Those other Druids

They’re at it again you know, those other Druids. Doing it wrong. Worshipping the wrong Gods, in the wrong ways, for the wrong reasons. Some of them aren’t even worshipping Gods at all. They aren’t wearing the right clothes, dammit, and as for the labels they’ve given themselves… pure nonsense. You know who they are. They are the Druids who are not like us and we must forever be righteously indignant about them and make snarky remarks via social media, because we are much more authentic and that’s clearly the way to go.

Most of us modern folk have grown up in a culture that is steeped in the influences of monotheism. We carry that influence with us, often unconsciously. One of the most insidious messages in monotheism is this notion of one true way. All fundamentalist activity is underpinned by a belief in having a monopoly on truth. You will hear the same kinds of assertions from science, commerce, government… the language of one true way is everywhere and we are letting it into Druidry, to our detriment.

Nature is plural. There are many ways of being alive (reptiles, mammals, fish, birds, amphibians, plants, fungi, amoebas….) There are several ways of reproducing (sexually and asexually) many models for having offspring, (from abandonment to one on one nurturing.) Diets vary, lifestyles, ways of existing. Nature is rife with diversity and difference. We Pagans keep trying to claim nature as our sacred book, and then, as people so often do with sacred books, are only quoting the bits we like and ignoring the rest. We owe ourselves more than this.

We have a binary right/wrong logic that we have inherited from our monotheisticaly underpinned culture. There is a right answer, the one true way, and everything else is wrong. Is a dolphin wrong and a shark right? How about emus and penguins, are they wrong? Nature doesn’t give us these binary answers. We get ‘right for this niche’, ‘right for this environment’ ‘right for being a dolphin’. There are many ways. The existence of sharks does not in any way invalidate the existence of dolphins or prove that dolphins are wrong.

In much the same way, the existence of those other Druids who do it some other way is not a challenge to how we are doing it. There is no reason to assume that one way is more or less right than the other. What is right for them may not work for us, because we are different people in a different place. Perhaps they are ferns and we are cacti. We would not thrive in the same environment. We have different needs.

Difference and diversity are good – nature tells us so. Diversity ensures that something will survive. Difference creates more niches in which life can exist. Homogeny leads to extinctions. The reason elms died out nearly in the UK may have had a lot to do with them being far too genetically similar to have any scope for resisting the Dutch elm beetle. It is tempting to suggest that Druids may be a lot like trees. Different soils, rainfall, environment…. Different trees thrive in different places. Alders might like getting their roots in streams and marshes, silver birches do not. What it takes to be a Druid in Australia is not going to be the same as what is involved being a Druid in the American Bible belt, or at Stonehenge, or on an oil rig…

Those other Druids are probably fine. If they are happy, they just aren’t my problem, or yours, and if they try to convert you, it is as easy to walk away from them as it is the Jehovah’s Witness on the doorstep. We’re all good. We are all proper Druids. We are all doing it right. We are better off investing time and energy in our own work than getting grumpy about what those other Druids dared to say now, or what they called us, or what they did wrong with that initiation, or whatever it is. I am a beechtree from the side of a hill. You are a rowan on a mountain top. The guy next to you is a Joshua tree. Some Druids are redwoods and some are tiny new saplings, some are deciduous and others are green all year. Some have fruits and some have seeds, some are more pretty than others. Some even have faces.

Peaceful protest

There’s a lot of talk on various Druid groups at the moment about both the warrior path, and the peace path. There are Druids who subscribe to both approaches. The Ancient Celts after all were not averse to a punch up, but the Druids could, it is said, step out between two armies and instruct them to stop.

I don’t think a modern Druid has much scope for stepping in front of the EDL, or other angry people, and making much progress by asking them to stop, but perhaps it would be worth a go anyway. Part of me suspects that’s a one way ticket to getting shouted at, if not thumped, but as I’ve not dealt directly with anyone from the EDL, I’m hardly in a position to comment.

I’m a rural Druid at the moment. About the closest we get to conflict within the community round here is when two tractors are trying to go in opposite directions down the same lane. This is a quiet place. No one is going to riot, or march, or do anything else. That has let me off the hook a bit, and not having a car I’m not well placed to travel to where there are problems.

