I bless and consecrate you with water … with spirit, and with fire.
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How often we’re put off by language — or drawn in and inspired, and for mostly the same reasons. The first piece of wise Druid counsel above comes, in fact, from Luke 5:16, describing what Jesus often did. Seems like a piece of uncommon good sense these days for anyone to practice, a sacred intention to add to our hours.
Another version* puts it like this: “Jesus often went away to other places to be alone so that he could pray”. Does that feel like anything most of us need to do regularly, to get off by ourselves so we can hear ourselves and our awen speak, and not merely listen to the strident echoes of the “24-hour news cycle”? Hear what life is constantly saying to the chakras and energy centers of our being**.
The second line above comes from Matthew 3:11-12, where John the Initiating Chief (Christians may know him as John the Baptist) names the powers he and Jesus invoke when blessing and hallowing others who seek out that particular ritual. Water, spirit, fire. What is baptism but blessing — literally, dipping in water and other holy substances or elements? A baptism in an initiation, and vice versa, symbolized by elements that have always been holy worldwide: water and fire, and spirit that animates them all. Call them elemental sacraments as I have, if that brings them into closer kinship and familiarity and comfort.
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One of my teachers observed that just as we can choose to go through initiations organized and conducted by others, we can initiate intentions and directions in our own lives. An actual ritual can help to impress this on the mind and senses, reifying it, to use technical language — making it “thingly”, bringing it through “right down to the physical”.
So I find my own ways of slipping away into wilderness to pray, listen to the trees, sing the awen, and prepare.
And initiation? Many have long looked at the Biblical Book of Revelation as a guide to our inner spiritual architecture, with the seven churches it describes in detail as the varying focus and health of our seven inner energy centers, typified in various traditions as chakras or by other names, the spiritual eye among them, along with the halos on pictures of saints, the sacred heart, the gut instinct, and so on — yet another piece of the philosophia perennis, the Perennial Wisdom we cloak with our regional robes, names and forms, then “name and claim” as the Sole Truth of the cosmos (which we just so happen to be in exclusive possession of).
So you have a vision, and it’s natural to be told to get it down in words before it fades:
Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later. The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden candles is this: The seven stars are the messengers of the seven Gatherings, and the seven candles are the seven Gatherings. (Revelation 1:20).
Then you work to initiate your vision, with the Messengers (Instant or otherwise), and the Light sources you find at hand, LED, spiritual, human. A little paraphrase that I assert does no injustice to the original, and we’re on Druid territory. And why not vice versa? Rework a Druid ritual in Christian terms, and see what you may discover.
We can initiate or baptize our complete body, energies centers all working together, to (re)call it to its holy purpose as an Ancestor-in-the-Making, a Walker-between-the-Worlds, a Holy One. If the world around us, or some other world we’ve walked in lately, seems sacred or holy, or some other ideal summons us, we can “level ourselves up”, to use the language of gamers — shift energy and consciousness, so that we mirror and embody — incarnate — that holiness, rather than working against it.
So I choose the time of ritual with care, honoring the harmonics of the planets and stars, the tides of earth and our lives. Three days, or maybe seven, beforehand, I slip away to the wilderness and pray. As part of my ritual — perhaps the core of initiation, or perhaps other words come — I say, “I bless and consecrate you with water … with spirit, and with fire”.
And perhaps I close with some version of the blessings from recent posts, drinking what seems right to drink, making an offering from that drink to whoever it feels right to honor at the moment of the rite:
I now invoke the mystery of communion, that common unity that unites all beings throughout the worlds. All beings spring from the One; by One are they sustained, and in One do they find their rest. One the hidden glory rising through the realms of Abred; One the manifest glory rejoicing in the realms of Gwynfydd; One the unsearchable glory beyond all created being in Ceugant; and these three are resumed in One.
May the blessing of the Uncreated One, of the Creative Word and of the Spirit that is the Inspirer be with us always …
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*Easy-to-Read Version, 2006, Bible League International.
**Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches (Rev. 2:29).
In the previous post I looked at the beginnings of a Druid-Christian ritual, letting the two traditions talk to each other through their images, rather than drawing on theology or metaphysics. (Druids and Pagans generally do have theologies — many of us just haven’t explored them in great depth or gotten them down in writing yet. Practice usually is more interesting, anyway.)
Name a purpose, and we can draft a Druid-Christian rite for it. Want a wedding, or a blessing, or an initiation? Both traditions have rich materials to draw on. Among other references and resources, Isaac Bonewits discusses ritual design at length in his book Neopagan Rites: A Guide to Creating Public Rituals that Work. Note Isaac’s focus on public: I use private Druid-Christian rituals that might not appeal to others, given our different histories and experiences with religions.
Shansui, the Chinese word for landscape: “mountains (and) water”
Already tired from too much thinking? Use the image above. Enter the scene. Walk that beach. Feel the warm, wet sand between your toes. Feel the wind play through your hair. Listen to the awen of the waves, calling. Salt air, seagulls.
Looking for a calendar, a whole set of practices and observances? The Pagan festival year lines up quite well with classical Christianity, for reasons that have been thoroughly (endlessly) explored and documented. Who knows how many Pagans sit in pews with Christian relatives at Yule and Easter, knowing other names, and sensing both kindred and at times estranged presences and energies?
For foundations for daily practice, one need look no further than the example of J M Greer’s The Gnostic Celtic Church, where Greer notes:
… personal religious experience is the goal that is set before each aspirant and the sole basis on which questions of a religious nature can be answered.
Greer also asserts as a piece of (Universalist) belief:
… that communion with spiritual realities is open to every being without exception, and that all beings — again, without exception — will eventually enter into harmony with the Divine.
What do I want and need? Do I even know? How can I find out?
The world’s spiritual traditions offer hundreds of variations on practices to answer just such questions. It’s good to check in from time to time, asking such things, living with the questions till they bud and leaf into answers, or into more beautiful questions.
As Mary Oliver sings, “So many questions more beautiful than answers …”
We change, and our practices need to keep up. Singing the awen, or other sacred word, is one tested and proven practice most traditions put forth for those seeking a new path, or a new branching along a path we know already. I sing till things clarify. Often for me this may take weeks, or months even … “Patience”, says one of the Wise. “Is not this our greatest practice?”
(But I just want to get to patience NOW …)
Smudge the whole cosmos, if necessary
Greer outlines practices for those interested in exploring a “Gnostic, Universalist, and Pelagian” Druidry. The ceremonies, rituals and meditations include the Hermitage of the Heart, the Sphere of Protection, the Calling of the Elements, the Sphere of Light, a Solitary Grove Ceremony (all but the first deriving from Druid AODA practice), and a Communion Ceremony that ritualizes the “Doctrine of the One”:
I now invoke the mystery of communion, that common unity that unites all beings throughout the worlds. All beings spring from the One; by One are they sustained, and in One do they find their rest. One the hidden glory rising through the realms of Abred; One the manifest glory rejoicing in the realms of Gwynfydd; One the unsearchable glory beyond all created being in Ceugant; and these three are resumed in One. (Extend your hands over the altar in blessing. Say …)
If you tried out Greer’s prayer above, who or what did you bless? If you didn’t, why not try it now? Say the words aloud …
Looking for a short form? Abred (AH-bred), Gwynfydd (GWEEN-veeth), Ceugant (KAY-gant).
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I’ve looked before at these lovely Welsh names for the levels of being according to Celtic lore:
With the love of triads and threes that marks so much of Celtic art and story, it’s no surprise that the Celtic conception of our spiritual journeys should mirror this same triplicity. From the starting point of Annwn, the Celtic Otherworld, we move forth and back through three states of manifestation and consciousness, in a kind of dance that sees us revisiting old lessons until we’ve fully mastered the material, spiralling through different forms and perspectives.
Most of us hang out for a considerable time in this present world of Abred, this place of testing and proving. From here we proceed to Gwynfyd, a world of liberty and freedom beyond the pale shadows of these forces in our present world. Back and forth between Abred and Gwynfyd, with dips into Annwn here and there. And last comes Ceugant, an unbounded, infinite realm. By definition, no end point, but a new beginning. The horizon recedes.
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And lest someone coming to the beginnings of Druid-Christian practice from the Christian side wonders how to begin with all of this stuff, consider this.
Nicholas Whitehead opens his curious book Patterns in Magical Christianity like this:
Christianity is a magical religion. This is not so controversial a statement as some might think. For all religious traditions are potentially magical by the simple fact that they embody or employ symbols, myths and rites that are mediatory, that intend or enable the translation of spiritual energies between levels of reality (pg. 13).
The author outlines a set of characteristics of such magical symbols, noting they
“are inherently appropriate”. He gives the example of a plant, with roots in earth, flower in the air, and “within its stem the life bearing sap rises and falls. Because of its intrinsic structure, the plant is a symbol for the ideal spiritual life … we live upon the earth, with our roots within the land. We are nurtured by the soil in which we live. Yet, without losing our connection to it, it is our destiny to rise above the land, to flower in the crowning glory of the light … Again note that we cannot make the plant into a symbol. It is simply is a magical symbol by virtue of its inherent structure and its role in the rhythmic life of the cosmos”.
“always participate in a greater reality”.
“enable the translation of energies between levels of reality”.
“are trans-rational”.
“are polyvalent”.
“tend to assemble in groups” (pg. 16).
Of course there’s a tremendous amount to unpack here — which is why it takes Whitehead a book to do so, along with a set of exercises he has developed in a workshop in order to put these precepts to the experimental test. Rather than debate them, which is a head trip I (mostly) don’t plan to take, they’re worth simply trying out, just as one would test the statement that water freezes at a certain temperature, rather than debating whether the claim is true. Of course adding salt, raising a wind over the surface, setting the container in a vacuum, and so on, all change the experimental parameters.
In the same way, my beliefs, intention, mindset when I experiment, past experiences, and spiritual awareness will all figure quite largely in any results I achieve. I’ve found I’m more interested in learning how certain things are valid or operational for me. That is, do they help me get somewhere worth reaching? Otherwise, an inner nudge or whisper usually alerts me: Move along — these aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Later I can play the thought and reason game for what it’s worth. Sometimes a lot, sometimes quite little.
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IMAGES: Pexels.com
Greer, John Michael. The Gnostic Celtic Church: A Manual and Book of Liturgy. Everett, WA: Starseed Publications (Kindle)/Lorian Press (paper), 2013.
Whitehead, Nicholas. Patterns in Magical Christianity. Sunchalice Books, 1996. (More recent editions exist, though I haven’t yet been able to find one.)
Ritual, remarks British Druid and author Emma Restall Orr,
is the process of taking time out of the rush of life in order to remember what is sacred, that when we return to the road we do so with a soul once again open to inspiration and creativity. How we do it – and how long it takes – to be effective depends on how scattered by distraction and tangled in need we are. It can be as simple as pausing, breathing deeply, acknowledging the gift of life, the land beneath, the sky above. It can take weeks of preparation, days of fasting, hours of concentration, to fall into the moment of realization about how we can live awake and with honour, not just believing nature is sacred, but unconditionally treating her as such.
ritual bathing
Judging by the continuing readership for a group of posts here on Druidry and Christianity, the vital possibilities of such a concord live still for you as much as they do for me. They branch and grow, and rich fruit hangs from their boughs.
Our instincts aren’t wrong. The two traditions are twinned in ways we may never untangle, but we can explore what they can contribute to each other right now. One way to do that — certainly not the only way* — is through ritual.
Already we hold hints and fragments in our hands. In the Christian Bible, Luke relates the experiences of a rich man, the chief tax collector Zacchaeus. “And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way” (Lk. 19-3-4). Sometimes we need to shift perspective, to climb out of our lives to see them more clearly.
Later in the same chapter, (Lk. 19:37-40), the followers of Jesus are overcome with joy and are peacefully celebrating. But their exuberance apparently touches a nerve — it seems excessive and undignified to the Pharisees, among the Powers-That-Be of the day:
And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him [Jesus], “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
Have we not all felt such joy, that the stuffy, fearful, joyless ones around us want to rebuke us for our happiness?!
