Acoustic spirits of place

Being a singer and musician, I’ve always had a consciousness of acoustics, and it slowly dawned on me that this is not universal. Apparently not everyone automatically does this or grasps it as an idea, so I thought I should share… Every space has its own sound quality. As a Druid, in ritual or just connecting with a place, the sound of a place is easily tapped into and, I feel, really enables you to engage with its spirit. Using the sound resonance of a space really adds to ritual work and performance.

If you listen to a space, you can start to get a sense of how the sounds work. Are there echoes? Is sound bouncing about? Or travelling to you from afar? What makes sound here? If there’s anything vertical, be that a slope, a tree, a standing stone, you can bounce sound off it a bit. The big stones at Stonehenge are amazing for this. Messing about with your voice and listening to what comes back will tell you what’s going on.

In buildings, the height of walls, length of room, shape of ceiling will inform how the sound behaves. Often, some spots turn out to be better than others. If you can stand in the right place, throw your sound the right way, you get to tap into that resonance. The space takes your sound and embellishes it. Sometimes certain notes or pitches work better than others, and if you can hear that, you can play with it, pitching your voice accordingly. It works as well for speech as for song, and puts you into the most magical kind of interaction with your space.

If you can tap into the echoes, into the pitches that suit the space and find the right place to stand to get the best audio effect (that might simply be upwind of everyone else so the wind takes your words to them, and not away) you are in harmony with the space. The space is working for you, you do not need amplifying, your words fly out as if by magic.

I’ve been doing this for lot of years, and I know when I’ve understood the space and worked with it, because not only do I hear the soft echoes supporting my voice, but I notice how much quieter people are. Get this right and an audience that might otherwise have been restless will stand still, silent, spellbound.

Druid magic… bard magic… there’s some science in this, although you have to work intuitively and with your senses to use it. This is the simplest way of adding a magical quality to your words or music, and it works anywhere. Even the deadest room will have places that work better acoustically than others. So, if you see me ambling about a place, staring and the ceiling and humming quietly to myself, this is why. I’m listening to the spirit of the place.

The journey back

Following on from Pathworking with Dunsany, I want to talk more broadly about the journey back. If you don’t die in the process, then the end of every adventure involves a return journey. This is just as true of rituals, pagan camps and deep meditations as it is for wandering Hobbits. At the end, you go home. This is an important part of the process.

Home is where you live. It’s where you come from, where you belong, be it ever so ordinary. Part of the coming back can be seeing the old place with new eyes. Like Dorothy in Wizard of Oz, you may find that the adventure allows you to see what was splendid about what you had all along. It may mean bringing back some of the mystery and wonder to share with those who did not go on the journey. It may simply mean finding a place to nurture the more down to earth part of yourself, because we need that too.

A wonder that you cannot speak of to someone who will appreciate it, turns out to be a lot less wonderful. The making of story and offering of experience to another human is part of the adventure. That sharing puts the adventure into perspective, places it in the wider story, perhaps helps us make sense of it too.

The contrast is important, between the wonderful and the ordinary. A life that was all ritual, or all pathworking would cease to make as much sense. That way, quite literally, lies madness. There’s only so much wonder a mind can take before it needs a rest, and perhaps a nice, mundane cup of tea and time to reflect upon things. We appreciate most stuff better for having a degree of contrast. The inherent peace of the ordinary probably seems a lot more valuable once you’ve trekked into Mordor, or whatever your personal equivalent may have been.

It can be tempting to want to disappear, taking the envisaged road into faerie, and never looking back. In the more profound moments of prayer, in the wilder dreams, in the deepest meditations, that call to just go and never return can be loud and powerful. This drab, damp life, this grey England, this lousy government… if only we could step through a magical portal and never come back. Only the coming back is necessary, and worth doing well. Come back smiling, with fresh inspiration, not reluctantly like a kid being dragged out of a playground to go and do homework. Bring a few shreds of glamour and wonder with you, for the rest of the world has need of them.

Only when we come back, can we reflect on where we’ve been and figure out what it means.

The naked dancing Pagan thing

One of the most common questions non-Pagans ask Pagans is “Do you dance naked, then?” The other one is about sacrificing virgins. B-movie images of lurid sexual ritual are no doubt in their minds, or at least, that’s what they rather hope we do. That way, they can have fun thinking about it, or get righteously indignant about us, or both.

