A Brief Overview of Druidry Across the Centuries

but then you have to let go and if if you don't let go it's like it becomes suffocating and I can't live with you anymore you know but but there are times for holding on times for letting at times for holding on times for letting go and a spiritual path meets to do that to spiritual teaching needs to hold us and contain us but also needs to set us free and that's the interesting challenge I think we are at today in terms of the so spiritual development of humanity if one can use such a big term is that as the the containers break down as so many people find that conventional religions don't hold them anymore or they don't want to be held like that anymore we're free but then when we also need to be held we need to be held when we're going through grief when we lose somebody when we need some sense of direction and when we need a sense of community all these things require a certain sort of holding and that's the challenge for us I think in these days is is how do we find spiritual directions that give us freedom but also hold us in a way so then you had you know at some point in this process these islands have split away via the Ice Age has happened the ice sheets have started to melt back the North Sea has filled up tribes have moved across you know with undoubtedly a kind of basic spirituality of of working with fire working with the power of the stars sensing the energy of the land sensing the old the old tracks which were originally forged by animals across the land but then humans started to follow them as well and and and you start to if you can imagine that's when you start to develop spiritual ways that are related to the local landscape if you like and then towards there was a big change in temperature and and people stopped building stone hurt circles there were there were time war and so on that can be traced archaeologically but at a certain time from around you know 2000 BC something like that onwards you start to get the emergence of a distinct group of people who would call the Druids and we know about this from the classical writers in the Julius Caesar and Doris EQs and so on started to write about these people in these islands who were divided into three classes of bards of eighths and druids who held ceremonies and this carried on this period of drudgery that we know know about carried on until the coming of Christianity the Romans came and on the whole the Romans had a policy of incorporating and tolerating local cults because it was politically the wisest thing to do one why make a problem and they only actually persecuted the Druids because of Boudicca at a time when Boudicca rebelled and she attacked London and Colchester and as a wonderful story of the druid using the animal as an Oracle which we'll use in a bit ourselves to predict the outcome of the battle and he released a hair from his cloak and if it went to the left they would be triumphant it went to the right they would they would lose they went to the left and so they attacked Colchester and killed a lot of people and the Romans retaliated and they retaliated at the sort of financial center it's a bit like we go for the al-qaeda bank accounts the Romans went for the druids source of gold which was coming across from Ireland to to Mona which is present-day Anglesey there's a big slaughtering of the Druids and there's this extraordinary account when you say you know were there any female druids yes there were there's this extraordinary account of how the Romans were massed on the shores of Wales and backed off across to attack the druids and there were druid priestesses who had their clothes ripped they were wearing black and they were shouting curses at the Roman soldiers the Roman generals had to walk amongst the ranks saying these women have no power you can attack and something went across on the boats and massacred everyone on the island apart from that incident the Romans tolerated Georgy with the coming of Christianity something changed we had a there was a monopolist agenda with Christianity and by around 600 AD all of Britain was Christian it's nominally so ah but even then Christianity integrated much of the pre-christian pagan practices such as Druidry you can see this very clearly in it's written down there's you know there's one wording that I remember about the festival of amok in Druidry we have eight festivals around the year the solstices the equinoxes and the cross-quarter days and that February first is called amok in Christianity is called Candlemas and Pope somebody in the fourth century I think it is said since the people cannot be dissuaded from parading in the streets with candles tell them that they can come into our churches and our priests will bless the candles so a very clever piece of engineering social engineering really to say it's okay you can keep doing it but and our priests will bless the candles so this is an added bonus and so you can deconstruct Christianity and look at all the elements of it and find many pagan inferences from the the vestments of the priests that are drawn from the classical Greek mystery schools from the outline of the churches even the concept of the sacrificed Savior is found all over the Mediterranean Basin ah so the difference being that in the store is all around Mediterranean basin the the the sacrifice God had a consort of female consort so there was balance and somehow the story was changed with Christianity so for a thousand years in history Druidry went underground but the story is more complex than that and the reason I'm mentioning all this to you is because we have to our story if you like or the story of these lands is very particular and and different we don't have an indigenous tradition that some other cultures might have that stretch back for thousands of years you know when you go to India for instance you know there's this extraordinary fact that you will see people chanting mantras that have been there for thousands of years you know so there's this complete sense of continuity the sort of a kind of collective wound if you like in the psyche here is around the fact that there was this repression around you know between say the sixth and the seventh century which shut down a lot of the spiritual practice in places like Latvia this happened in the 11th century Christianity came not sure about Sweden I don't know when it happened but it came to different countries at different times there was a kind of co-opting of things but there was also repression to but for instance if