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[The rite begins. Parts not yet assigned.]
Let the Great Gates open. For we hear voices crying in the wilderness … (1)
Climb your own sycamore! What will you ever see until you do?!
The stones are crying out at our silence (2).
If our houses of prayer and celebration have become dens for thieves, then it is meet and fitting that we repair to the green places of old (3).
For the Wise have counselled us, “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls” (4).
Our teachers are at hand: “Ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you, or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you” (5).
Let our prayers rise like incense (6), born of earth, moistened in its making, lit by fire, wafting through air.
“They have dressed the wounds of our people with scant care, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace at all” (7).
We will answer the call to peace, and serve. Let us give peace now to the quarters, and renew the Great Work again …
“May the blessing of the Uncreated One, of the Created Word and of the Spirit that is the Inspirer be always with us. May the world be filled with harmony and Light” (8).
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Some readers, writes Philip Carr-Gomm in his foreword to Nuinn’s Book of Druidry,
might be pleased to learn of such a dialogue between Druidry and Christianity, particularly when it results in specific action being taken to initiate a new impulse within the Christian movement. Others might be disappointed, hoping Druidry was exclusively ‘pagan’. But Druidry is a way of working with the natural world, and is not a dogma or religion … Druidry honours, above all, the freedom of the individual to follow his own path through life, offering only guides and suggestions, schemes of understanding, methods of celebration and mythical ideas — which can be used or not as the practitioner sees fit (pg. 14).
Rev. Alistair Bate, author of the OBOD website article “Reflections on Druidic Christology“, comments from a sensitivity to the contact points of the two traditions:
A more orthodox rendering of Chief Nuinn’s triadic formula might be “May the blessing of the Uncreated One, of the Creative Word and of the Spirit that is the Inspirer be always with us”. This, I believe, would not only be more truly in tune with the bardic experience, but would also resonate with the Om/Creation idea found in the Hindu tradition. As we envision Awen, the primordial sound, echoing out of the void, we connect with our own creative inspiration as part of that first creative Word, which is in Christian terms, at once Christ and his Spirit.
And with greater enthusiasm, perhaps, than comparative or historical theological accuracy, Bate concludes his article, summoning to his aid the words of probably the single most influential Christian thinker and writer:
In the 4th century St Augustine declared, “That which is called the Christian Religion existed among the Ancients, and never did not exist, from the beginning of the Human Race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity”. That the religion of our most ancient ancestors is in essence very similar to that of our more recent ancestors is the conviction that keeps some of us simultaneously both Druid and Christian.
And as many others have long noted, the Galilean master is at his most Druidic when he speaks with images of the natural cycle of things:
Truly, I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit (John 12:24).
An extensive Druid-Christian liturgy could be written with just the nature images that pervade Christian and Jewish scripture.
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IMAGES: Pexels.com
*Other practices one could initiate, as Emma Orr notes above, might be “as simple as pausing, breathing deeply, acknowledging the gift of life, the land beneath, the sky above”. Or correspondingly complex, and “take weeks of preparation, days of fasting, hours of concentration, to fall into the moment of realization about how we can live awake and with honour …” We decide what it is we need, rather than any authority over us. And often the best decisions arise from experimentation, and from an openness to trying something new.
1–Your grandmother’s Druids were most likely members of a fraternal order, similar to the Masons.
Many contemporary Druid orders seek to assist members in developing a spiritual foundation and fostering a training equal to the challenges humans face over the coming decades and centuries, where new understandings will help us adapt successfully to more limited resources, a hotter planet, rising oceans, pollution, species die-off, massive social unrest and population migration, and still other shifts and changes we do not yet foresee.
Even if the challenges remain exactly as they already stand today — even if all predictions, forecasts, and extrapolations from available evidence are hopelessly inaccurate — it’s clear we already need wiser approaches and clearer thinking to grapple with them. In this predicament, however, we do not confront anything new. The human experience over the history of our species is one of frequent and sometimes dire challenge and change. In any case, one of the benefits of Druidry is the gift [link to “Seven Gifts of Druidry”] of wisdom and foresight — always useful skills.
To explore a play on words, the difference between change and challenge is lle— the Welsh word for “place, room, accommodation”. As soon as we “make room” for actual reality, then, we can deal more effectively and creatively with change. It is only when we deny, balk, block, resist, fear or ignore a challenge that the initial change has no place to manifest, and so it pools, darkens, and accumulates into something much more difficult later, when it finally breaks through, whether it’s an individual illness, societal breakdown or planetary shift. Further, a major “secret” to dealing with challenge is respect for place, for the “room” or space we inhabit. Our ability to care for it, listen to it, learn from it and live in it more fully will help many thrive.
2–Your grandmother’s Druids generally sought and found inspiration and example in both the limited information surviving in classical sources, and in the Druid Revival beginning in the 17th century, which drew on practically every source that didn’t run away first, and on some that did.
As the growth and development of modern Druidry continued, and with contributions from Celtic Reconstructionists like ADF, who stressed historical authenticity and searched for the half-hidden remnants we still possess of older Druid traditions*, new teachings, practices, insights and shifts in emphasis emerged in many established Revival orders like AODA, OBOD and BDO. These “new” teachings are in fact often very old, reintroducing images, stories, understandings and quite specific herbal knowledge tribal peoples worldwide have long possessed. (As a single example, see the work of Druid and master herbalist Ellen Evert Hopman.)
3–Your grandmother’s Druids were generally, officially and at least nominally Christian. While other varieties no doubt existed, it was often both dangerous and illegal until surprisingly recently to be too open about believing and practicing anything other than some version of Christianity.
Today’s Druids span a much wider range of backgrounds, with atheist, pantheist, animist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other traditions influencing and being influenced by Druidic perspectives and practices. As with Alexandria and Rome in the centuries before and after Christ, a stir of Gnostic, Egyptian, Chaldean, Christian, Neo-Platonist and Pythagorean mystery teachings, practices, ideas and perspectives produced a potent ferment that still pervades much contemporary culture worldwide.
4–If your grandmother’s Druids were challenged with the oft-heard critique “You can’t be a real Druid because we know hardly anything about ancient Druidry,” they might readily concur and acknowledge that their Druidry is a fraternal order, inspired by the romantic image of the Druid as a learned leader and cultural arbiter and repository of tribal memory.
Today’s Druids still hear this increasingly ridiculous challenge, about as accurate as early challenges that “Christians practice cannibalism” because they ritually drank the blood of Christ in the Mass.
In fact, a surprising amount of information survives about older Druid practice and training, outside of the fragmentary Classical references, largely in Irish but also in Welsh sources.
Members of OBOD can trace the increasing influence of these sources in the revisions of the OBOD coursework, first in the transition from Chosen Chief Nuinn/Ross Nichols to Philip Carr-Gomm, and in the new Chosen Chief Eimear Burke, who has said that OBOD “isn’t broken so it doesn’t need fixing”, but that an increased focus on Irish material will be a natural outcome of her Irish identity and experience.
For a quick overview of the hundredsof sources available, of varying age, usefulness, completeness and provenance, check out this link at the Celtic Literature Collective. Here’s just a small fraction:
Trioedd Ynys Prydein / Triads of the Island of Britain. Versions in 13th century White Book of Rhydderch / Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, the Red Book of Hergest / Llyfr Coch Hergest, and the Peniarth Manuscripts.
The Mabinogi(on) / Another link. One of the most famous of sources listed here. Welsh tales, legends, philosophy, magic, training, etc., from the medieval period.
Book of Ballymote / (Wikipedia link.) Leabhar Baile an Mhota. 1400s. Includes the “Instructions of King Cormac”, stories of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, and other tales.
Auraicept na n-Éces / Another link. An ogham treatise dating from the 7th century, with later interpolations.
Dindsenchas / The Lore of Places. A “recounting the origins of place-names and traditions concerning events and characters associated with the places” (Wikipedia) and vital as a gateway to understanding much of Irish myth and legend. Many are found in the Book of Leinster.
Brehon law / Senchus Mor or “Gael Law” — numerous collections (see link at beginning of sentence), the earliest dating from the 700s — “possibly the oldest surviving codified legal system in Europe” (Wikipedia). Focusing on restorative rather than punitive justice, and on care of the land. See also Laurence Ginnell’s 1894 The Brehon Laws: A Legal Handbook, full text online here.
“You can’t just draw a circle, step inside, and say it’s sacred. You just can’t!” said an acquaintance this last weekend.
In fact, you can.
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep”, says Glendower in Henry IV, Part 1 (Act III, sc. i).
“Why, so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?” responds Hotspur.
It’s a valid question.
We say “it’s sacred” the same way we say we love. It’s wishful thinking, or it’s meant to seduce, or it spills over from a heart already overflowing. Or a hundred other things. And we can usually tell the difference, being the fine-tuned crap detectors that millennia of gossip sessions rubbing shoulders with the neighbors have made us. If not, give it time. And as Zora Neale Hurston quipped (about love), “Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much” (Dust Tracks on a Road, pg. 203). The same holds true for ritual.
Access to the sacred is the big-ticket item, and if you’re at all insecure about your own access, you’re more likely to try tearing down the competition.
But rather than argue from a position of dogma, if I really want to know rather than simply score cheap points, I need to join the circle numerous times, attend mass the same number of times and then — maybe — I might be able to compare notes. Adjust as needed to fit the two practices I’m intent on assessing. And most important of all, deserving of seeming to be tacked on at the end here, because I’m saving the best for last: I need to bring equivalent reverent attention and curiosity to each rite. Otherwise, why bother?
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So we begin our rite together, Druid and Christian, Christian and Druid:
Now ask the beasts, and let them teach you,
and the birds of the heavens, and let them tell you.
Speak to the earth, and let it teach you,
and let the fish of the sea declare to you. [Job 12:7-8]
We call to the great bear in the starry heavens, power of the north …
We call to the hawk of dawn soaring in the clear pure air, power of the East …
We call to the great stag in the heat of the chase, power of the south…
We call to the salmon dwelling in the sacred pool, power of the west …
[OBOD ritual, adapted]
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More than anyone else in recent decades, Isaac Bonewits looked at ways to improve liturgy. Yes, we can connect with spirit, with the holy, in any number of ways, and on our own. But when we do so publicly, communally, we usually do it in ritual. How can our rituals be good? And then, how can they be better?
Pacing is something that anyone familiar with the theater will tell you is absolutely crucial to the success of a performance … The only way to learn pacing is to experiment a lot with modular design and to rehearse the people in your group to find their skills and limits. A five-minute guided meditation may be too long for some groups, too short for others. Taking thirty seconds to bless each person in turn is fine if you only have a small group, but can be a disaster with a large one. A chant that naturally builds to a peak in three minutes should not be dragged out for ten. Many problems with pacing are solvable by artistic means, especially musical …
We may think one rite’s sacred and another isn’t, in other words, when what’s really going on is the holiness is leaking out of a rite through inattention to theater. It was, after all, a burning bush and not a burning blade of grass that God used to catch Moses’ attention.
For private rites, I ponder Jesus’s counsel:
When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing … on the street corners, so people can see them. Truly I tell you, they already have their reward. But when you pray, go into your inner room, shut your door, and pray …
Private circle, inner room: we set apart sacred space in order to perform a (second) sacred act, just as much as we perform a sacred act in order to set apart sacred space.
I’m off to MAGUS, the Mid-Atlantic Gathering, in a few weeks. For those who can manage to attend, Gatherings can give a taste of true community. For Christians, ideally the power of baptism clothes everyone in unity: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:29). A deeper spiritual union does connect people who outwardly appear different, talk differently, live differently. It’s a measure of our struggle how often we lose sight of this profound truth.
Some two millennia on from Paul’s confident assertion of unity in Christ, issues rooted in social status, privilege, gender, class, ethnicity — all the things that keep rocking today’s headlines — haven’t gone away. Early Christians “held all things in common.” Druidry likewise points us towards our common wealth in each other, in all the millions of species we live with, and the planet we live on. We dimly remember this old understanding, if at all, in the names of things like the Commons, the Commonwealth in the names of states and nations, common ground, Holy Communion, community, even discredited Communism and other old words and ideas misunderstood, abused and abraded by ignorance and human weakness.