For the record, no. Never have, probably never will. For a start I like working outside and mostly the UK is cold, damp and not a good place to get your kit off. The bigger issue though is that I’m deeply uncomfortable with nudity. There’s a confession. Here we are, nature based spirituality, body as your own personal expression of nature and sacredness, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I don’t mind other people being as unclothed as they like, so long as I can stay securely wrapped up. Of course that’s mostly about an illusion of being less visible, less available, and I know that, but it’s still what I’ve got. I don’t much like being looked at. I really don’t like the idea of being judged, of being visually icky, or for that matter appealing. To be appealing is to be vulnerable, and I’ve had my nudity and the appeal of my body used to justify things happening to me in the past. Still got some baggage there.

I’m guessing that anyone who is so inclined can figure out what shape I am by looking, and that the clothes don’t really hide me. If I was a peacock person, it might be another issue, but I’m not that dressy either, I do clothes for practical reasons of warmth and comfort, and for camouflage, very seldom for any kind of display.

I’m wondering what it would be like to be in a social, ritual or spiritual context where people either casually didn’t have clothes on, or were very intentionally naked as part of the process. I wonder what it would be like to have that so much a normal and natural part of culture that’s it’s not excessively sexualised (at least in my head) or weird, or anything like that. Tricky to picture.

I think I was born with the sensibilities of an elderly Victorian spinster. If anyone had told me about covering up chair legs as a child and not flashing your ankles, I’d have been right there. As it was I just had to make do fashioning appropriate undergarments for bears. Toy bears that is. I used to have panics about guys who bared their chests, so all things considered I’ve made a lot of progress, but I’m a long way away from dancing naked round the fire in the woods in the middle of the night. Mind you, given how much rain we’ve had, I doubt anyone else danced naked round here this winter either.

Without a script

I want to talk today about the importance of not depending on a bit of paper in ritual. We don’t know much about the ancient Druids, one of the few things there is no doubt about is that theirs was an oral tradition. Bards and Druids alike expected to dedicate a lot of material to memory. This is a good thing, it means you have the words with you wherever you go, and no one can take them from you. I do understand that modern life tends not to encourage the hard work involved, but if you are serious about Druidry, this is a great place to start with really, seriously, doing it.

Paper is a problem in many ways. In low light, rain and wind, it can be unreadable, so if you were depending on it, you may be stuffed. It is a literal barrier between you and everyone else, it may seem small, but you will try to hide behind it. When you’re reading, you’re thinking about reading, not the meaning, not the people around you or the below or the sky above. With the words in your head, you have space to connect mentally with the space as you bring the words forth. If you’ve learned the words you’ve given time to pondering their depth and meaning, and you will speak them with feeling, insight, understanding, you will bring them to life. Even if you stumble and muff up a bit, it will be more alive. Lastly, if you really work and still don’t feel able to go without the paper, you’ll do a far better job for having tried to learn than if you’d gone the easy road in the first place.

I’m a big advocate of speaking in the moment. This takes confidence and practice, you need to know broadly what sort of thing to be saying, and so spending time with scripts can be a good preparation. Speaking in the moment, you can invoke awen and inspiration, you can respond to what’s around you, with feeling, making sense of your ritual space, your people, your experience. A script will not give you that, ever, it’s an imposition on the moment devised in advance based on assumptions about what you will get.

Part of this is about permission to mess up. You may forget the words. You may not spontaneously spout poetry. You may pause. But, you’ll have your head up, and you’ll be present. Whether working from memory or inspiration you will inherently be honouring the Druid tradition. You’ll be more real. We all muff up, that’s fine, it’s part of the learning process. You can’t open to the awen when you’re clinging to a bit of paper for protection, it doesn’t work that way. Learn the words, or don’t, but either way, dare to trust yourself. Dare to speak your Druidry in the moment, like you mean it. The difference is huge.

Emerging from the cave

Yesterday I attended the Cotswold Pagan Society Imbolc ritual held in Clearwell caves – Druid led but not just for Druids. It was a really interesting experience. The caves themselves are a mix of natural formation and iron ore mining that dates back into pre-history. Clearwell, in the Forest of Dean is part of an area where coal and iron have been mined for a long time, much of it by surface digging. The landscape is hillocky with leavings from mining efforts such that much of the place has been shaped by ancestral activity.

