Ancestors of Land

I talked a bit earlier this week about the relationship between Druidry and the Ancestors and Beyond the Map in terms of experiencing blood family. Ancestors of Land are also a connecting thread. We honour them in ritual, and they are whoever happened to be on the land before us. I have a keen sense of many ancestors in my current location. The canal was built, and there are ancestors of the boating life too. Go back far enough and this landscape would have been marshy. It has yielded evidence of ancient settlement. Listening to the wind in the rushes, kayaking, I have a sense of those first people who lived alongside the Severn, hunted the wild birds, and put some of their own dead in barrows on the hillsides. I’ve become conscious of how walkable the Severn vale is, and how, if there was no motorway, the journey from river to hill would be feasible.

This landscape is full of hints about ancestors. Having read Oliver Rackham’s book on the history of the British landscape, I had some ideas about things to look for, but they were broad and general. Then a thing happened. Tom and I were walking down the towpath to get to one of the places I can download email, and I saw a chap with a map in hand, looking out across the fields. There’s a footpath down towards the river, but it’s not as well signposted as would be ideal. I’ve stopped and talked to walkers many times about where the path goes. So I stopped and asked if he was looking for the aforementioned.
He wasn’t.

He had come down to look at a particularly old landscape feature indicative of former settlement, and explained to me how to read the humps and bumps in the fields. The enclosure around a settlement or farm means lower land levels on the inside as the river dumps soil round the outside. He told me how the New Grounds had been deposited by the river in mediaeval times, leading to court cases about who actually owned the land. An actual, real to goodness land historian, on my towpath, talking about my landscape. He was a tad self-effacing but after enthusing at him we managed to elicit both a name, and the critical information that he writes books. I’ve now got one of them – Gloucestershire 300 Years ago. The author is Alan Pilbeam and he’s written a few. He has an accessible writing style and an eye to the implications, so that the political and power shifts he thinks of in terms of ordinary people, too. So many of our ancestors exist as a silence in the historical record, a reasoned attempt to put some of them back in, is a wonderful thing. There’s a lot of detail about things you can go and observe, including pointers to ancient Pagan sites. It’s wonderful stuff.

To the handful of Gloucestershire Druids and for that matter non-Druids who read my stuff, I can only say hunt out this man’s work, it is brilliant. I don’t know who else is doing this other places, but if you can find any, do. There’s nothing like being able to look at the bumps in the ground and know what they mean and who was there, and why…

The evil ancestors

One of the things that made me want to look at the issue of ancestry, is the problem of how we deal with the difficult ones. I can’t think of a single family that I know well, where there isn’t a problem person tucked away in the not too distant history. Not necessarily entirely ‘evil’ people, but points in the family tree where bits have broken off and things have gone badly wrong. I have a few.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, even though he lived just a few miles away. It’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to make any connection with that side of my family. It feels odd. My grandmother has been dead for some time now but I still worry about whether she would have been hurt by my wanting to know, would have felt betrayed.

Go back far enough and we’re all going to have tricky ancestors, whether we know their names or not. Modern witches descended from the sorts of people who would, a few centuries back, have been very keen on hanging or burning. Sometimes it’s not that distant, either. The raping, pillaging, looting, land stealing and genocide is in our history, and we’ve all got a bit of it somewhere, odds are.

What do we do, as modern Druids, with the ancestors who would have hated everything we believe and feel, and who would have been ready to kill us for our own good? Where are they when we hail the blessed ancestors? What do we do with the more immediate ancestry? The tyrants and curmudgeons, the drunken, violent, angry, abusive, incestuous, mad and otherwise inevitable that seem to be hidden in so many skeleton closets. The legacies of fear, and victims, the ones who never dared to be true to themselves, and  who hammered that fear into later generations. The ones who failed, and expect everyone else to fail too. The ones who lived through a world war, and were changed, and could not speak of it. We all have them I think.

