The Druids: What Could They Do?, Part Two.

Back again for speculations about the abilities of the druids... the previous blog entry presented Henry Rowlands' view that the major college of the druids on Mona/Anglesey was divided into three areas of ascending prestige: Beirdd in the function of bard "historians" and legal council, loaning out druidical knowledge and wisdom to petty tyrants in the interest of preserving peace between potential combatants; Offwyr of the school of the study of natural arcana [the deep secrets of the physical world], most particularly the secrets of living things; and Druda of the school of study of ethics and morality, and the contemplation of Divine and Hidden Things.

We can be certain that the "job description" of the Beirdd [memorizing and putting into poetry and even song the political histories of local petty kingdoms, and then serving to clarify contentions and offer council towards non-conflict compromise] is well within the capabilities of intelligent humans. We can be fairly certain that intelligent Offwyr, given relative peace and time, could achieve a great deal of natural knowledge about plants, animals, inorganic materials, and actions of nature, AND know many things which could be done with that knowledge, and thus appear to the ignorant as not only valuable but "magical". For many centuries such pre-scientific knowledge was call "natural magic" in the Greco-Roman world and post-Empire. All this without going to the paranormal.

Could the high druids, the druda, the contemplators of Divine and Hidden things, know more?? Well, the druids must have thought so, or they certainly wouldn't maintain a third tier of their college based upon no conviction. What sort of things were they "contemplating"? Did it get them anywhere?

I can't promise anything very good on this, but let's look at it from an odd angle.

During my last visit to my home in Kalamazoo in February, I was straightening up some of Ivan Sanderson's SITU collection in hopes of being ready in April to build new shelving in the garage to finally organize it. It was definitely lower tier druidical work. One aspect of this is getting the chaotic mess of journals at least into sorted piles to be ready for periodical boxes pre-shelving. One such periodical, which there was quite a tall stack of, was The American Dowser Quarterly Digest. I've covered dowsing before in this blog way back in 11/11/09 and 11/13/09 and there stated that dowsing was initially for me one of the more foolish-sounding of the anomalistic claims. This was despite the fact that a VERY good friend of mine, and one who buys into almost none of this stuff, is absolutely convinced that dowsing works. The two blog entries express my excursion into those mysteries, and my conclusion that there does seem to be a lot of reason to believe that something lies behind this, but NOT a mere physical force somehow undetectable but subconsciously sensed. Rather, dowsing seems to me to be something more akin to clairvoyance, with the "ritual" of the water-witching wand being ritual trapping for getting the mind right.

The "ritual of the water-witching wand"..... hmmmm.... sounds like we may be in druid country to me. Well, I never made the connection. But here, in Ivan's old stack of American Dowser's, shouting out at me from a cover was "Druid Divining In Ancient Erinn". Well now.

The author retold the tale [allegedly written in the just pre-Arthurian era, c.450AD] about Edain, the femme fatale of ancient Ireland, who was so beautiful that she bound the hearts of kings in multiple centuries. This particular tale was of a foolish king who bet a stranger "anything one wants to the winner". The bonehead king of course loses and the stranger shocks him by demanding Edain --- what an idiot. Married to the most desirable woman on the planet and the thought never crosses his mind that it would be she that the stranger wanted. Edain would probably be better off without that bonehead. BUT apparently no one saw it that way, and the king resorted to his only hope of locating her and bringing her back --- the druids.

The king's chief druid was told to leave the court and not return until he had found out her location. The druid knew that the perpetrator was a preternatural being from the land of Faerie, due to the way he was able to pixilate all of the court into not seeing the "theft", except the paralyzed king, and because of the description of the land and the people to which he said he was taking her. Even knowing that, locating the faerie criminal was no easy task. Wearied with lack of success, the chief druid sat on a mountain under a yew tree. From that tree [no doubt with proper supplication for the gift], he "cut four wands". Using these wands, and the powers of his ogam alphabet [this refers to apparently the concept that the druids used the ogam alphabet in some "runic" type of way to attempt to clairvoy the unknown and get advice], he was able to determine that Edain had been taken "underhill" at Bri Leith, the land of the Faerie chieftain Midir. [Midir and Edain had a long dance across the centuries by the way, and this final dance was supposedly in the rule of an Irish king of the c.100BC-100AD era --- thus within Rowlands' version of the druids.]

The writer sees the story as indicating the druid as using yew tree divining to locate a lost treasure [Edain]. He also hints that this sort of divining had a ritualistic paranormal aspect to it [ogam rune casting]. The whole thing sounds as if the chief druid had to resort to paranormal ability/ arcane ritual knowledge to pull off his quest. The yew tree divining rods are the correct species for such probing into the spiritual, so maybe it hangs together a bit. Believing that the Rowlands' druids tried water-witching and forms of divination is not much of a stretch to me.

