Druid Mysteries

by Philip Carr-Gomm

  The outer forms of Druid practice vary and are not mandatory – some groups wear robes, some do not. Some might hold separate grove meetings for each of the three grades of Bard, Ovate and Druid, others not. Some might stick precisely to inherited rituals and ways of working, others might be more eclectic or experimental. Some might practise a combination of Druidry and Wicca – Druidcraft – and others might not. Groves can be made up of just a few members, or may number thirty or more, and although certain members will take responsibility for organising aspects of the grove’s activities, no one person acts like a priest or high priestess.

  It may seem incredible that a spirituality which can be practised in so many different ways – with such little conformity and so few overtly stated beliefs – can flourish. And yet it does. Part of the reason for this lies in the fact that Druidry is rooted in the imagery and inspiration of the natural world – it speaks of the mystery of life itself as it shows itself in the windswept sky, the gnarled oak, the sparkling wave. And another part of the reason lies in the fact that it is also a manifestation of the Western mystery tradition particularly suited to the world’s needs today. It draws on the heritage not only of the pre-Christian Celtic world, but also upon the inspirations of Pythagoreanism, the Egyptian and classical mystery cults, the worlds of alchemy and hermetic magic and the work of countless writers and scholars. But it does this in a non-dogmatic way that honours each individual’s unique needs and abilities.

  Incredibly, miraculously almost, it manages to offer a philosophy, a spirituality, a way of life, a religion to some, that is also at the same time a living mystery school whose roots and inspiration we can trace far back into the distant past.

  EXERCISE

  * * *

  Before we begin to explore these roots and the practice of Druidry, ask yourself which of the loves listed above calls to you the most. Try to do this spontaneously, without thinking so much that the rational mind gets in the way. Let your heart, your feelings and your intuition guide you as you read through the list again. The love or loves that have the strongest appeal may well show you the gateway through which you might want to approach Druidry.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE SEVEN GIFTS OF DRUIDRY AND ITS ORIGINS IN THE WORLD OF TIME

  It is often said – usually by those who have not studied the subject – that the worldview and philosophy of the old Druids is lost beyond recall . . . [but] it is by no means impossible to regain in the present age the spirit of original Druid philosophy. It is essential indeed to do so; for a revival of the old Druidic way of thought, acknowledging the sanctity of the living earth and all its creatures, seems the only alternative to planetary dissolution.

  John Michell, Stonehenge

  TODAY OUR BIGGEST problem is that we have separated ourselves from Nature – so much so that there is a risk we may not survive as a species. We need philosophies, spiritualities, ideas that can help us get back in touch with nature again – our spirituality must become ecological. The Duke of Edinburgh, in a speech to a Washington conference on religion and ecology, controversially pointed to the direction in which we should look when he said: ‘It is now apparent that the ecological pragmatism of the so-called pagan religions . . . was a great deal more realistic in terms of conservation ethics than the more intellectual monotheistic philosophies of the revealed religions.’1

  It now seems that the Old Ways, reinterpreted for our times, can offer us the kind of spirituality that we need to heal the separation that has occurred between ourselves and our environment. Druidry is one such way, and although at first sight it might appear to be just an old curiosity, a quaint memory from the distant past, if we take the time to look at it more closely we will discover a treasure-chest just waiting to be opened. And in this chest we can find at least seven gifts that Druidry brings to our modern world:

  The first gift is a philosophy which emphasises the sacredness of all life, and our part in the great web of creation. It cares passionately about the preservation and protection of the environment, and offers a worldview which is ecological, geocentric, pragmatic, idealistic, spiritual and romantic. It does not separate spirit and matter – it offers a sensuous spirituality that celebrates physical life.

  The second gift puts us back in touch with nature with a set of practices that help us feel at one again with nature, our ancestors, our own bodies, and our sense of spirit, by working with plants, trees, animals, stones and ancestral stories. Eight seasonal celebrations help us attune to the natural cycle, and help us to structure our lives through the year, and to develop a sense of community with all living beings.