Ancestry can be a deeply uncomfortable topic. But this is where we came from, our genes and our heritage. This is the stuff we are made of. To carry a fear of turning into one of your parents, or becoming too much like the mad uncle no one likes to talk about, can make it that bit harder to figure out who we are in ourselves. How much of identity is unique to us, and how much is the replaying of genetic history, and exactly how many crazy people do I have in my family tree anyway?

It’s important to know, I think, and to face up to what we do know. Skeletons in closets are only useful to authors, because they make such wonderful plot devices. In real life they’re nothing but trouble. Best to get them out and name them, and give them a proper burial.

We choose who we are. This has been very much the underlying thought form in the last week of blogging. We can only do a good job of that choice when we know what we’re choosing. It’s very hard to avoid repeating a pattern you won’t admit exists. It’s much easier to change things after you’ve acknowledged them.

All families are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional in places because all people are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional too. Some hide it better than others. Some manage to channel it in good ways, and some, like one of my distant ancestors by the name of Octavia, lose the plot entirely and have to be taken away. Some lose the plot a little bit and just go to bed for the rest of their lives. Some pass as normal.

I have a fair idea where I’ve come from, and some of it is good, and some of it isn’t. I’m trying to replicate the good bits and step away from the things I don’t think are so good. Coming from three generations of women who did not hold the first marriage together, I’m conscious that many of my mistakes are not very original. But I think I can move beyond that. It’s got to be worth a try, at any rate.

Druidry at the end of history part 6

Conventional history, in schools and on our televisions encourages us to focus on the named and famous whilst imagining ourselves insignificant. There’s no reason to think one small person’s one small action makes any odds at all. You have to have money and power to change the world, don’t you? An army might help, or being one of the ultra-clever who invents something life changing. Everyone knows that, and we know if because we are primarily taught the history of power and wealth. We are not formally taught about the evolution of ideas behaviours and cultures that belongs to the many. We perpetuate the stories of our own insignificance.

Most of the time in our history, most people have bought into the ideas of their own powerlessness. History also shows us what can happen when we collectively realise our own power and potential. Revolution happens. Emancipation and equal rights get on the agenda. Peasants demand the vote. Uprisings happens. Cultural shifts take place. It must be terrifying for those who want to be in power and I’m sure they would much rather we used that collective energy to vote on which TV celebrity gets to be considered especially important this year. That kind of power, to topple nations and make change, is frightening for the majority too, because we’re encouraged to think, and we encourage ourselves to think that we couldn’t handle the responsibility. We can. We do, it’s just most of it happens unconsciously, which is not ideal.

We are society. We are culture. We are the ancestors of the future and the inheritors of the past. We are the life blood of tradition and, whether we do so consciously or not, we all contribute to shaping the present and crafting the direction the future will take. If we do that obliviously, we don’t get to do anything with our power. We let history and habit shape us and we leave ourselves open to being herded around by others. The politicians. The corporations. The media. Anyone with an agenda and the will to lure us into serving it, potentially. If we know who we are, if we think about where we want to be going and make our choices accordingly, then we do have power ad who knows what we might achieve, as individuals and as part of traditions.

Today is the end of history. The entirety of the past has been building towards this moment. Tomorrow is the future. It always was, and always will be. There is nowhere for us to stand but at the end of history. However, we have a great many options over what we might undertake to do with that.

 

(This is the final part of my regurgitating roughly what I said at the Druid Network’s convention last weekend. Part one is here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1 . I am entirely open to speaking at pagan events, moots etc, in the UK. This piece was written to match the conference theme – Druidry in changing times, and with an eye to the Mayan 2012 malarkey. I’m always happy to contribute in line with a theme or topic. Queries are always welcome and if at all technically possible, I will say yes.)

