Druidry and the Ancestors: Finding Our Place in Our Own History

ancestors.

INTRODUCTION

In some ways it is easier to explain what this book isn’t, than to begin by pinning down what it is.

This is not a history book in the sense of having lots of dates and hard, dependable information about the history of Druidry in it. It definitely isn’t a linear narrative history of Druidry at all. It is, however, a book about history, with the emphasis on the story. This is an exploration of how we imagine and construct our ancestors, and what the implications are of the ways in which we think about them. Anyone interested in the history of Druidry, I would suggest reads both Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe and Graeme K Talboys’ The Way of the Druid, which are highly informative and offer very different understandings of the subject. It’s not the facts of history I want to explore, but what we do with them.

This is also not a book designed to teach a person how to do Druidry. It is, I hope, something that would be of use to anyone exploring a Druid path, to people in the wider pagan community, and to anyone with an interest in the ancestors. We all have ancestors and, for most of us, that can be a complicated issue. This is a book about making peace with the ancestors, understanding their legacies and their ongoing presence in our lives, and exploring how ancestry impacts on community, and ideas of race, nation and culture. For someone looking for a book that will help them begin the study of Druidry, I recommend Graeme K Talboys’ The Druid Way Made Easy and Robin Herne’s Old Gods, New Druids.

One of the things I do want to do is raise the issue of how we access history. Many pagan readers and authors alike are self-taught people. Working outside formal academia, dependant on what we can find and not always aware of where the cutting edge is, we are a community vulnerable to misinformation and being horribly out of date. Mistakes made by authors fifty or a hundred years ago still surface in pagan writing and new examples of that surface all the time. I recently read a book that claimed ‘The Hallstatt Celts (named for a region of Austria where their culture originated) were the earliest Celtic group to reach Caledonia.’ [1] Hallstatt Celts didn’t originate there; it was simply the location of some finds that went on to define our understanding of that period. How many readers will go on to transmit the error as fact? Did the author acquire it in all innocence, or through lack of due care and attention? The same book offers it as a certainty that the ‘Coligny calendar’ constitutes evidence of Druid astronomical understanding. It doesn’t even mention the issues of interpretation and uncertainty around this fascinating item. The Coligny calendar finds its way into a lot of commentary on the Druids and Celts, along with the idea of Pythagoras being taught by Druids, and a great many other unsubstantiated or over interpreted details. As pagan readers we’re still afflicted by the influence of figures like Gimbutas and Margaret Murray, the wild imaginings of antiquarians, and a plethora of other dubious sources. Picking threads of truth from this messy heap is not easy.

A poor understanding of our own history does not allow us to deal well with history as presented in the mainstream. It encourages an inaccurate understanding of who we are as a religious people and where we came from. We can easily get snarled up by other people’s ‘facts’ – The British Museum thinks Lindow Man was a victim of Druid ritual murder. Ronald Hutton disputes this. It pays us, as a community, to be skeptical about history, and historians, especially when there is so clearly no one agreed upon ‘truth’. It is important to be able to differentiate between an indisputable fact and a speculation. Most historical writing involves some degree of guesswork. We need to differentiate between what can be inferred, reasonably, from a piece of evidence, and what is plain assumption. Sometimes writers offer inferences as the only possible way of making sense of something, when that’s seldom the case. When guesses are presented in a language of authority, it is hard to tell which bits are certain, and where gaps have been filled with imagination. Hutton is my personal hero in this regard, with his willingness to express the limitations of fact and to make sure all speculation is clearly stated as such. His writing has sensitized me to the lack of such clarity in other histories.

Working with other people’s mistakes, we as pagans can also very easily make ourselves look like fools, as with the Hallstatt example above. If we’re working with theories that are a hundred years out of date, or based on something widely known to be a forgery, we are open to criticism, and rightly so.

Part of the problem here is the tension between spiritual truth as known by an individual, and the kind of truth that is recognized by the rest of the world. There are plenty of goddess worshippers who know that Gimbutas was right about ancient matrilineal societies, that the feminist pagan movement inspired by her was right, and know that nine million women in Europe were burned at the stake for witchcraft. There are plenty of Druids who know that Druid organizations and wisdom have survived intact since ancient times. There are also people who ‘know’ that the holocaust didn’t happen, so this is not a simple issue. There are many stories out there, and many people who consider them true, regardless of the available evidence.

