citing the Encyclopedia of Islam, notes that “Any act of worship that follows the Islamic rules of prayer can be said to create a mosque, whether or not it takes place in a special building”. The act of grounding and centering can establish our center if we’ve lost it. It returns us to our “native land”, our spiritual home.
The practice of grounding and centering can open up still more. Out of a daily spiritual practice, new doors open to ways of grounding and centering. The guidance can be so subtle I don’t perceive it as anything separate from myself. It becomes what’s now being called “self-care”. Recognizing I need a break from social media, taking a nap, getting outdoors to encounter the elements, walking in the rain, connecting with a friend — these nourish the heart and guide us to do what’s right for us to do. They’re essential ways to ground and center — in that particular moment. From these elements of practice, more hunches, nudges and intuitions may come. Go here, not there. Try this book, resource, doctor, treatment. Reconnect with this person, spend a little more time with that one. Greet the clerk at the store checkout with my full attention, without rush. Ask how to serve quietly (or noisily!) in this moment, then the next. Listening for such answers is itself grounding and centering.
In a kind of paradox that starts to become familiar to us along any spiritual path, grounding and centering can help us discover when we need to ground and center, when we’ve lost balance, thrown ourselves out of whack. They ease us back “in whack”.
With all the talk of out-of-body experiences, sometimes I need in-body contact with the elements. Touching the cool earth with the palms of my hands, taking three deep breaths and releasing carbon dioxide and tension both, drinking a few sips of water, lighting a candle or passing my hand smoothly through flame, can all ground me. With my physical body composed of the elements, each element assists in the centering I need. As above, so below — yes! But also as below, so above. Full-circuit spirituality.
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In some ways, grounding and centering is the only practice there is. Out of groundedness, out of centeredness, we think and feel, speak and act with integrity, with wholeness. Rather than lamenting what I did badly a moment ago, I can ground and center right now.
From the heart of the awen to you, from the love each being manifests simply through existing in its uniqueness, from the possibility the cosmos is always showering forth to this moment in life.
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One of the distinctive dynamics of our world is that it appears to function as a stable system. It continually seeks equilibrium or balance. How can that be, I hear myself mutter, when the last 200 years look like some of the most violent and tumultuous in human experience? After all, one of the foundational understandings of Druidry and some other spiritual paths is that human and natural worlds both unfold according to the same patterns and principles, because both exist as parts of the same dynamic flow. How I talk to and treat my garden plants and how I interact with my neighbors come to resemble each other. Douse my plants with pesticides against all manner of worms and bugs; gas, cuff, asphyxiate and shoot the vile Others — many make a direct equation between these acts.
In the words of the Dao De Jing, that old Chinese classic that attempts to make useful observations on how energy flows through both natural and human worlds and institutions, “extremes don’t last long”. Not because they’re “good” or “bad”, but because extremes are inherently unstable and unsustainable. Push for one extreme, and the planet’s tendency towards natural equilibrium will reassert itself. The world will rebalance in the opposite direction, often with just as much vigor as our initial push towards one extreme. Attempt to eliminate all bacteria, and superstrains of the pesky little fellows will emerge, literally to plague us. Oust the Foreign Devils, and then it’s the Communists/Nationalists who polarize the land. Throw off the imperial yoke of the British Empire, and in time those evil Party X or Party Y people will break into our new Eden and foul things up. Round up and imprison-exterminate-exile-convert all those evil Others, and a new Other will take shape. In a demonstrable sense, the (binary) door always slams us in the back on our way in or out.
OUR HUMAN GENIUS is MANIFESTATION
That decidedly does not mean we shouldn’t work for changes we desire. After all, we can each point to successes in manifesting at least some of the things we want — manifesting is what we do each day. It does mean that when we enter a binary dynamic and pursue one side too forcefully and unskillfully, the back-and-forth of rebalancing that results may end up strengthening both sides to roughly the same degree. The result is a feedback loop, a self-reinforcing polarization that builds and builds. But a binary isn’t our only choice, just one among a good range of ’em.
As Exhibit A of an active binary, examine media on both ends of the recent U.S. political spectrum, and you soon see how each pole has come to adopt apocalyptic rhetoric and characterize the victory of the other side, whether in November, or tomorrow, or right now, as “the end of America”. Each chooses a side, dons the appropriate Superman-Batman-Jedi Knight-Righteous Warrior-Crusader costume, and sallies forth to do battle. Eventually, regardless of my current score in the game, I stand convinced of my moral superiority, I keep fighting the good fight, and I exhort others to do the same, or shame them for an uncaring heartlessness almost as bad as siding outright with the Opposition.
Long-time readers of this blog know that over the decades I’ve grown to admire J. M. Greer for his useful and test-able insights. One of his more acute set of observations concerns the kind of polarization we now face. His “Getting Beyond the Narratives: An Open Letter to the Activist Community” is well worth studying. It’s a thoughtful response to a specific book, so you can see previous instances of what we’re facing today, but it’s also a good look at our ongoing tendency to entrap ourselves in binaries of Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Civilians vs. Police — and at productive ways out from such binary prisons. Greer writes at one point:
When activists define their role wholly in terms of resistance and refusal, of “articulat[ing] a NO to the system” rather than pursuing a positive ideal, they guarantee that they’ll perpetually be scrambling to counter some new assault by the system, trying to maintain an inadequate status quo against the threat of further losses, rather than making the system and its defenders scramble to counter efforts to change the status quo for the better.
He reminds us of what Buddhists have called upaya, “skillful means” for moving forward. He looks at binaries, or reifications of a situation, but also at the remarkable energies that can be liberated for our use when we sidestep such polarizations. Such binaries, he notes,
are problematic because they can distract [people] from points of access where their actions can make a difference. Consider George Lakey’s fascinating account of the Otpor movement against Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in his article “Strategizing for a Living Revolution” (pp. 135-160). One of the tactics Otpor members used to halt police violence against them was to take photos of their wounded and make sure the family members, neighbors, and children of the police got to see them. This was a brilliant bit of magic. The individual human beings who made up that reified abstraction, “the police,” were stripped of that identity by a spell of unnaming, and turned back into neighbors, husbands, children, parents: people who were part of civil society, and subject to its standards and social pressures. That couldn’t have been achieved if Otpor had reified and protested “police brutality,” since that act would have strengthened the reification of police as something other than ordinary members of society.
A STRATEGY for BOTH LARGE and SMALL
This potent strategy is one I can apply not only to the kinds of events now convulsing many places in the U.S. but also to other stagnated, reified situations where I’ve labeled myself into a dark place.
irises already flowering — early this year
A similar strategy of depolarization emerges in an NPR segment (link to recording and transcript) broadcast two days ago on 4 June. The segment’s titled “Police Officers, During Protests, Are Resembling Soldiers In War Zones”. In a short 5:02-minute interview, the NPR reporter speaks with Patrick Skinner, a former CIA officer, now a Savannah, Georgia police officer, who has chosen to live in the same neighborhood he polices. Skinner remarks:
But I think that instead of a war … you change it. You have a neighbor mindset. And it sounds really cheesy. (Laughter) It is cheesy. But it’s effective. And that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for whatever is kind and effective. I believe that instead of calling people civilians, call them your neighbor because they are. I live here. I work here. I don’t say that police should have to live where they work. This is a personal choice I made. But it really drives home the fact that the people I’m dealing with every day — it’s not a metaphor — they are my neighbors. And so I have to treat them as such.
So many current problems look intractable and unmanageable because we’ve imagined them in a particular way, pumped them full of our doubts and fears at least as much as our optimism and hope. We’re getting back what we’ve been putting in. Greer suggests:
Make an effort to experience the world around you as though today’s global corporate system isn’t a triumphant monster, but a brittle, ungainly, jerry-rigged contraption whose managers are vainly scrambling to hold it together against a rising tide of crises. See the issues that engage your activism in that light, not as though you’re desperate, but as though the system is. It’s a very different perspective from that of most activists, and reaching it even in imagination might take some work, but give it your best try.
The point I’d like to make, once you’ve tried on both stories of the future, is that both of them — the story of corporate triumph and the story of corporate failure — explain the past and present equally well. The actions of the IMF and the World Bank in the last decade or so, for example, can be explained as a power grab by a doomsday economy in the driver’s seat, but they can equally well be explained as desperation moves by a faltering elite faced with a world situation that’s more unsteady and ungovernable by the day.
Which of these stories is true? Wrong question. The events that define either story haven’t happened yet, and which story people believe could well determine which way the ending turns out …
Yet of course these aren’t the only two choices. Philosophers of science have agonized over the hard realization that any given set of facts can be explained by an infinite number of hypotheses. Mages, by contrast, revel in the freedom this implies. The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It’s a freedom that today’s progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.
