Both Emma and Philip also have recently published or will soon publish books. Philip has articles in The Druid Renaissance, edited by Philip Carr-Gomm, and Paganism Today, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, as well as books published by the British Druid Order. Emma has a book to be published in June 1998 by Thorsons, called Spirits of the Sacred Grove (its title changed from In the Arms of Nemetona) and a collection of poetry published by the British Druid Order.
Leon Reed, a long-time Seattle pagan and witch, encouraged the Druids to come to the United States after he initiated into the British Druid Order as a Bard, an experience he described in the Litha 1996 Widdershins in "Leon's Big Adventure." He came to the interview and added his insight.
Miriam: My first question is: How would you define Druidry?
Philip: Get the easy ones in first (laughs).
Emma: Druidry is the craft of finding inspiration and using inspiration.
M: How would you compare Druidry and Wicca?
P: To some extent, it depends on the Druids, because there are so many different kinds. They're even more diverse than Wiccans (laughs).
E: The measure of that is that you actually get Druids who are Christians, as well as Druids who are witches, and pretty much anything in between. It's finding inspiration in different cultures, different deities.
P: One night some friends talked about this until the early hours of the morning -
E: With plenty of mead -
P: Eventually they boiled it down to, someone is a Druid if they perform their rituals wearing white robes, although many Druids don't, and if they perform their rituals in daylight, although many Druids don't.
E: Or if they use Iolo Morganwg's universal prayer. But increasingly some people don't.
P: So ultimately they came to conclusion that what made someone a Druid is the fact that they said they were one.
E: And enough people didn't disagree.
One of the things that we challenge is the idea that Druids must be Celtic. It comes across very strongly in some Druid circles that are very exclusivist that Druids are people who come from Celtic culture, people who have Celtic blood. We think that is a ludicrous way of describing Druidry. Although some people find inspiration in Celtic archetypes, others find theirs in the Anglo Saxon, the Romano-British, the medieval and Norman, or cultures that have recently spread into Europe.
P: Some of the Celtic separatists believe there is no Celtic blood in England. Just recently there was an experiment done in which they used some bones that were found in caves, 9000 years old. A bunch of school kids gave some material for genetic matching. And they were short a few kids, so they got a couple of volunteers, including their own class teacher. And he turned out to be a match with this 9000 year old DNA. He was living a few miles from where the 9000-year-old bones were found. So there's no Celtic blood in England? From everyone who has ever inhabited England, there are still genetic seeds floating around. So we're not Celtic separatists.
The other reason why we're not is because, as we move around the countryside, we don't find pure Celtic sites. There are a few sites archaeologists have come across where no one's done anything really since the Celts. But most places you go have many different layers.
E: People think of America as a juxtaposition of so many different cultures, and people think that somewhere like England is much purer. And it's not; it's just been a juxtaposition for a couple more thousand years than America.
M: Philip, in your essay in Paganism Today, you say you started out as a Wiccan. What was your passage from Wiccan to Druid?
P: I first identified myself as a Druid, and I looked around for a group. But most Druid groups that are around now didn't exist in the late 1970s. And the ones that did exist were deeply boring.
Witchcraft was an obvious step for me. Alex Sanders was living in my neighborhood in those days, initiating all comers. I actually avoided being initiated by him, because I have a problem with guru figures. A friend of mine was forming a group, which had hived off from Alex Sanders' group, and asked me if I was interested. I joined this new Wiccan coven and started subverting it right off (laughs.)
M: How did your subversion work?
P: It was very easy. We got Alex's Book of Shadows from the guy who had hived off, and we were all supposed to sit there as good Wiccans and copy out our Book of Shadows. We would do this in a group, and we kept coming on things where we'd say, Wait a minute, why do we do that? So we'd say to Gary, who'd brought us the book, What do you think about this? Do you think that this is workable? And usually he'd say, Well, I've always had a bit of a problem with that one, too. We started dropping lines, and we started substituting things.
When it came to the celebration of the festivals, all we had was the very bare bones of celebrations. We wanted more. Being the bibliophile in our group, I was sent off with orders to find us a mythology that we could work with, of local origin. The nearest mythology that was really deeply rooted in the ground was Celtic mythology, particularly British Celtic mythology, the Mabinogian.
After not very long, we became so Celtic in our working, we added so much stuff, we sat down one night and said, Can we seriously keep calling ourselves a Wiccan coven? We looked around in the ether for another name to call ourselves, and we called ourselves a grove. The Grove of the Badger. And that was the mother grove that started it all.
M: Emma, how did you come to Druidry?