It is a place of my ancestors. My father’s mother came from the Forest, so I assume given so many people there were miners that I probably have an ancestor or two who worked those caves. In youth, before it was all organised and a centre, my father and his friends wandered about down there, he was clearly a braver and more adventurous soul than I am! I’d be nervous doing that in the dark, it would be so easy to get lost.

I’ve never done a ritual in a cave before. I’d also not previously done anything so formal, planned and scripted, so that was an interesting experience. Despite the OBOD training, I’m too much the bard to want paper in hand. If words need to be fixed I feel a need to learn them – for me that’s part of the bard tradition. Really I prefer to wing it, finding inspiration in the place and the moment. I’m aware that comes from a long history of improvising – with music, mumming, writing, I’m in the habit of doing things in the moment. Many people aren’t, and a lot of life doesn’t encourage us to open up to sudden flows of creativity. One of the things yesterday left me with was a sense of being fortunate in the skills and experiences life has brought me. There must be many people who need the support of the written word, the permission inherent in a ritual script, to make Druidry available to them. Taught as we are to follow and regurgitate, it seems like an act of ego, insanity or self importance to be burbling away off the top of your head. At least, it does at first… Druidry has to start places people can cope with, and sometimes the reassuring bit of paper is needful.

During the ritual I found myself thinking about Stone Age cave painters, mysteries explored in art in the deep darkness of the earth. I thought about the hibernating bear, and also the mystic cave dwellers, the dragons and goblins, and wondered who, traditionally, inhabited those forest caves. I thought about the association between caves and hermits seeking inspiration and closeness to spirit. Inevitably I also thought about the womb of the earth, especially as we walked the steep and narrow path up towards… not rebirth in daylight, but the gift shop. Ah, modern humanity…

I spent so long running rituals, or being at the running end. It’s really good to stand in circle without any particular job or responsibility, to just be there and see what happens. It’s a relearning process for me, in all kinds of good ways. I have no doubt that at some point I’ll be setting up some circle of my own, quietly, but yesterday reminded me of how much work goes into making those big, public circles happen. All kudos to the people who pour their energy and creativity into such events around the world. It’s such a valuable service, connecting communities and letting inspiration flow, but I remember all too well how it used to wash me out.

Voicing the Druidry

The voice any of us write with can seem like a very personal, natural thing, but to some degree it’s a construct. I did a degree in English lit a long time ago, and one of the ongoing effects is that I am very conscious of voices in writing, both my own, and other people’s. I write erotic under another name, and I have a whole other voice for that; arsey, darkly playful, much more evil than my regular self. That voice exists to do a job, and I created it in a very deliberate way.

One of my first Druid teachers was in the habit of saying ‘in Druidry we…’ which drove me nuts. Normally ‘we’ ought to be an inclusive word, but when you hear a lot of ’in druidry we do something entirely different from this thing you want to do’ it can become remarkably exclusive. Even so, I probably default to the language of ‘we’ more than anything else. We can do this. We can try that. I use ‘I’ to talk about things that seem passably unique to me. Okay, this is all a bit navel gazey and meta bloggy, but I think it’s worth a thought.

Language, in its subtle nuances conveys all kinds of information. Who has the power and authority here? Am I telling you what to do, telling you what I do, talking about what I do, suggesting what we could do… it all creates different vibes and will impact on how you, dear reader, experience my words. Now, if there was just one of you and I knew who you were, I could tailor it, but I’m also very conscious that there are quite a few people reading this, scattered about the world, coming in from different language backgrounds, with various levels of experience and different needs and expectations. You, dear reader, are a creature of many faces, voices and identities, and to treat you as one person may be convenient from a writing perspective, but ultimately feels a bit weird and probably doesn’t work.

That whole ‘dear reader’ thing is one of those charming Victorian conventions that modern authors aren’t supposed to dabble in. Ah well.

Some authors use the third person, and that voice is laden with authority. Here we can see that the author is a person of great insight who is handing out the facts in a calm and objective way. Only, all authors are people, and that objective third person voice readily disguises opinion and assumption as unassailable truth. Do not be seduced by the authority of the third person voice! (There, I said that in an authoritative, third persony sort of way, is that irony?)