What would I do if there was unrest on my doorstep? I think it would depend a lot on the nature of the unrest. There are plenty of things I think need protesting about and that I would march over, were there anyone around to influence. The sheep are pretty disinterested on this subject, although my local badgers are developing an unfortunately large degree of political awareness, I suspect.

I would not take arms, or go out expecting to fight. Partly because I am woefully out of practice, partly because a quarterstaff would draw all the wrong sort of attention in the first place, partly because I have no desire to hit anyone. I would like to think that if it came down to it, if people where I lived were marching with hatred and an intention to do violence, I would find in myself the courage to take my body into that space and simply put my flesh in their way. Not aggressively, but accepting the likelihood of violence in order to slow down, protect, discourage.

It’s one of those things. Until we are tested, all the ideas about what we *might* do are hypothetical. Would I have the courage to face being arrested if honour demanded that I put myself in opposition to the police? I think about activists who have gone to court, and sometimes won, standing up for the idea that powerful entities do not have the right to run roughshod over individuals. Would I be brave enough to do that? I think of the three women in Woolwich who tackled the psychos still holding weapons, who had killed Lee Rigby. Do I have what it takes to walk forward in such a situation?

I do not know.

We only find out whether we can truly walk our talk when we are tested to our limits and beyond. What I do know, is how grateful I am for the times when I am not being tested, when I am not overwhelmed by impossible choices or being asked to put my life on the line for honour or justice. Some people do that every day in their normal line of work, and I am deeply grateful to them for shouldering that weight for the sake of the rest of us.

Celtic religion

In his excellent book, Stalking the Goddess, Mark Carter makes some interesting points about Celtic religion. (You’re going to be hearing a lot about Mark). The Celts didn’t have a name for their religion so far as we know. Why would they? It was their religion, the religion, it didn’t need naming. To call it Druidry, he points out, is like calling Christianity Priestism. Celt itself is a word that comes from the outside too. There’s the Greek word Keltoi, which I think the Romans took up to describe some of their ‘barbarian’ neighbours, designating others as Germanic. The divisions are arbitrary.

Often names come from the outside. We don’t need them. We are the people, this is our earth, this is our religion, you only need names when there’s something to distinguish yourself from. As Alan Pilbeam points out when writing about countryside history, inside the village, it’s just the village. The name other people give it will tell you a lot more about what the place is like. I live in the area that was once Slime Bridge. Nice.

Druidry is not the word for ancient Celtic religion. Is it the word to
describe a modern religion? I’m going to say no. Druidry is not A Religion. For many people, what they practice as a Druid is effectively a religion, but that’s not the same as A Religion. We have polytheists, monotheists, duotheists, animists, pantheists and non-theists amongst the modern Druid ranks. No amount of mental wriggling will enable you to call that A Religion. It’s lots of religions.

It’s also worth noting that our culture is totally different. Modern Druids are not one people in one society with one land and one religion. We are scattered across diverse communities and walk amongst people of widely different beliefs. We live in very different places, too. It no longer makes sense to say ‘we are the people and this is our religion’ because the context that worked in no longer exists. There is a great deal about Celtic religion we can never replicate because we do not have social context in which it functioned. A religion is not a tag on to a society. It both informs, and is informed by everything else. Without Celtic life and Celtic social structures, we are doing something else. That’s fine, but we need to recognise it.

I think it helps to consider Druidry as a doing term. Druidry is that which Druids do. This in turn allows us to focus on the commonality and not get bogged down in what it means that some of us believe in individual, personified deities and some of us don’t. Druidry is service. It is study. It is using your creativity for the good of your land and tribe (whoever they are). It is teaching and enabling other people, planting trees, honouring the natural world. Druidry is turning up when you are needed and doing the things you are called on to do. That might be celebrant work, or helping other people find the words they need, or writing stroppy letters to the press, or any number of other things. It’s not belief that makes a Druid, but the doing. It’s also wider reaching than the Druid or Pagan communities. It’s being a voice for the environment at a local planning session. It is protest for human rights and social justice.

Often where your Druidry is most needed is not in the company of other Druids, but out in the rest of the world. The company of Druids is more a place to share ideas, and draw inspiration. We do not need to do Druidry for other Druids very often. Rites of passage maybe, support in hard times, but mostly if a person is doing Druidry, they don’t need another Druid to do it for them. The (im)moral support can be nice though.

