Sex and Druidry

(Nimue)

One of the things I very much like about Druidry is that there’s room for everyone. My experience of Druid spaces, and rituals is that assumptions aren’t made about what’s going on for people sexually. I have encountered witchcraft content that has assumed everyone is hetrosexual, and also sexual. I know a lot of queer Druids, and there’s evidently plenty of room in Druidry for asexual folk and people who don’t identify with gender.

My experience of the Druid community is that it’s a mostly sex positive space. People aren’t encouraged to feel uncomfortable about their sexuality or their bodies. Many of the Pagan Godds are sexy and have sexual content in their stories, and quite a bit of that is very much at odds with more restrictive thinking that tends to go with Christianity. Paganism tends to be celebratory, and I’ve found Druids to be no exception.

Sex, after all is part of nature. Human sexuality is complicated, but when you look around at the natural world you’ll see we aren’t alone in that. Gay penguins raising abandoned eggs together are a lovely example. For a long time we didn’t see queerness in nature because we inferred gender from behaviour based on human assumptions about what those behaviours meant. It’s good that progress is being made on that score.

Not being sexual is also perfectly natural and deserves as much respect and inclusion as any other way of being. 

I think at times, modern Paganism has got a bit hung up on ideas of fertility and reproduction. This isn’t inclusive of people who cannot have children, or do not want children and it’s important to keep that in mind alongside any celebrating we might want to do. It’s important that if we intend to celebrate our sexual selves that we’re clear about what’s going to be involved. People who are asexual, and trauma survivors need taking into account. Sexual symbolism and ritual acts have the potential to be distressing, so it’s important participants are able to give informed consent.

Bigots get everywhere of course, and Druid spaces are no exception. No community is free from predators and we have a responsibility to take care of each other and keep each other safe. That means being inclusive. It also means not creating spaces where it is easy for predators to act. The way in which Paganism is sex positive can be capitalised on by predators to cover for inappropriate behaviour. This is why it’s good to build a culture of active consent, even around symbolic activities. If you’re going to make obscene brioche for Beltain,check everyone is comfortable with that! If you feel the need to put an athame in a chalice during a ritual, make sure that symbolism works for everyone and consider alternatives if it doesn’t. 

The more we do to show each other respect and take care of each other, the harder it is for anyone to act abusively.

Daily Rituals

(Nimue)

David’s recent post prompted me to think about my own daily rituals. Having spent a lot of years on the Druid path, my daily rituals have changed a lot over time. Usually what happens is that I get interested in a particular practice and for a while I explore that intensely and decide what to do with it. There have been times when I’ve had daily prayer practices, daily meditation practices, regular altar-oriented practices and gratitude practices. All of those have evolved over the periods I’ve spent focused on them.

I’d like a living arrangement where I could easily slip outside in the morning and have somewhere quiet and private to stand, and just be present. That’s not feasible at the moment, and I make the best use of the windows that I can. 

Currently I’m exploring a reflective relationship with the everyday details of my life. This is more about responding to my experiences rather than setting up specific actions. I’m making a point of pausing to reflect on things as I’m doing them. It mixes ideas I’ve explored before – slowing down and gratitude, conscious living and reflection. I’m currently bringing those things together in a different way. Part of the reason for this is that life has thrown a lot of new and unfamiliar experiences my way in recent months, and this deliberate slowing down has been needful.

Otherwise I’m flitting around a lot. Sometimes I do very intense and deliberate meditations. Sometimes I do body-healing meditations. I’m doing a lot of unstructured contemplation and window gazing, because I’m not so fraught all the time. I note that being calm is a great enabler of meditation and that meditating to become calm is actually a lot of work. I note that it’s a lot easier to have a spiritual life when your life is better arranged to support your spirituality. If your spiritual practice is a set of coping mechanisms to deal with stress and try to keep moving, it’s not as effective as a spiritual practice.

Working with embodiment has brought me towards relishing as part of how I do my Druidry. It’s an ongoing process of celebrating lived, embodied experience. I pause to relish the flavours of the food. I linger over my tea. I gaze out of the window at the sunlight on the trees while relishing the cool breeze and the bird song. The sun on my skin and the wind in my hair are sensory experiences I make time for. Spending enough time in hugs and snuggly situations where I can take the time to really relish that is part of this, too.