Druidry at the end of history part 5

You can be an ancestor of tradition, sending thoughts and actions into the world that will live on into the future. I think people tend to assume that being a future ancestor of tradition means being famous and influential in both your lifetime and beyond. After all, without fame, how are your ideas going to spread? This way of thinking owes everything to celebrity orientated culture and nothing to the nature of tradition. A famous person is just that, but the effect of their influence is limited to their lifespan unless they have followers. That means either belong to, or founding a tradition. The life blood of tradition is not big names though. Traditions do not require famous people to keep them going. They need participants. Regular people. Us. Consider the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, or Oxfam. Organisations only outlive their originator if there are many participants to keep the project alive.

We all get to be part of that. In every ritual and moot, in every blog post and conversation we choose what to pass on, what to discard, what to tinker with. The act of sharing, one person to another, is the essence of a living tradition. Every time you interact with a tradition, you are helping to carry if forward, and you are being a future ancestor of that tradition.

I come from a folk background. While the writer’s name is attached to a song, it isn’t folk. Only when the originator cases to be visible, is it truly a folk song. All folk was once written by someone, and has been through a lot of hands. To be truly a part of the tradition is to have disappeared into it merging with the flow. Without individuals, there can be no great flow of tradition, either. We shape traditions and are shaped by them.

Most of history was not made out of famous names. Every big event, every new movement and cultural shift was not just about the famous few, but involved the hidden many. The invisible ones whose many hands and voices decide what is kept and what is discarded. When the invisible many at together, we get results. It may be Brian May who is remembered for Team Badger, but on his own, h wouldn’t have managed much.

 

(For anyne who missed what’s going on here, this is the talk I gave at the Druid Network con last weekend in bits, and the first installment is here – http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1 )

Druidry at the end of history – part 4

First one is here, http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1others are on the blog so if you landed on this one first, the history category is your friend!

Now we finally get round to the Druid bit of the title. At this point it would be nice if I could tell you how Druidry is the magic cure for everything and the solution to any risk of ending the world. It isn’t. Not on its own, at any rate. However, there is one concept from Druidry that I think could make a big contribution here, and that’s the concept of ancestry. Mostly because ancestry carries within it the idea that we too will eventually be ancestors. The answer to the end of history, is to be an ancestor of the future. In fact, if we don’t implode for 2012, we are bound to be ancestors of the future.

Even if we choose to have children, they might not reproduce. There are no guarantees that our blood lines will carry us forwards. Think about how much you know of your own blood ancestors. History teaches us that blood ancestry gets forgotten, unless you’re a King. Famous people may be remembered by their descendents, but that’s all about the being famous. Generations of quiet, uneventful lives disappear, forgotten. Staking your immortality on blood descendents is a dead loss. However, in terms of future impact, bloodlines should be the least of our concerns. That whole business with kinds and inheritance has slewed our culture towards prioritising blood ancestry and directed our perspective away from where the real influence lies.

We are all going to be ancestors of land. Every last one of us.  We’re making a future landscape every day out of our choices. The things we send to landfill. The roads that are built for us. The buildings we live and work in. The power stations we demand. Ancestors of waste and pollution. Ancestors of nuclear dumps and widespread extinctions. Ancestors of poisoned rivers and toxic farming methods. We are all part of this. It is our culture, our society, our motorways and our poison. Future generations will be hard put to forget us, because they’re going to have to live with our rubbish piles, depressing architecture and al the long term consequences of our short term thinking. Ancestors of land. What will the future make of us?

Take up that title, and the full horror of what it means should, if you are paying attention, put you on your knees and break your heart. Ours is the generation that has lost the Chinese river dolphins. We are not going to be the beloved ancestors of future Druids at this rate. We’re going to be the villains of the story.

I offer this not to demoralise you, but as a challenge. The enormity of all that is wrong out there can make action seem futile. It isn’t. The most important thing is to believe that your bit makes a difference. It does. Even the smallest choice counts. Every round of doing more and taking less, every move towards greater sustainability, helps. Be part of the solution. Be a heroic ancestor of the future.