Druid Adventures

I mentioned a couple of days ago, that I was plotting something, and after some reflection, I’m going to blog the process, whatever it is, even if it doesn’t work out the way I hope it will. If things go to plan, there’s going to be study, and scope for some really productive service. I love studying, so am hoping for things to get my teeth into, and the direction I have in mind could bring some really good challenges.
Of course the flip side is that trying can mean failing. Which is why I’m going to talk about the whole thing.

I’m in the process of applying to become a tutor for OBOD.

I completed the three grades some years ago, and I enjoyed the process. It was challenging, sometimes pretty hard (the Ovate Grade I found emotionally very difficult.) Progression through the grades is not a given. Many people just don’t finish the Bard grade anyway. If you complete it then you can move on to studying the Ovate material. At the end of the Ovate grade, you can fail. It is possible for someone to say no to you carrying on.

I had several tutors on the way through. My Bardic tutor was totally awesome and really helped me. I’d been set back by some bad teaching, and needed help rebuilding my confidence. I’m not a passive receiver of other people’s truths, I need to test and challenge, and what my tutor for that grade gave me was a safe space in which I could do just that, and be accepted. I struggled more with my Ovate Tutor, he had things going on in his life, we weren’t on the same wavelength, and I discovered he was moving out of tutoring, so that was a very different experience, but I got through. In the Druid grade I didn’t have much contact at all. I’d found my feet.

Talking to other OBOD students, I’ve come to realise how critical the good tutor-student relationship is to the whole process. The tutor you get is one of your main experiences of the Order and that relationship can make or break your studies. Although, even the best tutor can’t fix a student who isn’t really interested enough to try, and the most determined and able students will do ok even if their tutors aren’t so good.

I think I have something to offer here, and I think I could make a meaningful contribution. I’d like to try. It means making the jump, risking the failure, or them not having any use for me after all.
It won’t be my first time volunteering for an organisation. I spent a few years doing things for The Pagan Federation, and for The Druid Network. I was so unhappy at the end of my first round of TDN time, that I didn’t think I’d volunteer again. I hated finding other people judging me over the rest of my life (it’s not like I was doing anything illegal). I don’t want to bring any organisation into disrepute, but its bloody hard hearing that people consider you a risk. Will OBOD consider me a risk? (I have this nasty habit of saying things in public, after all). Can I function inside an organisation? I went back to TDN to do book reviews, because I like reviewing books and because that’s useful to both readers and authors. Going back was really hard. I let because I was insulted, and going back felt a bit like letting the people responsible off the hook. I realised it wasn’t about them, it was about the readers and authors I could benefit by being a reviewer. Service matters to me. There are some very good people at TDN, who I am very glad to count as friends, but it only takes one or two hostile people to make a space deeply uncomfortable. As a consequence, TDN is never going to feel like home for me. Perhaps OBOD could be.

I’ve had my years in the wilderness, my hermitude, and I know, coming to the end of that, how much I do want to be part of a community. I want to feel that I belong, and that there is a place I can give service. I want to be somewhere that values what I do, that accepts I’m a bit chaotic and not keen on keeping silent about things that matter to me. It’s an interesting one, because OBOD seems pretty structured. I can cope with structure, I can work with it, and I think they could find a use for me. We shall see.

The other reason for going this way, goes like this. The back of book blurb for Druidry and Meditation mentions that I’m OBOD trained. As a consequence of this, Philip Carr Gomm got in touch with me, I’ve had some lovely reviews from OBOD, and been invited to contribute to the site. I admire Philip as an author, and he’s a lovely chap. At the time in my life when I felt I belonged nowhere, and that the wider Druid community had no place for me, he sought me out, and that meant a huge amount to me. If I could give something back… that would be good too.

Bubbling Up

This week’s instalment of Theo Wildcroft’s Sacred Body series contains my favourite bit – the idea of Bubbling Up http://druidlife.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/sacred-body-part-2-bubbling/. I’ve been studying Druidry for some time now, I’ve read Blood and Mistletoe, I’m conscious of the flaws in writing about Druids from the time and the likely weaknesses of mediaeval texts as source material. For some, that pretty much makes impossible the idea of authentic modern Druidry. However, the one idea I keep coming back to, is that the ancient Celts got their Druidry from somewhere. Not in the sense of revelation, monotheistic style (I assume). My belief is that ancient Celts got their Druidry from the land, the rivers and trees, the mountains, the cranes, aurochs, badgers, buzzards, mice and so forth. Most of that is still here.