Finally, Greer shifts gears to a magical alternative of a very practical and particular kind, one that opens up options to us for concrete action, rather than closing them down to the brute oppositions of a dysfunctional binary like some of the ones we’re in:
Toward the beginning of this letter I mentioned that the structures of consciousness are tools of magic. In the system of magic I practice, those structures are identified with the numbers from 1 to 10, understood not as quantities but as abstract relationships. You can experience anything through any number (though numbers above 10 denote relationships too complex for the human nervous system to handle). Each number has its strengths and its weaknesses. If you’re working deliberately with the structures of consciousness — which is to say, if you’re a mage — you choose the structure/number you use based on the effects you want to get. Most of the time, for reasons too complex to get into here, you choose one, two, or three.
Anything seen through the filter of the number one is called a unary. When you see something as a unary, you highlight qualities in it such as wholeness, indivisibility, and isolation. See it through the number two, as a binary, and you’ll highlight different qualities such as division, conflict, balance, and complementarity. See it through the number three and still different qualities such as change and complexity will be highlighted. All these have practical implications. If you want people to cooperate and build community, get them to think of themselves as part of a unary; if you want them to quarrel and resist change, convince them they’re on one side of a binary; if you want them to make change, make them think of their community and their world as a ternary.
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May our practices, whatever they are, wherever we draw inspiration, help us grow and learn and act wisely and lovingly in the coming weeks and months. May we see and hear the wise teachers already in our lives. May we work for the good of the whole.
Some bloggers on spirituality are taking heat for not addressing the protests in the U.S., or the larger political context. At the same time, some of you have told me in personal communications that one reason you keep reading this blog is because it (usually) offers a refuge from current controversies, or supplies a perspective or practice you can use or try out as you consider you next steps, how you will spend your hours, what you will prioritize as most deserving of your time and energy and love.
John Beckett addresses the present moment in his June 3 post titled “Why My Practice Includes Both Devotion and Politics“. I admire John for his thoughtful writing, and if that title speaks to you, please do read it.
Equipment for Living
My purposes here on A Druid Way are specific. A spiritual path worth following equips us for living better, in my experience, than anything else. Such a path helps us explore the cosmos in light of what ideally are “best practices”, the accumulated wisdom and insight of centuries of trial and error, inspiration and discovery, perspective and growth. That includes political action, relationships, affiliations and memberships of all kinds, care for our bodily and environmental health, our means of livelihood, our stance toward a world of Others, and so on. I focus here on what can fortify and strengthen us to make good choices along whatever paths we choose to pursue.
front lawn this a.m.
For such reasons, this isn’t an education blog — I’m not urging you all to pursue a career in education and teaching as I have done. We obviously need more than just teachers if we want to eat, to clothe ourselves, to find shelter, and then to express our humanity through language and music, art and dance, games of physical skill and prowess, to improve and enrich the lives of our neighbors and ourselves, and to agree to law and good custom. In the same way, you may support a range of political candidates, and you may hold a number of different political opinions, but this isn’t a political blog, and I’m not running for office with solutions for political problems.
Clearing Your Way
If what I write here helps you do whatever you do more thoughtfully, compassionately, wisely, lovingly, skillfully, then I’ve achieved my principal goal. Any good teacher doesn’t try to dictate others’ choices, but to clear the way for them to make good ones. If you don’t already habitually desire and seek a path that encourages you to be thoughtful, compassionate, wise, loving, and skillful, then you’re probably not reading this blog anyway. Despite what we read and hear, there’s no “single path forward”, any more than evolution, as some sort of stand-in for deity, has “chosen” or will now “focus on” just a single species. Humans will continue to be as diverse and varied and contrary as we’ve ever been. But our genius and our unique “species-strength” has always been cooperation, compromise, consensus, collaboration, community. There’s a reason these are all “co-” words. They reflect what we do best, and we fall to pieces whenever we forget that fact, as our tumultuous histories show.
marigolds among the squash
A single crop is susceptible to pests and destruction. We know enough about agriculture to see how companion plantings work better — marigolds among the veggies, for instance. Likewise, a mono-myth rarely serves a culture well — multiple stories that demonstrate resourcefulness, that multiply our ways of perceiving and responding to life, almost always prepare a culture better for the flexibility and adaptability it will need to survive and thrive.
May’s full moon over our rooftop, looking east — night filter
The “equipment for living” of any valid spiritual path includes daily practices to build resilience and a reservoir of strength. It also sets before us a number of recurring seasonal and annual celebrations to mark planetary changes as we move through the personal and historical changes of lives lived in time and space. Such observances remind us to reconnect to the center and the heart of what matters most. The full moon tomorrow is one such opportunity, for those who look to patterns in the cosmos as guides for living, and each valid spiritual path offers many. Jesus offers an earthy, agricultural metaphor that accords with Druidic sensibilities as a means of identifying any good path: “By their fruits you shall know them”.
Whatever we may think of the present reality, things still manifest in accordance with the law of harmony. Like begets like. We see this in family patterns continuing from generation to generation, in the vegetables we harvest from the seed we sow, in the societies and civilizations we live in as a consequence of the structures we’ve established and the ideals we’ve prioritized. “As we sow, so shall we reap”: these can be hard words, a difficult principle to internalize and live from, but also a great signpost for how to proceed. We forget that any change we desire manifests in exactly the same way as our current reality has come about — through effort and choice, consensus and imagination on a large scale. And that’s a potentially joyful undertaking, working for what we desire.
The Qur’an, no surprise, echoes the same wisdom: “God will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves” (Surah 13). The cynic in you might say “What’s a god for, then?” Or you can say that Spirit manifests precisely in the efforts at change we make when our previous agreements no longer serve us. (Certainly those dedicated to particular gods like the Morrigan don’t lack for divine prods to action from outside the self.) Political action can bring change, but it’s the spiritual foundation underlying any political action that will make that change a wise and loving one. Absent wisdom, it’s hit or miss.
Wikipedia — fair use.
“To be alive at all is a reflection on our character”, quips the wry Mario Belli in Samuel Shellabarger’s 1947 novel Prince of Foxes, a historical romance set in the medieval Italy of the Borgias, a time of violence and upheaval and change. Put another way, you might say that each of us is born during a particular historical harmonic because we’re attuned to its overarching dynamic. I’m here now, and not at any other time, and so are you — for a purpose. And we get to shape that purpose. It’s not imposed on us, not separate from who we are and what we do.
It’s an interesting possibility: our presence contributes to maximizing the effect of each moment on and for ourselves and others. My participation and yours stamp a particular character on each moment, giving it a unique shape and effect, a distinct contour and identity. When the times turn especially dark, we may well say, along with people like Hamlet: “O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” Or we resist or abdicate. But always we affect the time and place we live in. It’s our burden and our strength, our obstacle and our great opportunity.
How we live is what we choose. And vice-versa. We are always “responsible” in the sense that we are able to respond. We never wholly forfeit that power, no matter how harshly life batters us. Our strength lies in that choice, the one freedom we never wholly lose.
Clearing the way. What will I choose right now, and going forward?
The co-occurrence of astronomical events multiplies their psychological effect. Even if the new moon and the coming solstice (winter in the southern hemisphere, summer in the north) on this June 20-21 weekend offer no more than a psychological effect, they would be worth acknowledging and celebrating. But for many they offer much more.
As markers of both sacred and secular time, they locate us in the moment. No thanks, you might be saying. Any moment but this. It can help to think of what our ancestors had to bear, but that’s often easier when our own troubles don’t crowd around us and nip our heels. At such times we may not have the leisure or perspective to be grateful our forebears survived long enough to keep the line going, to pass along whatever wisdom they’d garnered, along with their DNA. The advice to “live always in the present moment, because it is the only one that’s real” sounds wonderful — until the present sucks. Then it’s anywhere and anywhen but here and now. So we time-travel with a vengeance, distracting ourselves through whatever means we can lay hands on. Sometimes it can seem like the best prayer we can offer for others is may your distractions bring you comfort. Wine, weed, wool-gathering, to name just a few.
But pursued with intention and love, moon and sun festivals lift us out of ourselves. We’ve all had the experience of playing sports, or gardening, or some other activity where we’re so intent on what we’re doing we don’t notice the cut or scratch or other injury until some time later, or until we spot the blood or bruise. Only then, with the coming of our attention, do we feel the sting or ache. For an interval, something else was more important and more interesting than pain. Celebrating seasonal and planetary cycles can help us focus where we choose to look, not where our circumstances pluck and tug at us to look. Always? No. Often enough to help us reset and recalibrate? Yes.
Sun and moon, they reconnect us. The jarring frequency of fluorescent lights can bother the eyes, and the hum of them overhead can be an irritant. Sunlight and moonlight don’t feel that way. They energize, unfolding us to ourselves and our surroundings. They bathe us in light, in a vibration billions of years old, native to our atoms.