Druidry likewise celebrates the essential kinship of all things. “What we do to the land we quite literally do to ourselves”, as we keep discovering to our dismay and bitter relearning. Linked to places and ancestors, we inherit both specific and planetary pasts, and shape the future of our own bloodlines and also the biosphere we live in. “Rain on Roke may be drouth in Osskil … and a calm in the East Reach may be storm and ruin in the West, unless you know what you are about,” says the Master Summoner in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
So often we plainly don’t know what we’re about. But the Web of Things does yield to power regardless, in hands wise and foolish. What have we summoned? Whether knowledge or ignorance launches an action, what goes around still comes around. Simple and difficult: until we value and claim our unity as more important than our differences, it’s the differences that will dog us and define who we are and what matters. Depending on your understanding of the purpose of life at this rung of the spiral, that’s cause for weeping, rage, incomprehension, humble acknowledgment, redoubling of efforts …
When we consider the nationalist fervour sweeping the West, surely we might benefit from wider practice of such awareness of unity. While the broad tolerance of difference that Biblical verse expresses can also appeal broadly to many Druids, side by side with it is a celebration of particularity. Sometimes Christians call this the “scandal of particularity”: the difficulty of accepting a single individual man — Jesus — as the savior for everyone. You know — what traditional Christianity teaches about his exclusivity: “no one comes to the Father except through me”. As in, “my way or the highway”.
There are many ways to work with assertions like these. We know all too well, on the evidence of centuries, what literalism offers and where it leads. Political religion — the system of creeds and salutes, conformities and genuflections to whoever holds the stick — exists in every culture. To pick just one blatant and current example, North Korea has made a religion and cult of the Kim family. Metaphorical understandings, because they grant freedom to each person, have always been suspect in some quarters. “Power-over” dies hard, keeps dying, never quite dies out.
Nonetheless, there are Druids who sit in pews and recite the creeds with no sense of hypocrisy or incongruity. That doesn’t mean that church attendance is anything like the only way to find even a fragile unity. It’s merely one option. Nor does that mean Druids who do sit in Church surreptitiously fingering their pentagrams and awens beneath street clothes have necessarily somehow immersed themselves in any of the myriad alternative understandings of Jesus as great moral teacher, example, political gadfly, Jewish mystic, cleverly-disguised New Age guru, just one of a series of divine avatars* and so on.
[*avatar: (Sanskrit) 1) an incarnation in human form of a god. 2) That icon of your net presence? A second meaning of the word, fast eclipsing the original.]
Options, options. How about Jesus as the inner consciousness in each of us that leads us on the next spiral beyond the apparent world? Or Jesus as a man working within the confines of a monotheism that his ongoing experience of the divine kept bursting at the seams? How many of us are, like him, the sort of people who, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:40)? Do we even want to be? Why (or why not)? What would such close identification and intensity mean in this coolly detached age?
J. M. Greer in his The Gnostic Celtic Church which I’ve cited here previously offers one valid way among many to experience such kinship between Druid and Christian, noting that
a rich spiritual life supported by meaningful ceremonial and personal practice can readily co-exist with whatever form of outward life is necessary or appropriate to each priest or priestess … and the practice of sacramental spirituality can be pursued apart from the various pathologies of political religion (Greer, The Gnostic Celtic Church: A Manual and Book of Liturgy, AODA, 2013).
To create forms that will answer to widely perceived inner need and aspiration will take devotion and dedication, but the seeds are many, and some have already germinated and flowered and borne fruit, in both likely and unlikely places.
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This series of themes points to possible directions, and offers a few leads here and there, but in most cases doesn’t offer anything like a full-grown practice — the thing waiting, a project ready for many hands. (I have my own version of such a project, half-complete, still very much a work in progress. I’ve taken it on as a study of awen and experiment, rather than an urgent spiritual quest. Right now I drink from other wells, myself.)
By way, then, of appendix or commentary or prophecy or something else to this theme, I quote below at some length from Kipling’s Jungle Book, now in public domain. Here Baloo, the wise old brown bear — not the manipulative Bill Murray-voiced version in the recent 2016 film — talks to Bagheera about teaching Mowgli the Master Word of the Jungle:
“A man’s cub is a man’s cub, and he must learn all the Law of the Jungle” [said Baloo].
“But think how small he is,” said the Black Panther, who would have spoiled Mowgli if he had had his own way. “How can his little head carry all thy long talk?”
“Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed? No. That is why I teach him these things, and that is why I hit him, very softly, when he forgets.”
“Softly! What dost thou know of softness, old Iron-feet?” Bagheera grunted. “His face is all bruised today by thy — softness. Ugh.”
“Better he should be bruised from head to foot by me who love him than that he should come to harm through ignorance,” Baloo answered very earnestly. “I am now teaching him the Master Words of the Jungle that shall protect him with the birds and the Snake People, and all that hunt on four feet, except his own pack. He can now claim protection, if he will only remember the words, from all in the jungle. Is not that worth a little beating?”
“Well, look to it then that thou dost not kill the man-cub. He is no tree trunk to sharpen thy blunt claws upon. But what are those Master Words? I am more likely to give help than to ask it” — Bagheera stretched out one paw and admired the steel-blue, ripping-chisel talons at the end of it — “still I should like to know.”
“I will call Mowgli and he shall say them — if he will. Come, Little Brother!”
“My head is ringing like a bee tree,” said a sullen little voice over their heads, and Mowgli slid down a tree trunk very angry and indignant, adding as he reached the ground: “I come for Bagheera and not for thee, fat old Baloo!”
“That is all one to me,” said Baloo, though he was hurt and grieved. “Tell Bagheera, then, the Master Words of the Jungle that I have taught thee this day.”
“Master Words for which people?” said Mowgli, delighted to show off. “The jungle has many tongues. I know them all.”
“A little thou knowest, but not much. See, O Bagheera, they never thank their teacher. Not one small wolfling has ever come back to thank old Baloo for his teachings. Say the word for the Hunting-People, then — great scholar.”
There was the briefest mention of fire in the previous post, but much more about the other three elements. Why?
Deborah Lipp notes in her The Way of Four Spellbook (Llewellyn, 2006):
Fire has always been set apart from the other elements, because Fire alone has no natural home on the earth; Air has the sky, Water the sea, and Earth the land, but only Fire stands apart from geography. In nature, Fire is the outsider; it is out of control, and it conforms to no known rules (pg. 10).
Now Lipp’s observation both captures the nature of fire and also feeds our stereotypes about impulse, passion, strong feeling. How often we may long — or fear — to be out of control, fearless, spontaneous! Who hasn’t felt like an outsider at some point? Why would the Australian-inspired Outback Steakhouse restaurant chain opt for its advertising slogan “No rules. Just right”? Because there is indeed a rightness to fire — it can only flame up where there’s something to burn, after all. And most of us have been storing combustible material for a long time. How else to explain our explosions, outbursts, flares of temper? Even our language about these things draws on fire for metaphor.
Following the theme from the last post, we can speak of a fire baptism. You’re wholly in it when that happens. The full experience, nothing held back.
John the Baptist, Jesus’s precursor, explains to those asking, “I indeed baptize you in water … but he that cometh after me is mightier than I … he shall baptize you in the Holy Spirit and in fire”. We sense the power in fire, of all the elements closest in so many ways to Spirit. It can purify, transform, forge and anneal. Its extreme heat can also scorch, char, consume and destroy. Each element transforms its own way. “We didn’t start the fire”, sings Billy Joel. “It was always burning since the world’s been turning”. But he goes on: “We didn’t start the fire. No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it”. And sometimes we even try to “fight fire with fire”. Yet we also long for fire to kindle cold hearts, to heat a flagging will, to spark the spirit deepest in us. We yearn to be fire.
“O! for a muse of fire”, cries Shakespeare’s Chorus in the first line of Henry V, “that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention”. We long to blaze, because we feel in fire something native and free. We are both it and other, too, as with all the elements. “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire”, says Jose Luis Borges. The elements are natural sacraments, folds and garments for Spirit all around us. For fire, we light candles in so many traditions, for so many reasons, the flame cheering to the eye and heart.
I both am and am not fire. Self and other: the quest of our days, the distinction we cherish and also long to cast away. Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Jew, atheist, shaman, through all these experiences and intuitions we still ask ourselves, each other and the world: “What makes a good burn?”
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Maybe the purest ritual Druids and Christians might share is one which seeks not to fill our ears with answers, but that gives us space and silence to listen to and ponder the questions. In some ways, the long, slow burn of Spirit in us is fire in its most potent form of all.
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Beltane approaches, that festival of fire. The Edinburgh-based Beltane Fire Society celebrates 30 years this year of a dramatic festival of thousands, from 8:00 pm to 1:30 am. Here’s the “Drums of Beltane” subpage of the Society’s website. As the page notes,
Beltane may be known as a fire festival, but it may as well be considered to be a drum festival too. Drums are the beating heart of Beltane that create the rhythm of the festival, drive the procession forward, and soundtrack the changing seasons. They have been an integral part of Beltane since our tradition was first re-imagined on Calton Hill in 1988.
Looking for a fix of Beltane energy to get you launched? Here’s a video of the Drum Club which will be among the groups performing this year for the event. Just the first five minutes will give you a fine taste of Beltane fire in sound form. We can spark from anything, but sound and rhythm are powerful keys.
[This post begins a series of explorations of nine themes that can serve as sources of ritual and common ground for Druids and Christians. I’m setting forth on such a series for two reasons. First, reader interest spiked, with visitors from over a dozen countries in the 24 hours after “Jesus and Druidry, Part 3” was posted. Second, I include myself among the interested.
The great majority of us have Christian friends, relatives or co-workers. Also, many of us know Biblical stories and images, and count them as part of our “wisdom-store”. Some of us have also experienced the more toxic forms of institutional religion but nonetheless have managed to hold on to a love for the Light in its Christian garb.]
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“Image is more transformational than doctrine”.
As I started to draft a list of Druid-Christian themes, that message came through sharply. How to make generous use of imagery in helping to energize the transformations Druidry — and Christianity — can provide? John Muir writes, “The power of imagination makes us infinite”. I’d amend that: the potential in the wise use of imagination can reveal our limitlessness. Not as snappy, but more accurate, for me.
First on my list of image-themes is “trees”. As a primary Druid focus, trees also link to Christianity. One obvious example appears in the book of Genesis with its two trees in Eden, the tree of knowledge* and the tree of life. If Druids are tree-knowers and seekers of tree-wisdom, these two trees have something to teach.
arbor scientiae — tree of knowledge
One year as I read Genesis with my high school students in freshman English, a student quipped that the real problem was one of sequence. Adam and Eve simply ate from the wrong tree first. “What are we supposed to take away from this? Go for immortality, thenknowledge!” (The other order may leave you wise but dead.)
Wit can take you surprisingly far at times. Perhaps the serpent as well was mistaken in the advice he gave. Why no mention of the other tree? Was immortality in fact already an option at that point? After all, God never banned that second tree. Or did we need it, even then? Was that an early mystery? Isn’t life inherent in all we are and experience? We’ve all sensed the undying in us, even as the physical body faces all the many challenges that will one day wear it out, even as our beloved Druid trees must eventually fall.
We can also see in the two trees a kind of psychic split, perhaps — a split in us, in our consciousness. But together the two name a wholeness that Druidry and other traditions point us towards. The cycle of birth and death reveals an underlying energy or vitality — the thing that makes worlds possible, that greens (and reddens) them with life, with chlorophyll and hemoglobin. “From the One come Two; from the Two, Three; from the Three, the Ten Thousand Things”, says the Tao Te Ching.
