Studying Druidry

(Nimue)

When you first come to Druidry, the odds are you’ll pick up a book about it from one of the more famous Druids, maybe read some blogs and articles to get a feel for what Druidry is. You might build on that by reading more about the history and mythology. You’ll soon find that there isn’t as much historical detail as you might have hoped for. Many of the people who are attracted to Druidry are also attracted to the idea of study and learning, so, where do you go next?

Anywhere you like!

One of the things we can be pretty confident about regarding the ancient Druids is that they were thinking people. They learned history, law, medicine and more. We don’t have the lore they studied. We also don’t need it. Knowledge needs to be meaningful, so there’s a good argument for saying that modern knowledge is the most relevant thing for a modern Druid. Any area of study that interests you can therefore be part of how you do your Druidry.

Aside from the relevance of a love of learning, what makes your study Druidic is what you do with it. What I refer to for guidance here are the pledges I made when I first initiated as a bard – that I would use my creativity for the good of the land and the good of my people. Therefore I use my learning to inform my creativity so that I can work for the good of the land and the good of my people. I learn so as to make better choices, and so that I can act in meaningful and effective ways.

The Gorsedd Prayer that many of us use asks for the blessings of understanding and knowledge. Knowledge brings us to the knowledge of justice, and to love. It is through understanding that we are able to act justly, to empathise and to be compassionate. Anything we learn has the potential to take us in this direction.

To study as a Druid is to study anything that strikes you as worthy of your time and attention. To seek knowledge is Druidic. You can do that formally through courses, you can read, take classes to develop skills, or learn by experimenting and through experience. It’s all equally valid. You are responsible for what you learn, and what you do with it, and it is on you to find the best resources. It is also on us to use critical thinking skills, work out who to trust and how to sift the grain from the chaff. 

Perhaps the most important test of anyone’s thinking and teaching is what it encourages. I reject the teachers who sow division and encourage selfishness. I reject the teachers who offer simplistic takes and no nuance. I want to learn from people who are compassionate, working for peace, cooperative and inclined towards sharing. This is not just about teachers of Druidry, but about anyone we might learn from along the way.

Being a modern English Druid

(Nimue)

I think it’s increasingly important to be clear about the ’English’ part of my Druidry. I’m not part of a living tradition in the way that some Druids are. I come to this path as a modern person inspired by the past. I am not a reconstructionist. I do not claim that what I do is historically accurate. I’m not personally much invested in the idea of my Englishness, but I still think it needs flagging up.

There are issues around what non-Welsh, non-Scottish and non-Irish modern Pagans do with those traditions. If this is something you want to know more about then your best bet is to find Druids who are deeply involved with those lands and cultures and take on board what they have to say about appropriation and people talking over them and misrepresenting their stuff. I’m not in a position to speak for them.

However, I live in a landscape where Druidry was practiced historically and where revival Druidry took root. I don’t think that being a Druid depends on either your ancestors of blood or your ancestors of place, and that the path should be open to anyone who wants to walk it. We can balance inclusion with respect. We can recognise that some of us come to this with ancestors who were oppressors. Most people, like myself, will have a bit of both. 

For me, my relationship with the landscape I live in is the bedrock of my Druidry. My local museum has figures of local Iron Age deities in it, and there are pre-Roman godds associated with this landscape. As I’ve talked about before, there is ‘Welsh’ mythology set in Gloucester, because the borders haven’t always been the same as they are right now. Boudicca was right out in the east of the UK – Celtic peoples were everywhere here, so in the UK we all have that as part of our landscape history.

My local Roman villa was most likely to have been Romano-British, Plenty of ‘Celtic’ people willingly adopted Roman ways of doing things. There are no hard lines between the two cultures, as further evidenced by how the Romans treated local deities, usually associating them with their own and continuing use of the same shrines. People have always been mobile, intermarriage between groups of people has always been a thing. None of us are ‘pure’ anything and notions of purity underpin a lot of fascist thinking so it’s important to take that into account.

You can be a Druid on your own terms. All you have to do is be respectful of people who may have closer and deeper ties with landscapes and deities than you do. If your personal experience of a deity makes you feel entitled to talk over or argue with people who belong to that deity’s landscape, history and traditions, take a good, hard look at yourself. Ask why you think you are so special and so important, because trust me, that’s a ‘you’ issue and has nothing to do with the godd in question.

Service and everyday Druidry

(Nimue)

The call to service as part of Druidry can seem like and intimidating thing. If you are already time-poor, already tired and struggling (as so many of us are) then how can you possibly add ‘service’ on top of that? It can seem like an idea that more properly belongs with anyone trying to take more of a priestly role.

However, there are many different ways of approaching this.