When I go through deliberate phases with things, my aim is to embed something into my life. I don’t always know what I want to have stick. For me, an important aspect of setting out to do spiritual things is to change what I do in the ostensibly more mundane parts of my life. At the moment I’m drawing on a lot of previous explorations to find ways of being more reflective as part of what I do all the time rather than as something I set aside specific time for. It’s all threaded through with experiences of gratitude and joy.

Who are the Deities and Spirits in my shower ritual?

(David)

I’ve been thinking about the deities and spirits I conversed with in my shower and then posted about last week. I’ve been asking, who are they?

Things might fall into place for me sensibly if I look at them in chronological order, starting with the Hebrew god Yahweh. Who is he? Where did he come from? How did he achieve such all-encompassing and absolute power? Did he achieve it, or did humans achieve it for him?

I’ll start by saying that I’m not an atheist. I believe in spirits. I have met some. Communed with them. Travelled with some. There’s no reason for me to doubt their existence, in this world and the Otherworld.

I believe that some spirits are gods. I don’t worship them, although I’m open to the possibility that I might work with some in the future, but I do believe they are genuine beings with individual personalities and varying degrees of power and influence.

My departure from believing that Yahweh is the one and only god came from my personal experiences, from my realisation that other gods did and still do exist.

So, who is Yahweh?

He is presented to us as the Creator God. Therefore, it makes sense for me to start my search for his origin by looking at the cosmogony of the Abrahamic faith.

The creation myth of the Hebrews, which appears in the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis in all the nearly six thousand translations of the Hebrew and Christian bibles in two hundred languages, is a collection of much earlier regional creation myths that were absorbed from other cultures.

The two most recent absorptions and strong influences at the time when Genesis was being written were from the Egyptians and the Babylonians.

For thousands of years, Egypt controlled the eastern leg of the fertile crescent, all along the Nile and up to include the land of ancient Canaan, which is a region that roughly corresponds to modern day Palestine, Israel, western Jordan, southern and coastal Syria, Lebanon, and up to the southern border of Turkey. The Hebrews lived in captivity in Egypt for 430 years, calculated by scholars to have been between 1876 and 1446 BCE.

The Babylonians controlled the western leg of the fertile crescent, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Babylonia conquered the kingdom of Judah and took the Hebrews into captivity for 59 years of exile from 597 to 538 BCE, when the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, released them.

Modern scholars place the authorship of Genesis in the 6^th and 5^th centuries BCE, a window that includes that period when the exiled Hebrews were absorbing Babylonian culture.

It’s the Babylonian creation myth that is rehashed in Chapter 1 of Genesis, and then the Egyptian creation myth is rehashed in Chapter 2. They’re not identical, obviously, but installed one after the other they pretty much cover all the bases the Genesis writers wanted. The main one being that in their re-telling of these stories, the many gods of Egypt’s and Babylonia’s polytheistic religions became the monotheistic god of the Hebrews.

Those creation myths from Egypt and Babylon weren’t original, either. They both derived from even more ancient sources, including mainly the Sumerian creation myth. And it’s reasonable to assume that the ultimately original source material had been around for long before even the Sumerians.

So those stories had existed for thousands of years before any Genesis writer put pen to papyrus. Everyone knew them. Everyone. The Genesis writers’ primary task was to have readers recognise the ancient oral traditions in their opening words, and from that comfortable place take them on a different journey during which recognisable events and places and even character names cropped up in often recognisable sequences, but they were heading to an entirely new literary destination where the multiple gods of the earlier creation myths were condensed into Yahweh, the single all-powerful and all-creating god of the Hebrews.

That’s how those writers positioned Yahweh, and it’s fair I think to assume that their motivation was largely political, mainly, in the first instance, to achieve control and power for themselves and their peers inside their own culture.

So that’s how it came to be taught that Yahweh was the one and only. And that, I think, is why those writers did it. But what about Yahweh?

Do we accept that he is a spirit, a being with intentions and agency? I do. I accept him as such, along with many other spirits. If that’s the case, did he go along passively with the elevation to supremacy? Or did he inspire those writers and guide them in their work in order to achieve that huge power for himself? To rule absolutely what started quite small but would one day become a world religion, in fact three world religions?

I don’t know. My instinct is that it was the latter. I’ll see if looking at his earlier identity and nature might help to clarify things.