Druidry at the end of history part 3

Part 1 is here http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

and this is part 2

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/20/druidry-end-of-history-part-2

The apparent obliviousness of the majority is one of the things that drives me crazy about people. Look at us, the way we consume and destroy, the rampant expansion of our species. We’re like a cancer, and less use than wasps. What we clearly need is a ice, big apocalypse to clear the air. Then, when we’ve torn everything down there will be room to rebuild, better. We can get it right, there will be utopia. I’m prepared to bet it’s a fantasy most people entertain now and then. Of course that one big apocalypse won’t affect me, or you. The people destined to die will all be somewhere else, somewhere I don’t care about full of people I never met. A tidy apocalypse that selectively takes out things and people I don’t like, leaving only the good stuff. We are, of course, intrinsic to the good stuff.

It’s probably quite natural to want all the bad stuff to disappear, it would be an easy solution. I think we all know that the fantasy of a lovely apocalypse, is at best, totally bonkers. It’s impossible. A real, full blown apocalypse would be awful, and we know that. For too many people though, it is the plan. People whose response to history is to want to end it. These are not people whose ears I am going to get to bend. But even so, we do need to challenge nice big apocalypse theory, because it’s lazy.

The world is people. Society is people. The human future is going to be people. We’re not going to get a magically clean slate to work with, there is no re-boot reality button. Imagining what we would do if only it were made very, very easy, it a waste of time. The only way to make a future, is by starting from here, with what we have, and knowing that we can start here and get to somewhere. We don’t need epic scale drama to jump start us, but realistic visions of things we can achieve and the will to make a start. Evolution ore than revolution, building not destroying.  Knowing where we’ve come from and where we want to go.  Knowing, we will be better placed to make changes. If that all sounds like a huge and daunting task, well, it is. But it’s not impossible.

You’ll notice I’ve been talking about process, not aims. I believe that if you really understand who you are and where you’ve come from, you can make better choices. People not thinking enough is the root of most if not all problems. So I preach a doctrine of thinking about stuff. If we thought more, we’d at least make new and interesting mistakes. You don’t need a nice big apocalypse for that, just a lot of people thinking about what, and how and why, ad what if?

Druidry at the end of history, part 2

Part 1 is here -

http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/druidry-end-of-history-part-1

I gave up on the formal study of history when I was fourteen. I was sick of the world wars, and due to a shortage of books we had to study them in the wrong order, which made it very confusing. I suspected geography would b both easier and involve less Hitler. History and I parted company for a while, right up until I got to doing my Degree. A horrible truth dawned on me. All books come from a point in history. Many of them don’t make much sense if you don’t know the context. Try doing Shakespeare without understanding any of the history! Istarted swotting up, and during that process another alarming truth occurred to me. That came because I was minoring in psychology, and they taught us initially by teaching the history of the subject. Every subject has its own history. We didn’t do the history of chemistry at school, with its origins in alchemy and magic. How different would that have been? The history of medicine is terrifying. The history of sex really puts an interesting spin on things.  We do not teach children the history of how people have thought about the world. A few minutes with that one is enough to show how fragile and ephemeral out whole culture is. We live in a web of stories held together by ideas about ideas. In time, all of it will probably change or be discarded.

All most of us learn is political history. Every human activity and tradition has a history, be it known or unknown. It all came from somewhere – not that we should assume that means it must also be going somewhere. How much of it do we even know?

What does the end of history mean? It means having no idea where you came from or who you are. It means having no roots, no sense of connection to the enormity of all that went before. How many people are conscious of the roles they have been born into, or the patterns they are living out? How many people repeat history precisely because they have no idea what history is. Not the history of politic and rulers, but the personal history of family and culture.  These are the kinds of history we don’t much talk about.