A persistent Christian legend has it that the wood for the cross of the Crucifixion originates from the Tree of Knowledge, or in some variants of the story, from a tree that grew from seed that Adam’s third son Seth planted in his father’s corpse. A full circle of ritual story here, or better, a spiral: it’s a tree that stands at the center of the Christian drama. Literally, wood serving as the stage for the unfolding of the human experience of the loss of innocence that comes with maturation, and the return, for those willing to make the effort to learn and grow and change.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge is, after all, desirable, because it holds the power “to make one wise”, as the serpent tells Eve. Life (the Hebrew meaning of Eve) tells us as much.
Why not then a Druidic-Christian “Mass of the Holy Trees”?
“Tree and leaf, breath and fruit, wisdom and life — all these come from you …”
Bring branches and leaves, images of both cross and spiral, Brighid’s cross serving well for a combination of these. A cross — the quartered world of directions and physical energies, the elements, the cycle of death and life. Spiral — an image of eternity, of rebirth and continuity, the cycle continuing.
But wait … there’s more.
The book of Revelation gives us the image of heaven or eternity in the holy city, foursquare (four again!) and whole. And through it runs
… a river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the main street of the city. On either side of the river stood a tree of life, producing twelve kinds of fruit and yielding a fresh crop for each month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations (Rev. 22:1-2).
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations”: the tree of knowledge has merged with the tree of life — or rather there is no difference between them. All the healing we have sought in knowledge now issues from a double(d) tree — one on “both sides” of the river. And it is fruitful in every month, a cornucopia, a message that each month has its life and healing energy, freely given, whatever the apparent season. In the middle of a city, a human and humanly-shaped place, grows life in its most potent imaginal form as Tree, the world-tree, a worldwide image and cluster of stories.
Here are powerful images to unite Christian and Druid observance and practice. A second Druid-Christian theme is up next.
*Tree of Knowledge: the illustration comes from Ramon Llull’sArbre de Ciencia or Tree of Knowledge. Llull, aka Raymond Lully (1232-1315), was a renowned medieval writer and thinker, who studied both Latin and Arabic science and mathematics.
I want to do some thinking out loud here. Nothing new, since I do it frequently. But it’s an experiment with a more specific kind of thinking I share less often here, because for many people, negative experiences with Christianity raise painful associations and memories that make even a mention of Jesus or the long, rich, varied and potentially very useful Christian tradition anathema to them. So if you’re still deeply allergic and over-sensitized to some of the more toxic forms of religion, well, here’s your red flag. But if you choose to go forward, simply treat the following as another kind of practice, like tai chi or dancing when no one’s watching, or waving at the moon.
Try it out for what it’s worth, without preconceptions. If you need a prod, here’s one: “I can’t dance” doesn’t cut it. Everybody moves, and everybody can move rhythmically. That’s all that’s needed. The rest is mere practice and polish.
As a Druid I feel almost a compulsion to follow wherever the light leads. I’ve rarely been disappointed, which is why I keep doing it.
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One legacy of my Christian upbringing is a fascination with “wisdom from the borders.” Unlike my more fundamentalist cousins, my mother was drawn to Christian Science with its focus on healing, and my World War II vet father was a member of the “God made the world, I farm a small piece of it, I’m grateful for its seasons and gifts, and that’s already enough for me” school of deism. From that initial gift of my parents’ openness to possibility, I learned and grew the most, before I took other paths, through insights from the periphery, or even outside the official “party line,” of Evangelical Christianity, or “EC.”
EC is, after all, just one sub-branch of one faith, but it’s a sub-branch that sometimes gets a bad name for its often unreflective adherence to dogma, especially in the face of good counter-evidence. Because of that, it also gets a lot of press from agnostic and atheist strands in contemporary thought and journalism. One of the regrettable but understandable consequences of the debate is that many people write off a whole religion because one or two particular flavors of it that they happen to know or have experienced just make them gag. It’s a “baby with the bathwater” thang.
One of the EC dogmas that bothered me the most, from about the age of 8 or 9 onward, and that has set many other people’s teeth on edge as well, is what’s more recently been called “damnationism” — the apparent and deeply problematic need to condemn whole swaths of humanity to eternal torment because they don’t happen to believe the right things required by one stream of orthodoxy, all so we can hang with the sheep and not with the goats for the rest of time. Finally, some writers are even starting to call that out for what it is: a blasphemous perversion of an original truth.**
Hell, MI, 48169 — an actual place, population approx. 260, located 15 miles NW of Ann Arbor.
One of my favorite writers within the universalist stream of Christianity, which doesn’t clutch a self-righteous need to condemn everyone else but Christians to hell, is Thomas Talbott. Universalism can be conveniently summed up in just two words: love wins.
Talbott’s insights do come cloaked in evangelical language, because that’s his particular upbringing. But he looks far beyond the surface, like I hope you will, and like most people learn to do when they realize either a pretty or ugly face is often the least interesting and important part of a person.
Here’s an excerpt I want to work with, from Talbott’s fine book* The Inescapable Love of God:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad, and also one reason why God is able to bring redemptive good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves will in the end resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how God works with us as created rational agents. He permits us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and he then requires us to learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a source of revelation; they reveal sooner or later — in the next life, if not in this one — both the horror of separation from God and the bliss of union with him. And that is why the end is foreordained: all paths finally lead to the same destination, the end is reconciliation, though some are longer, windier, and a lot more painful than others.
When I read sound insights from the Wise working in other traditions that may ring notes that jar a little, I like to try out alternate versions, to see how they work when clothed in other terminology. How much of the wisdom survives the change? How much of the difficulty is merely semantics? Here are Talbott’s words again, re-garbed in non-theist language:
In fact, our bad choices almost never get us what we really want; this is part of what makes them bad for us, and also one reason why our subsequent experiences are able to bring good out of them. When we make a mess of our lives and our misery becomes more and more unbearable, the hell we thereby create for ourselves can eventually resolve the very ambiguity and shatter the very illusions that made the bad choices possible in the first place. That is how the patterns of the universe often respond to us as rational agents. They permit us to choose freely in the ambiguous contexts in which we first emerge as self-aware beings, and then let us learn from experience the hard lessons we sometimes need to learn in order to gain wisdom. So in that way, the consequences of our free choices, both the good ones and the bad ones, are a potential source of growth and discovery; they reveal both the suffering of separation from our own highest good and the bliss of heeding its shaping pattern.
That’s interesting to me. How much did I change? Well, “God” gets replaced with patterns that inhere in lived experience, and “redemption” becomes growth and increased insight. The universe becomes aware of itself in us and in other beings. Is that “true”? Well, let’s be Druidic about it and test it, for years if necessary, rather than bothering with any belief or disbelief about it before we even have a foundation of experience to reflect on. Whether the patterns of the universe tend towards love is an experiential question, and really not a matter that mere belief can adequately resolve either way. And for how many other questions like it is this also true?
These insights issue from what used to be called the “perennial tradition,” or the philosophia perennis, a well of wisdom common to the depths of all valid traditions, part of the heritage of humanity rather than the exclusive possession of any one culture or tradition. It’s also part of folk wisdom in the West that emerges in sayings like “what goes around comes around” and “what you do comes back to you.” The added insight here points to the value of “bad” experiences, just as useful — or misleading! — as the good ones. For ease and comfort can mislead us about the pain and suffering in the world, just as our own pain and suffering can blind us to the beauty and wonder and possibility around us. From all I’ve seen, life, fortunately, is bigger than either.
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One of the streams from the early days of the Druid revival and the writings of Iolo Morgannwg*** runs with a Welsh version of such wisdom, offering a vision of a cosmos in which all things move toward growth and increasing consciousness, over countless eons, through every imaginable form, and in every imaginable experience. In this conception, the universe is a flow of energies, and its current sweeps us/we ride it from Annwn (ah-noon) and Abred (ah-bred) to Gwynfyd (gwin-vid) and ultimately on to Ceugant (kye-gahnt), a kind of infinity. Eventually we all experience everything.
Unlike the Christian sense of redemption or heaven, you’ll note, these are simply points along the flow. Another way to see it: the mouth of the river as it enters the sea is not superior to its source in the springs on a distant hillside. All is flow. Things may slow down or speed up as they move along the river, adjusting to the current, to the shore, and to each other.
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I had the privilege this last Saturday to take part in an open discussion on the topic “Have You Had a Spiritual Experience?” Those who attended were mostly older than me. Graying or white hair framed almost every face as I looked around the circle of the dozen or so of us who attended. But when the question arose about how many of us kept to some kind of spiritual practice, every hand went up. I found this wonderfully inspiring.
The point that everyone wanted to tackle: what’s next? How do we work with spiritual truths, with the patterns of life we’ve all encountered, and continue to grow in wisdom and love?
Those questions also continue to drive me on my own path and underlie my explorations on this blog. Thank you to all who read this blog for joining me for a few minutes each week and for considering these things, too.
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*Talbott, Thomas. The Inescapable Love of God. 2nd ed. Cascade Books, 2014.
**Favager, David. Hell to Pay?: The Blasphemous Absurdity of Damnationism. Amazon Digital/Kindle, 2015.
***Iolo Morgannwg — from the foreword to the Sacred Text Archive to Morgannwg’s collection Barddas:
However, this is one of those visionary texts which is worth reading for its own merits, irrespective of whether it is ‘genuine’ or not. Taken at face value, the Barddas remains a fascinating text. It has resonances with the Upanishads, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry. The Bardic alphabet presented in the ‘Symbol’ section is completely invented, based on Runic and Ogham, and has utility as a magical alphabet. However it is about as genuine as the alphabets of J.R.R. Tolkien. The ‘Theology’ section appears to be based on Iolo’s peculiar Christian views (he described himself as a Unitarian Quaker). ‘Theology’ also contains a great number of Triads, some of which may be from authentic ancient Bardic lore. The ‘Wisdom’ section has a great deal of mythopoetic information, some of which is authentic, some not. The Barddas is great reading if you are at all interested in the ancient Druids, as long as you keep in mind the background of its creation.
With this post, A Druid Way marks its 4th anniversary — I started this blog on October 7, 2011.
I’m also committing to at least a weekly post each Wednesday. A hearty thank-you to you, readers of A Druid Way, for your encouragement and support over the past months and years!
This post and the next one pick up the theme of Arthurian myth and legend from the previous one. The “Matter of Britain” as it’s often called is an inexhaustible well of inspiration, of course. This time, however, I want to transition from King Arthur to his nephew Gawain and the Green Knight (and the Middle English poem by the same name), to the mysterious Lady that Gawain also encounters in between his meetings with her husband Bertilak, and more largely to the peculiar and delicious Medieval blend of Paganism and Christianity that surfaces in their story.
So what do we do until Arthur returns?
In the Arthurian peace and flowering of Britain which underlies much of the initial formation of the legend, the focus shifts from Arthur to his court, and more particularly to his knights and ladies, who leave Camelot to set off on their own adventures. A pattern to consider: first, achievement; but then, further exploration and spiritual challenge. Or the opposite — after a few iterations, it amounts to the same thing.
Round Table and vision of the Grail, from an illustrated manuscript, ca 1470, by Evrard d’Espinques.
After all, once Arthur wins through to his throne, marries, and begins to assemble his court, he himself can seem less interesting (at least until time whirls round again to the Battle of Camlann, his final and fatal engagement with his bastard son Mordred). So singers and storytellers started to look for adventure elsewhere, with knights inspired by Arthur’s example and by the fellowship of the Round Table. King and Queen on the throne, or knight on a noble/ hopeless/ mysterious/ romantic quest — it’s easy to see where the greatest dramatic potential lies.
The Medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sets forth one version of the story in 600-year-old English. The language is intermittently still quite comprehensible to us moderns, if you make some allowances for spelling (I’ve done very minimal editing):
Astrid Berges Frisbey as an archetypical young Guinevere in the upcoming (2016) film Knights of the Round Table: King Arthur.