This is not just an author issue. We voice our Druidry in ritual, and at other public gatherings. How much ‘I’ and how much ‘we’ needs to be in that mix? Well, that depends a bit on what you’re doing. If you are calling to Spirits of Place on behalf of a whole circle, you have to be offering your voice on behalf of everyone. It would be weird to say ‘spirits of place, I honour you’ at that point, it would leave everyone else out! I’ve also heard people in ritual call to Gods or Goddesses on behalf of everyone and felt uneasy because they hadn’t been asked to do so, and these were not my deities.

How we use language can have massive impact. I’m conscious that fellow blogger Cat over at http://www.druidcat.wordpress.com frequently talks about what she is doing, and rounds up by asking, what are you doing? A most direct challenge thrown out to the reader, a separation of ‘I’ and ‘you’ that always has a discernible impact on ‘me’. Am I really doing enough?
No matter where you are working, you are speaking and writing and interacting as a Druid. Your ‘natural’ voice is full of your beliefs and assumptions, and it is worth sitting down and poking it. (There, I went all I-you, conveying my authority and your need to do something different… fascinating, isn’t it?)

The devil is in the detail. I’m quite convinced the Druidry is in there too, more often than not. It’s amazing how much space you can get inside a detail… is it time to go all Doctor Who now?

Druidry outside

As a modern Druid, you may well be drawn to doing your rituals and celebrations outside. I’ve read descriptions by fellow Druids of getting soaked and frozen, being out all night, covered in mud and so forth, and I find myself wondering, is this what the ancients would have done, or is it actually both a reaction to, and a consequence of modern life?

Oddly enough what started me down this line of thought was a blog post about the archaeology of homelessness, and a dig in Bristol. Homeless people were invited to get involved, but most didn’t want to do any actual digging because they had nowhere to clean up and dry off, and so couldn’t afford to get wet and filthy in a hole in the first place. Our ancient ancestors had roofs and fires, but they didn’t have hot showers or tumble driers. Get a garment absolutely soaked, especially if it’s a wool garment, and then try to dry it, with just wringing out, and fire heat. It takes a while. Now, if you have lots of other clothes, this may be no big deal, but if you don’t… it’s a crisis.

I know runners who go out in all weathers and get soaked to the skin, and are fine with this. But they have places to dry their clothes, are not running water from a water tank for that hot shower, and I think this makes a lot of odds. I’ve been soaked to the skin a few times this winter. I have towels and changes of clothes, but what’s at a premium is drying space, and so I don’t get wet voluntarily. Not even for ritual. I can’t afford to.

I’ve also found that, since taking up residence on the boat, I’ve not felt the same need I used to, to reconnect with nature at regular intervals through the year. I’m living in such intense relationship, day to day, with the outside, that this has changed me. Light levels, weather conditions, visiting wildlife all impact directly, so there is no ‘reconnect’ issue. I’m here. Nature is all around me. I don’t especially need to sit on a hill all night to remind myself of the realities.

Our ancient ancestors owned a lot less than we do, lived far closer to the land than we do, and did not have anything resembling tumble driers. Did they go out and freeze their ancestral bottoms off, and get themselves soaked, for the sake of the Gods?

Maybe they didn’t.

Which does not invalidate our doing so, if we feel the need. If mud, cold, wet and the immediacy of living reality are not a normal part of life, those acts of reconnection are very important. You could do it by running just as well as by ritual, with the right intent and consciousness.

I’ll finish with a half remembered quote from Good Omens, in which it is observed that the female heroine, Anathema, had a mother who spent six months living in a field in order to get back to nature and understand why humans had spent thousands of years trying to get away from nature in the first place…

Druidry and Drunkenness

There are some for whom the image of Druidry is inexorably linked to excessive alcohol consumption. I’ve heard plenty of comments, and also Paul Mitchell’s wonderful song ‘I’m a much better Pagan when I am pissed’ but I’ve also never been in a Druid gathering where there’s been anything beyond merriness. It could be that I’m too obviously sober to get invited to that sort of gathering in the first place, of course.

I have no problem with drunkenness as a life experience. Most of us do it some time or another. It’s very hard to discover where your natural boundaries are without testing them. I’ve tested mine. I’ve explored what inebriation does to my mind and body, and seen what it does to other people. I’ve never been prepared to use it as an excuse to behave in ways that I wouldn’t the rest of the time. My suspicion is that many people who claim they were so drunk they didn’t know what they were doing, are lying, to themselves as much as anyone else. I’ve been falling over drunk. I’ve never done anything voluntarily that I wouldn’t have done when sober. Failures of co-ordination don’t count, I think. Starting fights, getting off with people you claim you wouldn’t normally go near, vandalising stuff… if you’re together enough to do any of these things, you are choosing.