Oh, by the way: the druid reported back to the king, who promptly rounded up every able-bodied man in the kingdom [finally getting his priorities right] and marched on the mountain. The faerie king of course knew that he was coming, and that his intention was to dig out the mountain in an attempt to break into the kingdom. Though this probably wouldn't have worked, it was just as bad, as it would have fatally desecrated the natural link to that kingdom and destroyed it. Midir therefore resorted to the subterfuge of presenting to the offended king several dozen women looking very much like Edain. To restore her, the king would have to pick the true Edain out. Apparently Edain liked the king better than Midir, and flashed a glimpse of a present which he had given her [a piece of jewelry --- always give your favorite girl lots of jewelry, boys] and the king accurately chose her to the great irritation of the defeated Midir. [that's Midir taking Edain in the picture above].

So, what could a druid do? He could remember history and try to make peace. He could display astonishing knowledge of the natural world. He probably had "inventions" that others had not yet seen [though claims of gunpowder and telescopes seem devoid of factual support]. And he seemed to believe that he had means of achieving insights into things in a "divinatory" ritual way. That last to me means clairvoyance, whether highly accurate and accomplished or not. Dowsing could easily have been one such "ritual". It can hardly be any coincidence that the device is called a divining rod and the act water-witching. Other rituals like casting ogam runes or any of the other "----mancies", could easily have been part of what these druda tried to do. And, as said in the last entry: the Roman Church did NOT view these rituals as ineffective. The Church viewed them as effective and dangerous, possibly leading one into the clutches of the Devil. [The reasoning behind this is not simple competition-with-the-other-religion rhetoric. The wiser Church religionists {there were some} saw these forms of rituals as conveying power to the hands of an individual and thereby dangerously swaying the person towards enhancing his own goals with that power to the detriment of others. Such behavior then leads right to manipulation by the Dark One. This in a far less dramatic way, is why martial arts masters demand a good soul and a clear mind from their students or they are not worthy of the gifts of the powers that the arts give them].

And for me there is something else about the story that we've been telling. The druid hunting Edain knows perfectly well about Faerie. If Faerie were real, how could colleges of forest-meditating priests NOT know? Moyra Doorly encountered the Faerie crowd on Arran while practicing meditation even in the 21st century. Could centuries of "professionally meditating" monks, sitting beneath their favorite oak and yew trees have completely whiffed for a couple of thousand years? Did the druids know of Faerie? I'd bet so. Was some of that interaction similar to Native American vision-questing? Why not? Did druids gain any sacred wisdom about the wholeness and integrity of Nature through such visions/encounters? ....... Did they learn how to DO things because of that?

In a possibly irrelevant sidelight, I'd like to reflect for just a moment on a very unusual character in Catholic history: St. Kevin.

Kevin was an early [pre-Patrick, even] Irish monk. He was however very different. Instead of raising fire and brimstone, throwing down the symbols of other peoples' beliefs, and generally trashing everything sacred to the invaded societies, Kevin seems to have quite loved the closeness-to-nature of the Irish druids, and almost became one, in spirit anyway.

Kevin, instead of continuously insinuating himself and the new Christian ideas into every household, went into nature and into communion with it. [left is the traditional cave in which he stayed]. His life was relatively solitary and produced a profound closeness to the creatures of the Irish forest. Miracle tales, some seeming much too far over-the-top to be literally true, are happily told in Catholic recountings of the life of this saint. I wonder if those doing the recounting were aware that that they were essentially describing a solitary druid in monks robes? Kevin WAS Catholic Christian, but a very unique variety. He found God and the spiritual in Nature communing as much as in the scriptures... and I'll bet moreso. Wisdom was to be had there. There was Presence.

From Rome's [doubtless puzzled] point of view, Kevin's life "worked". Local people from all about began to see the strange "natural" man who was visited by the animals as a holy man, a good soul. So, Kevin was ordered to bring that reputation out of the deep woods and to begin to function more publicly.

This he reluctantly did, setting up what was to be viewed as one of the holiest churches in Ireland at Glendalough.

I cannot help myself but to view Kevin as anything other than a Catholic monk with a Druid's heart. And, although I'll reserve some doubt about the specifics of the animal-related miracle stories, I cannot bring myself to doubt that he had a special communication with the animals and even the spirit of the forest itself. When the bird or the boar or the deer came to visit, was it "just" the bird, the boar, the deer? Or was it, just as the Native Americans believe, THE bird, boar, or deer? Was it in fact the good element of the "world alongside", the realm of the paranormal of Faerie?

All that is by now far Out Proctor.

I've walked a little way on the forest paths with Kevin and the druids, and of course do not well understand them. It's probably unlikely that I ever will. But there are a few more existing paths [in my Olde Bookes] that I can try before simply wishing them blessings and waving them on their way. But I have nothing more that I can pass your way for now. When some little possible flicker of light emerges from that Old Forest, I'll let you know.