My purpose is not to denigrate anyone’s personal truth, but to help fellow pagans hold a dual perception of the world. I am increasingly convinced that we need to be able to think about all things in two ways, and to hold those simultaneously. We need to be able to recognize and work with the fruits of rationality as they manifest both in academic work and in the mainstream. We also need our more private knowings, and critically, we have to know which is which. We need to be able to think analytically about ‘truth’ as it is handed to us by others – no matter who they are, and to think in just the same way about the truths we construct for ourselves.

In modern Druid ritual, we normally honor our ancestors. This is usually a brief business, undertaken after either the four quarters or the three worlds have been hailed. A typical honoring in ritual would go something like this: ‘Hail blessed ancestors, you of our blood, you whose bones are in this soil and whose wisdom guides us. We thank you for your blessings as we gather for this ritual today. ’ Then, at the end of the ritual as things unwind, a few words of thanks might also be offered.

Sometimes Samhain rituals bring a deeper focus on our ancestors, but for the greater part of the time, this is the current level of conscious attention they enjoy in contemporary Druid ritual. Part of the point of this book is to argue that those few lines are not enough, and to demand that we do more. We need to understand ourselves within in the context of our actual ancestry, and the ancestries we, and others, have imagined. I want to explore how our understanding of the past, and explicitly our ancestors, informs who we are and where we might be going. I also want to look at how we use and reimagine the past for our own purposes.

Modern Druidry exists with a historical context that is both complex and frequently challenging. The material we draw upon is not exclusively ancient, and the means by which it has come to us is not always the most honorable. I think these are issues we need to face head on as we construct ourselves and our religion. In this aspect, I am hugely indebted to Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe.

Some years before I even considered writing this book, I arranged for a workshop on ancestry, led by Gary Cousins. I organized the technical bits, including chasing round to encourage attendance. I ran repeatedly into the same reaction – folk who felt so uncomfortable about their immediate ancestry that the idea of any serious work in that area alarmed them. Most modern pagans come from non-pagan backgrounds, and for many that can be a source of tension and discomfort. It can act as a barrier between ourselves and the past. Part of the aim of this book therefore is to explore how we make peace with our own ancestry.

This last year has sent me on an unexpected journey into my own ancestry, so I’ll be drawing on that too. Tales from actual life are often more resonant than theoretical ideas.

These are the various ideas that have motivated me in putting this book together. While I am writing from a Druid perspective, I am confident that many of the issues are to some degree relevant for anyone on a pagan path, and hopefully beyond. We all have ancestors, they are part of our shared humanity and while historically ancestry, especially in the guise of race, has been used as a tool to divide, it is also a commonality that might yet help us move in greater harmony.

CHAPTER ONE

DEFINING THE ANCESTORS

The current interest in Druidism depends not so much upon the ancient past as upon very recent history. [2]

The three Druidic ancestors

Modern Druidry identifies three groups of ancestors. They are the ancestors of blood, the ancestors of place, and the ancestors of tradition. There is plenty of scope for overlap between the three, but in separating them out, we have scope to think creatively and to make deliberate choices about how we identify ourselves with them. The choosing and constructing of ancestors is, I think, an activity most pagans engage in to some degree, although how conscious the process is, I am less certain. I imagine we all have different levels of consciousness about the stories we construct.

Frequently, ancestor construction is a shared project, and one that moves forward all the time. Envisaging the ancestors is often far more about trying to figure out who we are than anything really to do with them. While that self-understanding agenda is important, holding a wider, more honest and perhaps more accurate picture would be advantageous. Later on I will be exploring in depth how each of the three ancestral groups function and how we might relate to them. First it makes sense to consider the full breadth that ancestry implies.

It is most usual to consider ancestors purely as being those of blood. However, the inclusion of ancestors of place and tradition open us to much wider ways of contemplating our ancestral heritage and may be less familiar to people who are not already on the Druid path. It also draws into the mix an element of choice. Our blood lines may be beyond our control, but in choosing where we live and work, we choose our ancestors of place. Our traditions are entirely a matter of choice, as are the ancestors were thereby select for ourselves, allowing us total freedom to place ourselves in any context or conceptual lineage we find appealing. This would not always have been an option for our blood ancestors. For someone whose blood ancestry is unknown, or is a source of grief or insufficiency, this option to choose is incredibly liberating.

When we think about ancestors, it is important to remember that we too will be ancestors of the future. Again this shift away from the simple ancestry of blood is important. There is more to continuation than the passing down of your genetic material. A person who is unable or who chooses not to breed will still be an ancestor of place to future generations. That impact is unavoidable and important. However, it is only through the legacy we leave in our work that we might become future ancestors of tradition. We cannot entirely choose this role for ourselves and will never see what the true extent of our impact is.