Anything we do to live lightly and sustainably is an act of service to the Earth. That includes your recycling. It can mean things like avoiding over-packaged goods and throwaway plastics. Cutting your food waste, composting your kitchen waste, avoiding microplastics, using more environmentally friendly cleaning products, keeping usable items out of landfill… all of this is service.

Any commitment you make to learning and growing is part of how you serve as a Druid. You may be laying down foundations for future service. The most important work to do right now might be the work you are doing in your own life that will give you more options in the future.

Looking after nature as it manifests in your own body is looking after nature. The things that are best for us are also best for the world as a whole, and this is good work to be doing.

If you give time to prayer, to ritual, or to any other form of honouring what is sacred to you, this is service to the divine. It doesn’t have to be showy or dramatic. If you practice gratitude then you’re honouring what’s around you which is part of the same thing.

If you are drawing inspiration from Druidry to inform your everyday life, then you are embodying that Druidry. You’re putting it into the world and living it in a meaningful way. This is also an act of service.

Everyday opportunities to practice kindness and compassion abound. We all get opportunities to act fairly, to speak up for justice, to bring wisdom and care into our lives. When we act thoughtfully and treat the people we encounter in line with our values, then that also counts.

Service is about making your Druidry real in a way that doesn’t only impact on you. When we’re thinking about how we impact on the world, and working to do that in the best possible ways we can, then we are making service part of what we do. Whether that’s working to ease tensions in our families or workplaces, or trying to lift and encourage others, there are many ways of expressing aspects of your Druidry in your everyday life. Small everyday gestures matter, and often have far more impact than occasional big gestures.

Plants and everyday Druidry

(Nimue)

Plants are a great thing to focus on if you’re looking for small, simple things to engage with in an everyday way. Being consistent and predictable, plants are easy to engage with. Finding a plant that lives near you is something most of us can do. I favour trees, but if that’s not what your landscape does, any local plant is a good choice.

Find out what your plant is – the internet makes this easy, you can just take a photo and then search for the image. Visit your plant regularly. Everyday might be ideal, but whatever suits you will be fine. Do a bit of reading, find out about your plant – smaller ones can be seasonal so some relationships are only short term.

Visiting your plant regularly will give you a seasonal practice rooted in day to day experience. Following the wheel of the year through the life of a single plant is a really good way of connecting and engaging. 

The odds are that your plant won’t be solitary. Other plants will exist around it, most likely. Insects may interact with it. If you’ve picked a tree then you might also find birds, fungi and assorted creatures inhabiting either the tree or its vicinity. A single tree can show you a lot over time and help you connect with other wild things.

There may be folklore associated with your plant. It may have magical associations, or applications in herbalism. With trees, you can look at traditional uses for the wood, and for anything else the tree produces. This is the kind of thing you can explore gently and when the fancy takes you, but it will enrich your experience of visiting your plant.

If you have bardic inclinations you can draw, photograph, write about or otherwise let yourself be inspired by your plant.

If meditation is your thing, sitting with a plant to just see how the world is where your plant lives can be really rewarding. You don’t have to do anything complicated, just share the space in a contemplative way. If you need a focus for meditation at other times, contemplating your plant is a good choice.

A few minutes a day can make a lot of odds. Taking a couple of minutes to acknowledge and pay attention to a plant in your garden can show you a great deal. Small walks to the nearest tree can open the wild world up to you without requiring huge amounts of time and effort. Feeling a connection to a wild and living being roots your Druidry. It’s a good way of slowing down and building a relationship with the natural world.

Part time Druid

(Nimue)

There are a few people out there who might be full time Druids, but it isn’t a huge number. Some Druids manage to have day jobs that align perfectly with being a Druid, but many do not. The historical Druids (so far as we know from the Romans) occupied a particular cluster of roles in their society. We don’t exist in that context, there isn’t a modern Druidry that gets to talk to Kings or opposing armies on battlefields. Not having that context makes it difficult  to be a full time Druid in the style of a historical Druid.

Most modern Druids, then, are part time. It is however possible to bring your Druidry to pretty much anything you end up doing. It’s an understated way of being a Druid, and of necessity a lot of the time no one else will know that you’re doing the things you do in a considered and Druidic way. I think it’s enough to be Druiding on your own terms as best you can around the life that you have. I fall into this category. My Druidry is part of my everyday life, but for the vast majority of the time it’s not very self announcing.

You don’t have to be doing all of the things to be engaging with Druidry. If you’ve got some room for doing Druid stuff in your life then that’s enough to qualify you as being a person who does Druid stuff. I’m increasingly convinced that the best way for me to do all of this isn’t about dramatic rituals and looking the part. It’s about living the philosophy, and bringing it into your everyday life. Lived Druidry has a lot to offer. 