“This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse” and “was cummen with knyghtes into the halle.” And there Guinevere rules beside him as queen, a Guinevere as yet untouched by the scandal of any affair with Lancelot, “full gay, graythed [arrayed] in the midst” of the noble gathering. And a more lovely lady, “sooth [truly] might no man say.” Here then are the archetypes, before they decline into stereotypes. Here are the originals, magical king and beautiful queen. Part of their appeal is to our own psyches, to the beauty and power we instinctively know both genders possess — or could possess, if only …
The story setting is the three-part holiday of Christmas — New Year’s — Epiphany, the ancient tradition — and ultimate source of the song — of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Midwinter, birth of the Son, rebirth of the sun, the new year at hand. The Court’s right in the middle of its fortnight of feasting. Shortly, it’s New Year’s Day. And as such gatherings and festivals and holidays so often do, this revel has already begun to spin off its own local customs. After all, when does your family open presents on a gift-giving holiday? And what rituals have you perhaps built around it? Or if not you, a relative or friend?
Not surprisingly, in Camelot it’s Arthur himself who starts it, ritualizing the festivities. “The kyng wold not ete til al were served.” It’s a gesture wholly in keeping with the holiday season of generosity and joy. And the king extends the ceremonial atmosphere still further, also refusing to eat before he hears a story: “he wold never ete upon such a dere [dear, special] day ere him devysed were of sum adventurus thyng an uncouthe tale …” Or until someone challenges one of his knights “to joyne with him in joustyng, in jeopardy to lay … life for life …”
And things Medieval and magical being what they are, if you’re Arthur — if you recognize and live from the throne of your spiritual sovereignty — sometimes the “uncouthe tales,” marvelous stories previously unknown — come to you.
The Green Knight, William O’Connor, 1996
Right in the midst, then, of all the noble knights and fair ladies, heaping platters and heavily laden tables, sprightly servants and bold banners, talk and revelry, the Green Knight suddenly barges in on horseback. For a moment he just sits his mount, framed by the main door, towering over everyone. The perfect Medieval photo op.
Huge and red-eyed and green is he indeed: “for wonder of his hue men had.” Likewise “his strayt cote” and “his hood bothe” and on his legs “hose of that same grene.” A marvel! The hair on his head, “the barres of his belt and other blythe stones,” even the steed he rides, “a grene hors grete and thikke” — everything’s green! In one hand he holds a branch of holly; in the other, an enormous axe.
Then he spurs into the great hall. “Where’s the governor of this gang?” he demands, haughtily. “To knightes he cast his eye.” For an instant — no surprise — silence greets him. “Each mon had marvel what it might mean” that man and horse both shone “grene as the grass, and grener it seemed.”
Green Man, Bamberg Cathedral, Bamberg, Germany, ca 1300s
Green can be unseely — Northern dialect for “unlucky, unholy.” Corpses and cheeses rot to green, metals like bronze corrode, swamps give off their ghostly phosphorence, moss and weed, creeping vines and algae, all overtake things each in their green fashion. Even the Devil himself gets rendered in green in more than one Medieval painting.
With modern commerce and ecology, green is almost wholly a good thing — not so in Medieval times. It represented a mixed bag of lust and youth (we can still be green with envy, too; and an untried youth is still sometimes called a “greenhorn”), nature and fertility, and early versions of the Green Man beloved of Pagans. Another post on this blog, about Beltane, also treats of greenness in some detail.
[Most clearly, perhaps, we see and hear and feel this enchanting but deeply ambiguous green in Dylan Thomas‘s wonderfully Bardic poem “Fern Hill” : “Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green” and later “I was green and carefree” and later still “And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman” and “it was air/And playing, lovely and watery/And fire green as grass” and then nearly done “And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows/In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs/Before the children green and golden/Follow him out of grace” and last of all “Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,/Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” A poem that doesn’t merely describe but evokes … Follow the link to the poem and read it aloud.]
To return to the Medieval poem: Arthur answers the arrogant Knight with courtesy — the Medieval cortaysye — bidding him join the feast and tell his errand later. It’s an age-old gesture of hospitality, one that dates back to Homer, the traditional and trusting host’s welcome to a stranger. Eat and drink first, and only then speak your will, or recount your story.
Still haughty, the Green Knight declares his nature means he has no intention of lingering. I come, he declares, because of the fame of Arthur’s realm: castle and court are called “the worthyest of the worldes kynde.” The axe I carry, he announces, is no threat. Look to the holly sprig. Be sure “bi the braunch I bere here that I pas in peace.” If I wished for war, I’ld have come fully armed. “But if thou be bold as all folk tellen, thou wil grant me goodly the game that I ask bi ryght.” A Christmas challenge: “I crave in this court a Crystemas gomen.”
Besides, if he were spoiling for a bout, he’d win easily, he boasts. All he sees on the benches around the hall are “berdless children.” But if anyone’s got the guts, “leap lightly to me and latch this weapon. I schall give him of my gifte this axe, to hondele as he likes. I quit-clayme it for ever — keep it as his own. And I shall stond him a stroke” and promise “the doom to deal him an other … and yet give him a respite, a twelve-month and a day.” And again we’re into magical territory, the “year and a day” of testing and challenge, mystery — and mastery — and cyclic completion.
The Knight taunts the company further, and when no one rises to accept the challenge, Arthur himself reaches for the axe. But his nephew Gawain intercedes and claims the right, pointing out that with warriors in the Court to uphold its honor and reputation, the king needn’t lower himself to accept such a challenge. Gawain reasons further with him: besides, as your nephew, if I die, the loss is less.
To make short work of the next few stanzas, Gawain readies the axe, the knight stands with neck bared to receive the keen edge, and Gawain gives him a fierce blow that lops off that green head. Through fat and flesh, the blade bites the floor. Blood spatters those nearest, and they kick at the head as it rolls past the benches.
The Knight, however, strides forward undaunted, retrieves his head, and turns back to his horse. “The brydel he cachches, steps into stirrup and strydes aloft, and his hede by the here in his hondes holdes.” And he speaks one last time: “On New Year’s morn, Gawain, come to the Green Chapel, I charge thee, to receive such a dint as thou hast dealt and now deserve …” And then, as British poet Simon Armitage* renders it in his fluent and lively translation, “So come, or be called a coward forever” (pg. 51)!
Knight, horse and now chapel — green and Christian mixed. The whole game’s unseely! The Knight departs, more food, drink and dancing displace everyone’s fears — except Gawain’s.
Thus the original anonymous Middle English poet closes this first of his four sections (here again is Armitage’s translation*): “But mind your mood, Gawain, keep blacker thoughts at bay, or lose this lethal game you’ve promised you will play” (pg. 53).
*Armitage, Simon. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007. (There are other good translations — notably one by J. R. R. Tolkien. But I like this one, partly because my high school seniors liked it when we read it in our British Lit. class, and also because it provides the Middle English text on the facing page, for linguistic nerds like me who enjoy fine language for its own sake. You can find it used and in paperback. Or get thee hence to thy local library.)
Greer, John Michael. The Gnostic Celtic Church: A Manual and Book of Liturgy. Everett, WA: Starseed Publications (Kindle)/Lorian Press (paper), 2013. NOTE: All quotations from Kindle version.
Quick Take:
A valuable resource for those wishing to explore a coherent and profound Druid theology and to develop or expand a solitary practice. Greer offers pointers, reflections, principles — and a detailed set of rites, visualizations and images emerging from both AODA Druidry and Gnostic-flavored Celtic Christian magic practice.
Expansive Take:
John Michael Greer
John Michael Greer continues to advance ideas and books that provoke and advocate thoughtful, viable alternatives to dysfunctional contemporary lifestyles and perspectives. The Gnostic Celtic Church takes its place among a growing and diverse body of work. Author of over thirty books, blogger (of the influential weekly Archdruid Report, among others), practicing magician, head of AODA (Ancient Order of Druids in America), “Green Wizard,” master conserver and longtime organic gardener, Greer wears lightly a number of hats that place him squarely in the ranks of people to read, consider, and take seriously, even if you find yourself, like I do, disagreeing from time to time with him or his perspectives. In that case, he can still help you clarify your stance and your beliefs simply by how he articulates the issues. In person (I met him at the 2012 East Coast Gathering), he is witty, articulate, widely informed, and quick to dispose of shoddy thinking. (As you can ascertain from the picture to the right, he’s also has acquired over the decades a decidedly Druidic beard …)
What all Gnostic traditions share, Greer notes, is that
personal religious experience is the goal that is set before each aspirant and the sole basis on which questions of a religious nature can be answered — certain teachings have been embraced as the core values from which the Gnostic Celtic Church as an organization derives its broad approach to spiritual issues. Those core teachings may be summarized in the words ‘Gnostic, Universalist, and Pelagian’ which are described in this book.
The Gnostic Celtic Church (GCC) may appear to step away from direct engagement with contemporary issues that have been the focus of Greer’s blog and recent books: peak oil, the decline of the West and its imperial overreach, and ways to begin laying the foundations and shaping a new, more balanced and truly green post-oil civilization that can arise over the next few centuries.
Instead of avoiding what amounts to an activist engagement, however, the book comes at these issues indirectly, outlining a set of core practices and perspectives for what AODA intends as “an independent sacramental church of nature spirituality.” The “independent sacramental movement ranks among the most promising stars now rising above the horizon of contemporary spirituality,” Greer observes in his introduction. Its freedom from the bonds of creed and doctrine has helped carry it to fresh insights and creativity, and deep applicability to the seeking that characterizes our era of “spiritual but not religious.”
What, you may be asking, does this have to do with Druidry? A lot. Or why would a Druid group include a “church” in the middle of its affairs? Read on, faithful explorer.
To examine in turn each of the three terms that Greer puts forth, the GCC is “Gnostic” because it affirms that “personal experience, rather than dogmatic belief or membership in an organization, can form the heart of a spiritual path.” This sensibility accords well with most flavors of Druidry today. While there is an admitted theme of ascetic dualism and world-hating in some currents of Gnostic thought, Greer provides useful context: “… this was only one aspect of a much more diverse and creative movement that also included visions of reality in which the oneness of the cosmos was a central theme, and in which the body and the material world were points of access to the divine rather than obstacles to its manifestation.”
The GCC is also “Universalist.” Among other early Church leaders, the great mystic Origen (184-254 CE) taught that “communion with spiritual realities is open to every being without exception, and that all beings — again, without exception — will eventually enter into harmony with the Divine.” The Universalist strain in Christianity is perhaps most familiar to most people today in the guise of Unitarian Universalism, a relatively recent (1961) merger of two distinct movements in Christianity. A Universalist strain has been “central to the contemporary Druid movement since the early days of the Druid Revival” (ca. 1600s) and “may be found in many alternative spiritual traditions of the West.” Both Gnostic and Universalist links existed within AODA Druidry when Greer was installed as Archdruid in 2003. For another perspective, check out John Beckett’s blog Under the Ancient Oaks: Musings of a Pagan, Druid and Unitarian Universalist.
“Pelagian,” the third term, is perhaps the least familiar. This Christian heresy took its name from Pelagius (circa 354-420 CE), a Welsh mystic who earned the ire of the Church hierarchy because of his emphasis on free will and human agency. Pelagius taught, as Greer briskly characterizes it, that “the salvation of each individual is entirely the result of that individual’s own efforts, and can neither be gained through anyone else’s merits or denied on account of anyone else’s failings.” Of course this teaching put Pelagius at odds with an orthodoxy committed to doctrines of original sin, predestination, and the atonement of Christ’s death on the cross, and to policing deviations from such creeds. A Pelagian tendency remains part of Celtic Christianity today.
Greer draws on the history of Revival (as opposed to Reconstructionist) Druidry and notes that the former places at its center some powerful perspectives on individual identity and destiny.
Each soul, according to the Druid Revival, has its own unique Awen [link: an excellent (bilingual) meditation on Awen by Philip Carr-Gomm]. To put the same concept in terms that might be slightly more familiar to today’s readers, each soul has its own purpose in existence, which differs from that of every other soul, and it has the capacity — and ultimately the necessity — of coming to know, understand, and fulfill this unique purpose.