I use alcohol in ritual. I particularly like the more Heathen tradition of passing round a mead horn and making toasts. It’s a very easy thing, so long as the horn goes round a couple of times even the most nervous and inexperienced person usually manages to say something. A simple toasting of the company, the gods, the ancestors… it doesn’t take much. I think getting everyone actively involved is an important aspect of ritual, and a little alcoholic toasting can make this happen. It’s also very communal and bonding, sharing the cup, and the diseases… there’s an intimacy to it that has a value. I’ve been in plenty of toasting situations where the non-drivers have become merry, and this has not detracted from the ritual at all. Group rituals, especially open ones, are not the place for very deep and very quiet introspective work anyway, so there’s nothing to lose.

The Greeks had Dionysus, and I’m sure his equivalent crops up in many other cultures too. The God of the vine whose blood is quite literally wine, and who is celebrated with excessive consumption. The traditions of my own lands include periods of misrule and mayhem, a collective letting down of hair and venting of whatever you need to get out of your system. Drunkenness has a place in misrule, in celebration, ritualised rule/taboo breaking. More modest degrees of merriment have a place in social bonding and let’s face it, being slightly drunk in the right context is a lot of fun.

Falling over drunk is not very amusing, although the spectators can get a few laughs at your expense. Yes, I once got so drunk that I fell off my high heels into a book case, and was covered in bruises the next day. I learned from this. I don’t wear stupid shoes any more. I also don’t get that drunk anymore for the very simple reason that it isn’t fun. Throwing up isn’t fun – not done that one, but have helped enough other people deal with booze induced spewing. Being unable to protect yourself from sexual predation isn’t fun and while the onus should not be on anyone to avoid becoming a victim, the sad reality is that when you are off your face, you are desperately vulnerable to violence, theft, sexual abuse and really evil practical jokes.

Changes of perception and brain functioning can make for spiritual experiences. I’ve never felt moved to try and use alcohol this way, but assume it’s feasible. It is after all a manifestation of nature to take within the body, and it has been deemed to be the blood of Gods, so there is justification for exploring the spiritual impact of booze. However, a thing is what you make of it. You’re only likely to get an alcohol induced spiritual experience if you set out in search of one. Rolling out of a bar to vomit in a back alley is unlikely to give you a moment of numinous wonder.

Of course there’s no one tidy answer here. There are times and spaces for all things. There is room in Druidry for times of excess. Balance is not about just holding the safe middle ground. You can create balance through extremes as well. The question to ask is, do your actions serve you? Are you getting something out of them? If alcohol brings merriness, social lubrication and a warm fuzzy feeling of connection to everyone else, then why not? If you are in the business of poisoning yourself and acting out, then there are problems. There’s a Roman motto, that comes out as ‘in wine, truth’. It isn’t the truth of the vine that counts here, it’s the truth of who you are and what you do with it.

Chanelling the folk

For a long time it was a commonly held belief that folk customs could be assumed to contain ancient Pagan remnants. After all, the common folk are so often an illiterate, uneducated lot, not too bright… what can they do but repeat what they’ve always done? Clever people from the literate classes can interpret things into the unwitting actions of the folk people.

I’ve been doing some deep, deep work over the last few days, listening to the voices of my peasant ancestors, and this is the wisdom I have brought back to you.

We have to make our own fun, and so we make stuff up. We tell stories. Some stories are old and some are new and some are the kind of new stories that are really the old stories in new skins.

Begging is mostly illegal and shameful. None of us are beggars. Although, if you get a nice bit of greenery and a dead bird to show people, that’s not begging, that’s tradition. Sing the song, do the dance, pass the bowl round. That’s not begging either, that’s a custom and it’s heritage and thank you yes, a pint would go down very nicely just now. Got any apples? How about a nice bit of pudding? We’re very good at coming up with things that aren’t begging at all, but that result in people who have a lot of money, food and drink passing it around to those of us who don’t have quite so much.

But we’re just simple country people acting out the timeless traditions. So that’s different. If you don’t pay up, we’ll plough your drive, or piss on it, or put a rude verse in about you for next year. That’s traditional too, that’s not menacing anybody, it’s how things are done.