E: I came a totally different route. I started off as a solitary witch and had no intention of working with anybody besides the energies that came to me.
Then I started thinking that I was living too isolated, that I had to start working with other people. I was going through my own healing processes, trying not to be so destructive and anti-social, and I wanted to come out into the world and become more social. I wanted to find a way that I could express my spirituality, which was the core of my life, in the society which I wanted to be in. I was getting to know my parents again, and then I had my son; I wanted to be in a society where I could free my child and free my spirituality. At the time, there was no way I could express myself as a witch in society. There was no way that the archetype of the witch, the word "witch," would allow me to be as free and open and proud in my culture and my spirituality as I had a right to be. So I was looking for a way of opening out. The archetype that came to me was the archetype of the Druid.
Then I searched for a Druid group to work with. Initiating into Druidry changed everything for me. Essentially, my outer work is Druidry. And my inner work is still traditional Craft. The in-facing side of the coin for me is witchcraft. Druidry is the reverse side, the outer.
M: Do you and Philip work together in one group?
E: We work in different ways. We still work individually, and together as a small group. Also we work with various different groups in various different places, and in big festivals, in Gorseddau, and in small groups at Gorseddau.
M: What is a Gorsedd?
P: A "Gorsedd" literally means a "high seat." Originally a Gorsedd was a Gorsedd mound, which was a sacred mound where people met. It was a place for tribal gatherings and particularly for the inaugurations of kings in Celtic times. But the mounds were older than the Celtic period. They were already prehistoric mounds. That was a Gorsedd mound.
From the fact that gatherings happened there, the gatherings themselves came to be known as Gorseddau. So now a Gorsedd is a gathering, and particularly a gathering of Bards. That mainly comes from Iolo Morganwg, who was an 18th century Druid revivalist. He made the term specific to gatherings of Bards.
M: Until I read Philip's essay, I didn't even realize there was a Druid revival in the 18th century. How does that stratum of Druidry work with the other strata of Druidry? What do all these different kinds of Druids look like together? Do they come together?
P: They come together sometimes. Whether or not they make sense to each other is another thing.
E: They look very peculiar.
P: There's an almost pan-Druidic gathering at the summer solstice every year in London at either Primrose Hill or Parliament Hill, where a lot of different groups get together, from the completely insane biker Druids to the fairly staid or respectable business Druids, who tend to turn up wearing blazers rather than robes. They get together for the summer solstice.
And there's a Council of British Druid Orders, the membership of which fluctuates somewhat as people get pissed off with it and leave.
E: It's a fairly political organization, the Council of British Druid Orders. We have also an organization called the Druid Forum, which is just a gathering of Druid groups who come to share teaching, share discoveries and inspiration without any political bent.
M: Does the Council of British Druid Orders hang together very well?
E: No.
P: No. We quit.
E: All the big Druid orders have broken away from the Council of British Druid Orders. It's still a council, but it's run politically by a man who has declared himself the archdruid of all Britain.
P: This guy is a direct descendent of Merlin.
E: He took over the Council of British Druid Orders and made it into a political forum, so most people got out.
M: When you say political, what do you mean?
P: (He wants) unlimited access to sacred sites. There are restrictions as to the numbers of people who can go into Stonehenge at any one time, because of erosion and because of the possibility of stones falling and the cost of protecting it from vandals.
E: The last stone fell at Stonehenge very recently, at the beginning of this century. There are big roads that go either side of Stonehenge, and with the big trucks that go past, there is an incredible amount of movement in the land. As well as, you have the Ministry of Defense nearby, and they have cannons and bombs and mines going off, which all destabilizes it. So they're really worried about people going in numbers.
And you get these crazy kids taking too many drugs and screaming their anarchy who climb up on the stones. It destabilizes the stones. It destabilizes the magical energy in the stones, and everything gets out of control. Especially somewhere like Stonehenge, which is a place of very strong, dominating male power.
P: It's a very authoritarian structure in its history and its energy. It has that kind of masculine desire for dominance about it, and the curious thing is that a lot of the kids who are drawn there have this tremendous anti-authoritarian side. So they're going to absolutely the wrong place.
E: They're finding a power object to fight, and they've done it perfectly at Stonehenge. Especially they fight the caretakers, English Heritage, which they see as being some quasi-governmental organization with credentials and rights. But English Heritage does an excellent job. And we get special access permits very easily to go in, so we can do our devotions there at dawn and at dusk, after the public hours have ended. The only time you can't get access is at the summer solstice, when it's just too dangerous.
P: They have a six-mile-wide exclusion zone at the summer solstice.