None of this is intended to deny the value of community — one of the great strengths of contemporary Druidry. But we each have work to do that no one else can do for us. In keeping with the Druid love of threes, what we do with the opportunities and challenges of a life determines where we find ourselves in the three levels of existence: Abred, Gwynfydd and Ceugant. These are a Druid reflection of an ancient and pan-cultural perception of the cosmos. Greer delivers profound Druid theology as a potential, a map rather than a dogma. “It is at the human level that the individual Awen may become for the first time 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.” Thus while the Awen pervades the world, and carries all life, and lives, in its melody and inspiration, with plants and animals manifesting it as instinct and in their own inherent natures, what distinguishes humans is our capacity to know it for the first time — and to respond to it with choice and intention.
Thus, Greer outlines the simplicity and depth of the GCC:
… the rule of life that the clergy of the Gnostic Celtic Church are asked to embrace may be defined simply by these words: find and follow your own Awen. Taken as seriously as it should be — for there is no greater challenge for any human being than that of seeking his or her purpose of existence, and then placing the fulfillment of that purpose above other concerns as a guide to action and life — this is as demanding a rule as the strictest of traditional monastic vows. Following it requires attention to the highest and deepest dimensions of the inner life, and a willingness to ignore all the pressures of the ego and the world when those come into conflict, as they will, with the ripening personal knowledge of the path that Awen reveals.
All well and good, you say. The basis for a mature Druidry, far removed from the fluff-bunny Pagan caricatures that Druids still sometimes encounter. But what about down-to-earth stuff? You know: rituals, visualizations, prompts, ways to manifest in my own life whatever realities may lie behind all this high-sounding language.
Greer delivers here, too. Though membership and ordination in the GCC require a parallel membership in AODA, the practices, rites and visualizations are set forth for everyone in the remainder of the book. That’s as it should be: a spiritual path can take either or both of these forms — outward and organizational, inward and personal — without diminution. And those interested in ordination in other Gnostic organizations will probably already know of the variety of options available today. Greer notes,
Receiving holy orders in the GCC is not a conferral of authority over others in matters of faith or morals, or in any other context, but an acceptance of responsibility for oneself and one’s own life and work. The clergy of the GCC are encouraged to teach by example, and to offer advice or instruction in spiritual and other matters to those who may request such services, but it is no part of their duty to tell other people how to live their lives.
If, upon reflection, a candidate for holy orders comes to believe that it is essential to his or her Awen to claim religious or moral authority over others as part of the priestly role he or she seeks, he or she will be asked to seek ordination from some other source. If one who is already ordained or consecrated in the GCC comes to the same belief, in turn, it will be his or her duty — a duty that will if necessary be enforced by the Grand Grove [of AODA] — to leave the GCC and pursue another path.
The ceremonies, rituals and meditations include the Hermitage of the Heart, the Sphere of Protection, the Calling of the Elements, the Sphere of Light, a Solitary Grove Ceremony (all but the first derive from AODA practice), and a Communion Ceremony that ritualizes the “Doctrine of the One”:
I now invoke the mystery of communion, that common unity that unites all beings throughout the worlds. All beings spring from the One; by One are they sustained, and in One do they find their rest. One the hidden glory rising through the realms of Abred; One the manifest glory rejoicing in the realms of Gwynfydd; One the unsearchable glory beyond all created being in Ceugant; and these three are resumed in One. (Extend your hands over the altar in blessing. Say …)
Included also are seasonal celebrations of the four solar festivals, the two Equinoxes and Solstices, ordination ceremonies for priests, deacons and bishops, advice on personal altars, morning prayer, evening lection or reading, and visualizations that recall Golden Dawn visualizations of rays, colors and symbols.
At a little over 100 pages, this manual in its modest length belies the wealth of material it contains — plenty to provide a full Gnostic Celtic spiritual practice for the solitary, enough to help lead to a well-informed decision if ordination is the Call of your Awen, and material rich for inspiration and spiritual depth if you wish to adapt anything here to your own purposes.
It’s almost here: Halloween, All Hallows Eve, Samhain/Samhuinn, Dia del los Muertos, Day of the Dead. Whatever you call it, it’s one of the most unusual festivals in the calendar. In this post I want to take a different tack, exploring history at least somewhat removed from the usual Christian-Pagan fireworks that continue to pop off annually around this time. Because the Druid-pleasing answer* to “Is it Christian?” and “Is it Pagan?” is “Yes.” What matters more, I hope, is what that can mean for us today.
A recent (Tues., Oct 28) issue of the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper features an article on Halloween by British historian Ronald Hutton, who’s well known in Druid circles both for the quality and thorough documentation of his historical work and also his interest in Druidry. Among many other points, Hutton addresses the impression, widespread in Great Britain, that Halloween’s an import from the U.S. It’s not, of course, being instead as English as Monty Python and Earl Grey (and later, as Irish as the Famine, and Bailey’s Irish Cream). Hutton’s observations suggest a connection I’d like to make in this post, in keeping with this time of year. Hence my title, which will become clear in a moment. Just bear with me as I set the stage.
November, rather unimaginatively named “Ninth Month” (Latin novem), was called in Anglo-Saxon Blodmonath, the “blood month” — not for any “evil, nasty and occult” reasons beloved of today’s rabble-rousers, but for the simple fact this was the month for the slaughter of animals and preservation of meat for the coming season of darkness and cold.
Hutton observes that the ancestor to modern Halloween:
… was one of the greatest religious festivals of the ancient northern pagan year, and the obvious question is what rites were celebrated then.
The answer to that is that we have virtually no idea, because northern European pagans were illiterate, and no record remains of their ceremonies. The Anglo-Saxon name for the feast comes down to an agricultural reality, the need to slaughter the surplus livestock at this time and salt down their meat, because they could not be fed through the winter. A Christian monk, Bede, commented that the animals were dedicated to the gods when they were killed, but he did not appear to know how (and they would still have been eaten by people).
Hutton proceeds to examine how we can nevertheless reconstruct something of that time and its practices through careful research. As a Janus-faced holiday, Halloween marked the fullness and completion of the harvest and return home of warriors and travelers — a time to celebrate. It also marked the coming of the hardest season — winter: cold, dark, often miserable and hungry, and sometimes fatal. People then measured their ages not in years but in winters — how many you’d survived. Hutton eloquently conveys all this — do read his article if you have time.
And because so much of North America bears the imprint of English culture, I want to peer at one particular autumn, and the Hallowed Evening that year, in England 948 years ago. It’s 1066, a good year at the outset, as historian David Howarth paints it** in his wonderfully readable 1066: The Year of the Conquest. A year, strangely enough, both like and unlike our own experience so many generations later in 2014:
It was not a bad life to be English when the year began: it was the kind of life that many modern people vainly envy. For the most part, it was lived in little villages, and it was almost completely self-sufficient and self-supporting; the only things most villages had to buy or barter were salt and iron. Of course it was a life of endless labour, as any simple life must be, but the labour was rewarded: there was plenty to eat and drink, and plenty of space, and plenty of virgin land for ambitious people to clear and cultivate. And of course the life had sudden alarms and dangers, as human life has had in every age, but they were less frequent than they had ever been: old men remembered the ravages of marauding armies, but for two generations the land had been at peace. Peace had made it prosperous; taxes had been reduced; people had a chance to be a little richer than their forefathers. Even the weather was improving. For a long time, England had been wetter and colder than it normally is, but it was entering a phase which lasted two centuries when the summers were unusually warm and sunny and the winters mild. Crops flourished, and men and cattle throve. Most of the English were still very poor, but most of the comforts they lacked were things they had never heard of.
Howarth’s account continues, vivid in detail; he chooses the small town of Little Horstede near Hastings that dates from Saxon times for his focus, to examine the immediate and later impact of the Norman Conquest.
Harold in the Bayeux tapesty, with a hawk
By early autumn of the year, things still looked promising for the English. True, their king Harold Godwinson, new to the throne just that past January, faced a dispute with the Norman duke William over the succession after the late king Edward passed. But Harold was Edward’s brother-in-law, he apparently had the late king’s deathbed promise of the throne, he was unanimously elected by the Witan (the English council of royal advisers), and he was a crowned and fully invested king as far as the English were concerned.
He was also proving to be a competent leader and warrior. When an invading army of some 7000*** Norwegians under Harald Hardrada and Harold’s exiled brother Tostig landed in the Northeast of England, Harold rode north in force, covering the 180 miles between London and Yorkshire in just four days, meeting and defeating the Norwegians on September 25 in the Battle of Stamfordbridge. The peace that the English had enjoyed was tested, but as word spread of this English victory, you can imagine the relief and the sense that all might well continue as it had for decades now. The rich harvest of 1066 went forward, and plans could proceed for the annual All Hallows celebration.
Swithun (d. 862), bishop, later saint, of Winchester
England was by this time thoroughly Christian (see St. Swithun, left), though folk memories of older practices doubtless persisted, mixed with a fair helping of legend and fantasy and uneven religious instruction from the local priests. The Christian retrofitting of Pagan holidays, holy sites and practices is well documented, and hardly unique to Christianity — the same thing occurs worldwide as religions encounter each other and strive for dominance or co-exist to varying degrees. To name just a few examples, take for instance Roman polytheism and many faiths in the lands of the ancient Empire, with Roman priests adding one more deity statue to the crowd for each new god they encountered, including the current emperor of course (with most peoples acquiescing happily except for those odd Jewish monotheists and their bizarre prohibition against such images!); Buddhism and the emergence of the Bon faith in Tibet; Shinto and Buddhism in Japan; and mutual influence between Islam, Sufism, and older practices like the Yazidi faith in the Middle East.
In his Guardian article on Halloween, Hutton notes:
All Saints Day, Oswiecim, Poland
It is commonly asserted that the feast was the pagan festival of the dead. In reality feasts to commemorate the dead, where they can be found in ancient Europe, were celebrated by both pagans and early Christians, between March and May, as part of a spring cleaning to close off grieving and go forth into the new summer. On the other hand, the medieval Catholic church did gradually institute a mighty festival of the dead at this time of year, designating 1 November as the feast of All Saints or All Hallows, initially in honour of the early Christian martyrs, and 2 November as All Souls, on which people could pray for their dead friends and relatives. This was associated with the new doctrine of purgatory, by which most people went not straight to hell or heaven but a place of suffering between, where their sins were purged to fit them for heaven. It was also believed that the prayers of the living could lighten and shorten their trials, as could the intercession of saints (which is why it was good to have all of those at hand). The two new Christian feasts were, however, only developed between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, and started in Germanic not Celtic lands.
Yet all was not peace in England. The triumph that was the Battle of Stamfordbridge proved short-lived. Disturbing rumors kept arriving of William assembling an army of invasion across the English Channel on the shores of Normandy, in fact ever since January when Harold received the crown. The English king began preparations for defense. Yet as the days and months passed, and the good weather for such crossings steadily diminished as all of September and then early October came and went without incident, most people began to relax. England would enjoy a breathing space for this winter at least. Whatever might happen next spring, this late in the year no one chanced the storms, fog and rough water, least of all a large army that would have to arrive by boat.
Yet William and his invasion force did just that. After weeks of bad weather, the wind finally shifted to favor the Norman leader, and he and his men set sail on September 27. When word came to the English king of the Norman landing, with ships and troops on the southern shore of England, king Harold and company rode back south, already weary from one major battle, right into another.
Careful excavation, study of contemporary accounts, and site visits mean that resources like the Eyewitness to History website can give us a portrait like this:
Harold rushed his army south and planted his battle standards atop a knoll some five miles from Hastings. During the early morning of the next day, October 14, Harold’s army watched as a long column of Norman warriors marched to the base of the hill and formed a battle line. Separated by a few hundred yards, the lines of the two armies traded taunts and insults. At a signal, the Norman archers took their position at the front of the line. The English at the top of the hill responded by raising their shields above their heads forming a shield-wall to protect them from the rain of arrows. The battle was joined.
Contemporary accounts record how the two armies fought all day, until Harold was dispatched with an arrow through one eye. Shortly after that, the disabled king was cut down by Norman warriors, and England’s fate turned.