I ask, how can we be free and capable of self determination if we do not know what shaped us and what might be pulling our strings? The end of history is all around us, in the minds of anyone who is re-enacting all that they are oblivious too. It’s nothing new. I rather suspect this kind of end of history has been with us all along.

Druidry at the end of History part 1

This is roughly what I said at the TDN con this year, I’m going to blog it in stages.

Rumour has it that the Mayans reckoned 2012 would be the end of the world, which is partly, I imagine, why the convention’s theme was ‘druidry in changing times’. There’s nothing quite like the end of the world to change things! The Christians of 2000 years ago were expecting it, with the second coming right after the first. In the civil war, once again people were expecting Christ at the head of an army. The Victorians got all apocalyptic in the 1890s, with looming end of empire. The world war made annihilation seem immanent. If there’s one thing history can teach us, its that the end of history does not turn up anything like as often as advertised. Hardly at all, really. Perhaps though, in times of upheaval, the idea of it all ending helps people make sense of the chaos.

For falling cultures and those who die, the end of history is real enough, but others continue and when we too are gone, history will carry on without us. Actual history. Time history is not the stuff we put in books. It’s an important distinction.

There are times when the changes seem so great people feel history can have nothing to say to the present. What could the past know about our modern, technological lives? Rather a lot. All the fears we have about the internet were also fears people had about the telegraph network. Nothing is as new as we like to think it is.

Every so often some bright political spark will question the teaching of history in schools. It’s not the kind of subject that suggests utility in jobs. Mostly what we learn in school history is that Henry the 8^th got through a lot of wives, and Hitler wasn’t a very nice chap. If you’re paying attention, you also learn that mostly we do not learn from history. In wider culture, we have history on the TV that is all costume, drama, sex and violence. It’s not very real either.

History as a subject has tended to be all about Kings and Queens, wars, nations, borders and a handful of very rich men. Most people are edited out of history by those who write it down. Most live are a great silence n the record. Names and opinions vanish, lives quietly washed away by the passing of time. Your ancestors will, for the greater part, belong to the silence. They disappeared. We will all disappear too. If we’re thinking about history in terms of the subject, it’s worth considering that for most of us, it never started. We weren’t there. Our people were not there. Your dead ancestors are not in the history books. It’s a sobering thought. Only the literate left a written record on which history can be based. For most of time, most women and children and poor people of both genders left nothing written about themselves. The wordless so soon become invisible.

History as a written subject is a long way from the reality of all the time that led to this moment. When we talk about the end of the world, what we really mean is the end of a human civilization. That’s probably not the end of the species even. Even if it was, for the cockroaches, history would continue to be made. If we eradicated all life on earth, there’s a whole universe out there, full of time. It exists regardless of whether we are around to tell stories about it.

Of Graeme and Ancient Druids

Continuing then, with the story of what underpinned writing Druidry and the Ancestors. It was one of those serendipity things, that not long after reading Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe, I was sent some very relevant review books. Graeme K Talboys’ Way of the Druid, and The Druid Way made easy. I review quite a lot of Pagan and Druid writing for The Druid Network.

In many ways, the larger, more detailed Way of the Druid is the perfect companion to Blood and Mistletoe. Where Ronald Hutton carefully deconstructs certainty, Graeme Talboys shows the means by which something of Druidry might have survived. We’re in the realms of interpretation here, and he never creates a false impression of certainty, which I like. After the necessary doubts Blood and Mistletoe creates, Way of the Druid offers possibilities, potential, and hope.

It also made me realise a thing, and that thing turned out to be critically important.

All of history as a subject, is guesswork, story making, looking for plausible explanations. There is, as Ronald Hutton makes clear, precious little certainty. What I learned from Graeme was that I wanted to believe in the literal and dependable truth of every word he’d written. If I do that, and I carry forward in my own work, inspired by those words and by a possible path, what happens?