And... As the faeries from their haunt in the ancient yew tree might say [if you treat them respectfully]: Blessed be until we meet again.

The Druids: What Could They Do?

This blog entry will be more of a Taoist Walk [i.e. an organic meander rather than a strict linearity] largely because I don't know what I'm talking about and therefore can't possibly know where I'm going. Still: the topic seems interesting, something related just fell into my lap, and time and interest in getting blog entries have been tough to come by, so, "here goes nothin'".

Some time ago I was upgrading my library with a few Olde Booke purchases. The incentive behind one of these was that I'd been catching dismissive comments from Academia for several years and the comments had begun to acquire an unconvincing aura [well, let's say it: a stink] about them which was suspicious. They had begun to sound like the conservative cant of the academic tribe. They were reminiscent in fact of such near-derisive put-downs suffered by many anomalistic subjects. The "Druids" were everything from a bunch of brainless pagan priests to maybe an invention of "modern times" who never really existed at all. Their "non-existence" seemed far over-the-top and not to be taken seriously by me for a moment, and knowing what I know of humans, "brainlessness" [foolishness; stupidity of primitive people; charlatans; etc] did not seem likely. But what-the-heck, maybe the "experts" were right.

To do a little private "look into", I decided to try to find the oldest attempt to study the druids [in English] that I could.... something hopefully before the modern prejudices of the establishment would have settled in. As you can see above, that book was/is Henry Rowlands: MONA ANTIGUA RESTAURATA 1723.

Expensive.

Magical.

Worth it.

Rowlands was Vicar of Llanjan, Isle of Anglesey, Wales. Like many vicars of the age, he preferred a hobby which took him outside of his church doors than locked him within them. In fact, this good fellow wanted very much to understand the ancient pagans of his Welsh isle perhaps more than his current Christians. [Actually he may have been a great vicar, but he DID spend an awfully lot of time on Druids].

Rowlands' interest was fired by his belief that Anglesey was the ancient Isle of Mona, and the home of the high college of the Druid priesthood. He probably was right on all of that. If this Isle was that significant to Druidism, then what could he still find out about it? Fortunately in Wales there are still today many old megalithic sites [see the map] and many in Mona, and folklore about some of them. So Rowlands began to study everything from the ancient writings to the geology of Anglesey to the megalithic remains. And he, at this very early time in English-language book-writing, began to see a picture emerging about his Isle, and put it on paper for all of us late-comers to read. Rowlands, a Christian man of his times, tried to take what he was gleaning and force-fit it into an Old Testament biblical schemata, and so turned much of the "where did this come from?" part of his book into nonsense. Such Elmers Gluing of different resources together is what gets academe to reject everything about an old work. It is the Baby & Bathwater phenomenon. I find it rather easy to carve away the Old Testament intrusions from the direct fieldwork. And so I find much of Rowlands interesting.

What do I suggest that Rowlands knew? I think that Rowlands was right that the druids had a major [if not THE main] "college" resident on Mona. This was why the druids made a constant retreat from the Romans in the direction of NW Wales and gathered there. There they put up a great bluff with all manner of weird behavior to attempt to spook the Romans out of a fight, but the Romans had seen weird bluffs before and ultimately just swept across the narrow waterway to the Isle and scattered them without a fight. This is the central truth to take away from the Roman record: when facing the druidical priesthood, that priesthood DID NOT FIGHT. It bluffed but ran. Druids were in my reading people of peace. Petty Celtic tyrants may have been men of war, but not the actual druids. This is a rather big deal and fits smoothly with several other aspects of what seems to be true about them.

Mona was home to a major College and, therefore, the base of the archdruid. I have no idea of what this meant. Maybe he was a strict authority; maybe he was just a facilitator. I find nothing credible [yet] about how he may have wielded that authority. Rowlands didn't either. But he seemed to find that the druidical college had three distinct areas to it. These "specialities" defined the three classes of druids: Beirdd, Offwyr, and Druda. The Beirdd were the druids as we tend to picture them: Bards of History and Law. The Outreach program of the Inner Druidical Priests. The Beirdd are those that volunteered themselves out to the petty tyrants as Keepers of the Political History of those "kingdoms" and councillors of right judgement between political disputants. What were they really doing? They were trying TO KEEP THE PEACE. The druids, an organization viewing The Cycle of Life as sacred, has come up with a brilliant way of minimizing wars. Nothing could STOP wars altogether, but it was apparently a priority for these people to try to prevent them.

So, who were the other guys?