Like Theo, I am conscious of how many artificial structures surround our daily lives. Sat here in my metal boat, with this box of plastic wizardry on my knees, typing words that will be read by people I’ve never met… we’ve created a rather fantastical and unreal sort of world. And yet… every few seconds I inhale. Air, one of the elements, with me moment to moment. Real. My boat depends on a stove for heating, I cook on gas. There’s fire in my life, every day, another element, another realness. Water, hopefully on the outside of the boat. The earth is right next to the canal, I tread on it regularly. The sky is above me every day. My food came from plants that lived, grew in soil, experienced light. If I raise my head I can see the willows, thinking about leafing, tentatively getting busy out there. Even in my constructed, human environment, nature is present. I also notice that the moss growing on my boat’s fenders do not see human construct, just a place to call home. Birds shit on the roof just as they would on the ground. I may see a human construct, but to the rest of nature, it shows every sign of just being more environment. Maybe a bit sterile and drab, but the spiders do their best to correct this.

It’s terribly easy to go ‘ooh, nature is my sacred text’ and then not really do anything with that. What can you do? It’s out there, we’re in here… and as long as we see the divide, holding ourselves as separate, we are separate.

For the ancient Celts, survival meant understanding the natural world. This soil. That tree. Those weather conditions. All of it immediate, some of it longer term – when to plant, when to harvest, what to kill and what to leave. I don’t claim to know what the ancient Druids got up to, but understanding nature must have been in the mix. That doesn’t have to mean placing ourselves on the outside with a clipboard. You can stand on the shore and watch the sea, or you can get in it and learn how to rise and fall with the waves. Or you can drown.

Druidry, for me, is increasingly about participating. Not standing back as an intellectual observer, but being in the scene, in the moment, acting and reacting, and paying attention. This land, that tree, another seagull crapping on my boat…

Druid community

There are a lot of places online where Druids gather to talk, and there is a lot of diversity in Druidry. One of the things that depresses the hell out of me, is when debate generates into angry shouting. It does this rather a lot. As there are a number of different, well established approach to Druidry (as well as all the individual stuff) this more-druidy-than-thou attitude doesn’t seem that well founded. Even in conversations about how Druids are supposed to be peacemakers, we get it wrong. It makes me sad.

However, I’ve seen this week a Druid group over on google, where on the whole some quite strenuous discussion has happened without descending into the other stuff. This inspires me. It is important to be able to debate the hard topics, to be able to hear ideas that do not fit with our own. I think it is healthy and important to be challenged, to be required to explain your thinking, show your evidence and deal with people you don’t agree with.

It’s pretty easy to be a peaceful Druid when there’s no conflict available. That isn’t actual peace, it’s just a convenient setup. Real peace is being able to handle conflict without it getting nasty or destructive. This is where we really test ourselves, really find out if we can walk our talk. It doesn’t mean we have to agree, or like each other, or persuade everyone to think the same. It really comes down to respect, and being able to acknowledge that my truth may look different to your truth, and that we can live with this.

I get excited by challenges to my thinking and people who know stuff that I don’t. It’s part of my on-going love affair with being a student. I want to understand. That means encountering stuff that initially makes no sense to me, and rather than rejecting it, trying to engage with it. I get a real buzz out of those. So yes, I have tried to figure out why so many Druids don’t seem to get all excited when they run into someone with a different perspective. I think there are two factors. One is that we are not, as a community, taking manners seriously enough as an issue. It’s all well and good being passionate and plainly spoken, but that can be done without actually being rude to people, I think. Encountering rudeness is a big turn off when it comes to tackling alternative perspectives. The other part is more a protective/fear issue. The more you have invested in your beliefs, the more uncomfortable it may be to have them argued with.

We live in a context full of religions and politicians all claiming a monopoly on truth. Anyone who isn’t strident can seem wishy-washy, undecided, not properly dedicated to their cause. And yet, step back a moment and it should be obvious that mostly none of us have any hope of truth monopoly. The bigger the truth, the harder it will be to grasp. Is my truth really at odds with your truth? Are we in fact groping the same elephant without realising it? (I love that story). I want to know what the elephant looks like. So if I can attach your bit to my bit, I will probably still be way off the mark, but now instead of a big flappy thing, I’ve got a flappy thing attached to a ropey thing. It’s still wrong, but it is a bit less wrong, and I’ll keep looking, keep wondering.

