Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, founder and Archdruid Emeritus of of Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship, one of North America’s leading experts on ancient and modern Druidism, Witchcraft, magic and the occult, and the rapidly growing Earth Religions movement, died today after a short struggle with cancer.

Mr. Bonewits first came into the public eye when he graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelor of Arts in Magic and Thaumaturgy (1970). During his tenure there, Mr. Bonewits worked with many renowned professors including Nobel Prize Laureate Owen Chamberlain. The work he did for that degree became his first book, Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic (1971).

In 1983, he founded and became the first Archdruid of Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF) an international fellowship devoted to creating a public tradition of Neopagan Druidry. In 1995, he retired from a leadership role due to complications from eosinophilia-myalgia syndrome. ADF has grown to become the best-known Neopagan Druid group based in North America. At his death, Mr. Bonewits held the title of ArchDruid Emeritus.

During his forty years as a Neopagan priest, scholar, teacher, bard, and polytheologian, Isaac Bonewits coined much of the vocabulary and articulated many of the issues that have shaped the rapidly growing Neopagan movement in the United States and Canada.

Mr. Bonewits was internationally known as a speaker who educated, enlightened and entertained two generations of modern Goddess worshippers, nature mystics, and followers of other minority belief systems, as well as explained these movements to journalists, law enforcement officers, college students, and academic researchers.

His personal papers will become part of the American Religions Collection at the Library of University of California at Santa Barbara.

One of his most influential contributions was the Advanced Bonewits Cult Danger Evaluation Frame (the “ABCDEF”), developed in 1979 as a response to the Jim Jones People’s Temple tragedy. It has been translated into many languages and used around the world to evaluate how dangerous or harmless an organization might be. It was the first such scale to use theories of mental health and personal growth to judge rather than theological or ideological standards.

His other books include Authentic Thaumaturgy (1979, 1998), The Pagan Man (2005), Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Witchcraft and Wicca (2006), Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism (2006), Neopagan Rites (2007), and Real Energy (2007), which was co-authored with his wife, Phaedra, as well as numerous articles, reviews and essays. As a singer-songwriter, he released two albums, Be Pagan Once Again (1988), and Avalon is Rising (1992).

He is survived by his wife, Phaedra, his son from a previous marriage, Arthur Lipp-Bonewits of Bardonia NY, his mother Jeannette, his brothers Michael and Richard, and sisters Simone Arris and Melissa Banbury.

ALG celebrated this year’s Summer Solstice at Gaia’s Gardens in Raleigh NC. (not to be confused with the BBC photo of Stone Henge celebration pictured left)

This nicely centralized location was perfect place for the Keltrian based ceremony that was performed by Ailim with Sundruid supporting the ritual. The “Gardens” is nestled close to NC State campus and boasts beautiful oak, maple and various vines and shrubs. This was also the first morning ritual that Awen’s Light Grove has performed since our founding in January 2007.

It’s easy to get in the rhythm of doing evening ritual. It was really nice to soak in the sun’s energy with a great morning event.

ALG will be performing the Raleigh Pagan Pride Day opening ceremony in September. Be sure to attend the next ALG moot in July.

This was a response to an inquiry I received on Druidry. The querent asked really good questions. I’m not sharing his writings to protect his privacy, but I do want to share my responses as he moved me to put this down in writing in a way that I don’t often take the time to do.

Summary of conversation – “I’m not convinced that there is life after death. I also want to know more about druidry as an experience and also how your values and morals guide you. Seems that this kind of religion could be used for selfish purposes”

Sure. If you believe life ends at the end of this incarnation and time is linear – you’re existence will be bound by these rules and you will make decisions based on that. My experience is that the universe has much more poetry, vastness and strangeness to it than that. Science is now starting to find quarks that jump time and space, particles that fly through the Earth without touching a single atom and studies concerning near death experience and ghostly phenomena seem to point out that we don’t know the half of it..

Druidism is an experiential path, not one of dogma as you may be use to studying. So you’re only going to be able to pierce the veil so much before your intellectual mind begins to hurt 🙂

Only giving your intellectual side to life will yield a texture of dry, uninspiring cynicism to your life. This is the curse of the spirit that relies too much on Air. The new druid synchronizes their exploration to that of the forest and the seasons. Many folks approach earth centered spirituality with a strong Air affinity (intellectual bent) and it is the age of Aquarius which is an Air sign, but if you begin the OBOD druid path, you’ll work on balancing the other 3 elements of your personality in the Bardic grade. Really neat opportunity to explore yourself on a ‘guided path’ using meditation, ritual and other projects that bring better balance. You’ll gain new perspectives on poetry than you have contemplated in the past. You’ll connect to inspiration within yourself and it will be totally unique to you (no one can teach you) and you’ll only get out what you put into it.