E: With police around the edge.
M: Why is it dangerous at summer solstice?
P: Because for a number of years, from the early 1970s, there was a rock festival at the summer solstice where all these completely crazy people would turn up. The Druids doing the summer solstice ceremony there at that time were the Ancient Druid Order, a very quiet, staid, peaceful little group. They would be in there doing their high Victorian ceremonial that greets the dawn on the summer solstice surrounded by about 1500 seething, drunk kids, which they found a little difficult. And the kids didn't like them, because they felt excluded. And there were some self-styled local Druids, most of whom were Wiccan dropouts, who moved into the space that was created by this conflict and set themselves up as Druids to the kids at the festival. There was this tremendous conflict between this peaceful ceremonial and this completely chaotic thing surrounding it.
E: One of the things that we do in the British Druid Order is work with English Heritage, try to defuse the situation in talking with the authorities, and try to defuse it magically as well, to dissipate that energy.
Also, three-and-a-half years ago Philip began a Gorsedd at Avebury, to move energy into Avebury circle, which has a very soft, mothering, female energy, in the beautiful rolling hills about 30 miles north of Stonehenge. It's across the other side of the Wansdyke, which was the dividing line between the Saxon and the Celtic territories. It's gentler, older, without so much battle energy.
M: What leads you to feel that? Your impressions, or research?
P: Usually the research comes later, after the initial impression. That's the way we work.
E: What we're doing now is taking our big Gorsedd ceremony around the country, to open up more Gorseddau in other places, to help diffuse the energy.
P: The Gorsedd celebrations we do are Druidically based ceremonies, but they're open to everybody, so we find a lot of Wiccans coming along.
E: We have whole covens that come out, that have never, ever celebrated their spirituality in public. And they're just like, "Wow!" And they're standing beside Christians. And there are Odinists, Buddhists, New Agers, women's groups, shamanic practitioners, who are there in the circle.
M: Is there much tension between the Christian and pagan Druids?
P: It depends on your Christian, really.
E: I did a big Earth Day, which got into the local news before the event. The newspapers very kindly passed my number on to people. I had a fundamentalist Christian call up. The press had reported that this was an Earth Day run by Druids in the spirit of Druidry and the spirit of the land, and that there will be Christian Druids working, Buddhists, whoever. This fundamentalist Christian wasn't bothered that we were doing it, but he wanted to know who the Christians were, and how they could call themselves Christians. This is what pissed him off.
In any Druid gathering, there will be at least one Christian Druid, or some people call themselves Christic Druids, which means than they work with the deity, the culture of the Christian faith, and not with the Christian Church.
P: It was so cool, after the first Avebury Gorsedd ceremony, Autumn Equinox of 1993, a few of us wandered back to where the lectures were happening. There were two Christian ministers there, both of whom were in their late 60s, I guess, and they both came up to me together and congratulated me on the way I conducted the ceremony. It was just thrilling.
Wade: How do you work with the authorities when you go to new sites, or in your use of Stonehenge and Avebury?
P: We talk to them as people, instead of seeing them as bricks in a monolithic power organization. There are people in there, and once you connect with the people, things just open up.
E: One of our Bards from the Gorsedd was working in a coven, and that coven had never practiced outside. It had a barn, and it practiced in the barn, and it never practiced outside, let alone in public. And then the whole coven started coming to the Gorsedd. Based on the inspiration that they got at the Gorsedd of Avebury, they went to their local (governing) council and asked the local council if they could have permission to plant a grove, and the council actually gave them money and land so that they could make a Gorsedd in a park in their local town.
M: In general, how does the non-Druid community react to the Gorseddau?
P: The community in Avebury was a little nervous for a while, so we started talking to them, and they're fine.
E: Loads of the villagers come, and the vicar of the local church. For those people who are reading who don't know, Avebury is a tiny, tiny village. There is one church, one pub, about 40 houses. And that's about it. A little primary school.
You have this road that goes right through (the circle), and the village in the middle with the pub in the middle. It's a good English stone circle; there's a pub right in the very center.
P: And the pub has a sacred well in the corner of the games room.
E: Part of our work, when we work together, allows visioning back to how it was. Avebury's on chalk country. When this beautiful stone circle, with this huge henge (bank and ditch) around the edge, was first built, it wasn't turf; there was no grass. This mound of earth all the way around the edge was shining white.
And who knows, perhaps they would have kept it white, kept the grass off it, around the edge. The grass in the center - how much of that was grass? When did the grass come through? And Silbury Hill in the distance would perhaps have been completely white with the chalk. In that country, in that area, when they plow the fields, the fields are white with chalk. When we go back and we can imagine it, it's just this huge expanse of grass with this white earthwork around the edge. It has an extraordinary peace and serenity.