There is no single, coherent narrative approach for how modern, western pagans should relate to their ancestors. Looking around the world at the practices of indigenous and traditional peoples, we can find all kinds of models for how we might exist in relationship with our ancestors. However, any practice we consider in this way belongs to a people, a tribe, a culture and a history that are not directly our own. It is of course a different matter if they are ours, and tapping into traditions you do belong to can provide a simple solution to all this. However, for the white westerner, there are no tribal myths or ancient rituals of ancestor honoring. We will have to develop our own.

I have no doubt that we can productively learn by considering what other cultures do. The wholesale borrowing of other people’s beliefs and ways of living is not always honorable though, nor is it reliably helpful. Relationship with the ancestors is not a concept that can ever exist in isolation. It belongs to place and time, to ways of life, to art, story and life experience. The ancestors are not separate from life as we live it, but intrinsic to it. We need to see them as part of our community, not a few extra lines in a ritual. A modern, western pagan with no ancestral tradition of reverencing the ancestors cannot simple take someone else’s approach and assume it will work out of context.

All that remains to us, therefore, is the tricky process of building new traditions. Modern paganism has been doing just this for a good fifty years now. It is the essence of moots, intrinsic to every new branch of paganism that flourishes, vital for any aspiring teacher. We are in the collective process of making a new story and constructing new ways of being. How long they will serve we cannot know. Many practices do not outlive their originator. Some are discarded a few years after being thought up. Others turn out to be durable enough, and resonant enough, to be shared and passed on. Perhaps these will survive for years, or even generations. We have no way of knowing.

What humans want from tradition is a way of doing things that creates a feeling of connection and involvement. Whether we want to feel part of the cycle of the seasons, part of the land, or the chain of ancestry, it is the involvement that matters most. Tradition gives a form to the involvement that has the additional prestige of being old. Being passed down through time lends weight and credibility to the strangest and least comprehensible of practices. Traditions tend to evolve and change over time, as susceptible to innovation and external pressures as anything else. Somehow even if they have evolved beyond all recognition from the original, the idea that we are part of a tradition still gives that all-important sense of connection. Most of us want to belong, somewhere.

The ancestors of modern paganism are very recent. Some have passed over, many still live. Their names are still known to us.

Whether we seek to venerate them, or race to throw out their ideas and replace them with our own, will vary. Whether in a few hundred years time anyone remembers them as ancestors, remains to be seen. How we construct our understanding of ancestry is not just about these high profile figures in our traditions, however. It’s about how we view ourselves and our blood lines and story lines, about what we want to pass down, and how we undertake to make sense of the world and our place within it.

The ancestors of Druidry

We have a vague collective awareness of ancient Druids, as a religious group associated with Celtic peoples. As Ronald Hutton went to some length to demonstrate in Blood and Mistletoe, all of the written information about the Druids has come from other sources, and none are without issue. In a much older text, archaeologist Stuart Piggott also explained there are no sites featuring a word for ‘Druid’ that give us a definite link between physical evidence and Druidry. [3] Outside those uncertain classical texts, we can only infer Druidic practice by first assuming the presence of Druids. Consequently, there are many things we ‘know’ that could be true, but no indisputable facts. However, the past few hundred years have been full of speculation about the early Druids, including all kinds of ideas that probably had no historical accuracy. Picking through these is very difficult, not least because the ideas and images are so widespread, like the claims for a Stonehenge association, human sacrifice and the white-nighty-robes. None of this necessarily has anything much to do with our ancient Druid ancestors.

In his books, Graham Talboys makes a case for the survival of bardic schools and the transmission of Druidry by other means. If ‘Druid’ basically meant the educated classes, then Druidic ideas will have survived in stories, wisdom teachings, and so forth. It’s a very tempting argument, and one my heart wants to believe even if my head remains uncertain. I hold a duel understanding of this theory. I feel it as truth; I accept it intellectually as unproven. This is entirely comfortable for me.

If our ancient Druid ancestors were complicated, the more recent ones are far more troublesome. The Druid revival began with antiquarians. Archaeology was a new science, for which the rule books had yet to be written. Men with all kind of drums to bang and personal theories to shoehorn in somewhere piled in. Men with political agendas looking for icons to work with. Men who just wanted some fame and money and weren’t too fussy how they got there. Yet from amongst the flights of fancy, forgeries and self importance of the Druid revival, came the seeds that have grown into modern Druidry. Just as we may look back at our blood ancestry with mixed feelings, so too can we find our ancestors of tradition are a challenging lot as well.

