Adelphiasophism
Modern Druids: OBOD, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids
Abstract
Review of a book about modern Druids, their beliefs, and Nature
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Thursday, July 22, 1999
”The Druid Tradition”
Philip Carr-Gomm, head of one branch of the modern Druids, The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, in his little book, “The Druid Tradition”, Element Books, Dorset, 1991, describes the outlook of modern Druidry.
At the outset he pooh-poohs those who say we know nothing about Druidry even though the Druids famously refused to write down anything about themselves, the essence of their scholarship being an apprentice system requiring the learning by heart of orally transmitted legends, sagas and romances, not to mention the many practical skills that many categories of Druids needed, and which the Merlins of Celtic cultures sedulously kept to themselves.
Our knowledge of the Druids today is based on the work of classical authors—who were prejudiced against barbarians—and archaeology which, though it can be revealing, can tell us little of the rituals or practical principles of the Druids. Not to worry, though. Carr-Gomm does not need any continuity of tradition. He has better ways of knowing than history—"channeling"! Like the evangelist, Paul, who thought little of those who knew Jesus but discovered all that was necessary by visions, for Carr-Gomm the ancient Druid tradition is passed on by supernatural means. So it is that Robert Graves, the poet, became a Druid though he did not know it, because he wrote down his ideas about the battle of the trees and the old tree alphabet of the Celts.
The OBODs will believe this if they choose but the outside observer will note that they are not preserving or reclaiming an old system of beliefs but are formulating a new one. Why then pretend it is an ancient and largely unknowable one? The answer is that religious confidence tricks often depend for their success on equating age with wisdom. Their practitioners find it easier to establish their authority if they can persuade punters that the are entering an age old sanctum. Christianity did it by pretending to be New Judaism, the Theosophists pretended to have the wisdom of ancient Tibet and the New Druids pretend to have the secrets of the ancient Celtic administrative and priestly class.
Carr-Gomm seems ready to concur that it is trickery, pointing out that the god of thieves and deception was Mercury, equated with the Celtic god, Lugh. Since Mercury-Lugh was also the messenger of God—the "god of channelling"—we should not disparage the tricks that His messenger gets up to. Eventually the message rather than the tricks will prevail. Nice one! Fall in with every trickster and swindler you can find. One of them might be Mercury transmitting God’s message in his own peculiar way. The cynic might feel inclined to ask why the absolute God does not sack such a poor messenger and appoint a better one. But there you go.
Sanctity of the Earth
All right, the believers in modern Druidry are dishonest or deluded in claiming to be a lost tradition, but the new sect they are creating has much in it to be admired as well as the barmy bits. Carr-Gomm begins his book by quoting John Michell praising the Druid revival as "acknowledging the sanctity of the living earth and all its creatures" and as "the only alternative to planetary dissolution". It is not the only alternative and it is probably not the most effective one, but it “is” one and it “does” acknowledge the sanctity of the earth which must be cheered.
All of us should accept that "we are not separate from Nature but part of it" and having accepted it look to what we are doing to our surroundings. Carr-Gomm rightly tells us that "man’s sense of alienation lies in the fact that he has cut himself adrift from both the natural world and from his roots in the past" The purpose of modern Druidry is to heal this alienation. Well, we must also applaud that, but Carr-Gomm is not interested in Nature as the Goddess or that the Goddess as the totality of Nature is truly the supreme being. Goddess does not appear in the brief index and is scarcely mentioned in the text. Nevertheless much of Druidry is about the natural world and the need for a religion that reveres rather than abuses it.
For Carr-Gomm the supreme being is still God, essentially the Christian god and one is not surprised to discover that his tutor in Druidism was a lifelong confirmed Christian, Philip Ross Nichols. Thus Carr-Gomm tells us that religion is a "top-down" structure and "it is a well known occult dictum" that the spiritual is causal to the physical. A dictum is a dogmatic assertion, invaluable to priests and preachers who would control people’s ways of thinking and behaving but not something that anyone should respect, occult or otherwise, unless it is based on sound evidence. Our Druid speaks like a Catholic bishop. Yet Carr-Gomm writes with admiration about John Tolund, also a Christian but said to be a seventeenth century founder of the modern Druids, who opposed "priestcraft" as the exploitation of religion for personal and political ends. Quite so!
Elsewhere Carr-Gomm dons his Jungian cap and speaks of archetypes and collective unconscious as established facts, writing that "C G Jung shows..." as if Jung were proof enough. Psychiatry is not a science and is based on the patriarchal values of Western Judaeo-Christian culture. I am not decrying the possibility of a collective unconscious and, indeed, if anything of our minds survive us, it is more likely to be in a form of collective unconscious rather than a personal life after death, and "unconscious" it surely is. He also speaks of Atlantis, morphic resonance and ESP as if there was no doubt about them. Perhaps for him there is no doubt—he has probably been "channelled" but for the rest of us who value the real world above fads and fancies, and want to protect it, these are still hypotheses or speculations.
Druid?