Antelope Canyon, New Mexico — a play of light and form. Image: Pexels.com
As archetypes with physical analogues, moon and sun help tune us in to other archetypes, if we choose. We can begin with the physical realm, and let experiences accumulate without jettisoning our critical intelligence, taking us step by step more deeply into wonder and joy. Our ancestors painted animals on the walls of caves, danced the hunt, linked with a clan or tribal spirit, saw in animals a brother and sister that could guide and teach, advise and protect. An animal, they long ago discovered, isn’t “just an animal”. One of the large and wonderful lessons of Druidry, as in many other paths, is a simple and profound one: Things are more than they appear.
You might call it the iceberg principle. What’s immediately visible is a key to what’s underneath. We seem to get this with the people in our lives we know reasonably well. We see through a friend’s odd mood or gruffness or silence or manic laughter into a more underlying movement and wait or prod or listen as we’ve learned to do. Moon and sun reward a similar friendship and patience.
The next full moon arrives in just a few days, and I’m revising and tweaking the draft of my recent full moon ritual, and thinking about dark moon and new moon rituals, too. With the clearer skies much of the world is enjoying with the enforced reduction of traffic and travel, this could be an ideal time to deepen acquaintance with the Two Lights in our skies no one needs to plug in, or pay a utility to operate.
And so the voice of a Druid comes, and says to me, even as I say to you:
I bless you in each of your moons,
your fullnesses and your dark nights.
I bless you in your changing faces,
in the pearl shadows of your twilights.
Because who doesn’t need blessing, and to bless ourselves, and to bless others, and to welcome the blessings of others coming our way!
And we can say to ourselves, and to each other:
In between, when we dance or dream,
we trade places with tree,
beast, or spirit of the grove,
and soon or late we uncover
another doorway that opens
for us to walk the sky.
Some of our truest names are written in sun- and moonlight.
In the previous post, I looked at thirteen facets of Doing Druidry that mostly revolve around inquiry and study. You can’t easily be a Druid without engaging in at least some form of one or more of them, because each of them connects you to the worlds where Druidry happens. (If that sounds restrictive or dogmatic or exclusive to you, just go back and look at the list! Got something to add that makes you a Druid? Tell us a little about your journey as you go for it!) The list doesn’t characterize only beginning Druidry, but serves as a rough outline for the kinds of studies that can occupy Druids their entire lives. However, that’s not the only thing happening in the life of a Druid.
In this second post on Doing Druidry without an Order, I want to look at five less tangible aspects of Druidry (and other traditions) that may have occurred to you as you read the previous post. These five are initiation, spiritual formation, community, proficiency and service. From the first glance it should be clear why they’re harder to talk about and describe in terms that people can identify. But that fact in itself makes it worthwhile to try. As you may come to see, these five aspects are closely linked things, almost versions of the same thing.
Initiation
Like other intensely personal experiences, initiation will always be a live issue for many of us. What it is, who can experience it, who can oversee, facilitate or “give” it, what happens when we undergo it, and what we become as a result, can all provoke passionate discussion and disagreement. Most spiritual traditions have an equivalent of one or more initiations among their practices, and the most non-religious among us still experience “built-in” initiation in human events like birth, death, sex, grief and creative flow. Change characterizes each of them. You’re not the same afterwards. When and how you discover this, however, can range very widely.
We could claim that one of the things that distinguishes modern Pagan practice from older traditions is the option of self and group initiation. As a comparison, Christians, for instance, can’t usually baptize themselves; to become a Muslim requires two witnesses to hear you recite the shahadah, and so forth.
Like other groups, OBOD succeeds tolerably well in having it both ways: the coursework for the grades of Bard, Ovate and Druid includes self-initiations that members can perform, and as a member of the Order you can request a group initiation with other members, and these two initiations aren’t “the same thing”. The rituals are different, the outcomes can be different, yet paradoxically they are in important ways “the same”.
You don’t need to do both a self and a group initiation, but it makes little sense to continue unless you do one of them. (Doing both gives you a feel for their interconnections and value.) They’re part of doing Druidry. If you’re doing Druidry without an Order, you’ll come quite naturally to initiation in your own way. Your life will see to that. You can seek out initiation, of course, adapting published rituals to your purposes, or crafting something unique to your own experience. Or you can wait until an experience shapes itself into an initiation, which you may not recognize until after the fact.
For an earlier 3-part series on initiation, go here.
Spiritual Formation
This largely Christian term has no ready Pagan equivalent, though this aspect of practice certainly exists in all spiritual traditions. Christian spiritual formation means molding or conforming one’s life to Christ. In Pagan terms it means moving beyond, diving deeper, maturing in practice and wisdom. You begin to embody more of what your tradition values and holds up as an ideal, of what your deepest spiritual connection opens up to you, and open you up to. Pagans speak of Elders, those with earned authority and sacred connection, in ways similar to how Christians speak of saints, of holy individuals that spirit shines through.
One of the joys of a practicing group is the heightened chances of encountering and knowing such people, learning from their example and growing through associating with them. Being around them can constitute a form of initiation. As a number of the Wise have remarked, spirituality is “caught” rather than “taught”. We’re all in training.
Community
The most obvious difference between the experience of the Solitary and the Order member might seem to revolve around community. Christians acknowledge the priceless gift of others. In Hebrews 12:1, for instance, the sense of a supporting community, many without bodies, pervades the verse: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us”. The interior worship spaces of Orthodox churches often have icons on almost every available surface, emphasizing this spiritual presence of a larger community than only those “with skin on”.
icons at Varlaam Monastery — image courtesy Andrea Kirkby
Pagans may talk of raising power, while Christians acknowledge the presence of the Holy Spirit. Isaac Bonewits notes:
If the people in a group have bonds of genuine friendship or love between them, their ability to perform ritual will be greatly enhanced. The psychic and psychological barriers that most people keep between themselves will be fewer and more easily breached. This is why Wiccans place so much emphasis on “perfect love and perfect trust” — love and trust, even when imperfect, tend to strengthen each other and increase a group’s psychological and psychic unity (Rites of Worship: A Neopagan Approach, pg. 105).
Of course, one of the discoveries Druids make is that they are never alone. Solitary, but not alone. A whole world of Others surrounds them, and if that is where community lies for that particular Druid, that is the call to answer.
Proficiency
We can become refined in the presence of others. Lifted out of our own concerns by the group energy, we can begin to “see larger” than when we arrived, and to take something of that enlarged perspective home with us like a fragrance or flavor to our hours and days. Elastic beings that we are, the company of other people “facing the same direction” can stretch us more than we can easily stretch ourselves, making us more flexible, adaptable, compassionate and empathetic. Think of the privilege of finding a good listener, someone who can still their own concerns and focus their attention on you and your world. How many of us know the love another can express in hearing and seeing us, even if they say little or nothing else? Our lives have been witnessed, our struggles acknowledged, we can walk from there a little lighter of heart.
By their fruits you shall know them, says Jesus, and a good test of a group or Order in the simplest of terms is the kind of people they produce. Are they enjoyable to be around? Do they lift you up or drag you down? Are they kind to each other?
Service
I desire to know in order to serve, runs the vow in more than one magical order of repute.
So I was struck when my teacher remarked one day that he serves in order to know. That’s how I grow and learn, he says. Offer yourself in “the unreserved dedication”, as some Orders call it, without qualification or expectation, and you will benefit. I get so tired of hearing about service, remarked one long-time member. Go apart for a while, counseled our teacher. You’ll be eager to return when you see how it’s a gift of love. You may just need to be on the receiving end for a time, for that to happen.
We may first begin to recognize the value of service when others serve us with love. If you’re like me, you may have a favorite restaurant (pre-virus, if necessary) where the food isn’t the main thing that draws you back. Yes, the meals are good. But it’s the ambience, the atmosphere, the attentiveness and welcome of the staff, the mood of other customers treated hospitably, that shapes your total experience. We go back for the service as much as anything, we say, when people ask.
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In every case, Solitaries find ways to fulfill these aspects. It may demand more flexibility and creativity, or it may take the Solitary in directions others do not understand. Service to the non-human world, for instance, can often pass unseen, unacknowledged for an entire lifetime, known only to the “bird and beast, bug and beech” the Solitary serves.
“Magical Properties and Benefits”, says the incense packet on my desk, and it then lists several qualities like “confidence” and “purification”, along with instructions to keep lit incense away from draperies, other flammable items, children, animals, etc. At the bottom, in small print, appears this brief notice: “Sold as curio only, no magical effects are guaranteed”.
The magic, as always, lies in our hands.
“Druidry”, says one book blurb, “puts you back in touch with wild wisdom”. It’s “a spiritual path, a philosophy, a way of life, or all three” says another. “It’s free and open to join”, proclaims a third.
Intrigued, you light your incense, meditate on these varied impressions of Druidry, and decide to visit the website of one of the better-known Druid orders. “You must be 18 years of age”, you read. “Basic membership is a one-time fee of $50”. Additional study has additional one-time fees. Startled, you decide to check out the websites of a few other Orders. The next one says “Register for free”. That’s more like it, you think. Nothing about a minimum age requirement, either. You’re interested in Bardic study, and click on the link. Then you see the words “course fee”, and discover it’s £150, (about $US 185 as of today).