If it’s the celebratory side that calls to you, that’s fine too. If you’re an eight festivals a year kind of Druid, and celebrating those key points is what speaks to you most then that’s also Druidry. If you engage more at the key festivals and aren’t so focused on your spiritual life the rest of the time, that’s fair enough. For some people this is going to make most sense, and it depends on how you want your spiritual life to fit into the rest of your life.

I’m a fan of the everyday Druidry, and that’s something I mean to talk about more as we go along. I figure plenty of other people are putting good material out there about how to celebrate the festivals. I’m going to be thinking more deliberately about the day to day magic, the small, sustainable ways in which we can do Druidry, and how to be on the Druid path without wanting to organise anything. Making room for Druidry in the apparently more mundane features of our lives is a really good way to enrich daily life without creating a lot of extra work for yourself.

Lay Druids and other definitions

(Nimue)

The term ‘Druid’ suggests authority and importance. For this reason many people who are interested in Druidry do not feel able to call themselves Druids. We don’t have an agreed term for people who are interested in Druid stuff, doing Druidry, on the Druid path but do not yet feel experienced enough to use the word to describe themselves. 

Lay Druid seems like a bit of a contradiction. But at the same time, if it works for you, use it. A person absolutely can be a lay Druid. That would mean studying Druidry and practicing it, perhaps in a solitary way. It could mean going along to rituals or being part of a grove. It might mean any level of commitment that seems appropriate to you, including just wanting your rites of passage handled in a Druidic way.

People who are definitely Druids may well be using other terms too, reflecting which bits of the Druid work they do. Celebrants lead rituals and perform rites of passage and I think that’s the only term that might be unfamiliar. Other Druids will call themselves teachers, writers, healers, activists etc in ways that are usually easy to make sense of. We know that the historical Druids performed a lot of different roles, and that clearly not everyone did everything.

There has tended to be an assumption in Paganism as a whole that people want to be their own authority, their own priest or priestess and that lay Paganism doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never agreed with this. Not everyone wants to make their spiritual life the centre of everything they do and that should be fine. A functioning society needs people doing all kinds of different things. Wanting someone else to be a Druid for you so that you can do Paganism in a way that works for you is totally fine. Druidry makes most sense when it includes community service, and it actually works better when there are people who want people in those roles.

If you want to be a lay Druid, you will need to give some thought to what you want from that. There will be people who can support you, however you want to do things. You might want inspiration for celebrating the wheel of the year, or a small daily prayer practice, or a source of everyday inspiration. Having a bit of Druidry in your life in a way that suits you is a totally valid way of doing things and there are plenty of resources out there.

I’m perfectly happy to support people in this way. I have taught in the past, but currently I don’t have the resources for it. However, I’m always happy to tackle topics and questions (if I can) so if you read the blog and you have queries, or thoughts, just leave me a comment and I’ll see what I can do. Drop it on any post and I’ll see it. This post was prompted by a question from Victor Sudakov, and I hope I’ve managed to answer it sufficiently.

Call yourself a Druid

(Nimue)

If it speaks to you, do it.

There’s no official qualification that entitles you to say you are a Druid. There are all kinds of courses out there and you might feel easier using the term if you’ve completed one of those. It’s a weighty sort of word, and it can be hard to tell at what point it is appropriate to identify with it.

If it seems too big a word for wearing, then there are other ways of handling this. I quite often describe myself as on the Druid path, and on the Bard path. That doesn’t seem like an excessive claim. Sometimes I describe myself as studying Druidry, because that’s central to how I do Druidry anyway. I’m always studying something.

It’s important to find the words that work for you. It can make a lot of sense to use different terms in different contexts. Sometimes I just identify as ‘Pagan’ because it can involve less explaining. 

For me, Druidry is very much about how we do things. It’s not a title, a qualification or an award. It’s a dedication to a conscious, thoughtful life rooted in respect for the natural world, honour, relationship and inspiration. Or however you prefer to define the path – different Druids have different priorities and that’s one of the more historically accurate things about modern Druidry, so far as we know.

If the word feels right to you, then use it. If you are rooted and supported by calling yourself a Druid, then it’s the right word to use. If you’ve been exploring Paganism for more than a week you’ll already know that giving yourself names and titles confers absolutely nothing – it does not get you taken seriously. Anyone can call themselves a high priest, an archdruid, a fount of all wisdom. Some people will. Some people are so invested in having their status affirmed by others that they put a lot of work into making the case for the title.

It’s a lot of work, and I can’t see much point in it myself. ‘Druid’ is not a title that will bring you wealth, fame, riches, power or respect. Sometimes the opposite. But it is a word that carries deep resonance for some of us. Using it can help you connect with fellow travellers, and that’s arguably the most powerful aspect of it.