What then is the meaning of Druid? In Irish Celtic it was the plural of drui, their word for an oak tree. In Welsh it is derw, the Welsh w being sounded as a u. Curiously the word is apparently the same in Greek, drus, and the Greek word for a woodland nymph was a dryad, written in Greek which has no letter y as druad. Either Greeks had a distant impact on Ireland or the word goes back to the language of the Indo-European invaders of Europe who spread out over the continent.
The Indo-Europeans had a root, wid, which seems to have been compounded with derw to give, in Welsh, derwydd, which is exactly the word Druid. Wid seems to have meant knowledge or wisdom so the meaning of Druid is something like, the wisdom or knowledge of the oak or woods. However, since dryad meant a spirit of the woods, the word wid must have implied spiritual as well as practical knowledge. Indeed essentially the same word seems to have meant magic or enchantment. Much of the European homeland of the Celts was, in those days, heavily wooded and woods were looked upon with awe and fear. It seems the priestly and mandarin class of the Celts took their authority from the sense of sanctity and enchantment of woods and used it to preserve their authority among the people.
Ultimately perhaps the long apprenticeship necessary to become a Druid distanced them from the people who sought a simpler spirituality and found it in Christianity. The Druids were displaced by Christian monks as the objects of the simple admiration of the peasants and the traditions of Druidry became those of travelling poets and minstrels surviving in gradually attenuating form until quite recent times.
Ring or Cross
Druids have as their symbol the ring or the spiral rather than the cross. Any sensible religion should adopt the circle as a more meaningful and sensitive form than the cross. Rings and spirals evoke cycles, the cycles of nature, the daily cycle of the sun, the seasonal cycles, the revolutions of the celestial orbs and the precession of the ecliptic as well as the less distinct cycles of history. The ring is infinite in its concept—it can be traversed forever—and therefore universal, yet it encloses, being womb-like and therefore symbolic of motherhood and life.
The cross represents an end to life, it arms leading nowhere, contradicting Christian belief, but the circle is the everlasting cycle of being. The cross leads to a single point and might therefore be taken by the Christian faithful to represent the absolute but it is static and falsely precise in highlighting a meaningless focus. The circle encloses a space but is imprecise about what is within or where it is to be found, thus suggesting uncertainty and change, the quintessential characteristics of life. The cross is precise but a lie, the circle imprecise but true.
As Tolkien knew, it is the ring, not the cross that is the age-old symbol of life, the true mystical symbol. In getting people to think about the cycles of existence rather than the utterly false and selfish Christian objective of salvation as the eternal survival of the personality, meditation on the circle seems to be a good start. We see with little encouragement as our eyes follow the circle round that motion is all, change is all, nothing is static, nothing stops. The falseness of a never ending, unchanging personality, living forever is immediately apparent, whether it is your own desire or God himself.
The cross was merely an adjunct to the circle as seen in the Ankh and the sun-cross, meant to add to its symbolism but really detracting from it.
Gnostic?
Carr-Gomm’s Druidism seems to have elements of gnosticism in it, because we have a Mabon or divine child within us, reminiscent of the divine spark of gnosticism. Psychiatry appears again for when the Mabon is released or recognised it emerges as a "radiant seed-being".
The meaning seems to be that the hurt child within us is our intuitive self which understands what we are doing to ourselves and our world. It is properly divine because it understands its place in the cosmos which is itself divine. The divine child or the gnostic spark is our understanding that we are part of the Goddess and can only seek to ignore it at our peril. When we destroy our environment, we do not destroy the Goddess, though we might scar her, but we certainly destroy ourselves. The Mabon is the recognition that through the Goddess’s endless cycles of living we have evolved wonderful gifts and the ability to appreciate the blessings of the womb of the Goddess in which we live. The Mabon is the realisation that we are behaving like a monster, trying to gnaw our way out of the womb into a supposedly greater world, but simply destroying the only one that preserves and succours us.
The modern Druids are correct that the fate of the planet depends upon our thoughts and our actions. They are correct that all life is interconnected and all life is sacred. We can self-righteously pour cups full of chlorine-based bleach down our loos and sinks to kill off nasty germs but when the chlorine poisons the atmosphere, we too will die. Druidry seems genuinely based on love of the natural world. But if Carr-Gomm’s book is anything to go by, it is a form of Creation Spirituality, a recognition by Christians that their selfish faith has no part in the universe of the Goddess. It is patriarchal, it is eclectic, it is complacent. It will attract those who feel that dancing in groves and wandering in woods will cure the destruction of the world. It will not.
The Goddess is the Goddess of death as well as life. Those tempted to humour the Goddess by seeking fairies in forests had better realise that she will not be appeased. While Druids complain that they have no access to Stonehenge for the midsummer solstice, the abuse of the Goddess is continuing. As a variety of Franciscan Christians, they will pray, admire animals, birds and trees (while they exist) and seek to spot dryads, but otherwise will depend on God answering their prayers. It will be their ultimate disappointment.
The OBODs offers a correspondence course which is recognised by some universities, and, though I know little of its content except that study at the Druid grade involves studying the myths and legends of King Arthur and the Grail which we non-Druids would have thought post-Druid, it can hardly do any harm. Anyone interested can write to OBOD, PO Box 1333, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1DX UK or check in to The OBOD Website.
© AskWhy! Publications 1997. All rights reserved. If quoting please give due attribution.