Years later the Bayeux Tapestry commemorated a version of the event. But of course at the time there was no Twitter feed, no broadcast of news minutes after it happened by correspondents on the scene. No Fox News and CNN to digest and sort through the implications according to the politics of the day. Word of the battle and what it might mean would take weeks to spread, rippling northward from the coast where the first battles took place. For much of England, the Hallowed Evening, the All Saints Day of 1066 came and went without change.
At this distance, and without knowing the details, most of us may naturally have the impression Hastings was decisive. King Harold dead, battle won, QED. From there, we assume, William advanced toward London, accepted the grudging fealty of a defeated people, and after maybe quelling a few sparks of resistance or rebellion, took firm control of the throne and nation and ruled for the next 21 years, until his death in 1087.
Except not. True, William was crowned king in Westminster on Christmas Day 1066. But the following years brought their own troubles for the Norman king. Here’s the Wikipedia version (accessed 10/30/14; endnotes deleted):
Despite the submission of the English nobles, resistance continued for several years. William left control of England in the hands of his half-brother Odo and one of his closest supporters, William FitzOsbern.In 1067 rebels in Kent launched an unsuccessful attack on Dover Castle in combination with Eustace II of Boulogne. The Shropshire landowner Eadric the Wild, in alliance with the Welsh rulers of Gwynedd and Powys, raised a revolt in western Mercia, fighting Norman forces based in Hereford. These events forced William to return to England at the end of 1067. In 1068 William besieged rebels in Exeter, including Harold’s mother Gytha, and after suffering heavy losses managed to negotiate the town’s surrender. In May, William’s wife Matilda was crowned queen at Westminster, an important symbol of William’s growing international stature. Later in the year Edwin and Morcar raised a revolt in Mercia with Welsh assistance, while Gospatric, the newly appointed Earl of Northumbria, led a rising in Northumbria, which had not yet been occupied by the Normans. These rebellions rapidly collapsed as William moved against them, building castles and installing garrisons as he had already done in the south. Edwin and Morcar again submitted, while Gospatric fled to Scotland, as did Edgar the Ætheling and his family, who may have been involved in these revolts. Meanwhile Harold’s sons, who had taken refuge in Ireland, raided Somerset, Devon and Cornwall from the sea.
Pacification, oddly enough, usually involves violence.
Ideologies and politics trouble us this Halloween just as they did 948 years ago, on a misty green island off the continent of western Europe.
Centuries later, as blended Norman and English cultures formed a new unity, the Protestant Reformation which swept much of Great Britain blotted out the doctrine of purgatory and the practice of prayer for saintly intercession. But as Hutton notes, Halloween “survived in its old form in Ireland, both as the Catholic feast of saints and souls and a great seasonal festival, and massive Irish emigration to America in the 19th century took it over there.”
In fact, having made this a citation-heavy post anyway, I’ll give Hutton nearly the last word, which is also his last word in his article:
In the 20th century [Halloween] developed into a national festivity for Americans, retaining the old custom of dressing up to mock powers of dark, cold and death, and a transforming one by which poor people went door to door to beg for food for a feast of their own, morphing again into the children’s one of trick or treat. By the 1980s this was causing some American evangelical Christians to condemn the festival as a glorification of the powers of evil (thus missing all its historical associations), and both the celebrations and condemnations have spilled over to Britain.
On the whole, though, the ancient feast of Winter’s Eve has regained its ancient character, as a dual time of fun and festivity, and of confrontation of the fears and discomforts inherent in life, and embodied especially in northern latitudes by the season of cold and dark.
There’s a worthwhile Conquest. “Is it Pagan?” “Is it Christian?” Let’s ask “Is it holy?”
*Rather than dualities and polar opposites, ternaries and triples permeate Druidry. As J. M. Greer observes,
Can anything as useful be done with the three elements of Iolo’s Druid philosophy, or for that matter with the four medieval or five Chinese elements?
Nwyfre, gwyar, and calas make poor guides to physics or chemistry, to be sure. Their usefulness lies elsewhere. Like other traditional elemental systems, the three Druid elements make sense of patterns throughout the universe of our experience. Tools for thinking, their power lies in their ability to point the mind toward insights and sidestep common mistakes.
Take the habit, almost universal nowadays, of thinking about the universe purely in terms of physical matter and energy. This works fairly well when applied in certain limited fields, but it works very badly when applied to human beings and other living things. Time and again, well-intentioned experts using the best tools science has to offer have tried to tackle problems outside the laboratory and failed abjectly. Rational architecture and urban planning, scientific agriculture and forestry, and innovative schemes for education and social reform often cause many more problems than they solve, and fail to yield the results predicted by theory.
Why? The theoreticians thought only of gwyar and calas, the elements of change and stability, expressed here as energy and matter. They left something out of the equation: nwyfre, the subtle element of life, feeling, and awareness. They forgot that any change they made would cause living things to respond creatively with unpredictable changes of their own.
In every situation, all three elements need to be taken into account. They can be used almost as a checklist. What is the thing you’re considering, what does it do, and what does it mean? What will stay the same, what will change, and what will respond to the change with changes of its own? This sort of thinking is one of the secrets of the Druid elements.
**Howarth, David. 1066: The Year of the Conquest. Penguin Books, 1981, pgs. 11-12.
***A conservative figure — estimates range as high as 9000.
Some of you may recall a minor kerfluffle from the Christian Right a decade or so ago, when then Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams joined the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards and appeared in — gasp! — “pagan” Druid robes and hood. One of the many ironies of that moment and others’ reactions to it is that of all Druid groups, the Welsh Gorsedd is among the most secular and the least woo-woo (a highly technical sociological term).
So here’s a worthy sequel: an excerpt from a 2009 lecture Williams gave titled “The Climate Crisis — a Christian Response.” During his talk he offers Druidic perspectives:
I once suggested that one necessary contribution to a better awareness of these issues was to make sure we went out of doors in the wet from time to time (a suitable lesson from Noah…), and – if we haven’t got gardens of our own – make sure we took opportunities of watching the changing of the seasons on the earth’s surface. This may seem trivial compared with the high drama of ‘saving the world’; but if this analysis is correct, our underlying problem is being ‘dissociated’, and we ought to be asking constantly how we restore a sense of association with the material place and time and climate we inhabit and are part of.
A transcript appears on the link page — it’s worth skimming for additional insights like this, a thoughtful and mature Christian grappling with the same realities we all face, and feeling his way into a diagnosis that accords with earth-centered insights and experiences — one that also doesn’t deny Christian wisdom either.
Many spiritual and religious traditions feature a special language used for ritual purposes. The most visible example in the West is Latin. The Latin Mass remains popular, and though the mid-1960s reforms of Vatican II allowed the use of local vernacular languages for worship, they never prohibited Latin. For some Catholics, the use of vernacular reduced the mystery, the beauty and ultimately, in some sense, the sacredness of the rites. If you visit an Orthodox Christian or Jewish service, you may encounter other languages. Within an hour’s drive of my house in southern Vermont, you can encounter Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic and Tibetan used in prayer and ritual.
Language as Sacrament
The heightened language characteristic of ritual, such as prayer and chant, can be a powerful shaper of consciousness. The 5-minute VedicSanskrit video below can begin to approximate for one watching it a worship experience of sound and image and sensory engagement that transcends mere linguistic meaning. The rhythmic chanting, the ritual fire, the sacrificial gathering, the flowers and other sacred offerings, the memory of past rituals, the complex network of many kinds of meaning all join to form a potentially powerful ritual experience. What the ritual “means” is only partly mediated by the significance of the words. Language used in ritual in such ways transcends verbal meaning and becomes Word — sacrament as language, language as sacrament — a way of manifesting, expressing, reaching, participating in the holy.
And depending on your age and attention at the time, you may recall the renewed popularity of Gregorian chant starting two decades ago in 1994, starting with the simply-titled Chant, a collection by a group of Benedictines.
Issues with Ritual Language
One great challenge is to keep ritual and worship accessible. Does the experience of mystery and holiness need, or benefit from, the aid of a special ritual language? Do mystery and holiness deserve such language as one sign of respect we can offer? Should we expect to learn a new language, or special form of our own language, as part of our dedication and worship? Is hearing and being sacramentally influenced by the language enough, even if we don’t “understand” it? These aren’t always easy questions to answer.
“The King’s English”
For English-speaking Christians and for educated speakers of English in general, the King James Bible* continues to exert remarkable influence more than 400 years after its publication in 1611. What is now the early modern English grammar and vocabulary of Elizabethan England, in the minds of many, contribute to the “majesty of the language,” setting it apart from daily speech in powerful and useful ways. Think of the Lord’s Prayer, with its “thy” and “thine” and “lead us not”: the rhythms of liturgical — in this case, older — English are part of modern Christian worship for many, though more recent translations have also made their way into common use. A surprising number of people make decisions on which religious community to join on the basis of what language(s) are, or aren’t, used in worship.
Druid and Pagan Practice
When it comes to Druid practice (and Pagan practice more generally), attitudes toward special language, like attitudes towards much else, vary considerably. Some find anything that excludes full participation in ritual to be an unnecessary obstacle to be avoided. Of course, the same argument can be made for almost any aspect of Druid practice, or spiritual practice in general. Does the form of any rite inevitably exclude, if it doesn’t speak to all potential participants? If I consider my individual practice, it thrives in part because of improvisation, personal preference and spontaneity. It’s tailor-made for me, open to inspiration at the moment, though still shaped by group experience and the forms of OBOD ritual I have both studied and participated in. Is that exclusionary?
Ritual Primers
Unless they’re Catholic or particularly “high”-church Anglican/Episcopalian, many Westerners, including aspiring Druids, are often unacquainted with ritual. What is it? Why do it? How should or can you do it? What options are there? ADF offers some helpful guidance about ritual more generally in their Druid Ritual Primer page. The observations there are well worth reflecting on, if only to clarify your own sensibility and ideas. To sum up the first part all too quickly: Anyone can worship without clergy. That said, clergy often are the ones who show up! In a world of time and space, ritual has basic limits, like size and start time. Ignore them and the ritual fails, at least for you. Change, even or especially in ritual, is good and healthy. However, “With all this change everyone must still be on the same sheet of music.” As with so much else, what you get from ritual depends on what you give. And finally, people can and will make mistakes. In other words, there’s no “perfect” ritual — or perfect ritualists, either.
(Re)Inventing Ritual Wheels
Let me cite another specific example for illustration, to get at some of these issues in a slightly different way. In the recent Druidcast 82 interview, host Damh the Bard interviews OBOD’s Chosen Chief, Philip Carr-Gomm, who notes that some OBOD-trained Druids seem compelled to write their own liturgies rather than use OBOD rites and language. While he notes that “hiving off” from an existing group is natural and healthy, he asks why we shouldn’t retain beautiful language where it already exists. He also observes that Druidry appeals to many because it coincides with a widespread human tendency in this present period to seek out simplicity. This quest for simplicity has ritual consequences, one of which is that such Druidry can also help to heal the Pagan and Non-Pagan divide by not excluding the Christian Druid or Buddhist Druid, who can join rituals and rub shoulders with their “hard polytheist” and atheist brothers and sisters. (Yes, more exclusionary forms of Druidry do exist, as they do in any human endeavor, but thankfully they aren’t the mainstream.)
About this attitude towards what in other posts I’ve termed OGRELD, a belief in “One Genuine Real Live Druidry,” Carr-Gomm notes, “The idea that you can’t mix practices from different sources or traditions comes from an erroneous idea of purity.” Yes, we should be mindful of cultural appropriation. Of course, as he continues, “Every path is a mixture already … To quote Ronald Hutton, mention purity and ‘you can hear the sound of jackboots and smell the disinfectant.'” An obsession with that elusive One Genuine Real Live Whatever often misses present possibilities for some mythical, fundamentalist Other-time Neverland and Perfect Practice Pleasing to The Powers-That-Be. That said, “there arecertain combinations that don’t work.” But these are better found out in practice than prescribed (or proscribed) up front, out of dogma rather than experience. In Druidry there’s a “recognition that there is an essence that we share,” which includes a common core of practices and values.