On to the next site. This one lists an even higher price of £195 ($US 241). Free and open to join? you mutter to yourself.
One more site to investigate. Basic membership is $30 per year. OK, mostly doable, but definitely not ‘free’, you say to yourself. That includes the beginning training program required of everyone. But additional studies have additional costs. Interesting. So there’s a real range among orders. It’s worth investigating a little further to see what’s included for each of these outlays of your hard-earned money and time. Sometimes no other materials are required; sometimes you’ll need books not included in the Order course of study. Sometimes significant additional publications come your way for that fee.
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It’s possible, of course, to find materials for extensive Druid study for free, or very inexpensively. You can locate remarkable amounts of material online, many introductory titles can be found at larger libraries, or through interlibrary loan, used bookshops can supply many unique and valuable resources no longer in print elsewhere, and you can join online forums and talk with other Druids and ask for their recommendations and reviews. (Ask three Druids, goes the saying, get ten answers.)
One advantage of a well-designed study program is its structure: much of the work described in the preceding paragraph has been done for you. Knowledgeable teachers have developed a meaningful sequence of materials, broken them up into manageable pieces, identified helpful ways to access additional information, explore outer and inner worlds, and advise you on how to avoid dead-ends and get more for the time and effort you put in.
Study programs of the four established Druid orders I name on Books and Links have been developed by experienced teachers, field-tested, used by many, and continue to be updated and refined. None of them are for-profit ventures. Druidry isn’t a cash cow. Printing and mailing and electricity for website servers and even small offices cost money. Travel to events where we want to see and hear speakers and leaders and musicians also costs money. Advertising, permits, minimal secretarial staff to answer phones, field questions, etc. — all additional costs.
Going it alone is cheaper, and you do get what you pay for, in both good and bad senses.
Leaders of all four groups know of each other, and generally speak well of others’ groups. Some of them have studied in more than one of the groups themselves, and can “speak from within”. Choosing membership will link you to exclusive member forums, alerts you to member-only information and events, and affords you just as much community as you would like. Some people make life-long friends. Some prefer to remain solitary. Among other things, shared rituals unite members of an Order; it’s a distinctive flavour, like the u in the British spelling, or cinnamon and cloves and allspice in a pie. It’s a recognizable style. It’s the stone steps along a well-worn path, walked by people you know. It’s never, however, the “only” way to go.
But if cost, or a distaste for group-think or others’ maps of reality, or an eremitic temperament, or physical isolation or some other reason obtrudes itself, no worries. Your study can begin the moment you notice your breathing and pulse, or look out a window.
Begin where you are. That’s how all knowledge and civilization began. If you should reinvent the wheel on occasion, well, that can teach you things about wheels nothing else will. Your learning and experience will carry the stamp of firsthand engagement. People whose opinions are worth hearing will recognize the authority of any wisdom you accrue.
Thirteen Paths for Self-Directed Druid Study (in no particular order)
1 — Learn the trees and plants, birds and animals of your region. Seek and encounter them where they live, learn to recognize them in every season, observe them, meditate near them, ask them for insight, and keep studying. This by itself can be a lifelong project. Herbalism and healing, natural cycles and ecosystems, knowledge of subtle and less subtle shifts in habitat and non-human populations as climate change makes itself felt are all very worthwhile, and will only become more valuable in the ensuing decades.
2 — Draw up a reading list with the help of online websites, reviews on Amazon, the many free texts at websites like the extensive Internet Sacred Text Archive, and personal recommendations. Any good librarian can help you identify basic titles to explore almost any topic. Set yourself a study calendar that you can follow, read what interests you, check bibliographies of those same books for other titles on specific topics that interest you, and you’re off. Druids, and Pagans generally, are definitely readers, and independent lifelong learners.
3 — Master a musical instrument — this includes the human voice — and if you feel inclined, compose new music that expresses your experiences. Humans enjoy a truly enormous musical heritage, and more and more music (and training in music) is available online for free, or for a reasonable price per song or composition or class.
4 — Learn another language that will help open up cultural communities and wisdom, practices and traditions that intrigue you. Many study a Celtic language, or you may have an ancestral connection to other cultures and languages, and here again the internet can help smooth your path, and aid you in finding resources, chat rooms, and ways to practice even if you live many miles and kilometers from the nearest speaker.
5 — Study the magic and traditions of another religion or spiritual path besides Druidry. This can be a valuable source of breadth and perspective when studying and understanding your own tradition, and it allows you an independence of thought not easily acquired in any other way. Insofar as you can do this respectfully, take part in the rituals and celebrations of the other tradition, ask questions, get to know the local community, and volunteer your help if it would be welcome.
6 — Seek out a deity whose stories, focus, symbolism, traditions and ritual speak to you. The deity may have called you, or you may be looking for a patron god or goddess. Or you may simply find it worth knowing more about the deity. Your level of engagement is a matter for you and your inner guidance, not a prescription or any kind of requirement. Nor is belief — encounter outweighs dogma.
7 — Study and practice with a set of symbolic elements. The classical four elements of European tradition, earth, air, fire and water (or five, with Spirit), have much to teach, and pervaded culture, myth, religion and science for over a thousand years, and still reverberate; other elemental symbolic systems have exerted similar influence. The four Orders I mentioned above make substantial use of these, and direct students to still other resources.
8 — Study a system of divination. More than one, if you’re so inclined, for the same reasons more than one of almost anything is worth knowing. What do you discover over time with regular practice? What would you teach another person? What remains largely unteachable? Runes, Tarot, ogham are just the beginning. Feeling constrained? Devise your own system of divination! Test it!
9 — Take up the study and practice of a system of sacred geometry. Though it’s fallen largely out of sight in the West, it remains alive and well in other parts of the world, and profound insights remain for the effort of learning and practicing. To name just one sub-study, architecture, especially of older structures across Europe, has much to teach about earth energies, proportion, symmetry, psychological effect, symbolism, etc.
10 — Study and practice ritual. We all do ritual already. Humans are a ritualizing species — so are many animals and birds. It repays richly to make at least some of our rituals more conscious and intentional, to learn and perform life-giving rites, and to develop new ones at need.
11 — Study and practice poetry, or word-awen. As with music, the field of poetry is vast. In spite of the bad experience many of us have with how “poetry” is taught in schools, the art is vital and alive and lives deep in our hearts in songs, sayings, chants, metaphors, idioms in language, and so on. Poetry slam competitions can be eye-opening for the power of spoken performance, and the best performers in most popular music are creative lyricists.
12 — A study and practice of astronomy and cosmology can open up literal and symbolic worlds. With some ingenuity and willingness to search for materials, inexpensive and partially home-made reflector telescopes are with the reach of many, and can help independent observers make useful and significant contributions to planetary and stellar science.
13 — Meditation, contemplation, dream-study and inner exploration complement the spiritual path anyone may take. The physiological benefits are well-established; the spiritual ones become apparent over time as well.
Things I’ve left off the list may be occurring to you even as you read this. But you get the idea. Druidry itself IS open and free. How you explore and what you choose to do with its many facets will involve you in different kinds of exchanges — time, money, study, effort, searching — for what you receive. Everyone can join and belong to DOYO — Druidry On Your Own.
In Arthur Myghtern I looked at the king at the heart of one resonant mythos still living in the consciousness of many in the West. “King who was and will be”, myghtern a ve hag a vyth, Arthur points us toward a profound magical and spiritual technique: we can walk up and down, back and forth in time. We become truly “royal”, goes one interpretation, when we accept this capacity, when we rise to the occasion, grasping our spiritual destinies with both hands. (Of course, I can always stay where I am for a few more cycles, if I choose, and accept what comes with that choice. How often I’ve done just that!)
Chinese tradition of Qing-ming ancestral observance, after the Spring Equinox. Image Source.
Now “time travel” is easy to say and write. But what about doing it? Well, simply being alive is one technique — the ancestors live through us in surprising ways. (Does that feel too “easy”?) We carry their DNA, and we carry on far more of their traditions and perspectives than we might think at first — as almost any couple discovers when birthdays, holidays and other traditions from two different families run headlong into each other.
But while “living through our descendants” is one way to be a time-walker, there are others. The traditions of Samhain, “when the veil between worlds thins”, is one of them. For some the romance of those words is enough. If you have something to say to me, now’s a good time, says my inner skeptic, more interested in keeping a distance than in doing any listening. (Some of the best conversations are whispered up close and personal.) For many, it usually feels fitting to remember the dead, even if it’s once a year. Most of the rest of the time we’re too busy just trying to survive ourselves.
Observing birthdays and anniversaries of those who’ve passed into the Otherworlds can bring us closer, as can photographs and family stories. What is remembered lives, indeed. Dreamwork around an ancestral photo, carried on over several days, together with journaling, drawing and meditation, can often open up new territory of insight and subtly shift our spiritual practice. I gain clarity and self-understanding by looking at what my ancestors have bequeathed me, bad and good. Some of the inheritance consists of difficult gifts, but everything can be a resource for moving on from here, if only as a guide for what to avoid.