All we can ever hope to be, is inspired by the idea of something. Hard, solid truth is never going to be available to us, because other interpretations are also always available. Inspiration is more dependable. Which matters most, the facts, or what we do with them? Well, in terms of life lived in the present, and the future we choose to create, what we think about the past will have at least as much influence as what actually happened. What we do with history, how we use it, what we make out of it, is far more important in terms of our own, individual lives, than anything else. For some, that will manifest very precisely as a quest for truth and accuracy. For some the inspiration of the story will carry more weight. We use and subvert our own and other people’s histories in just the same way that we use and subvert other things in order to make sense of our lives, justify our actions, and craft our futures.

I figure, if I’m going to do it, I may as well do it consciously and deliberately. I may as well knowingly pick the stories and ideas I find most powerful and inspiring and work with those. I want Graeme’s vision of ancient Druids and Druid survival to be true. I have no way of knowing whether it is. I made a conscious choice to take those ideas and run with them, as though they were true. In the same way, others take inspiration from myths, from modern fairy tales like Lord of the Rings, and then there’s the glorious creative, chaotic Steampunk scene which is all about taking inspiration and having a history story that is quite deliberately not history. It’s what we want history to have been, and we have the option to make the future out of that retro-aspiration.

I have huge respect for Graeme’s work and he’s been a source of considerable inspiration to me. Not least, he made me realise that the best thing I can do is choose my story and run with it. I’ll keep following the quest for truth alongside it though, inspired by the greatest Druidic fraud, Iolo Morganwg, who claimed ‘the truth against the world’ as his motto. There is however, more than one kind of truth. Sometimes it is the soul truth, the heart truth of a story that really matters, not the technical accuracy. I think that’s why so many people find things like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings affect them so profoundly. Heart truth matters.

Out of the tension between known history, and the history we might want, came Druidry and the Ancestors. And, for added strangeness, it turns out that Graeme and I have ancestral connections, our people were close neighbours in the past! Sometimes, it’s a very small world.

Ancestors of Book

When I started work on Druidry and the Ancestors it was as a deliberate response to the work of Graeme K Talboys and Ronald Hutton (more on that another day). I’ve recently realised there was an unconscious ancestor in the mix and I thought that would be a good topic today, because I’ve just re-read the book that it turns out, significantly contributed to mine. It’s Graham Swift’s Waterland, and is, amongst other things about the Fens, history and the end of the world. I’d re-read it because I remembered it talking about the death of history and my topic for Druid con in a few weeks, is Druidry at the end of history.

One of the things I did with Druidry and the Ancestors was to think about the kinds of overarching stories we tell about history. The big two are history as progress and history as decay. I knew, when writing this, that it wasn’t entirely mine but I could not think where I’d got it from. Waterland, is the answer.

It’s a beautiful, mournful book, about the strange historical connections that get us to where we are, and the circular nature of history, and the way thing flow back upon themselves. Reading was also a reminder of how many influences we absorb, and how easily a thing can become part of us and we not know its source. That was also one of the things in Druidry and the Ancestors, wanting to explore how we build a sense of the past, what we take on board unquestioningly. All those stories that are so deep within us that we no longer realise they are stories. Waterland was one of those, for me, it was the story of the making of history stories and from it I unconsciously made a history story and then, for an event where talking about my book is on the agenda I suddenly, irrationally wanted to talk about this book as well, and re-read it, and there it all was.

Another moment of strange cyclicalness. Cyclicity… is there a word for this? The book has been full of them, bringing with it a journey that goes forwards as it goes backwards, that has taken me deeper into my sense of self and taken me forward. Back I go, into a book that I read for A level English an then again during my degree and which, coming back now as a parent reads completely differently. At seventeen, how could I understand a fifty something male history teacher, childless, and the theme of children? Can I understand it now? Maybe more. Books change you, and as you age and grow and learn, when you read the same book again it too becomes different. We bring so much of ourselves to books, that I think it might be fair to say that, as with the proverbial thing about getting into rivers, you can never read the same book twice.