As a result, to give another instance, Carr-Gomm says, “If you take Druidry and Wicca, some people love to combine them and find they fit rather well together,” resulting in practices like Druidcraft. After all, boxes are for things, not people. Damh the Bard concurs at that point in the interview, asserting that, “To say you can’t [mix or combine elements] is a fake boundary.”
Yet facing this openness and Universalist tendency in much modern Druidry is the challenge of particularity. When I practice Druidry, it’s myexperience last week, yesterday and tomorrow of the smell of sage smoke, the taste of mead, wine or apple juice, the sounds of drums, song, chant, the feel of wind or sun or rain on my face, the presence of others or Others, Spirit, awen, the god(s) in the rite. The Druid order ADF, after all, is named Ár nDraíocht Féin — the three initials often rendered in English as “A Druid Fellowship” but literally meaning “Our Own Druidry” in Gaelic.
A Human Undersong
Where to go from here? Carr-Gomm notes what Henry David Thoreau called an “undersong” inside all of us, underlying experience. “We sense intuitively that there’s this undersong,” says Carr-Gomm. “It’s your song, inside you. The Order and the course and the trainings [of groups like OBOD] — it’s all about helping you to find that song. It’s universal.” As humans we usually strive to increase such access-points to the universal whenever historical, political and cultural conditions are favorable, as they have been for the last several decades in the West.
Paradoxes of Particularity
Yet the point remains that each of us finds such access in the particulars of our experience. (Christians call it the “scandal of particularity”; in their case, the difficulty of their doctrine that one being, Jesus, is the sole saviour for all people — the single manifestation of the divine available to us.**) And the use of heightened ritual language can be one of those “particulars,” a doorway that can also admittedly exclude, an especially powerful access point, because even ordinary language mediates so much human reality. We quite literally say who and what we are. The stroke victim who cannot speak or speaks only with difficulty, the aphasic, the abused and isolated child who never acquires language beyond rudimentary words or gestures, the foreigner who never learns the local tongue — all demonstrate the degree to which the presence or absence of language enfolds us in or excludes us from human community and culture. And that includes spirituality, where — side by side with art and music — we are at our most human in every sense.
In the second post in this series, I’ll shift modes, moving from the context I’ve begun to outline here, and look at some specific candidates for a DRL — a Druidic Ritual Language.
*Go here for a higher-resolution image of the title page of the first King James Bible pictured above.
**In a 2012 post, Patheos blogger Tim Suttle quotes Franciscan friar and Father Richard Rohr at length on the force of particularity in a Christian context. If Christian imagery and language still work for you at all, you may find his words useful and inspiring. Wonder is at the heart of it. Here Rohr talks about Christmas, incarnation and access to the divine in Christian terms, but pointing to an encounter with the holy — the transforming experience behind why people seek out the holy in the first place:
A human woman is the mother of God, and God is the son of a human mother!
Do we have any idea what this sentence means, or what it might imply? Is it really true? If it is, then we are living in an entirely different universe than we imagine, or even can imagine. If the major division between Creator and creature can be overcome, then all others can be overcome too. To paraphrase Oswald Chambers “this is a truth that dumbly struggles in us for utterance!” It is too much to be true and too good to be true. So we can only resort to metaphors, images, poets, music, and artists of every stripe.
I have long felt that Christmas is a feast which is largely celebrating humanity’s unconscious desire and goal. Its meaning is too much for the rational mind to process, so God graciously puts this Big Truth on a small stage so that we can wrap our mind and heart around it over time. No philosopher would dare to imagine “the materialization of God,” so we are just presented with a very human image of a poor woman and her husband with a newly born child. (I am told that the Madonna is by far the most painted image in Western civilization. It heals all mothers and all children of mothers, if we can only look deeply and softly.)
Pope Benedict, who addressed 250 artists in the Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo’s half-naked and often grotesque images, said quite brilliantly, “An essential function of genuine beauty is that it gives humanity a healthy shock!” And then he went on to quote Simone Weil who said that “Beauty is the experimental proof that incarnation is in fact possible.” Today is our beautiful feast of a possible and even probable Incarnation!
If there is one moment of beauty, then beauty can indeed exist on this earth. If there is one true moment of full Incarnation, then why not Incarnation everywhere? The beauty of this day is enough healthy shock for a lifetime, which leaves us all dumbly struggling for utterance.
But what of the Galilean Rabbi himself? Enough about trends, which I said last time I wasn’t really interested in. We may forget that Jesus is a common enough religious name of the time — a version of Joshua — “God saves.” (It’s a name still popular today among Hispanics.) Thirty, and he’s still not married. A disappointment to his culture, his family. After all, both count immortality at least in part through heirs and bloodlines. His mother tries to understand, received a sign when she conceived him, has her suspicions and hopes.
Reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem
An itinerant teacher and preacher, one of many, traveling the countryside. On festival days, when he can, like many of his countrymen, he visits the great Temple in Jerusalem. A short career: just a few years. A group of followers who scatter at his death, denying him repeatedly. A promising life, cut short by an ill-timed visit to the capital. The one who betrays him comes from among his own followers. Roman overlords, touchy at the major festival of Passover, the city bulging with visitors and pilgrims, a powder-keg, awaiting a spark to flame into chaos. A summary arrest and trial for the young Rabbi, followed by an ignominious and agonizing death.
Except unlike so many other such preachers, after his death Jesus is not forgotten, is eventually deified, gets elevated to membership in the theologically-problematic Trinity that Christians insist isn’t polytheistic. (If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck …) What was it about him that came across as godlike?
As with other spiritual teachers, we can see his divine intoxication ebbing and flowing, peaking and falling away again, a common enough human phenomenon. Most of us have known a peak experience at least once; we’ve also sadly watched it slip away.
At times Jesus is a poor Rabbi working for justice and compassion, firmly ensconced in the tangle that is 1st century Judea, with its liberal agnostic Sadducees, conservative legalistic Pharisees and radical Zealots. Israel, a stand-out nation, with its peculiar and demanding monotheism, an island of faith and practice in a sea of surrounding nations with their many gods. A politically contentious region, one the Romans occupy, “pacifying” it in typically straightforward Roman style, with local career politicians like Pilate. The Romans crucify troublemakers, tax the province for whatever they can squeeze out of it, and garrison it as a staging point for patrolling other legs of an Empire increasingly wobbly and quarrelsome and groping towards revolt.
More and more, this Rabbi draws a crowd when he stops to preach. He’s a vivid speaker, his rural Galilean-accented Aramaic familiar to his audience. He’s one of us, Joseph’s son. Did you hear what he said earlier today, last night, a week ago? Almost always something memorable.
Show me a coin, he asks those gathered around him one day. A natural teacher, using whatever’s on hand to make a point.
Whose image appears on it? he asks them now.
It’s Caesar’s, they answer.
Exactly so, he says. Distinguish rightly what goes where. The coin, the tax, that goes to Caesar. The divine , however, requires something different.
Like what? his listeners wonder.
Good master, somebody else asks him, intent on his own issues. What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?
Don’t call me “good,” the Rabbi replies, after a pause. I’m not. Call nobody good, except God. And that’s not me, not me, not me the silence echoes, in case anyone was wondering.
The fig tree, when he reaches it, has no figs. Of course not — it’s not the season for them. Jesus, hungry, tired and discouraged, curses it anyway, goes to bed with an empty belly. Real son of God material. Not likely. Word of it gets written down, too.
I’ve been with you this long and you still don’t get it? he scolds his closest followers one day. How long must I endure you? Almost losing it. In public. Another low point. Another note that rings humanly true.
Sea of Galilee
That’s “this-world” Jesus. He sweats in the Mediterranean summers, shivers in the damp, rainy winters. Cries when his friend Lazarus dies. Bellows at the merchants and money-changers in the Temple.
Sheep and goats wander the roads as he walks from town to town. It’s hot and dusty, it’s raining, it’s stormy. The Sea of Galilee can turn to whitecaps in a minute, threatening the small fishing boats that work its coves and depths. Workmen hail him, stop and question him, ponder his words. His own people. Fishermen, slaves, tax collectors, soldiers, prostitutes, farmers, widows, children. The sick, the street people, the lepers and beggars, the homeless. His message first of all must reach them, before anybody else. They need it so badly.
But at times we hear a different voice, sense a very different presence. The Otherworld vivid, all around. (“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes …” writes Elizabeth Barrett Browning, nineteen centuries later.) The Kingdom, here, now. This Jesus, so drenched with the divine that the rocks sing to him with it. He can be wrapped in a shining cloud and commune with the ex-carnate Moses. Perceive the spiritual temptations of worldly power, available to anyone who begins to walk into the heart of the Great Mystery. He can say, Satan! but he’s really talking to his own human capacity to choose for good or bad. The power that goes with deep awareness and choice.
This Jesus says The divineand I are one. I came to testify to the truth. If you see me, you see the face of the divine. I came so that people can have more abundant lives. I came for you all. And you are all my sisters and brothers. All children of God, all walking the fields and forests of the Kingdom.
This Jesus knows the divine is all-present, that the flow of Spirit sustains everything, that there’s always enough.
How to capture this inner truth in stories? A huge crowd, fed, with left-overs. A leper healed. A poor woman looking for love or a livelihood, taken in adultery or prostitution, forgiven — and no one to say “But wait!” or argue the letter of the law with the Rabbi with the shining eyes. The accusing crowd, unsettled, disperses.
The hick Rabbi, dying a criminal’s death on the cross, thieves and murderers on both sides pf him, gasping as he asks God to forgive those who nailed him up to die a slow death. The palpable sense of his presence after his death.
His consciousness rising and falling in its breadth of awareness of its own divine potential, its union with all things, its kinship with mustard seeds, with the birds of heaven and the foxes of earth and trees that clap their hands. What could be more human? What could be more Druidic?
The world has three levels: heaven, earth and hell. The leaven is divided into three portions and hidden for a time. All things will be revealed. The divine is both different and the same, yesterday, today and forever. Ask, seek, knock. Druidic triads everywhere, once we start looking. No, the carpenter’s son wasn’t necessarily a Druid. No, Jesus maybe didn’t “in ancient time walk upon on England’s mountains green,” as Blake imagines it in his poem “Jerusalem.” Another story to convey the sense of the divine, here. No reason to claim kinship where it doesn’t exist. But every reason to celebrate links and commonalities and similar wisdom, wherever, whenever they appear.
A man who touches the divine and tries to express it in a culture steeped in a monotheistic tradition of necessity will draw on monotheist images and tropes. How else to express his sense of profound communion, except by an image of a family, father and children? How else to communicate the sense of despair and agony of being cut off from every hope and healing, except by images of lasting hell? How else to convey the divine promise rich inside every breathing moment, except by saying something like It’s the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom?
The gift, already given, given every day, dawn, noon and sunset. The divine never offers less than all. We strain to catch and carry the ocean in a coffee mug. We gaze at dawn and can never hold all that light. We go for water, and it changes to wine, intoxicatingly alive. Each spring, the world practices resurrection. And yes, even the rocks are singing.
I’m off to MAGUS, the Mid-Atlantic Gathering, in a few weeks. For those who can manage to attend, Gatherings can give a taste of true community. For Christians, ideally the power of baptism clothes everyone in unity: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:29). A deeper spiritual union does connect people who outwardly appear different, talk differently, live differently. It’s a measure of our struggle how often we lose sight of this profound truth.
There are many ways to work with assertions like these. We know all too well, on the evidence of centuries, what literalism offers and where it leads. Political religion — the system of creeds and salutes, conformities and genuflections to whoever holds the stick — exists in every culture. To pick just one blatant and current example, North Korea has made a religion and cult of the Kim family. Metaphorical understandings, because they grant freedom to each person, have always been suspect in some quarters. “Power-over” dies hard, keeps dying, never quite dies out.
Bring branches and leaves, images of both cross and spiral, Brighid’s cross serving well for a combination of these. A cross — the quartered world of directions and physical energies, the elements, the cycle of death and life. Spiral — an image of eternity, of rebirth and continuity, the cycle continuing.
A Druid Way 