In the earliest known mention of Yahweh, in the Bronze Age between 1550 and 1200 BCE, he was one of the many sky gods, specifically in his case a weather god and a divine warrior of lands in the south. His cult followed trade routes north, eventually into Canaan. There, he was introduced to the Hebrews, who were at that time a polytheistic people worshipping a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, El’s consort Asherah, and Baal. Yahweh was added to the list.

His nature? Storm god and divine warrior. Smiting and destroying and all-conquering. The exact nature of the god-to-come of the Old Testament.

When did he become a gentle, loving, father figure? That came hundreds of years later, and involved the creation of the Jesus Christ we are taught about, the creation of the messiah cult, which I can’t see any other way now than as a hugely successful political PR job by Israel’s religious movers and shakers.

So, Jesus. Was he an actual living person? Respected academics who have spent their lifetimes studying this subject are divided on the question. Having absorbed much of their discourse, my instinct is that he was a useful myth. An essential one. If he was actually skin and bone for a few years, then later he was mythologised because the movers and shakers needed him to be so much more.

Was he the Son of God? Well, yes, he was, wasn’t he? Because that’s what he was created to be. It’s precisely what he existed for in the political arena. If Yahweh can be said to exist as a powerful spirit and divine myth, then Jesus exists too regardless of whether he was ever a person drawing breath.

I’m an animist. For me, everything has a spirit. Including fictional characters in books read by many people. They become egregors, those characters, magical entities created from the thoughts and feelings of people. It requires no stretch of my imagination and understanding to accept Jesus as such, which means that for me he is a spirit.

How did the myth of him come to take over so much of the world? Because that’s what he was for. That’s what the human movers and shakers wanted, generations of them in the Hebrew religion followed far more successfully by many more generations of movers and shakers among the gentiles. I don’t need to examine the history of the Christian churches to see this playing out.

And that, I believe, is also what Yahweh wanted. Because he’s still the storm god, the divine warrior, the smiting destroyer and conqueror. That’s been his nature all along, from way before he was elevated to supremacy over all other gods, and it’s still his nature now. Jesus’s gentleness is a master stroke of genius to balance that stormy violence.

Which brings me, finally, in my thoughts about the deities and spirits I conversed with the other day in my shower, to Anthony.

Is he a saint? Well, yes. The Roman Catholic church sanctified him, so he is undeniably a saint. But did he exist before that? Before the person who may or may not have existed in human form but upon whom the church hung an identity and a responsibility.

My instinct is that, yes, he did. That he was a spirit loved by the people of some place, known in their local folklore, a being who helped people to find things they had lost.

That’s how the Christian church has operated through the ages, isn’t it? Co-opting pagan spirits, making them saints. People continued communing with them, working with them, regardless of their official status. I think Anthony is one of those spirits.

In my shower, today, I was comfortable asking “the spirit who protects me” to look after me getting in and out of the shower, and then to see Anthony as a different spirit who I ask to help me find my missing pebble.

I don’t know who that first spirit is. The genius loci of our valley perhaps? I don’t know. I’ve asked them to reveal themselves to me. It’s something I’ll meditate upon.

Rituals

(David)

One of my daily magical rituals is my morning shower. This was the ritual today. Its magical structure changes as required, along with the deities and spirits that I address in it, but like my other daily rituals it always takes place in parallel with its related mundane routine.

“Lord, please protect me from any injuries and every sort of harm as I get into and out of this shower and while I’m in there, in Jesus’s name.”

Step into the shower, taking care to avoid slips and falls even on days when my strength is weak and my balance poor, not relying on spiritual protection alone without doing my conscious part.

“Anthony, please find for me the sea-smoothed pebble I brought home from the beach years ago.” I visualise the lovely flat pebble, which I know is somewhere in this house, hidden from me unintentionally since our bedroom was emptied to be decorated, and which I would very much like to take its place on my sea magic altar.

Step forward under the water. “I am cleansing, physically, mentally, and spiritually.”

Shampoo and condition my hair and beard, then wash my body, a thorough process of routine which has grown in sequences of threes and sevens as I am exploring numerology, everything with magical intent as well as for physical cleanliness.

Step forward to rinse off. “I am losing weight. I am shedding pounds of fat. I am eleven stone and I am healthy, happy, and content in my slim, trim body shape. I am eleven stone and I am happy.”

Finish rinsing off. Stand beneath the jet. “I am cleansed, physically, mentally, and physically.”

Grip my magically charged bracelet. “I am strong. I am protected. I am Lion. I am Wolf.” Breathe the presence of my power animal spirits in me, knowing their strength and protection.