Abuse of followers? You mean like suicide cults, religious based racism, bombers and priests taking advantage of children? We don’t have clergy and I’m hardly the leader of any ‘movement’. We have Awen’s Light Grove as a place for druids to meet together and I’m the organizer, provide some direction to make it worthwhile for folks. I like to answer questions and be a beacon for people seeking.

“For all the hillside was haunted

By the faery folk come again

And down in the heart-light enchanted

Were opal-coloured men”

republished from http://celticsociety.freeservers.com/sidhe.html

The Sidhe (shee) are considered to be a distinct race, quite separate from human beings yet who have had much contact with mortals over the centuries, and there are many documented testimonies to this. Belief in this race of beings who have powers beyond those of men to move quickly through the air and change their shape at will once played a huge part in the lives of people living in rural Ireland and Scotland.

It is difficult to pin-point an exact historical era as the time when fairy lore began. Many writers maintain that the people of Ireland and their Gods before the coming of the Gaels are the ‘ancestors’ of the sidhe.

Clearly the belief in the sidhe is part of the pre-Christian religion which survived for thousands of years and which has never been completely wiped out from the minds of the people.

When the first Gaels, the sons of Mil, arrived in Ireland, they found that the Tuatha De Danaan, the people of the goddess Dana, already had control of the land. The sons of Mil fought them in battle and defeated them, driving them ‘underground’ where it is said they remain to this day in the hollow hills or sidhe mounds. In the early Irish manuscripts (which were recorded from an earlier oral tradition) we find references to the Tuatha De Danaan.In ‘The Book of the Dun Cow’ and the ‘Book of Leinster’ this race of beings is described as “gods and not gods”, pointing to the fact that they are ‘something in between’. Also in the Book of the Dun Cow it says of wise men that: “it seems likely to them that they [the Tuatha De Danaan] came from heaven, on account of their intelligence and excellence of their knowledge”.

The hold that the Tuatha De Danaan had on the Irish mind was so strong that the new religion of Christianity could not shake it. In ‘The Colloquy of the Ancients’ a dialogue which supposedly took place between St. Patrick and the ghost of Caeilte of the Fianna, Patrick is amazed to see a fairy woman coming out of the cave of Cruachan, wearing a green mantle with a crown of gold on her head.

Whereas the fairy woman is young and beautiful, Caeilte himself is old and withered. When Patrick enquires of this, Caeilte tells him that: “She is of the Tuatha De Danaans who are unfading… and I am of the sons of Mil, who are perishable and fade away”.

The sidhe of the subterranean mounds are also seen by the Irish as the descendants of the old agricultural gods of the Earth, (one of the most important being Crom Cruaich, the Crooked One of the Hill). These gods controlled the ripening of the crops and the milk yields of the cattle, therefore offerings had to be given to them regularly. In the Book of Leinster we discover that after their conquest the Tuatha De Danaan took revenge on the sons of Mil by destroying their wheat and the goodness of the milk (the sidhe are notorious for this even today). The sons of Mil were thus forced to make a treaty with them, and ever since that time the people of Ireland have honoured this treaty by leaving offerings of milk and butter to the Good People.

A notable feature of the sidhe is that they have distinct tribes, ruled over by fairy kings and queens in each territory. It would seem that the social order of the sidhe corresponds to the old aristocracy of ancient Irish families,which is in itself a reflection of the ancient Celtic caste system.

It is interesting to note that many of the Irish refer to the sidhe as simply “the gentry”, on account of their tall, noble appearance and silvery sweet speech. They have their own palaces where they feast and play music, but also have regular battles with neighbouring tribes. The great fairyhosts seem to be distinctly Milesian, but there are still folk memories of perhaps older pre-Gaelic races and their gods, in the form of the ‘geancanach’, a spirit of Ulster, or the ‘cluricaun’,of Munster. We must not forget also the ‘leprechaun’, a diminutive creature who is said to know the whereabouts of a pot of gold hidden in local fairy raths.

The leprechaun could possibly be a folk memory of a dwarfish race of Fir Bolg people who lived in these raths before the coming of the Gaels.

A distinction is often made between the sidhe who are seen walking on the ground after sunset, and the ‘Sluagh Sidhe’, the fairy host who travel through the air at night,and are known to ‘take’ mortals with them on their journeys. There are also guardian sidhe of most of the lakes of Ireland and Scotland.

These distinct categories of sidhe beings ties in with the testimonies of seers who divide the sidhe into wood spirits, water spirits, air spirits and so on, the elemental spirits of each place.

Lough Gur in County Limerick is a very magical place where we meet many of the sidhe kings and queens of Ireland. The lake lies within a circle of low lying hills, but once every seven years it appears as dry land, where an entrance to the Land of Youth may be found. The lake’s guardian is known as Toice Bhrean (the lazy one) because she neglected to watch over the well, from which the lake sprang forth.It is believed that once every seven years a mortal meets their death by drowning in the lake, ‘taken’ by the Beann Fhionn, the White Lady.

L. MacDonald DALRIADA MAGAZINE 1993