  The third gift brings healing with practices that promote healing and rejuvenation, using spiritual and physical methods in a holistic way to promote health and longevity.

  The fourth gift affirms our life as a journey with rites of passage: for the blessing and naming of children, for marriage, for death, and for other times of initiation, when it is helpful to mark our passage from one state to another ritually and symbolically.

  The fifth gift opens us to other realities with techniques for exploring other states of consciousness, other realities, the Otherworld. Some of these are also used by other spiritual traditions, and include meditation, visualisation, shamanic journeying, and the use of ceremony, music, chanting and sweathouses, but they are all grounded in specifically Celtic and Druidic imagery and tradition.

  The sixth gift develops our potential. Druidry as it is practised today offers a path of self-development that encourages our creative potential, our psychic and intuitive abilities, and fosters our intellectual and spiritual growth.

  The seventh gift is the gift of magic. Druidry teaches the art of how we can open to the magic of being alive, the art of how we can bring ideas into manifestation and the art of journeying in quest of wisdom, healing and inspiration.

  To begin our exploration of at least some of these gifts, let us look at where they come from. If you believe in the reality of the spiritual world, then it is easy to believe that the source of a spiritual tradition lies in that realm. Like a spring that emerges from an underground source, or a waterfall that cascades down a mountainside, a spiritual tradition enters into our limited world of time and space from another dimension – the Otherworld, as that spiritual realm that exists beyond the physical world is known in Druidry. It emerges from the timeless into time, and over the centuries different individuals and different groups of people have given expression to its guiding ideas.

  THE LOST WORLD OF ATLANTIS

  * * *

  Some people believe that the historical origins of Druidry lie in the lost world of Atlantis. Recent writers have suggested that when the ice sheets melted as the last great Ice Age came to an end about 12,000 years ago many great cities, and perhaps even civilisations, were destroyed as the sea rose dramatically. More and more submerged ruins are being discovered around the world from that or later inundations, which suggests that the myth of Atlantis may not be a myth after all. This also offers a convincing explanation of the origins of the many flood stories that exist in different cultures.2

  It has been considered unfashionable and overly romantic to believe that Druidry’s roots lie in Atlantis, but if present discoveries continue we may find that this is a perfectly logical hypothesis. If global warming continues and sea levels rise, parts of the earth will again be submerged, but future generations will hopefully be less likely to dismiss the evidence of cultures and ideas that flourished in a submerged London, Paris or New York.

  The founder of Anthroposophy,3 Rudolf Steiner, believed in an Atlantean origin for Druidry, and he used his clairvoyant powers to observe the events surrounding the fall of Atlantis and the migration of its sages east and westwards. Eleanor Merry’s The Flaming Door relates Steiner’s discoveries of the origins of Druidism, explaining that the magicians of Atlantis had discovered the secrets of nature and worked in tune with her powers. But some used these same powers for their own ends – to d
ominate and manipulate others. In talking of the struggle between these two groups, Merry says, ‘The War in Atlantis was the war of white against black magic – between those who saw in Nature the great Divine Mother of men and used her gifts for human welfare, and those who saw in Nature the satanic Temptress, offering dark dominion and cruel power.’4

  As catastrophe struck Atlantis the ‘baddies’ were engulfed as they tried to hold on to their temporal powers. The ‘goodies’, having greater gifts of foreknowledge and a deeper conviction in the supremacy of spiritual wealth over the material, journeyed both east and west. In the west they landed on the shores of America, in the east, on the shores of Ireland and the western coasts of Britain.

  Christine Hartley, drawing on the teachings of Dion Fortune’s Society of the Inner Light, suggests in The Western Mystery Tradition that ‘we, with our perhaps great inner knowledge, are content to take it that their [the Druids’] wisdom came with the basis of our mysteries from the great Temples of Atlantis’.5

  If we accept this theory of the origin of the early Druids, we are able to understand more readily the reason behind the number of startling similarities that exist between Native American and Druid teachings and practice, including the use of sacred circles and sweat-lodges, the honouring of the cardinal directions, a belief in animal- and spirit-guides, the use of birds’ feathers in ceremonial clothing and the adoption of specific animals as clan totems, or as personal or family names.