Visuals meant to suggest “time travel”, especially those courtesy of Hollywood sci-fi, can both help and hinder. We don’t need to “see” anything, or “go anywhere”, for time travel to happen, so we may miss it if that’s the confirmation we’re expecting. “Nothing happened” is our most common experience, as we tend to label it, ignoring most of what actually does take place where we’re not looking. Time travel may not offer anything to “see”, but what of other senses?
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What of the future? Using the image of the spiral of experiences and lifetimes, I’ve found that many of those portals that most readily open across time are those which are in harmony with this moment, both behind and ahead. When some people speak with conviction of past-life recall, there need not be any disjunct between that and a sense of ancestral influence — I may well “be” my own great-grandfather, whatever that “means”. More to the point, from the perspective of that past self, I am its future, and the two of us together converse with a combined past-future that is the same larger thing. You touch your past by wearing skin today, say the Ancestors. We touch our future the same way.
One of the more remarkable stories I’ve heard firsthand comes from a woman now in her 80s. She tells how her own past self, a Greek physician from centuries ago, healed her present self in a series of dream-visions. The sense of vertigo and time-shift I’ve felt as I enter such experiences is a valuable guide. We give ourselves wider permission to explore through such stories, and we start to break the hold that time-magic wields over us. They catch the imagination and liberate us, rather than chaining us to logic and binding us to present circumstances.
If I fear a future event — my cancer returning, the death of my wife or best friend, poverty and old age, whatever — I can begin to send strength and needed courage and inspiration to that future self, and rather than passively and fearfully dreading the arrival of the event, shift the quality of that experience through my efforts today. My present fear breaks up, and my future experience changes, too. At least if our ancestral recall has anything to say about it, my life today is the magic of my ancestors made manifest in the most concrete physical ways. I am their survival, their dreams come true, their hopes realized, their magic working still.
Various teachings and understandings of our human experience talk of M-E-S-T, matter, energy, space and time. (And “messed” it is, says my inner imp.) The harmonics of our common experience organize our worlds, but they needn’t be the only way we perceive. Each perspective offers gains and limits, and learning to shift among them broadens the field of “what’s possible”. In the process, we don’t “cheat death”, any more than we “cancel winter”, but we learn to walk with and through it into the following spring, both the “same” and utterly new.
One of J. M. Greer’s “notes in passing” in his latest book, The Mysteries of Merlin, which I reviewed here, concerns a cross-cultural phenomenon that with careless treatment sounds like the makings of a script for some breathless “Hidden Mysteries” documentary, or a really good-bad horror film. With attention, though, we can discern a remarkable and ancient conception of sacrifice for the communal good that spans the globe.
In the West are the legends of Merlin, still alive and enclosed in his Crystal Cave, and Christian Rosenkreuz [Wikipedia link | Alchemylab account], reputed founder of Rosicrucianism, entombed for 120 years in a seven-sided vault, and eventually disinterred, perfectly preserved, with a book of Rosicrucian occult secrets in his arms.
Monks carrying food at Okunoin mausoleum of Kobo Daishi. Wikipedia/creative commons
A similar tradition emerges in Japan, with stories clustering around Kobo Daishi (774-835), founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Tradition holds that he did not die but remains in meditation to this day, entombed in Mount Koya, awaiting the future Buddha. Monks in the Shingon tradition present food at his shrine twice a day.
Greer points to stories of “an archaic magical operation by which a sufficiently knowledgeable and strong-willed person can pass into another mode of existence at death and function for many centuries thereafter as the guardian spirit of a family, a community, or an occult school. Legends in many lands tell of great sages and heroes of the past who descended into stone tombs beneath the earth while still alive, and the stone-chambered mounds of northern and western Europe are routinely connected with such legends” (Greer, pg. 33).
A successful outcome of such practices leads in Japan to people like Kobo Daishi, and to others who become sokushinbutsu, literally “living Buddhas” — the rite was performed as recently as 1903. Mummies of those who underwent the rite are preserved in Senninzawa (“Valley of the Swamp Wizards”), Yamagata Prefecture, and occupy locations of honor in temples otherwise reserved for figures of the Buddha. For a fascinating article on contemporary observances, with details of the living mummification regime, including a strict diet, pursued by those aspiring to this role, along with images of the mummified remains and the monks and temples caring for them, see The Buddhas of Mount Yudono.
Less successful outcomes of this operation, Greer suggests, account for at least some of Europe’s traditions of barrow-wights, vampires, and the orc-neas or “hell-corpses” of Anglo-Saxon legend (from which Tolkien lifted the name and image of the orc). In one sense, then, such beings are simply testimony to “good magic gone bad”.
Odin — Georg Von Rosen, 1886. Public domain
One thread of this story of ritual death specific to Europe, Greer asserts, is the magical three-fold death of Indo-European tradition, linked to air, water and earth, which we see embodied in the Norse god Odin, who is ritually slain, depending on the source, by being hanged, drowned and stabbed.
Christianity runs with this idea of the power of a magical or holy death, making it the center of its faith in a single divine being whose death can save many. Central to all of these magical and ritual self-sacrifices is their voluntary nature — the “sacrifice goes consenting”; the gift of the self is given freely.
The biblical Book of Hebrews explains the continuity between Jewish traditions of animal sacrifice each year in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Christian conception of the holy and sacrificial death of a god in the form of Jesus: “Christ offered for all time a single sacrifice” (Hebrews 10). Animal or human sacrifices must be renewed because their benefit wanes over time. The sacrificial death of a god, on the other hand, need happen only once.
Some two years ago I commented: “… a devotional practice undertaken with love over time generates a momentum no finite thing can contain”. More than ever I’ve found that’s true, in ways easy and hard.
a play of shadow and light
But what if you’re not devotionally minded? What does that even mean, anyway? Beyond humans and pets, who is there to be devoted to? (Some politicians and holy folks keep shedding our trust like snakes wriggling out of old dead skin.) Or if not an incarnate being, how can you be devoted to something (or someone) invisible? Gods may just not do it for you. And as for “momentum”: momentum toward what? I hear you, questioner. I hear you.
“You keep using these words,” goes the oft-quoted meme from The Princess Bride, “but I do not think they mean what you think they mean”. So do they mean anything?
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This morning my wife and I received word that a beloved friend just passed away yesterday in his wife’s arms. He was in his mid-60s, and his death wasn’t from the virus. So “plugged in” he was, to the cosmos, to the pulse-beat of things, to the endless possibilities of his life as a lacrosse coach, high school teacher, father, husband, and spiritual mentor to many, that it’s impossible to feel sad for him. But we sure feel sad for us, for his wife and son and many friends, for the prospect of no longer being able to hug him, talk with him, listen to his stories and his corny humor, his remarkable spiritual journeys and example, and the impact of his deep humility and love on everyone he met. He remarked in passing some months ago that he knew where he was going in “the next step along the journey”, and I’m convinced he did, that his words applied to his passing as much as to anything else. More to the point, we can know, too, if it’s something we want and need and choose to know. Where am I going, after all? Where are we all? No reason to make an idol out of him, something he would have detested. Every reason to make the most of the inspiration he provided.
As Ursula LeGuin writes in A Wizard of Earthsea, “Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it”.
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Grief is an energy flow, like so much else. So is love. Of course that’s not all they are, but I’ve found it’s often helpful to understand them in that way, to see how I can begin to provide a clear channel for their flow, rather than block or wallow or some other reaction. As with grief and love, provide a channel for inspiration, too. Learn how not to fear them, hoard or repulse them, how to see them as part of life, how each of us handles them somewhat differently, how to honor and respect them. Pit or portal? says a Native American elder. What will we make of such experiences? Part of their power is that in the end no one can rush them. They take their own time.
the first of three loads for next winter
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“When I am among the trees”, writes Mary Oliver in a poem by that title,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often …
Tuesday morning as my wife and I were returning with the rare indulgence of take-out breakfast from a local cafe we love, we saw a morning walker on the back roads wearing a fluorescent yellow vest with the black lettering “I own safety“. All I could think was, Wow! Really? Could I please borrow some from time to time?
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Steve writes in a couple of recent comments:
… set(s) the truth right side up again …
I have long thought one of the primary functions of the modern druid should be to keep truth on a firm foundation, both for oneself and one’s “tribe”. Truly a worthy task in a time when truth has often been a subjective commodity, sold to the highest bidder.
A worthy task indeed. Far too many people in this era seem confused about truth, even about whether it’s possible. I keep attempting to present on this blog an experimental knowledge anyone can test and duplicate for themselves, as one reliable way of getting to truth. That’s why I keep writing about practice, practice, practice in as many ways as I can. Practice helps keep me honest, and also gives me plenty of material.
Words about truth can resemble what remains after a fire.