But when we imagine it, almost instantly, hang on, you can hear the music, you can hear the sounds of people coming. You can hear the bells of the goats. Everyone's coming, converging on this place, and it is a place of celebration, of meeting together. In some ways, that is what's still happening.
M: When you first start working with a site where you haven't been before, what do you do?
E: Listen.
P: You have to be open, is the key to it, open with every sense that you have to what's going on around you, including what has happened and what may be yet to come.
M: Have you worked with any new sites recently?
P: Yeah, we've worked with America (laughs).
E: We went to Stonehenge, Washington.
M: What was it like listening to Stonehenge, Washington?
P: It doesn't reverberate in quite the same way.
E: It was quite interesting, drumming for a good 10 minutes before the concrete stopped absorbing the sound of the drums, before it started to actually fill.
Leon: It was longer than that. It took almost a half-hour before the stones started to respond.
E: I'm just not used to that. Any site in England, which isn't in the center of the city, is going to start picking up sooner. Also, I guess I know what the songs are going to be like, I can hear what's going to come back, and I'm reacting with the ancestors who are being called to the place and the spirits who are hearing.
M: What did you hear at the Washington Stonehenge?
E: The first thing I heard was the crying, women crying for the death of their sons. It was a good war memorial. Most of the man-made sacred sites in England are either made newly for spiritual purposes, or else they're made by the ancestors, and the ancestors come through. But they're not for a lost generation. It was really interesting working at a place specifically for people of a lost generation.
The first thing that came out was the grief. There was so much energy that needed to come through.
P: I was moving around the circle, playing my penny whistle. I went around to, if they were aligned properly, what would have been the northeast, where the heel stone is -
E: The heel stone is a great big phallic needle.
P: But it's the place of sunrise and rebirth. And I took the energy around the circle, of these tortured people who died in awful circumstances far away. I took that and moved it through and sent it off into the west, where the sun sets, where they can go down into the arms of the Mother, and then I brought it back 'round the circle again, so they could rise up again reborn with the sun. That was my effort toward healing those folks.
E: Which is essentially what we do, in more generic terms. It's finding sacred sites, whether that sacred site is man-made or it's just a place with exquisite beauty. We were at Rockhouse Reservation in Massachusetts, which is just an unbelievably beautiful rock formation. It's in this gorgeous forest.
We were with a Keltrian Druid who was eager to understand what our vision was of the spiritual activities that had been done by the Native Americans. (Editors' note: Keltria is a American-based Druid organization.) But I was just singing with the devas - I mean the people, all respect to those who have worshipped there, were completely irrelevant. It was the devas and the dryads and the little folk who were important in a place like that. That was a sacred site where humanity was insignificant, and that's a healing for anyone who experiences it. I think we should all experience our own insignificance very often (laughs).
M: What is a Druid as opposed to a Bard as opposed to a Ovate?
E: A Bard is someone who is the storyteller, the poet, someone working on their own path of self-expression. If you're talking about Druidry as being the craft of inspiration, the Bard is the person who is working in the expression of inspiration, the exhalation of the inspiration.
The Ovate is working on the results of that weaving. They're working more specifically on the energy that is inspired. An Ovate would work more with divination, with catching the shimmers of the threads, with healing, with anything which is more proactively reading or changing the energy as opposed to just pure expression.
And then a Druid would be someone who can shift into the change so it's working on a deeper, magical level, and being able to shift into the change. People have different magical abilities through their own experience, but a Druid is more like the teacher. The Druid is the adjudicator as opposed to the judge, the medium between people, between cultures, between land and sky. Not necessarily a medium between the gods and the people, but that happens, for those who don't want to go through the mystical art of meeting the gods themselves. The Druid is more the bridge-builder.
But it's not hierarchical. I'm learning how to be a Bard, but I'm a natural Druid. I've been shapeshifting and working with the sidhe all my life. But I'm learning how to express myself more clearly. I'm a compulsive writer, which is an expression of my need to learn the craft of the Bard. And I worked as an Ovate, as a healer for nine years.
Whereas Philip is a rock star. (Laughter.) Philip is a natural Bard. He works his craft to perfect the Druid, whereas I'm a natural Druid and I work my craft to perfect the Bard.
P: Perhaps the Ovate is the most painful, being the healing part of the journey.
It's about how you work with spirit energy. We have a technical term for it, "awen," which means "flowing spirit."