  There is, however, no evidence that points to the origin of Druidry stemming from Atlantis in the early literature, though floods do figure in the Celtic tradition, and in the medieval Welsh collection known as The Black Book of Camarthen, for example, a maiden called Mererid uncovers ‘the fountain of Venus’ having been raped by Seithennin. The water from the fountain then covers the land.

  There are stories of the submerged land of Lyonesse off the coast of Cornwall, and across the Channel in Brittany the story is told of the flooding of Ys. The king’s wicked daughter worked bad magic and, taking from her father’s neck the key of the dyke which protected Ys from the sea, succeeded in drowning both the kingdom and herself in the process.

  These tales, and certain of the early Grail stories, speak of the same events that were supposed to have occurred in Atlantis – a violation of nature resulting in the welling-up of waters which inundate the land. The rape of the maiden Mererid, for example, can be seen as a mythic image for the rape of nature engaged upon by the evil magicians of Atlantis. The fact that the rape releases uncontrollable waters is symbolically fitting – for it is male analytical consciousness untamed by union with the Feminine that exploits the land, and it is the avenging power of the Feminine, symbolised by the waters, which is obliged to submerge the unheeding Masculine. And it is strange to note how history is apparently about to repeat itself in our age, with the waters of the melted ice-caps rising in response to our violation of the biosphere.

  In another medieval work, known as the Lebor Gabala Erenn – The Book of the Taking of Ireland – which documents the mythical origins of the Irish, the biblical flood is documented, but Caitlin Matthews has suggested that in this story and others ‘it is perhaps to some vague memory of Atlantis and the spring-guarding maiden that some of the stories look in their primeval vision’.6

  Certainly Celtic tradition speaks of six races who arrived in Ireland from ‘beyond the ninth wave’ (the defined boundary of the land beyond which lay the neutral seas): the company of Cessair, the company of Partholon, the people of Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha de Danaan and the Milesians. Lebor Gabala Erenn chronicles the invasions of these six races – attempting to integrate bardic memory with biblical tradition, making Cessair the grand-daughter of Noah. But it is the Tuatha de Danaan, the Children of Danu or Dana, the godlike race who have taken refuge in the hollow hills of the fairy-folk, the Sidhe, with the coming of the Milesians, who are taken by some writers to have been the Atlanteans themselves.

  Those who favour the Atlantean origins of Druidry suggest that while some of the migrants from the ‘shining lands’ settled in Ireland and Britain, others continued to Asia and India – some by a northern route, others by a southern one. Later these migrants flowed back from east to west, and it is this later migration, they suggest, which has been chosen by certain ‘exoteric’ historians as the focus for their attentions on the origins of Druidry.

  Leaving aside the Atlantean theory of origins, whose acceptance is a matter of individual judgement, we can now turn to the more conventional theories of the origins of the Druids, which are based on exoteric historical rather than esoteric or clairvoyant sources of information or speculation.

  THE CLASSICAL ACCOUNTS OF THE DRUIDS

  * * *

  We know about the existence of the ancient Druids from the writings of the classical authors. The Druids were first mentioned in two separate works dating from about 200 BC and 400 BC respectively that have unfortunately been lost. In the third century AD Diogenes Laertius in the preface to his Lives of the Philosophers mentions that the Druids were discussed in a book by the Greek Sotion of Alexandria and in a treatise on magic, ascribed to Aristotle. (Historians are confident of the existence of Sotion’s book, written in the second century BC, but believe the fourth-century BC work of Aristotle to be apocryphal.)