There is that famous paragraph in Diodorus about the priests of the Hyperboreans [who are, under any reasonable way I've seen discussed, the British Celts] "bringing down" the god Apollo every nineteen years in their round temple [again almost certainly Stonehenge], and generally showing knowledge of and interest in the heavens. This sort of thing matches Rowlands second "school" of the Offwyr. These collegians were the students of the natural world. [The picture above is of a Welsh stone circle at Penmaenmawr]. "Students of the Natural World".... the lives of the plants.... the lives of the animals.... the properties of materials and fire.... remedies, potions, the living pharmacoepia... the movement of the "stars".... the winds, the weather, the seasons.... These people had found a way in the middle of primitivism to create an environment within which it was possible to begin the paths of science, and doubtless applied science as well. It seems almost a certainty to me that from these "explorers" came the concept of the "magician", and the wizard and the witch in later defamatory Christian times. It is also important to remember that the early Church did not doubt the abilities of these "pagan sorcerers" to actually DO things; the Church merely said that such activity was DANGEROUS. What all the Natural Magicians of the druids, the Offwyr, could actually DO is still a mystery to me at least. But one would at least suspect potions and cures, advances in some material technology, predictive astronomy, good calendar information, good agricultural information, and probably occasional new inventions. "Real" magic? Not the Offwyr. The arena of the true "other" seems the realm of the Druda.

By the way, I have memories of commentaries wherein the dismissive skeptics cite the "impossibility" of druids having made the ancient megalithic structures such as Stonehenge, and going on from there to dismiss them entirely as having any significance. Well.... it is of precisely of no consequence for our exploration of "Rowlands' druids" of say the 300BC-600AD period that they built any megaliths. It is only important, and that only marginally so, that they used the sites. That they used the sites [ex. holding ritual at old tombs areas and burying bones under stone piles in "auspicious" locations] seems at least extremely likely. If Diodorus' remarks are to be placed into any context which makes sense, then they at least "used" Stonehenge [or another great circle {Avebury?}] as a seasonal ritual meeting place. If any of the "modern" remembrances mean anything, then circles like Boscawen-un in Cornwall were sites of druidical competition [gorsedds]. Lastly, if Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments served at least in part as astronomically-linked calendar devices [and the study of archaeoastronomy is by now so robust that only members of academia can be so biased as to resist it], then why is it not only possible but even likely that whatever smart "priesthood" who saw and used these relationships way back in 2500BC or so did not pass on the understanding of what the structures did over many centuries? Did the Egyptian priests "forget" what the pyramid builders thought about astronomical alignment of "sacred structures" just because centuries passed? Look at the tomb ceilings of the chambers in the Valley of the Kings.

But on to the third and "highest" druidical group.....

Who were the Druda, and what was their expertise?

Rowland saw the Druda as the high college of the organization called to the study NOT of the natural world, but of the spiritual world. It was their task to probe the deepest questions of existence. Whether they found answers to any of it who knows?, but it is from them that must have come the foundational druidical insight that it is the "Cycle of Life" which is the pre-eminent feature of existence, and which must be honored. This they symbolized as a three-lobed clover or shamrock, which members of the order wore on their cloaks. The three lobes stood for Birth, Life, and Death&Regeneration --- taken of course directly from observation of the kingdom of the plants, and seen as applying as well to the heavens, the seasons, and with wisdom's eye, possibly to animals and humans. It is this Circle which druids continuously drew on the ground in front of St. Columcille, as he converted his way across Scotland in the post-Arthurian period, they accusing him of preaching a religion which was contrary to the Cycle of Life, and he claiming otherwise [despite that the fundamental vision of druidism is cyclical, and Christianity linear]. Columcille, to give him credit could honestly claim that Jesus was definitely "pro-Creation" and therefore honored all aspects of it.

The druids are said to have loved the forests and the trees. There, perhaps like George Lucas pictured Star Wars' Yoda, they "felt the Force". Maybe I should be embarrassed about this, but ever since I was a kid I "felt the force" in some sense when I was in a forest or under a great tree, too. Life seems all around, and palpable. What that is, I can't honestly say, but hearing that the druids preferred the forest for meditation or a great tree for a meeting place is very natural to me.

It is agreed apparently by almost everyone that the druids regarded certain species of trees as special in various ways. Whether anyone should say that this was "tree worship", I don't see it going that far. Trees are more loci of nature's [yes, spiritual] powers, but not exactly "gods". Respected, yes. Never taken a sharp blade to when living, yes --- the mistletoe ritual doesn't count against this as the mistletoe is a "gift" from the oak tree itself to be used in ritual. Oaks were high on the list of symbols of the power of the Life force. Some folks even interpret the word "druid" as coming from the word for oak ["dair" Irish; "deru/derwen" Welsh]. Different tree species had different meanings for these people. Another "magical" tree in this story is the Yew [striking examples of which are in the pictures above both to the top and to the left]. The Yew tree is the tree of Immortality and the spirit-world. It is also the tree which provides the "wand".

And that leads us in a, to me, other surprising direction in this tale.... a direction to pursue in part two of this "intellectual fiasco" I am bumbling through today.