Understanding that influence, and facing up to it, is essential. We need to own the story, warts and all. Some of the prayers we use in modern ritual, the forms themselves, and even the cherished awen symbol probably originated with Iolo Morganwg, a man set on forgery and self aggrandizement, who used those around him and betrayed every Druid principle he ever put on paper. His inspiration was beautiful, his life was not. We can make our peace with that.

Mark Lindsey Earley, writing in the handbook for Exeter’s Bardic Chair sums the situation up in this way:

It is worth pointing out, at this juncture, that the historical accuracy of Iolo’s claims is highly dubious and that in all likelihood no such ‘ancient manuscripts‘ ever existed, despite his ironic espousal of the bardic/Druidic motto ‘The truth against the World‘! However, we think it’s rather harsh to label such an important ‘hero’ of the movement as an out-and-out fraud. A more mystical perspective might theorise that he ‘channeled’ his information. At the very least we like to think that he was creatively inspired, and that, although the history he outlined was possibly a purely ‘romantic’ one, it is no less important or valid, as long as we distinguish it from academic history. [4]

The less we make outlandish claims about our historical heritage, the better. The more we focus on our behavior in this time, the better. We need to know how we got here and how that shapes us, and we need to hold a realistic understanding of what modern Druidry is, and where it comes from. With that in place, we have room to talk quietly about the other ways of knowing, the heartfelt truth, the wisdom inherent in trees and the land that comes down to us regardless of human foibles, or any other story that we feel compelled to share. Stories are wondrous things, but it’s important not to confuse them with anything else.

Robert Graves

I want to take a brief detour through an example now and talk about a specific ancestor. He’s an ancestor of tradition for me, but he’s also a figure caught up in the complexities of academic history-making, the emerging Druid tradition and his own blood lines. He is a character who represents much of what this book is about.

My dad bought The White Goddess when I was fairly small, and talked about it. I think I absorbed the idea of a triple goddess round about then, such that it took me years to realize that it wasn’t an absolute fact of ancient belief. I have no idea what else entered my young mind as a certainty. So I came to Robert Graves through my own blood ancestry. I studied his poetry in detail whilst doing A-level English literature, and went on to read The White Goddess myself during my college years. By then I’d read a little Frazer, and had just enough contact with things academic to realize I was reading poetry, not history. Later on again, I started to see where others had taken Graves as history and quoted it. His tree calendar, in particular, comes up as ‘fact’ in places that don’t mention him specifically, or any other sources.

While I was working on this book, an essay on Graves came to me purely by chance, thanks to an OBOD egroup. On closer inspection it turned out that the author, Peter Berresford Ellis, is an English historian, literary biographer and novelist who has published over 90 books and has an MA in Celtic studies, according to that great fount of all wisdom; Wikipedia. It makes him more the expert than Graves.

Peter Berresford Ellis, in his essay The Fabrication of ‘Celtic’ Astrology [5] talks about the misleading influence of Graves, whose work on the tree calendar has become so pervasive. He points out: ‘Robert Graves relied on 19th Century translations, and often very bad translations as well as texts that were quite counterfeit. Indeed, texts which were simply mere inventions. He was inclined to late 18th and 19th Century Welsh romantics (‘gentlemen antiquarians’) rather than reliable scholars.’ This ties in with the points I want to make about ongoing confusion and dodgy scholarship, where other pagan authors are still drawing, sometimes indirectly, on all the same sources (Iolo Morganwg for example). We know there has been forgery and fantasy; what the vast majority of pagan readers do not know, myself included, is just how far spread those misleading influences are.

Graves went on to compound his mistakes by not listening to the advice of others who had worked in greater length and depth studying his field. I could argue that he rejected the knowledge of his immediate ancestors of tradition. Apparently it goes further. Graves had a poor relationship with his own father and, as a consequence, seems to have missed the resources of his paternal grandfather, who was, ‘both Professor of Mathematics at TCD, and a leading authority on Ogham. He was an expert on the ancient law system of Ireland, the Brehon Law, and convinced the London Government to establish a Royal Commission to rescue, edit and translate the surviving texts, which was done through 1865-1901.’ [6] Furthermore…

In 1876, Dr Charles Graves contributed a paper to the academic journal Hermathena (published by Trinity College, Dublin) on ‘The Ogam Alphabet’. For the first time, he pointed out that surviving Ogham inscriptions had been written at the beginning of the Christian period and ‘the extreme pagan theory could no longer be maintained’. He examined the claims made about Ogham in the Auraicept and the allied tracts on Ogham (not noted by O’Flaherty) such as Duil Feda ind Ogaim (Book of Ogham Letters) and