you take the bardic schools the tradition of the bards continued on into the 17th century in Ireland and in Scotland Martin st. Martin went out to the the Outer Hebrides in the 17th century and he said the bards there was still in order to incubate a poem they were still going into a bothy which is like an old little cottage shutting all the doors in the windows wrapping a scarf around their eyes and then laying a stone on their chest and and and lying in the darkness the stone on the chest is an interesting one you can do this with a telephone directory or a large stone if you have one in and you lie there in a dark room and put a scarf round and see it's a very weird thing what's happening from a kind of neurological point of view is you're getting this one it's like playing white noise through headphones you're getting one monotonous sensory input that is terribly annoying and in the end the brain says aha and shuts down that part of the brain and opens you up in a different way but what would they were doing is you can see that from 17th century you can trace this idea of going into the darkness and waiting to receive this one drop of illumination right the way back to the activity in the caves fast-forward a thousand years and you get to the 17th century the Enlightenment the grip of Christianity is is is starting to loosen with the Enlightenment and people discover start to look at their heritage texts are translated out of Latin and Greek printing presses start printing these accounts of the Druids in English are and America is discovered so people discover that there are initially this idea of the noble savage they discover people who haven't heard the good news of the Bible who are actually rather nice and the first reports coming back from America where hey these people are living in a kind of paradise they're really friendly they're giving us gifts and all the rustic it all went sort of sour a bit later but to begin with that that was happening and this together with reading the texts about the Druids in Germany France and England with this extraordinary kind of wake-up call if you like or discovery of the ancestors it's like oh I thought they were grunting savages but you know Caesar and and siculus and so on say that our ancestors were philosophers and bards and poets and and and you know the this was extremely I think the equivalent the way to understand it imagine you were adopted and your adoptive parents told you that your biological parents were good-for-nothings they would just hopeless you know whatever and then one day you're about 16 they go out of the house there's an old chest in the attic you open the chest and you find a book written by your mother and you discover she was a philosopher you find you know a photo album of your parents and you discover that they were actually great wonderful wise people so it was the same thing with people in Europe they'd been suffering from what's called the atom hide theory and they are done hype theory is the theory of original stupidity that we were grunting in caves until the good news of the Bible and then we went you know we we progressed and because you know then progressed up in an upward arc but suddenly that was overturned and people started to form little societies and that was called that was the time of the rebirth of Druidry in the modern era 17th century so we have 300 years of recorded history of modern Druidry that has drawn on the inspiration of the past the classical writers there are information we have from archeology from folklore which would be working with a little bit later from the old stories because the Christian writers had a kind of love affair with paganism and even though they tried to repress it in some ways they also wrote down the old stories so we have the old stories so in the 6th century as the door closed on Druidry and pre-christian religions somehow the information got through as the door closed it's snuck through as the christian scribes wrote down the old myths and the tales 300 years of this fast forward to the 1960s you have the whole kind of revolution of flower power over those 300 years you've had Druidry becoming kind of informed also by the whole Western Eastern esoteric tradition of magic and of the golden dawn and a Freemasonry and influence is coming from the east of wicker of all sorts of things happening and then you get the 1960s and flower power and that's kind of when I came across my old druid teacher it was in 69 that's a time and and from that period onwards Druidry started another kind of Renaissance accelerating in the 1980s and 90s as people started to realize what was happening to the planet and yearning for a kind of green religion or green spiritual way if you like that connected us to the earth John Michell wrote a book called a view over Atlantis in the 1960s where he took the idea of ley lines and ideas from the far east and put them together with the ideas of feng shui and Chinese ideas and put them together and suddenly there was this idea of this network of magical lines across the land he started having festivals at Stonehenge the whole festival culture coming coming in and druids became part of the kind of alternative scene I suppose so now today Druidry is this kind of vibrant nature spirituality the order that I lead has 25,000 members we we do a training that's published in seven different languages we have two hundred groups around the world when I was being initiated at the age of 18 on Glastonbury Tor to the sounds of the third year band wonderful wonderful really esoteric band little did I know that standing amongst these mainly elderly people a small group of elderly people that you know when I was 18 so that almost like yeah almost 50 50 years later I would be in Glastonbury and I was there just a couple of weeks ago you know where hundreds of people are standing there like kids and dogs and animals and just festivity and this wonderful kind of vibrant sense of aliveness and I think the reason is because it speaks to these three parts of ourselves that the the bard inside us all of us want to sing our song you know to be creative to all of us want to kind of journey in the other world and to explore the depths and all of us I guess would like to have some kind of wisdom and so let's have if you're up for it are you okay for a little journey yeah okay just just a short one just and

Channel: Philip Carr-Gomm

Views: 6,598

Keywords: druid, druidry, druidism, OBOD

Id: cUfBnEXdO9M

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2019