It’s amazing how many ancient folk traditions involve passing round a bowl or demanding refreshments. We could talk about the symbolic sharing of wealth to encourage the fertility and wellbeing of the tribe… we could shoehorn that into what we want to think ancient Paganism looked like, but I’m not convinced. I’ve been out with mumming sides, I’ve carol sung door to door. Most of the year you cannot knock on doors and demand money in exchange for a song, but in the week before Christmas, it’s fair game. Most of the year you can’t turn up in a costume and demand sweets, but on the 31st of October a lot of people will have sweets in, just in case. Penny for the guy? Ritualised begging. It’s mostly about the begging, and the sweets. I wonder how long we’ve put a skim of religion over the top of that? Because of course if you let yourself believe it’s religion or tradition, you can also pretend that the people you are ritually relieving of distress aren’t also bloody poor and in need the rest of the year.

It’s not poverty, it’s not begging, it’s traditional, and therefore the rest of the time we can pretend the need doesn’t exist. Because we’re clever and literate and we can read in the signs of ancient religion that tell us these people are just fine, and acting out ancient Pagan heritage, and not actually starving.

Most mummers these days aren’t starving, but as Christmas is the season of token-gesture charity giving, it’s worth a ponder.

(Also, I owe a lot to Ronald Hutton’s Stations of the Sun for this.)

Handling the evil ancestors

Thanks to a prompt on yesterday’s blog, Evil Ancestors, I realise I need to keep going with this issue. Some of it is in the book, but I shall avoid replicating material, as much to stop me from getting bored as for any other reason.

By whatever means, we’ve identified one or more ancestor we’re not okay with. Now what? Knowing is an important personal issue, but when you step into a ritual space and say ‘hail blessed ancestors’ what happens about the not-so blessed and the total bastards? As I said yesterday, odds are, we all have them.

The easiest wriggle is to just assume that when you’re talking about the blessed ancestors, you’re talking to the nice ones. The trouble with people, though, is that tendency to be complicated. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, and all that. People can change, and do. One act does not necessarily define the whole of a person. Often, the worst things people do can be motivated by a belief that they are doing the best possible things for the best possible reasons. Look at every religiously inspired act of violence, each one rooted in a belief that they’re burning /stoning hanging/ you for the good of your own soul. Think of the parents who try so hard to protect their children that they end up crushing all the spirit out of them. And of course there is the issue that we would not be here at all were it not for those direct ancestors, no matter how awful they were.

Silverbear made some lovely points in the comments yesterday, (do go and read them). Holding our own separateness, knowing what we are not responsible for – these things all help when it comes to dealing with the legacies of the dead.

I think that we can honour the ancestors in the sense of recognising that we would not be here without them. I begin to feel that if we’re inviting people into circle, there’s something to be said for qualifying that a bit. I wouldn’t want all of my immediate ancestors in the same circle – they don’t all get on, the same might be reasonably assumed of the departed. Perhaps it would make sense to call upon the peaceful ancestors, the kindly ancestors, much of the time. Blessed ought to be a good start. I’ve never tried to do a ritual approach to the unquiet dead or the troubling dead, but it strikes me as being an interesting idea. One for a closed group though, not a random public gathering!

I find what I want to face the evil ancestors with, is compassion. This is easier for me because none of my most immediate and nameable ancestors were total bastards, so my evil ancestors are more hypothetical and distant. I don’t have specific identities and actions to work with. For someone who does – I don’t feel qualified to make any suggestions beyond do whatever makes sense to you. I think one of the biggest reasons people mess up, is they act out of fear. Hanging on to what should be let go of, taking things they aren’t entitled to, doing things for which there can be no justification. You can’t be in a truly good, happy, healthy mental state and be out there abusing. With the safety of distance, I can respond to that with pity, towards both victims and aggressors. Victims who became aggressors. People who were so frightened they did terrible things. People who believed they were doing it for all the right reasons. I can honour the fact that we are all flawed, and there but for the grace of… what? Good teaching? A decent sort of culture? Sheer blind luck? There but for some kind of grace, goes any of us. How few choices different would have turned me into one of the dark ones, a skeleton for future closets?

Wish them opportunity to learn and heal, wish them a chance to redress the balance or to do better. And as Graeme pointed out this week, if you believe in reincarnation, we were some of those ancestors, and odds are at some point we were the evil bastards, so spare a bit of compassion for yourself as well, because that way lies healing and hope.