The Roman poet and satirist Horace (Horatius) is my bard today. Si quid novisti rectius istis, candidus imperti; si nil, his utere mecum. “If you can better these principles, tell me”, goes one translation. “If not, join me in following them” — Horace, Epistles, Bk 1, 6, 67-68. But that tame version takes the snarky edge off Horace: “If you have come to know any precept more correct than these, share it with me, brilliant one; if not, use these with me”. Or as we might say, “OK, genius, you got a better idea? No? Then let’s try this one”. (I let people like Horace be snarky for me, so I can pretend to claim higher ground.)
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Y gwir yn erbyn y byd, goes the Welsh tag: “The truth against the world”. This British blog attributes the words to Iolo Morganwg. Some claim them for much more ancient Druids, some for King Arthur, and some for Boudicca (Wikipedia | History.com), queen of the Celtic Iceni, who died in the year 61 fighting the Romans. (If the words do originate with her, they’d have first appeared in a much earlier form of Brythonic than the modern Welsh quoted above.) Amazon, no surprise, sells a black t-shirt emblazoned with them, accompanied by the awen /|\ symbol. (The Amazon page for the shirt airily notes, “Show your support for culture, history, tradition and peace”. Oh, where’s Horace when you need him?!)
The Gorsedd of the Bards has adopted the words as their motto, and there’s a bardic chair with them carved into its back for winners of the Welsh National Eisteddfod. (The words appear on the larger chair to the right, just below the /|\. The glare of the camera flash obscures part of the line.)
creative commons/Wicipedia (Welsh Wikipedia)
Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely considering we’re human, we want our truth boxed and bubble-wrapped and tamely waiting for when we deign to grant it our attention. We want to own it, defend it, and — gods help us — buy and sell it, like anything else. Fortunately, truth isn’t like “anything else”. I know it in its purest form when I serve it rather than try to possess it. And maybe it’s not a moving target: I am.
Christian, Pagan, humanist, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and so on — if you pray, meditate, study, struggle, do ritual, and pay attention, you too know these things from experience.
Rather than a list of principles straight from the mouth of deity, or set of ultimate equations about reality scrounged up in a Silicon Valley lab, truth seems to be a function, which Google obligingly tells me is “an activity or purpose natural to or intended for a person or thing”. We can live from it, in other words. We can express it through our lives and actions to a greater or lesser degree, but we’ll always find it hard to put into “words now and forever”. Words don’t do that kind of thing well at all*, and neither, the accumulating evidence of human history shows, should we.
So I can sing and dance the truth better than I can profess it from the soapbox of this little blog in the early decades of the 21st century. (You need to know I sing and dance quite badly.) And if it’s true that a person can experience deep realization gazing into the heart of a flower, as I noted in the previous post, any “truth” in that moment isn’t coming through words. It’s a function of the prepared individual and the flower and the moment of attention. It’s “an activity or purpose natural to or intended for a person or thing”. And so to the degree that I stray or get distracted from “the activity or purpose natural to or intended for me”, I lose the ability to serve truth.
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The “truth against the world” often means conflict and struggle. The “world” in this case seems to signify a human form of inertia and resistance to time’s change. The desire to box and bag the perfection of a moment effectively kills it, leaving me with a dead thing, a mental photograph that doesn’t show the living being that’s its original. The “world” doesn‘t seem to mean the tree outside my office window, the woodchuck nibbling the tender clover in the back yard, the sunlight blessedly falling all around, the “Time of New Talk”, as Rudyard Kipling called the springtime returning to India in The Jungle Book.
So if I want to serve truth, to practice “an activity or purpose natural to or intended for me”, I find I’m working with a kind of electrical circuit, with resistances and poles and a definite direction of flow. The more I struggle to own truth, to box it and lord it over others as if I finally “have” it, the more I forfeit the “spark” of my electricity — the metaphor’s a useful one — the very thing that keeps me alive and vital and rooted in what is “natural to or intended for” me.
The word “world” has a whole set of specifically Christian associations I’d like to glance at here. Be of good cheer, says Jesus at one point in the Gospels. I have overcome the world. To me one big takeaway of that is a priceless unspoken corollary. I have overcome the world, and so can you. The Galilean says to me, I have overcome the resistance in myself to serving truth, rather than owning it. Do that, and you too will be able to say of your holy experience “I’m the way, the truth and the life. Nobody gets to the Source, or stays centered in it, except like that”.
And I hold this out not as an “opinion”, or worse as some kind of dogma, Druidic or otherwise, but as a potential truth to try out, to test, to practice till I know it from my own experience and can live it more fully. Or prove it inaccurate, say so, and look elsewhere. And maybe you will, too. You can be my Horace: “if you can better these principles, tell me”. Because as one current meme suggests, I can hold all kinds of opinions without evidence. But as soon as I present them as “truth” to others, untested in my own experience, I’m guilty of lying and fraud.
To repeat Greer’s words from the previous post, “at the human level, the individual Awen for the first time may become an object of conscious awareness. Achieving this awareness, and living in accord with it, is according to these Druid teachings the great challenge of human existence”. The world (not the world that the truth is “against”) seems to manifest this out of the same awen, but without human conscious awareness. It’s what we’ve labeled instinct, though that doesn’t account very well for plant energies that manifest leaves and branches and fruit and roots. That’s one reason why we find the natural world a restorative presence when we walk in it, savor it, apprentice ourselves to it. Notice that you don’t have to believe nature is restorative. You know this from your experience in it, and any belief — more accurately, trust — comes after.
And so I return to words that are “holy” to me, because I keep discovering ways they prove worth my ongoing time and exploration. They’re also holy because the principle behind them can be rediscovered by anyone who does what they describe:
Druidry means following a spiritual path rooted in the green Earth … It means embracing an experiential approach to religious questions, one that abandons rigid belief systems in favor of inner development and individual contact with the realms of nature and spirit. (Greer, John Michael. Druidry — A Green Way of Wisdom, qtd. in Carr-Gomm, Philip. What Do Druids Believe? London: Granta Books, 2006, p. 34.)
May your practice and path bring you into contact with what is deepest and most worthwhile within you.
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*Ursula LeGuin says it well: a writer attempts to “say in words what cannot be said in words”, as she puts it. And so a writer resorts to story, getting at the “truth” through imagination.
In what follows, among other things I’m setting out elements from my own peculiar spiritual journey. So if what I write irritates or angers you, that’s probably a good signal to stop reading and go do (or eat) something else. When it’s not to your taste, any more than a mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwich, there’s no need to take a second bite. Or even a first one!
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A recent comment on an old post asking “What’s the spiritual meaning of X?” is what launched this post. In some ways, the question asks, “What’s appropriate action in this moment?” Or maybe, “How might I respond to this appeal to my attention?” or “Should I even bother to pay attention?” (Maybe we should start with “What’s the physical meaning of X?”)
The X in the question above isn’t the main point (Yeah it is! shouts the seeker in me), for though it’s what snags my attention and draws a lion’s share of the drama, the meat of the question is about meaning, about how and where my attention is focused, and about what if anything happens as a result of that focus.
One of the discoveries we can slowly make in worlds of time and space is that few things have a single meaning, spiritual or otherwise. At the most literal level, a good dictionary will list several meanings for almost every word. Even deceptively “little” words (“Those? They’re the absolute worst!”) like English a, an, the have numerous meanings, as learners of English discover to their dismay, and writers have attempted to catalog. (Alan Brender’s Three Little Words: A, An, The lists 52 meanings and uses for ’em — one for every week of the year.) What to do with a universe so perverse? says the rationalist in my spleen. Hey, you rhymed! says the bard at my elbow.
Meanings are almost always plural. OK, but does that in turn mean that it’s just “Pick a card, any card”? Well, it’s true that some days, or some whole lifetimes, can feel that way.
Usually if I’m noticing something, it’s communicating to me, and further, I usually already have a hunch or suspicion of some possible meaning(s) of that communication. These two go together, usually so intertwined I can’t separate them. We’re trained to sift and sort all the input from our senses and select only what we need to notice. If something’s already risen to my conscious awareness, the “meaning filter” has let it through. The “Ten Thousand Things” can fade into background. The particular thing or event or person now stands center stage.
My right shoulder and forearm have been bothering me on and off for over a month. Exercise helps some, but I’m still fine-tuning which exercises. As we age, the cartilage in the shoulder and spine, the facet joints, start to deteriorate, says my wife, with her physical therapy training. In fact, the shoulder is often the first to go.
And I can leave it at that. But I can also choose to listen how my experience opens up insight, including insight about the experiences of others.
If something’s already communicating to me, how can I respond?
Meaning-bearer, I greet you. Thank you for arriving in my world with your messages. As they unfold with my intention, may I honor and fulfill them with my life.
“Wait just a minute”, says another of the selves I wear. I can hear the outrage grow in his voice. “Do you mean I should be grateful for shoulder pain?!”
That’s not what I’m saying. Pain sucks. But like the X of the opening question, pain isn’t the final point. “If the world were only pain and logic”, says Mary Oliver in her poem “Singapore”, “who would want it?”
