Toward an Actual Druidry: Mythos

We need to talk about the religious system most schools of new druidry work under and why, if there is to be a real and deep druidry, this has to be reexamined. Traditionally there has been one source of myth and tradition for modern druids and that is the Irish cycle. This is the only cycle where the word druid is used as well. If we stretch our minds then every wizard in the Mabinogion ought to be translated as drui or derwydd. But it is only the Irish tales they are strictly called druids.

As discussed, modern druidry lives on being an eighteenth century English invention based on a Roman idea of what druids actually were that is given a Celtic twist with Celtic being defined as Irish. Next the definition of Irish is Irish through the eyes of the late 1800s and the revival of Irish myth aka Lady Augusta Gregory and William Butler Yeats, two Protestant Ulsterman who were certainly more English than Celtic.

The other thread of myth modern druidry had come to draw on is the Welsh cycle called the Mabinogion, but whether we are talking about Irish Cycle or the Welsh, there is a problem. Irish tales told by Anglo Irish people who are reinterpreting what was written down by centuries of Christian monks cannot count as “Irish myth”.  We have no real idea of what gods the Irish Celts worshipped or what their druids actually had to do with them. Unlike in Asatru where Heathens have confronted their dearth of knowledge about Norse worship and practice for the last forty years, druids and other pagans centered around Celtic revivalism have never faced this fact. When one turns to the Mabinogion, what it yields is the same problem but in thinner form There are comparatively fewer stories and a far weaker tradition that in the Irish Cycle. While the Irish myths are translate by Lady Gregory a self identified Irish woman, though certainly a virtually English one, Lady Charlotte Guest who gives us the Mabinogion, isn’t Welsh at all. Like Lady Gregory, she is taking her work from medieval monks and though both modern witches and druids have attempted to say the Mabinogion is a mythology and point out that many of its characters are Welsh gods the actual text does not support this. The Mabinogion gives us no real knowledge of Welsh gods, welsh religion or welsh druidry. In fact, since the people of Wales did not come together from scattered parts of Britain and acknowledge themselves as a people, there actually could not have been a Welsh mythology as Welsh people did not exist as a people until well after they were Christian. The Welsh myth was the same as the English myth or the French: Christianity.  The Celtic gods we do know of, Epono, Cernunnos, Taranis, Esus, and a few others make no appearance in either the Mabinogion of the Irish Cycle.  Nor is there any mention of the Wheel of the Year which even the NOD acknowledges is a late invention based, not in a Celtic paganism, but in a British Christian calendar. If we are to move to a real and effective druidry, then we must move away from accepting what has been set down and begin deeply researching, realizing we have far less knowledge of the past than we thought we did. But less is not nothing. We do have some knowledge, some seeds, and what is more, rather than an ancient body of knowledge and a book of modern Irish myths, we have several living myths. If  mall seeds, for certain, and beginning with these small seeds.

            If a druid is a practitioner of magic working in a Celtic mode, then the operative word is: IS. And that means it is not so much for us to ask what a Celt WAS, but what a Celt is, and not so much what was that spirituality then, but how do we live in it NOW? This means new interpretations of both Celt AND druid, and I will move toward those in future essays. My answers are SOME answers. They are MY answers. If you are concerned with the question, then the answers that matter most will be yours, but maybe mine can help.