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Season After Season

Last month, in The Deer Path, we reflected on meandering paths that appear in the landscape through repeated use. While no deer plans a track and no surveyor marks it on a map, a trail emerges because generations of animals return to the same route, season after season. That repetition creates a visible path through the forest.

Over the past few weeks, I have found myself thinking about a similar process in our spiritual practice, the less visible paths formed within us, rather than the paths we see under our feet.

There is a diversity of beliefs to be found among the practitioners of Druidry. Some Druids relate to the gods as distinct beings, while others approach them as symbols, cultural figures, or even expressions of nature’s forces. There are those who hold strong metaphysical convictions while others remain uncertain. Yet despite these differences, Druids continue to gather around the same festivals, observe the same seasons, and participate in many of the same practices.

How does that work? The answer may lie less in shared belief than in shared practice. 

Druidry often places a greater emphasis on what we do than on what we are required to believe. We mark the turning of the year; we observe the land around us; we return to ritual, meditation, study, or contemplation. Through repetition, these practices begin to shape our attention and perception, creating habits of awareness.

Just as repeated passage creates a deer path through a woodland, repeated practice creates pathways within our memory and understanding. Meaning often emerges gradually through our practice rather than arriving fully formed beforehand. The result is a diversity of beliefs in Druidry created from a shared orthopraxy. 

The Summer Solstice is approaching and we will gather again to mark a familiar point on the Wheel of the Year. It’s possible our beliefs may differ and the words we speak may vary but the act of returning remains the same. The return is itself part of the path. Perhaps over time and for some at least, it is the path.

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The Deer Path

Early one morning, on a recent visit to Ireland, I took a walk in the forested hills. It was an hour or so after dawn but the ground still felt like it was holding the night. Off to the side of the trail I noticed a narrow opening. Not a path in any formal sense. No edges, no clearing, nothing marked. Easy to walk past without noticing. It took a second look to see that it continued, meandering between the trees.

I stood there for a while trying to read it. It didn’t run straight. It slipped around trunks, dipped slightly, disappeared, then reappeared a few yards on. There was no vantage point from which its direction became clear. Whatever used it wasn’t interested in showing where it was going. Only in getting there.

It raised a simple question: how does something like this come into being?

It was certainly not through design or a single pass. A path like that forms because something returns, in this case Sika deer. Again and again, the same line is taken. Small pressure, repeated over time, leaves a trace. The ground yields just enough. Moss parts slightly. Eventually it is there, though only barely.

At this time of Beltane, seeing the deer path brought to mind the structure of our Druidic rituals. What is visited repeatedly becomes structure. The path was not planned that way, but repetition settled it in the ground. A working practice follows the same logic. It does not rely on explanation or performance. It returns to the same place, the same sequence, the same attention, often enough that the movement becomes familiar.

Over time, that familiarity reduces friction with less needing to be decided or said. The line is already there. Like the track in the moss, it remains easy to miss from a distance, but unmistakable underfoot. It exists because it has been used, and used again, until the ground remembers it.

SeanR /|\

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The Murmur of the Billows

You are on a beach. Close your eyes and hear the deep, rhythmic sound of the ocean—the layered movement of water rising and falling. Rest here for a minute while it envelops you.

You are listening to what an older language would call the murmur of the billows.

I am the wind on the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows…

In early medieval mythology, the bard Amergin Glúingel arrived in Ireland with the Milesian invasion. When the druids of the Tuatha Dé Danann raised a storm to repel the invaders, Amergin answered with an invocation that calmed the sea and allowed them to land. The storm broke, not by force but by what was spoken.

Amergin did not claim the land by naming it. He claimed it by demonstrating he could speak from within it. He showed his fitness to belong through identification across domains: landscape, animal life, and weather. In his song, he shifts perspective deliberately, reducing the sense of distance between self and environment. Instead of “this land is mine,” he says, “I can speak as this land because I am not separate from it.”

Druidry becomes real when it is expressed outwardly and physically, not just held mentally. Voice changes the quality of attention because speaking requires commitment. A thought can remain vague, but words spoken aloud have to take form. Speaking stabilizes attention; saying a line, a prayer, or a poem holds the mind in place longer than silent thinking. Voice externalizes intention. Once spoken, something exists outside of you; it is no longer just internal reflection.

Here is an English version of Amergin’s Song. Try it spoken aloud.

I am the wind on the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the bull of seven battles,

I am the vulture on the rock,

I am a tear of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am a wild boar in valor,

I am a salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of skill,

I am the point of the spear.

If you would like to hear Amergin’s Song in Old Irish sung to traditional music, here is a version by Iranian-born singer and composer Farya Faraji on YouTube. https://youtu.be/r63fRns0FSk

/|\ SeanR

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Art and Druidry

Those doing Bardic Grade work with OBOD know that activating our
inner creativity is a significant part of Bardic Grade work. Doing so
serves many purposes. We learn to lean into our inner selves and elsewhere
to awaken intuition. We learn to listen and turn what we hear into
something beautiful. We learn to sooth ourselves with the work that
we do. Within Celtic Druidry, Cerridwen is a Welsh Goddess of transformation
and rebirth. She is a keeper of Awen, the Celtic notion of divine inspiration
for poetry, the arts, knowledge and divination. For those doing Yoga and
working with the Hindu figures, Saraswati serves a similar purpose.

Bards are encouraged to try something they already do or to lean into
something they don’t think they can do such as poetry or music and to let
their inner being express itself. We grow the most when we try something
completely outside our “wheelhouse” of skills. And in the process we can
grow immensely and unlock aspects of ourselves that we never knew existed.

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300 Years of Druidry

NOVEMBER 28, 2017 BY JOHN BECKETT

November 28 marks an uncertain but important anniversary: 300 years of modern Druidry.

On November 28, 1717, the Ancient Druid Order was founded at the Apple Tree Tavern in London. Or at least that’s what Ross Nichols – the founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids – said in The Book of Druidry.1 Historian Ronald Hutton says there’s no evidence this meeting took place and puts the first documented Druid order as beginning in 1792.2

So do we have anything to celebrate or not? Like Christians arguing over whether Jesus was really born on December 25 (it’s uncertain but unlikely), finding the exact date is less important than picking a date and celebrating.

The re-imagining and re-creation of Druidry is very much worth celebrating.

awen flag 2015

The Ancient Druids

There is very little we can say with certainty about the ancient Druids. Based on the evidence we have, we think they were judges, healers, and keepers of records and lore. They were probably priests, though how closely they resembled the temple priests of the Greco-Roman world is difficult to say. Whatever they were, they were important enough for the Romans to go to the trouble of wiping them out in the Anglesey massacre of 61 CE. The Roman historian Tacitus reported:

On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women, in black attire like the Furies, with hair disheveled, waving brands. All around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven, and pouring forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motionless, and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general’s appeals and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troop of frenzied women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance, and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands.3

What the Roman armies could not destroy, the coming of Christianity did. Druids lost their positions as priests, then as advisors, then as healers. By the 7th century, their only role was as bards who may not have known anything about their predecessors.

The idea of underground survivals is attractive and therefore persistent. In The Book of Druidry (1975) Ross Nichols wrote:

Intermittent recognition of Druidry as a possible philosophic system or a local cult seems to have occurred from time to time since AD 1245 and obviously the tradition went on in hereditary groups who kept it to themselves.

Yet there is no evidence for these “obvious” hereditary groups, and it seems highly likely at least one would have come out of the shadows by now. As with the claims of witchcraft survivals from ancient Paganism, the claims …

Read on John Beckett’s blog