One of our great skills as humans is to bring the hidden into manifestation and to clothe the non-physical with form and shape. We do it throughout our lives, constantly. No surprise, we’re pretty good at it. (Wedding planners, investment bankers, gardeners, contractors, parents, janitors, children, athletes, generals, lovers, daydreamers, cooks, doodlers, singers … OK, you get the idea.) We bring into existence something that wasn’t there before. It’s also how we fall in love.
That spark of attention that events kindle in us also ignites our attempts to put them into words. For this reason many cultures consider speech a holy thing — words as spiritual objects are not to be lightly disrespected or misused. The Queen of Faerie tells Thomas the Rhymer to hold to silence in her realm, “so that his speech might store up power” for his return. In many cultures, songs and stories tell how speech is a divine gift, how creation happens through words, and knowing the right word, the true name for a thing, is a key that opens many doors.
Insofar as I think with words, then, I can hallow thinking through conscious intention. My attention and my intention, my noticing and the shaping of my consciousness in return, can be choices. (They’re also a deal of work, as anybody knows who’s tried.) They can be gifts to myself and to others around me, because they change me. Such holy things are never in vain. Even this much, just the attempt, although the fullness of meanings may not yet have come clear to me, takes me into sacred territory. With the sacred in my heart, I start to become a holy meaning maker with the materials of my attention and intention. These are among my return gifts to the sacred within and around me.
Stranger on earth, thy home is Otherworld. Pilgrim, thou are the guest of gods.
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The Céile Dé, Celtic Christian heirs to older teachings I mentioned in a previous post, offer on their website this article “Advice at the Threshold“, including the questions below, as a gauge to some of the challenges of conscious awareness of the awen:
In the course of what would be a typical week, would you say that you are very likely to experience one or more of the following?
+ hurt feelings
+ feel offended or insulted
+ lose your temper
+ act or react on impulse and regret it soon afterwards
+ complain about your lot
+ blame others for your inward state
If you want a clear account of my recent emotional geography, look no further than the list! (That unfriendly planetary virus that’s currently making the rounds doesn’t help.) But if I move beyond that threshold into realms of awen, I’m no longer a passive recipient of someone or something else’s meaning, floundering and struggling to figure out “what it all means”.
Oh, she meant well, we sometimes say. Or he didn’t mean it, we remark. But we usually offer these as excuses, rather than opportunities. J. M. Greer, citing the Barddas, that 19th century compilation of Druid Revival teachings, notes:
… a unique Awen is said to be present in each soul from the moment it comes into being, and guides it on its long journey up through the Circle of Abred — the realm of incarnate life in all its myriad forms — to the human level of existence. It is at the human level that the individual Awen for the first time may become an object of conscious awareness (Greer, The Gnostic Celtic Church, pg. 12)
As above, so below: we share in our humanity as individuals precisely because awen is present within each of us, but in each of us it’s a unique awen. To be a person is to be “awenized”, but also to be an awenizer. The Welsh call this awenydd, one filled with awen, a poet or bard.
Wait, you say. I’m not a poet or a bard.
Greer continues:
… the individual Awen for the first time may become an object of conscious awareness. Achieving this awareness, and living in accord with it, is according to these Druid teachings the great challenge of human existence.
Another way to approach it: You might say “awen isn’t just for poets anymore”.
When something comes into my awareness, catching my attention and seeming to signify s o m e t h i n g, “does it mean it”? One way to answer: Only if I respond and make meaning along with it.
Things “mean”, and “have meaning” for us, because in some way they are pointing us toward greater awareness of our awen, prodding us to become more conscious of it. Human existence provides a spiritual opportunity to make our awen a mode of consciousness — our prime mode of consciousness.
If I and my life could mean anything right now, in addition to whatever they already mean, what do I want that to be?
One way to grapple with this enormous question is to reply with a question: How and where — because I can’t know it unless I’m already in touch with it — is my awen already emerging and appearing?
For me, oddly enough, resistance is a key component. (Like so many people with mixed motives, I’m often working against my own destiny — a brutally efficient way to discover what it is when it smacks me in the face.)
“What are you rebelling against?” asks a character in The Wild One.
And Marlon Brando’s character Johnny Strabler replies, “What have you got?”
Johnny’s point underscores how rebellion or resistance is reactive — it takes a mechanical response to meaning-making, rather than a creative one. That is, the event, circumstance, or other person is still in control of what I do.
But once I get even some glimmers of my own awen, I start to know what’s right for me. Of course we can still confuse “what’s right for me” with ego, impulse, reactiveness and so on, but it’s a big step. Yes, I can cherry-pick meanings from the events in my life and miss larger beneficial meanings — we witness each other doing this all the time, while remaining half-blind when we do it ourselves.
But I sometimes think our resistance helps us from capsizing our lives with too much change all at once. The sailor’s strategy in heavy weather of deploying a sea anchor can stabilize a boat, keeping it pointed in the desired direction even as it slows forward movement. A little resistance can be a good thing, a way to try out the meanings I’m making, giving them a test drive.
“Find and follow your own awen” eventually becomes the foundation of each of our individual ways of life. That’s what gives them their integrity, power and beauty. And in the words of that wonderfully ambiguous expression current when I was in secondary school and still heard occasionally today, “It takes one to know one”.
Sometimes it takes one very far indeed.
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Can anyone identify either of the flowers above? The first is from a tree in our front yard that eventually produces a firm reddish-brown berry about the size and shape of a small olive. They remain on the boughs through the winter. Cedar waxwings come through in February and devour them all, usually in a single day.
The second, I’ve been told, is some kind of hyacinth, but I haven’t yet found a variety that matches. (Same color alone isn’t enough for identification!) Any ideas?
Does anyone here have experience with liminal spaces? someone asked recently on one of the online Druid forums I frequent.
Potentially, we all do: at dawn and twilight — during ritual — waking and falling asleep — walking on a foggy or snowy day alone — in meditation, prayer, etc. And sometimes during illness, or extreme exhaustion, as well. Liminal, threshold — neither word particularly common, though our experience of them is. (We hear about the sub-liminal more than the liminal.) Cultures vary in how they help or discourage us from seeking and navigating liminal spaces. Or even talking about them.
One of the purposes of ritual is to help us enter them and begin to explore their potentials.
In many older cultures at least some kinds of limen or threshold are places to watch and to guard: you may hang a charm at the doorway to your home or work. Your culture helps establish who is or isn’t allowed to touch your skin — the threshold of your body — and when. Shrines and temples have liminal areas in the form of sacred precincts, which you try to avoid profaning — literally, standing near the fane or holy place at the wrong time, or in the wrong state, unprepared. And if you think you have no fanes in your life to profane, think again — we all run into restricted or no-access areas — playing fields, stages, “authorized personnel only” zones, member-only forums and groups, relationships that allow you to say and do things with, to and for each other that no one else can.
What about seeking out and crossing into a liminal space consciously?
In many traditions, fasting from sex, or certain foods, or all food and drink for a designated period, are all time-honored ways to prepare to cross a threshold. Almost anything that shifts our habits — our “everyday-ness” — and that we can pursue with single-mindedness, can serve as a means of preparation, because the single-mindedness is the larger goal. Focus helps manifest the liminal.
Wikipedia calls the liminal the “boundary of perception”
Medieval knights-to-be kept nightlong vigil with their weapons in preparation for receiving knighthood. Holy days, as thresholds of sacred time, often acquire their own rites of preparation. Even in supposedly “secular” settings, we have ritualized requirements for behavior, dress, speech, etc., that accompany threshold events, especially changes of status. The job interview, wedding, graduation, birthday or retirement party, all signal the crossing of a threshold, each with its appropriate ritual accompaniment.
You can imagine a t-shirt with the words “Tame the Liminal!” except of course that’s the one thing we never do. The liminal says “possibility!” The liminal sweeps us to the brink of change. The poet Rilke gives us the experience of falling into the liminal “merely” by studying a famous statue in his poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo”, a figure that is missing its head:
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
Rilke struggles in similes with how to express this consciousness: “eyes like ripening fruit … torso with brilliance like a lamp … skin like a wild beast’s fur … stone’s borders bursting like a star”. In other and theistic traditions, it’s said you can experience God-realization by looking into the heart of a flower. The point is the same. Or in fact the point is often different for each of us. What does remain the same is preparation. (The Hopi call one of their ritual tools natwanpi — “instrument of preparation”.) Take that step with intention, and anything can draw us into such awareness.
And so “our mission, should we choose to accept it”, is to interrogate the borders, our own most of all, to investigate just where our cultures draw their lines, and what lies across them. Not to rebel against those lines mindlessly, but to understand any limen is there for a purpose, and to determine how far that purpose applies to us — and when it might stop applying. So if I quote that famous Socratic proverb, “The unexamined life is not worth living”, I also need to cite the corollary of script-writer and brilliant teacher Robert McKee, “The unlived life is not worth examining”. Ouch!