In the meantime, if I find I’ve irritated someone online where I didn’t mean to, I don’t get cross with them, I say sorry. I find it remarkably effective. If I’m not sure I understand what they mean, I don’t get cross, I ask what they mean. If someone misreads aggression into my words, I don’t get cross with them, I apologise for not having been clear enough, assure them that I’m not hostile, and try again. Why? Because just arguing with people is dull and pointless, and I’m not interested in scoring points or proving I am more right. Actually, being less right is more interesting, it means I get to learn something.

Where people are polite, show respect, actually listen, the conversations are amazing. We really could do more of this.

Zen Druidry and other meanderings

My friend Jo van der Hoeven’s lovely little book ‘Zen Druidry’ is out in paperback now. I’ve already read it, and can vouch for it being very nicely written and full of interesting and engaging ideas. I’m not a Zen person, but I enjoy reading about different paths. I believe we can learn a great deal by exploring the commonality between faiths, and also looking at the differences. There are enough overlaps between Buddhism and Druidry that plenty of people pair the two. Druidry, after all, suffers from a lack of ancient texts. Buddhism has plenty of source material, but is very much part of a different land and culture. Taking the bits that make sense and placing them where you are can work with many different paths.

I read widely and am fascinated by other faiths. Shinto, Jainism and Hinduism have recently featured a lot, and I’ve been reading about Zen (aside from Jo’s book) and want to get some Zen Koan teachings. I want to be very clear that this is not about a pick and mix approach to religions, nor about any kind spiritual tourism. I want to learn about what it is to be human, and I think belief is a window to the human condition as much as anything else. Cultures and alternative perspectives fascinate me, I read what philosophy I can manage, I read atheist writers… I’m a bit of an omnivore.

Zen Druidry made a lot of sense to me. I might not choose to go that way, but I can understand it, I see the attraction and it has influenced me a bit in terms of my meditation practice. Recently I’ve also had a look at some reconstructionist Druid writing. Now, given that this is just Druidry, it would be fair to assume this would be even more appealing and meaningful to me than all the ‘foreign’ faiths. I’m hugely interested in history, in the Celts, archaeology, the mediaeval fiction… and yet I fall down entirely with Celtic reconstruction. Why is it that, when I can comfortably read so widely, I struggle with what *should* be closest and most accessible? I can read, and know mostly what’s being referred to, recognise the source material, it’s not like I don’t know my stuff. I’m not an expert on Celtic history, but I’ve got some awareness.

I think it’s this. Religions evolve, and they do so slowly over long periods, punctuated by the occasional upheavals that, for example, bring Christianity out of Judaism, or creates splits into new subsets. Through the evolution process, religions stay with us. If I read about Shinto, I’m reading about something written for a modern audience. Even history is filtered through so that my mind can take it in. The one thing I struggle with is the idea that anyone, of any faith here and now could hope to fully understand the thoughts and beliefs of anyone from two thousand and more years ago. This is the premise on which reconstruction depends – that we can go to the source material, such as it is, and from that we can even viably attempt an understanding at the people who lived it at the time. That from our centrally heated houses with a supermarket down the road we could have some hope of comprehending what it would mean to be utterly dependant on the land you live on, just for starters.

I don’t think most of us have the slightest chance of making the jump.
I remember being told once that Vikings couldn’t have brightly coloured clothes, because as soon as you wash them, those old dyes run, and wash out. Of course he’d chucked his trousers in a washing machine. Soap. Hot water. If you don’t wash often and you don’t wash hot, you can have those colours just fine. A tiny example of how easily we fail to grasp the implications of difference.

Zen Druidry looks a little bit like modern, western Zen, which probably looks a bit like Japanese contemporary Zen which in turn bears some resemblance to other forms of Buddhism, and that no doubt has some stuff in common with forms of Buddhism through its history and through those roots back to the Vedic culture it began in and from there back into something I don’t know much about yet. But apparently that was an oral tradition, teaching in groves. It could be that Buddhism and Jainism, as post-Vedic attempts at reviving pre-Vedic culture have more relationship with something Indo-European that looks like Druidry than picking over Roman remains ever will. A living, evolving tradition may have more to say to us about how Druidry would have evolved, than the remnants of Druidry do. We’ll never know.