Excerpt from In A Hedge Druid’s Grove

(David)

A five-minute downpour in the valley, vertical, with no wind, dramatic, sounding like a hundred bass drummers immediately over my head on the roof of my study. The trees and shrubs in our back garden seemed to lift their faces to it in gratitude.

I walked through to our front room window and enjoyed the vigorous stream that immediately flowed down the avenue, as it always does in heavy rain like this, spreading from the lower gutter opposite, halfway across the narrow tarmac road surface, and flowing like a young river.

I’m convinced the line of our avenue is close to the original route of a westerly flowing stream down the hillside. I’ve seen a map of 1880 that shows five springs in the valley, three high on the southern hillside and two high on our northern hillside, one of which is above and to the east our house. I assume it flowed down where our avenue was later built, until, near to where the mill was then, where the primary school stands today, it joined other streams in the bottom of the valley and together they entered the tidal marsh.

In A Hedge Druid’s Grove

Joining a Grove

The single biggest influence on which Grove you might join is likely to be geography. There are places where multiple Groves exist in viable striking distance of each other, but Druidry is still at a level where this isn’t the norm. 

If you are new to Druidry, a Grove might offer affirmation and support. It would be a space in which you could learn about the path and benefit from the experience of other Druids. In joining a Grove, you might become involved with an Order and through that, a wider community. So the decision to join a Grove might define the kind of Druidry you practice. This is tricky for a new Druid because the odds are you don’t know enough about either your own preferences or how different Orders work to know how or if this is going to work for you.

How representative a Grove is of an Order can vary considerably. There’s diversity within every Order, and much depends on the individuals within the group. 

My recommendation is that first and foremost, you work with people you connect with and find it easy to get along with. If that’s in place, you’ll have the room to explore your own interests and find your own way of being a Druid, with the help and support of other people. If you’re dealing with Druids who are really dogmatic about how things must be done, and who don’t have room for you to find your own way, this is unlikely to work well. Firstly it’s not (in my opinion) terribly good Druidry to be authoritarian. Secondly it’s important in all situations to be able to ask questions about why things are the way they are and whether alternatives exist. Thirdly, a group that can make space for diversity and for the needs of new people is a better place to be.

It isn’t essential to join a Grove. There’s plenty of scope for distance learning and a range of Orders offer different kinds of teaching, focusing on different aspects of Druidry and with various styles and flavours. You don’t have to commit to one Order forever, and you can range widely to meet your needs. 

It is both feasible and valid to work as a solitary Druid. There are lots of ways to connect with other Druids that don’t require a Grove – camps, open rituals, online groups and other social gatherings can answer the need for a community without requiring as much commitment. 

If you really want to be in a Grove and there isn’t a suitable one, sometimes the answer is to start your own. You don’t need to be massively experienced in Druidry or in running things to do this. You just have to be willing to learn. Many of the established Groves exist because at some point, someone took a leap in the dark and set it up. Most of the people who start Groves do so because it’s needed, not because they’ve accumulated so much wisdom and experience that they feel ready for the task. If you feel called to set up a Grove, that’s more than enough reason to give it a try.

Making decisions for other people

This is an issue that comes up particularly around teaching, and it’s a fascinating ethical minefield. Most people do their best learning and growing when they’re at the edge of their comfort zones. Sometimes, breaking out of the comfort zone is absolutely necessary. Consent is also a super-important thing in all aspects of life. Teaching creates power imbalances and stepping up as a teacher is pretty much an assertion that you might have a better idea what a person needs than they do.

All of this creates a lot of opportunity for predators to thrive. You don’t have to be a Pagan long to run into stories about teachers who said that sex was wholly necessary for a rite, or who violated other boundaries. There are all kinds of ways in which teaching can cause distress, and cheerfully shoving people out of their comfort zones isn’t reliably in their interests. It can be alarming, terrifying and counter-productive.

If the teaching is good, then you’ll feel supported when you’re at the edges of your comfort zone, and able to step back at need. You know you won’t be told off, humiliated or rejected if you do need to say no. If you’re invited to enter a ritual or other activity where you don’t know in advance what to expect, you should be able to talk about your own boundaries and needs. And that won’t be normal. It might make sense for an initiation to plunge you into the unknown a bit, but to be pushed that way all the time isn’t good or healthy.

To teach well, you have to be willing to shoulder responsibility, and to make decisions for the people who you are teaching – how fast to take them into something, and what to advise them, in particular. These are issues whenever anything is taught. How do you keep an eye on where the student is in relation to their own comfort zone? How do you handle problems? How willing are you to put their needs ahead of your ego?

It takes considerable confidence to look at another person and make judgements about what they most need. Good teaching and leadership alike can really depend on this. So often, to grow we need someone else to guide us beyond what we’re familiar with. It takes a lot of trust to have that work, and when that trust is misplaced, it causes a lot of damage.