Lighting the woodstove this morning after the past nights’ cold moved through New England (8″ of snow in northern Vermont!), I encounter the liminal in a way everyone can experience. A fire, a candle, brings us into contact with that most liminal of physical things. But any of the four elements can: a waterfall or lake or stream; clouds or the sound of wind in the trees. Earth, too — a mountain or valley or meadow, or an unusual large stone, a piece of quartz or shale held in the hand.
And I also jump-start my awen from Bards, as frequent readers here know well. Here’s my man Thoreau, who closes Walden with a series of four potent and linked meditations that can serve as Druidic natwanpi, as preparation for the liminal:
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Greer, John Michael. The Mysteries of Merlin: Ceremonial Magic for the Druid Path. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2020.
Let me be clear up front that I’m reviewing this book as an interested reader, obviously not as someone who’s tried out over time the specific rituals Greer presents and can speak from that perspective. After all, the book just appeared in print this month. If you’ve already worked with the materials in his Celtic Golden Dawn, you’re well on your way to intuiting and valuing what he is doing here.
That means I’m reading and responding as sensitively as I can out of my own experiences with comparable ritual and magical practices. The best “review” of such a book, of course, is applying the rituals and techniques in the manner Greer recommends, over time, and only then assessing the results for oneself.
A mystery, as I need to remind myself as much as anybody, is something that simultaneously deepens and opens with steady practice. It emphatically does not mean something that remains obscure or inaccessible despite our best efforts. The Mysteries of Merlin as Greer presents them here are a comprehensive and cohesive set of rituals and techniques that point us toward discovery. Mysteries in the older sense of the word, as Greer points out, are “the traditional name for rituals of initiation linked to seasonal cycles and based on the mythic narratives of Pagan gods and goddesses” (pg. 2). Greer’s Mysteries of Merlin are founded on a variety of sources that he names and discusses. Chief among these are Medieval authors like the 12th-century Geoffrey of Monmouth, author of the TheHistory of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Brittaniae) and of the stranger Life of Merlin (Vita Merlini).
15th-century illustration for an edition of Geoffrey’s History. King Vortigern and the dragons. Lambeth Palace Library MS 6. Wikipedia public domain image.
The book, as Greer sets out in the very first sentence, presents what may seem an unusual marriage of practices: “a system of self-initiation that is based on ancient Celtic Pagan spirituality but uses the tools of modern ceremonial magic. That combination, though it has roots going back many centuries, may startle readers familiar with the attitudes of today’s Pagan and occult communities” (pg. 1) about magic. And Druidry, more than most revivals, has aroused suspicion in some quarters for its “awkward” (Greer’s word) position that straddles both worlds, incorporating elements from a variety of sources, magical and Pagan both. Furthermore, self-initiation, which has come under attack as a modern invention and a contradiction in terms, is something Greer reminds us was a valid and established ancient practice as well.
The proof, as always, lies in practice: quite simply, does it work? This is an experimental question, not one which armchair debate can answer. Work through the three grades of material, for Ovate, Bard and Druid (Greer prefers this older sequence) over the course of three years of seasonal practice with the “Great Eight” holy days of the Pagan year, and anyone can answer that question for themselves.
A book like this also necessarily relies on intelligent and wise reconstruction and improvisation. And that leads me to one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about Greer’s writing: how he contextualizes what he writes, while suggesting directions for further study and exploration. Rather than merely springing a new magical system on readers as if full-grown from the brow of Zeus, he clearly acknowledges its origins, and notes where he has “back-engineered” aspects of his material from documents or from intelligent surmise. This is an honesty rare in many modern books on magic. One of the advantages of working with the Merlin material is that interest in Arthur and the Matter of Britain has led to good translations of many original Medieval sources. Greer directs interested readers in many cases toward specific editions of these, as a way to deepen the engagement with and the effects of the rituals he has provided, as well as to build on them.
In this book, more than his earlier ones, Greer also suggests promising avenues of exploration for ways other sets of rituals could be developed. Much of this perspective arises from his earlier work in The Celtic Golden Dawn, which meshes very well with this one. Greer plainly reminds readers about what they are practicing, and in the process answers the criticisms by some Reconstructionists of Revival Druidry:
It’s probably necessary to state in so many words that the rituals, meditations and other practices that will be presented in the chapters that follow are not the same as the ones that were practiced on Bryn Myrddin in the waning years of Roman Britain. The mysteries of that time are lost forever. Even if somehow it became possible to recover the words and ritual actions that once made up the mysteries of the god Moridunos [explained earlier], for that matter, their meanings have passed beyond recovery. Like all meanings, spiritual and otherwise, they unfold from a context in which language, culture, and history all take part. No one alive today can possibly experience the world in the same way as a Roman Briton of the fifth century CE, and for exactly the same reason — even if the ancient mysteries of Moridunos were available in their original form — no one alive today could possibly experience those mysteries in the same way that a Roman Briton would have done in the fifth century CE.
Times change, and so do the mysteries. The Eleusinian mysteries themselves underwent countless changes, major and minor, over the period of more than a thousand years that they were celebrated. The transformations that apparently turned the mysteries of Merlin Caledonius into the Master Mason degree of modern Freemasonry are, as we’ve seen, far from unusual in the history of initiatory rites. What’s more, just as there were many different mysteries in ancient Greece that centered on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, using different rituals to do so, the mysteries of Merlin set out in this book are only one of many possibilities. In the work of initiation, there is no such thing as “only one right way” (pgs. 45-46).
Some specific details of Greer’s book that deserve brief mention:
+ complete rituals for each of the eight yearly holy days, for each of the grades of Ovate, Bard and Druid — pages 103-175.
+ the suggestion that Christian mysteries could be developed along similar lines (and that such a start has indeed already begun, citing John Plummer’s The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement).
+ the development of “The Rite of the Rays”, an awen mini-ritual, using the shape of the three-rayed awen /|\ for gesture and affirmation as part of the larger ritual for each holy day. On a personal note, this informs and confirms work I’ve been doing with the awen and its symbolism, as participants at Gulf Coast Gathering 2017 and MAGUS 2019 will discern.
+ Arthurian-themed visualizations and readings for inclusion in each of the seasonal rituals and for meditation and path-working. These seem to pair up well, I suggest, with Celtic and Arthurian tarot decks.
+ the use of a symbolic octagram throughout the eight seasonal rituals, and at the Druid level, an entire Octagram Ritual, with a detailed correspondence to a Celtic-themed and -named version of the universal Tree of Life.
+ the recognition that different levels of devotion and commitment to engagement and practice will naturally exist among practitioners, that this is a good and normal phenomenon, and that provision and recommendations for each level can help practitioners find what works best for them.
+ the flexibility of the ritual format provided here for both solitary and group practice. The focus is on solitary practice, but the rituals lend themselves to adaptation for group work if desired.
+ the value of continued working after having passed through all three grades. Practitioners can
decide whether to go on to become one of the epoptai, the initiates who continue to participate in the ceremonies after their initiation and gain the deeper dimensions of initiation that come with that experience. If you do, you will find — as the epoptai of the Eleusinian mysteries found in ancient times, and as members of other initiatory orders have found over and over again since that time — that repeated participation in a set of initiatory rites opens up portal after portal. Still, you and you alone can decide whether this choice is right for you (pg. 151).
+ the Appendix — “Other Mysteries, Other Gods”, which though clocking in at just seven pages, deserves careful meditation. Here again are humility and natural authority combined — something I savor! Greer observes,
The same process of revival and reworking I have applied to the legends of Merlin can, in fact, be applied to any suitable body of myth or legend to create a system of seasonal mysteries suited to regular performance by individuals or groups. Whatever deities or sacred figures you revere, whatever tradition of spirituality and magic you happen to practice, you can craft a set of mystery rituals suited to your own needs. If you’re prepared to put in the necessary work, the following steps will bring you to that goal (pg. 189).
+ the closing two sentences, which appear at the end of the Appendix just mentioned. Though Greer obviously completed the book before the virus launched on its current trajectory, the encouragement and value of his words in bolstering our spiritual effort is all the keener for its applicability in a time of choice, despair, distraction and spiritual need:
As you celebrate the mysteries, whether you choose the mysteries of Merlin set out in this book or a set of ceremonies you create yourself, you are participating in one of the great spiritual transformations of history: the rebirth of Pagan spirituality after more than sixteen centuries of violent suppression and persecution. The hard work and flexibility needed to make the mysteries you celebrate as rich and rewarding as they can be is a fitting contribution to that project (pg. 196).
In the previous post, I looked at thirteen facets of Doing Druidry that mostly revolve around inquiry and study. You can’t easily be a Druid without engaging in at least some form of one or more of them, because each of them connects you to the worlds where Druidry happens. (If that sounds restrictive or dogmatic or exclusive to you, just go back and look at the list! Got something to add that makes 
A Druid Way 