In the meantime, you can find Jo’s blog here –www.octopusdance.wordpress.com and here book here – http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portal-Zen-Druidry-Natural-Awareness/dp/1780993900/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365680961&sr=8-1&keywords=zen+druidry

Revival revival

Much of modern Druidry comes not from the ancient Druids, but from the revival Druids – and that great fraudster Iolo Morganwg in particular. The period of revival Druidry (read Ronald Hutton if this is unfamiliar territory) was both mad and wild. Speculation about ancient sites, mediaeval texts, invention of texts by Morganwg, and a wider culture full of secret societies, curious regalia and funny handshakes made for a crazy sort of time.

These days we have far better scholarship and everything has settled down a bit. While I’m all in favour of the more rigorous scholarship, we have lost something. That energy of mad creativity has gone, on the whole. Now, back in the day if you wanted to get all inventive you’d probably start by inventing an even more ancient and venerable history for you group, book, dining table, than anyone else had in order to establish seniority. I think we all know what the score is now, so those games should not be revived unless you’re being shamelessly tongue in cheek about the whole thing. (With all due reference to my most excellent colleagues, the Time-travelling Order of Ancient Druids, or Toads, definitively more ancient than anyone else!)

It is possible to innovate honestly, without needing to imagine a historical basis. We might look to our relationship with our specific bit of land, to invent a Druidry that is totally about where we are, responding to local flora, fauna, seasons and quirks. We might look at our ancestors of land, and innovate based on them. We might think about what else goes on where we are, and Druid our way into it. This would in turn inform how we do ritual and everything else.

The revival folk went in for costume in a way that puts our occasional white robes to shame. I’m not wild for robes, they aren’t very practical, but the whole ‘robes’ thing comes from a revival mistake about statues of Greek philosophers (Hutton again). We don’t really have a strong, exciting Druid aesthetic, in terms of how we might dress, or what imagery we stick on our book covers, or next to articles. Trees feature a lot, but there is no reason to get comfy with what is, in essence, a pretty dull visual tradition at the moment. We could do something. We could invent something new. We could have a really cool Druid aesthetic.

While we’re on the subject, we don’t have many prayers, or Druidic works of fiction either. We don’t have enough teachers or celebrants, and we don’t do enough real world stuff (yes, I know, I’m blogging….) We’ve settled into this comfy place of 8 festivals, a couple of prayers, a fairly staid way of doing ritual, and optional white robes. We’re rather inoffensive, and if you look at us collectively, we are a lot more bland than our Druid revival ancestors.

About the only thing you cannot safely accuse the revival era Druids of being, was bland.

Which brings me round to Steampunk, anachronism, fakelore and making stuff up. (What is a Secret Order of Steampunk Druids for, anyway?) If you aren’t mad for Steampunk, we can just come back to that central theme of the awen, inspiration and creativity. We can bring all that stuff to how we do our Druidry. We don’t have to get everything we do out of books or from courses. We don’t have to do it the way everyone else does it. Most importantly, that ‘stuff we all do’ the truth against the world and swearing by peace and love to stand, the awen and all that? Revival Druidry, for the greater part. Not ancient Druidry, not unassailable truth about what it means to be a Druid, just people making stuff up. We are people, and we ought to be perfectly capable of making stuff up.

That’s an invitation to listen deeply, to respond, to understand, to see the need and answer it. If Druidry is more, really, than people making stuff up and wearing silly costumes, then it comes from somewhere. It comes from the land and our experience of being human. It comes, I think, from deliberate and soulful interaction with the world. We should be doing that thing. I want to look to the revival folk for the inspiration of their energy and creativity, not to replicate what they were playing with.

What makes a Druid?

Following on from Those other people who should not be Druids, and the many fascinating and thought-inspiring comments. What makes a Druid?
It isn’t the name, really. We aren’t even sure where ‘Druid’ comes from as a word – there are many theories – and we don’t entirely know what it means, and we don’t know what the Druids called themselves, although we have guesses there too.

It isn’t the robes (those came from a mistake about some statues of Greek philosophers, apparently) or the beards, and it can’t be the gold sickles because no one has ever found one, and they wouldn’t work anyway.
I’m guessing that in ancient history, you were a Druid if you’d been taught by Druids and those who were already established said that you could be. Although given the speed of travel and communication in the ancient world and the general tendency of people to hive off and start new things, I’m also prepared to bet that even then, there was more than one kind of Druidry about, and probably a fair number of people who hadn’t got *proper* Druid qualifications and still used the title, or who were called it by people who assumed they were because they did the job. Even with the best organised system of education and regulation, there are still people who make stuff up and claim to be things they are not and I doubt that’s anything new. There are also people who just intrinsically are something, and for whom the piece of paper that confirms it hardly seems appropriate.