Step out of the shower. “Thank you, Lord.”

Towel off in sequences of threes and sevens. Apply oils and creams with magical intent.

Brush my hair and my oiled beard in sequences of sevens.

These deities and spirits I talk to in my shower ritual may well be the subjects of future entries here. They are inheritances of my childhood, of the Christianity into which I was born. I no longer practice that faith, although its personified deities remain present in my world. I’ve experienced many changes of perception and understanding in my long life, and some particularly significant ones in this regard during this past year. There are instinctual lettings-go underway, which I intend to complete with deeper understanding through historical study and spiritual explorations. This might prove to be my biggest recent shift, and the fact that its clearest manifestation occurs during my daily cleansing is not lost on me.

Do you have any rituals? If so, do they continue without change or are they dynamic events. Do any of your rituals ever prove to be vehicles for change in your life?

Crimson Coven

(Nimue)

I’ve been part of The Crimson Coven for a while now, and wanted to do a shout-out for this, and for Halo Quin who holds the space.

I’ve previously reviewed Halo’s book on Crimson Craft, which is very much linked to the Coven. This work is all about celebrating sacred sexuality, beauty, pleasure, love, joy and passion, and how all of that relates to creativity and magic and our everyday lives. It’s all focused on the solitary practitioner, so it’s really uncomplicated and the group is very much about mutual support. It’s a very gentle space. I’ve found this to be a wonderful way of exploring embodied Paganism and it’s been a meaningful part of my own healing work of late.

You can find out more about The Crimson Coven on Halo’s website – https://haloquin.net/crimson-coven/

There are online rituals which I’ve found surprisingly effective. Halo is an excellent ritual leader and holds space really well. This is the only group I’ve explored online ritual with because it wasn’t something I had previously thought would work for me. If you’re inclined towards meditative ritual spaces, this works really well. If you want to get some sense of this, check out Halo’s other videos for an idea of how she handles things. https://www.youtube.com/@haloquin

The facebook group includes daily prompts for sharing and contemplation – we talk regularly about what we’re celebrating, what we’re working on, what we’re doing in terms of self care – it’s all very accessible and easy to get involved with. No prior witchcraft experience is needed. If you’re on Facebook, you can join over here – https://www.facebook.com/groups/546845370250416

Sensuality and sexuality can be challenging subjects, and so many people experience wounding in that aspect of their lives. It’s good to have gentle safe space for mutual support. I’ve found this group empowering and uplifting, and it’s been really helpful to me.

Children in ritual

Back when I regularly ran rituals in the Midlands (UK) I made a point of including children. If you don’t include children, you exclude their parents and the burden of that falls disproportionately on women. 

It helps that Druid rituals are often public facing, community oriented and celebratory, because it’s a lot easier to include children in that, than in intense, focused magical workings. Even so, you can’t expect children to stand quietly in ritual for an hour or two – sometimes they will, but you can’t count on it and there has to be room for who and how they are.

Most of my rituals were held in woodlands, with room for our younger humans to be around but not obliged to join in. Having them free range outside the circle worked well. They did what they needed to do and were only disruptive if they were unhappy – which was usually about tiredness, temperature or hunger, which is fair enough. I think it’s really valuable to give children space where they can be themselves and do their own things while also asking them to be responsible and considerate.

It can be tempting in ritual to want to focus inwards. You face the centre of the circle, in your magical time out of time, and you step away from the world. That might make sense for some kinds of magic, but for a Druid group honouring the wheel of the year it makes little sense. Most of nature is outside of that circle, surrounding it. It’s good to let that in – all the sights and sounds of it – and absorb that into the ritual experience. Children can be part of that.

Children can be powerful forces of nature in their own right. Children can be enchanting and magical. It depends a lot on how they are growing up, whether they feel able to explore and to express themselves and whether they have learned to do that cooperatively rather than trying to run roughshod over everyone else. Children being natural are not necessarily loud or inconsiderate. I’m inclined to think that most children in history would have learned to be quiet so as not to be eaten by large mammals. Being noisy is only an option if there are no predators.

On one occasion, the children at the edge of the ritual decided they were a wolf pack, and howled accordingly. It was a surprising thing for those of us in circle, but actually lovely, and felt right.

