Toward an Actual Druidry: Part One

Around the same time as my dedication, I began to look at druidry and even entered the New Druid Order. My stay was brief, and then, years later, when I finally took my first and second degrees in the Craft, I returned to that order. It seemed the most fair and transparent and useful of the orders, as well as the most economic, no bundled packages of CD correspondence lessons in how to be a druid—whatever that meant—and so I returned, doing the dull, dull course work that would take me through the three steps of druidry. This business last about two weeks before I left again. Now, as I have looked at the way I practice, especially in how my work as a poet and artist stems from the Work, is the most important part of the the Work,  it seems important to look to druidry again, and again I have been looking and again I get the same feeling I’ve always gotten, the feeling that turns me away, and yet I now know druidry, this path which weaves are and wisdom and magic and spirituality, must be part of my practice. So… what turns me away, and what is druidry?

One thing that has always turned me away is the perception—given by druid groves themselves—that druidry is a lamer/tamer version of the Craft. If it is magic, and it isn’t necessarily, then it is a lighter more acceptable magic. Druids are acceptable if quaint. They are not exactly a mystery tradition, for there is no mystery. There is no initiatory ceremony, though if you join an order you will likely pay money to progress to the highest degree. There are the three grades, bard and ovate and finally druid, in most orders, and even in the free orders like the NOD to which I still technically belong, there is no mystery but rather a set of courses, essays to be written until you pass from one phase to another. There is no system, no world view except that druids are outdoorsy and like Irish mythology, and may pray to Irish—or sometimes Welsh—gods. There is no real rousing message, indeed, unlike witches, druids don’t want to be roused too much. You want to be sensible. I spent two hours reading a The Path of Druidry by Penny Billington, that was written with the blessing of the head of the OBOD where the writer tranquilly said that druids should never call attention to themselves, blend into the every day world and not get involved in any heady business that would make them not fit in, not be able to make a normal living. It was, and this has probably always been irritating, a manifesto to sameness. Good druids make good citizens. Druidry assumes that you not only wish to be sensible and fit in, but that you are capable of doing these things. Her book was to the Dionysian wine of witchcraft, O’Douls. Modern Druidry does not let Dionysus in. Neo Druids are the province of Apollo—excuse me—Lugh.

            This outline of Neo druids seem to be, is what I sort of hate, and this surely has to do with the roots of modern druids, in the patriarchal, fraternal society of the late 1700’s growing up along the lines of the Freemasons, the Golden Dawn and even the Mormons, it is of a piece with tame, malecentric orders which shun the dark, disdain the feminine, the juicy and the sexual and uphold the status quo. Made by the upper class and upper middle class, all of these secret semi spiritual groups upheld the boat rather than rocked it. Not rocking the boat and not challenging perceptions is as welcome among the light and the liberal as it is among conservations and one reason why modern druids fit in well enough with the hodgepodge of pastel neo paganism. From the three rayed awen symbol, to the word awen itself to the three successive divisions of bard, ovate, druid even until calling gatherings groves or nemetons, most druid orders are more or less the same. This tells us what neo druidry is, but it does not answer the question: what is a druid?

To answer what is, one must ask what was. This is a harder business for a few reasons. What we know about druids depends on what know about Celts and it turns out what we know is very little. The idea that Celtic=Irish and Irish=whatever it is imagined to be in a post late 19^th century romanticism is false. The next reason is because the information on actual druids is thin, and the information we think we have comes from the 1700s. The word druid itself is a Latin word for the third of the three classes of priest-minstrel-lawmakers of the Gauls as described by Julius Caesar. Tacitus later writes about them and how their stronghold of Mona was destroyed in the first century by the Romans, but accepting Roman descriptions of people they vanquished  and killed is like acception General Custer’s explanation of Native American culture, or the word of a white Southern slave owner about the spiritual lives of the people he kept in bondage. To know anything about what a druid is we must turn to actual Celtic sourses.

In Wales the word is derwydd, in Old Irish druí, In Old Cornish druw is the word and in Middle Welsh it is dryw . Most of these words translate our to sorcerer while the Welsh translates to “seer” and, probably “wren”. More on that later. The idea that druids were scientist, or that they were musicians and professors, or that there were three grades of them is not here. The idea that they may or may not have practiced a light form of magic is not here, either. From the actual Celtic sources what emerges is that Druid is the Celtic word which aligns with the English Saxon word we know as wicce: Witch.  

So, why in the world would Neo Druids take their lead from Julius Caesar, a conqueror looking from the outside in with no real reason to tell the truth and no archaeological skills as far as we know? Interestingly enough, the revival of modern druidry from which most druids take their cues was in England, a conquering country in an early empire just as Caesar was a conqueror in a new empire. Like Georgian England, Roman Britain was as was not ruled by, but ruling over actual Celtic people. Those first Neo druids were middle class and wealthy Englishmen, even when they happened to have Welsh blood, and they had no need or reason to question Caesar and so they didn’t, and yet the actual Celtic sources describe the druids by one word with many implications, sorcerer.