Buzzard commented yesterday that Druidry is heartfelt, and Symbian remarked on the importance of caring about what we do and giving it our best. Only in the safety of our own heads do we know what we’ve done, and whether we did it well or not. You can have a qualification and only the most superficial understanding of how to do the job. With the right coaching, you can fake a pass at most things, when you wouldn’t be able to sustain the work alone. This is not purely a Druid issue. How is anybody an anything? What makes me an author? What makes my bloke an artist? So often in life the titles aren’t really handed out. Anyone can write a book, does that mean everyone can realistically claim to be ‘an author’? As Wendy pointed out yesterday, many titles are so diluted as to be meaningless.

Part of me likes that. I’m not keen on authority, and the weakening of titles weakens arbitrary authority too. Part of me finds it frustrating, because the multiplying of meaningless titles makes it harder to see where the good stuff is, and makes the accolades less meaningful where they are deserved. On the plus side it means we’re all called upon to pay attention, to judge people by their actions and not the bit of paper (thank you Silverbear). We are all thinking creatures, and we can think for ourselves. When it comes to making judgements about what we do, and what other people do, your own mind is actually the only useful thing you’ve got. All the rest is just propaganda.

What makes a Druid? I still haven’t answered that, have I? I know what I think makes me a Druid, but that wouldn’t necessarily define anyone else. Nor should it.

Thank you everyone who shared thoughts and ideas yesterday, I greatly appreciate the comments, even if I don’t reliably respond to all of them.

Those other people who should not be Druids

Sooner or later just about every online discussion group for Druidry seems to get round to the idea of how irritating it is that anyone can call themselves a Druid. Those other people, the ones who do it all wrong and don’t know enough, inspire everything from frustration to full on outrage. If you’ve dabbled in any groups, odds are you’ve seen it. Any idiot can call themselves a Druid. They don’t even have to speak a Celtic language or know mediaeval Welsh mythology. They don’t have to be qualified herbalists either, nor do they need a degree in astro-physics, medical training and diplomatic service experience.

Why are we, as a community, so often obsessed with wanting to hold a boundary that excludes someone else from being able to call themselves a Druid? Why do we care? Am I any less a Druid because Fred at number four thinks that all you need is the right robes and a spangly wand he got off ebay? Am I any less a Druid because the Ancient and Austere Order of Very Serious Druids have not initiated me? Whose approval do I need? And who, come to that, needs my approval? Nobody, I hope.

Anyone can call themselves a Druid. Anyone can call themselves Napoleon Bonaparte as well, come to that. Titles are only as meaningful as we choose to make them. I could declare myself Queen of the Faeries, if I wanted to be pointed at and mocked a lot. I could call myself ArchDruid of somewhere or other if I wanted to. No one can stop me. Mostly what stops me is that I don’t care enough and really can’t be bothered.
Druidry is between you, and your land. You and your Gods, if you have them. You and whatever tribe you serve. It comes down to what we do, not what others think of us.

A frightening amount of time gets wasted in these pointless debates about who isn’t a proper Druid really and how nice it would be if we could have some regulating body. There’s a reason we don’t have a regulating body, and it is simply that there are far too many kinds of Druid and forms of Druidry out there for us ever to satisfactorily agree on who we ‘in’ and who we reject. I fear the truth may be that many people who want to regulate simply want to make everyone else do it their way. You won’t find many people on forums writing to the effect that they fear their Druidry is a bit shabby and lacks the proper intellectual underpinnings and bemoaning the shortage of people to tell them how to do it right. The people who come asking to be taught do not do that, and rightly so.

Amusingly, to make this stick I would have to go out and forcibly convert the Druid community to my way of seeing things and make everyone do what I say. Well, not this week, I’ve got better things to be doing, like looking at the sky and talking to the cat. And anyway, no one would go along with it I tried, which may be as well.

It doesn’t matter who calls themselves what. It matters what we do, whether we do it wholeheartedly and with integrity, whether we are any good, whether it works.