  Taking a mythic or poetic view of the origins of Druidry, it is somehow fitting that we cannot be sure whether the earliest record of this tradition really existed, and that the second earliest record exists not in a library, but in the intangible world where only its memory is recorded over five hundred years after it was written. In this way our knowledge of Druidry rises slowly up out of the realm of the unknown, rather than bursting upon us in a flood of awareness.

  THE FIRST WRITTEN ACCOUNT OF THE DRUIDS

  * * *

  The earliest extant record that we have of the Druids is that by Julius Caesar in the sixth book of his Gallic War, written about 52 BC. We then find a number of classical authors, including Cicero, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Lucan, Pliny and Tacitus, discussing the Druids up until about AD 385, when Ausonius wrote a collection of odes to the professors of Bordeaux which includes the story of an old man called Phoebicius, from the Breton stock of Druids, who managed to obtain a chair at Bordeaux university through his son’s intervention.7

  The work of the classical authors tells us something, though not everything, about what the Druids did and believed, and we shall examine some of this evidence when we look at the roles of the Bard, Ovate and Druid.

  When Caesar wrote about the Druids he was describing a system that was well established and that had clearly been in existence for centuries. Sotion’s book is dated to 200 BC and he was describing a group of spiritual leaders already in existence. By AD 600 Druidism had been totally eclipsed by Christianity. This gives us a span of 800 years in which organised Druidry flourished. It seems reasonable to say that when Sotion was writing the Druids could well have been in existence for at least 200 years, which gives us a time span of a thousand years, from the fourth century BC to the sixth century AD.

  We can call this roughly calculated span a millennium of ‘classical’ Druidry – the Druidry we imagine when reading the classical accounts. Prior to that, we enter the era of proto-Druidry, which merges imperceptibly into the distant past and the age of pre-Druidry.

  SOURCES OF THE CELTIC WORLD

  * * *

  In addition to the writings of the Greek and Roman authors, the other sources of written information that we have about the Druids come from Ireland, Wales and Scotland. But these are much later in date than the classical sources, and therefore present particular problems of their own when it comes to interpretation. The Irish texts date from the eighth century AD onwards, the Welsh texts were in the main only transcribed in medieval times, and the Scottish material remained in the oral tradition until the late nineteenth century, when folklorists began to document its treasures.

  Although not committed to writing unt
il the eighth century, the Irish texts are considered ‘an extraordinary archaic fragment of European literature’ reflecting ‘an older world than any other vernacular literature in Western Europe’.8 They mainly comprise hero-tales and summaries of law codes, and even though transcribed by Christian clerics, they are found to convey a reliable picture of the pre-Christian Druid world of Ireland that existed up until the introduction of Christianity in the fifth century AD.

  The Welsh texts, like the Irish, are written versions of material that was originally transmitted orally. Transcribed much later than the Irish works, the Welsh corpus includes the White Book of Rhydderch, which was compiled in about 1300, and the Red Book of Hergest from about 1400. It is from the Red Book that the well-known tales of the Mabinogion have been extracted, and a part of this series of tales is also found in the White Book – the evidence showing that they were originally committed to writing between 1100 and 1250. Another significant Welsh manuscript, which conveys much of the Druid wisdom to us today, is the Book of Taliesin. This is of even later date, being thirteenth or fourteenth century, although some trace its origins back to the sixth century or earlier.

  A further source of knowledge about the Druids and their work comes to us from the Irish and Welsh Triads, which are pithy wisdom-sayings based originally on Druid lore, and which have been gathered from many manuscript sources. From these and other texts we are given an insight into the complex syllabus of bardic training, and through their terse form we can glimpse the depth of bardic and Druidic thought. In addition, a study of the old Irish laws, known as the Brehon laws, gives us an extraordinary glimpse into the world of pre-Christian Ireland, even though they were not set down in writing until the sixth century – after the time of Saint Patrick. Since the Druids were known as the lawgivers, we can still hear today – across two millennia – the voices of these ancient sages whose ethical system was in many respects more humane than that of the dispensation which succeeded it.