If you give children the chance to participate in a ritual, a lot of them will. They have things to say and to share, they want to be taken seriously and they like to join in, is my experience. Let a child stand in ritual with the same dignity as an adult, and many of them will. And you can absolutely count on them appearing, as if by magic, whenever the bread, cake and ritual drinks appear.

When I’ve been able to work with children, I’ve found them fantastic at actually making circles – going round the edge with something noisy to mark out the space for example. If you want to bless people in mirth and reverence by flicking water at them, children are often far better at doing this than adults are. Give them a chance to learn and participate, and they will.

When one of the adults felt unable to call a quarter during a funeral, my then very small son said he could and would do that – and he was magnificent. Don’t under-estimate what your youngest folk in circle can do or will want to do. Give them the opportunity and they can bring a great deal.

Using your voice

Voices are very powerful tools, and vocalising has some really interesting effects. One of the things that can make group ritual more powerful than solitary ritual is that when we’re working together, voices are usually deployed. It can be tempting to do a solitary ritual mostly in your head, while doing it outloud can feel weird and exposed. Being self-conscious can be a genuine barrier to doing any kind of spiritual work, but I think it’s worth pushing through if you can.

When everything happens inside our own heads, it can easily be hurried and also jumbled up with whatever else is in our heads at the time. Speaking something is a way of asserting it as your focus. Spells, prayers, rituals, affirmations – there are many things we might do because we want to change ourselves or the wider world. Vocalising creates focus, which means that our brains are more engaged with those intentions.

If you’re trying to put an intention or a prayer into the world, then having it go out from your body as sound is a way of making that happen. 

There’s a significant psychological aspect to this, too. Hearing yourself say something can be deeply affecting. Thinking the words ‘I need to heal’ is not the same as hearing yourself saying them. Again, if you’re trying to change something, the process of hearing yourself saying something out loud can be very effective. If something is too difficult, or too painful to say, or exposes you in ways you don’t like then that can also help guide your actions. I’m not averse to curses, but saying them aloud can make it really obvious whether you’re seeking justice or being vindictive. It’s not difficult to say ‘I hope this person gets everything they deserve’ but even in rage, it can be more obvious if you’re ill wishing someone just to be vindictive.

I find that spoken words don’t have to be very loud in order to be more effective than doing things in my head. It is enough to whisper, because that’s still a physical thing to do and brings in all of the aspects I’ve described above.

I don’t really know how this would work for someone with impaired hearing, or for anyone deaf or experiencing limitations around speaking. If anyone has any insight and is willing to share in the comments, that would be great.

Planning a ritual

Rituals can be very small things for one person, through to elaborate hours or days of activity for a group. When it comes to group rituals, there’s a huge amount of scope for getting things wrong for some or all of the people involved. That might be a topic for another day. When it comes to solitary rituals, you can approach this from the position that you can’t get it wrong.

You can of course set yourself up to fail. You can load your ritual with expectations that you are unable to meet. This is most likely to be an issue if you focus on the outcomes you want from the ritual and not the process of doing it. Rituals that centre on spells can be very outcome oriented, but for a Druid there are other ways of approaching things.

I don’t do a great deal of solitary ritual, but when I do, I like to treat it as a process. The first part of this process is to make space for whatever needs and feelings I have that incline me to think that a ritual gesture of some sort is appropriate. I need to understand what’s going on with me and what I need to deal with. Working that through will help me understand what I need from a ritual.

For me, a ritual is a conversation with the universe – or perhaps with some specific part of it. I make rituals because I want to change something. I may not have a clear sense of how I want things to change, or I may not be able to make the changes I need by conventional ways. It may be that I just want to make something for myself – an intention, a dedication, or just the desire for change. I may find in my ritual-making process that coming up with and enacting the ritual gets a lot done for me. Undertaking a ritual is an act of will and intent and can also be a way of having a conversation with myself about how I want to change my life.

For me, the planning part of ritual activity is often the most important bit. Building the understanding, shaping intentions and working out how to meaningfully express that to myself and the universe gets a lot done. You don’t have to have a magical world view to see the useful psychological impact this process can have. I do however have a magical worldview. I see clear ritual action as an invitation to possibility. Everything out there is informed by someone’s intentions, (I say this as an animist – everything is someone). To speak your intentions clearly to the rest of existence can and does change things. It’s not something I do very often, but I’m always surprised by how powerful it is when I do feel the need to engage in this way.

Druidry and dedications

Rituals are a good opportunity for making dedications and having them witnessed by your community. Along the way there have been three dedications I’ve made in a Druidic context that have had a significant impact on me. Looking back I am all too aware that on each occasion, I really had no idea what the implications were of the commitments I was making.

Something like twenty years ago, I knelt in the wet grass at Stonehenge and initiated as a bard. I pledged to use my creativity for the good of my ‘tribe’ (not language I would now use) and the good of the land. I went into that not knowing what I would be being asked to commit to (not something I’d do these days either). That dedication has become central to what I do with myself, although it has played out in many different ways. It’s what I’m for.

Something like eighteen years ago I stood in the museum and art gallery in Birmingham in front of a small baked clay image called The Queen of the Night – probably a depiction of Ereshkigal. It was a gathering organised by The Druid Network. I had an overwhelming sense of being called to walk in darkness, and I accepted the call. I’ve walked a lot of dark paths since then, bringing back what I can by way of maps for others to use. It’s been hard, far harder than I could ever have imagined, but I’ve managed to do something useful with it here and there and perhaps that’s enough.

I’m not at all sure when I made my Order of the Yew pledge but it was in the same timeframe. This order was held within The Druid Network – I’ve not been involved with either for a long time. The Order of the Yew was very much about making dedications, and I started out with something long and fancy and probably rather self-important. I took myself far too seriously back then. At some point I came back and replaced it with a simple dedication along the lines that I would undertake to love as much as I could for as long as I could. It stuck to me, that one.

Of the three, it’s been by far the hardest. I’ve broken down repeatedly to places where the amount of love I could put into the world really wasn’t much at all. I’ve given from a state of being hollowed out and exhausted for extended periods of time. I have committed, over and over to loving with an open heart people who I knew perfectly well would not reciprocate. I step forward to get my heart broken. If I knew how to stop, I probably wouldn’t because I feel most like me when I’m honouring this dedication.

In theory the key thing with making a dedication in ritual is how much you invest in that dedication and how much you are willing to take it forward. In theory. I’m never sure what to believe about anything, but I can say with certainty that these dedications marked and changed me, and invited things into my life that perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have happened.

Druidry and speaking for the land

Reading Julie Brett’s most recent book I was prompted to think about who speaks for the land in a British Druid context. We often call to spirits of place, and I’ve long felt uneasy about going into a place and welcoming the spirits WHO ALREADY LIVE THERE. Julie led me to realise there’s a human aspect to this, too.

There are of course far more Druid groups in the UK than I have stood in ritual space with. My experience is partial, but I’ve never heard anything to make me think it’s untypical. Druids go to places of historical significance, and places that are local and wild, or geographically convenient – it varies.

I’ve never stood in circle with a Druid group that identified who had the most involved relationship with the land and who therefore should speak on behalf of the land. I’ve been in Druid spaces where people from away have spoken with authority about the deities in the landscape as though there were no local Druids honouring them. I’ve stood in ritual where the Druid who literally owned the land we were on was treated to a lecture by someone who did not live there about all the spirits they could see present in the space.

I had one occasion of speaking in ritual in an urban green space. It was a space I frequented – not quite in walking distance for me, but part of my wider landscape and a place I had a fair amount of relationship with. I talked about what a haven the space was for the urban people living near it. My comments were met with derision – you could hear traffic! The Druid in question had never been to the place before and lived many miles away. I was upset, and at the time I didn’t know how to articulate what was wrong in that situation. Also, it was a beautiful green place on the edge of a city and no, it wasn’t pristine nature, but that didn’t make it any less precious in my eyes.

I’ve felt it at a local level too – there are fields and hills here that I know deeply, and other parts of the landscape – in walking distance for me – that are much more deeply known by other people. I’ve had a longstanding urge to acknowledge this and am only just finding the language to talk about it.

Imagine if Druid rituals included consideration of who, in the ritual, actually had the most involved relationship with the land. Imagine what would change if we felt it was inappropriate to go into an unfamiliar space and start talking about it with authority. Imagine if being a senior, Very Important Druid did not entitle you to speak for, or to a landscape unfamiliar to you. Sadly there’s a lot of ego in all of this. It takes a certain amount of humility to acknowledge that the people who live on the land, or have spent a lot of time with a place might be better placed to talk about it and speak for the land.

Whose land is this? Is a really important question. Who are the ancestors of place? Who has a relationship with the ancestors of place? What assumptions do we make when we enter ritual spaces, and could those assumptions stand a re-think?