L: I want to clarify something that I said last year, that Emma and Philip were the archdruids of Avebury. I was incorrect in that assertion, and I didn't realize that at the time.
P: We are not archdruids of anything. We don't really like the term.
E: There is a man in England, as we've said, who is a little deranged, who calls himself the archdruid of Stonehenge, the archdruid of Somerset, the archdruid of Avebury, of Glastonbury -
P: And of the whole of Britain.
E: We figure that when you get so many arches you become a viaduct.
Amanda: Do you have clergy? Which of the three levels would be active clergy, people who marry and bury?
E: It depends what we're working. One of the big problems at the moment, in England, in all paganism, is the problem of whether we have clergy. And I think that's true here as well.
P: It's kind of a de facto thing. We find ourselves in a position where people want us to do it, so we do it.
E: The clergy, really, in Druidry, is the people you respect to be in that position. I think all the clergy I know in Druidry are Druids, people who have trained sufficiently so they know how to work all three facets of the craft.
Priesthood is not something that anyone who is sensible will choose to do. It's seriously responsible; it's seriously hard work. You need to go through so much crap to be able to do it well, with your own psyche. I think with people who aspire to it, it's all in their heads, basically. That's just my feeling. It's what we call Jungian Druidry, where people think: It all happens in my psyche, and if something moves outside my own head, it freaks me out, man. It's not supposed to! (Laughs.)
M: But you can't get legal status as clergy?
P: It just doesn't happen. England has a state religion, that's the Church of England, and that's it.
E: But it's incredibly tolerant. It's much easier to stand up in England and say, "I'm a Druid," "I'm a pagan," "I'm a witch" than it is in America.
M: How many Druid groups do you know of?
P: There's a guy called Michel Raoult whose published a book called Les Druides, it's only available in French. I did a rough count through the index, and he had something over 600 groups.
These are all around the world. There are now Druids in most countries and on all the continents. In Britain, there are probably something like 40 or 50 groups.
E: There are probably about 10 that are significant in terms of community.
P: The others tend to be localized and small. They range across the whole spectrum from groups like us, who put on eclectic gatherings and large group work, to groups like The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, which operate mainly through a mail-order course.
M: Emma, I heard you have a new book out, In the Arms of Nemetona. I couldn't get a copy of it.
E: It's not published yet, and it won't be until June '98, and in fact the publisher, Thorsons, has asked to change the title, so it's now called Spirits of the Sacred Grove. They think that Nemetona sounds like an Egyptian goddess.
I work with Nemetona as the goddess of the sanctuary. As a forest Druid, myself, I tend to think of the sanctuary most often as the grove, but that sanctuary is transplanted into different places. It is the containing space for the processes of change and centering. So she's a goddess of change and of healing. She's a goddess of nature and the processes of perpetual change, perpetual motion, and a central part in that. She's the goddess that I work with in the healing work that I do, and the apprentice work and teaching work.
M: How does she relate to Ceridwen, for example?
E: If you think of the grove, Nemetona is the one whose arms actually are the circle of grove. So Nemetona would hold us there, and Ceridwen would be spinning in the cauldron in the center. I work with Ceridwen in the Celtic tradition; I work with Freya in the Northern tradition; I work with Hecate in the classical tradition.
M: You like those tough goddesses (laughs).
E: It's true.
I used to work a lot with Panther. When I moved into Druidry, I started working with the bobcat, which was a little more accessible, and at the same time I started working with Nemetona. The other goddesses I work with tend to be the goddesses that work with the panther and the dark form, and the Craft inside me. Nemetona is the Druid goddess who I work with outside, communicating with other people.
When you're working with Ceridwen and you're working with a lot of people, that burning energy can frighten people, especially people who are sensitive. Especially when you're working in a group which is not magically contained, and a lot of Druid ceremony is not magically contained. It's only contained by the priest or the priestess who are weaving the energy. You don't invoke a goddess like Ceridwen into the circle without really being clear that you know how to work with that energy, because otherwise it creates too much turbulence. Whereas Nemetona is actually a stabilizing deity.
M: What is your book about?
E: My book is about the healing process of change that Druidry enables. It's about the weaving of the spirit of place with the spirits of our ancestors and the way that we change as we walk through our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of the cycles of life, or put it within the language of the Druid circle, the language of Nemetona's grove.
M: You say you've been working with the sidhe all your life. How did you start?
E: I started working with the little people and the fairy folk as a child, because I got poked and prodded and tripped up, and got my hair pulled and things kicked out of my hands. I was called to work with the fey and the sidhe.
The little people for me are the original, the indigenous people, of Britain or any land, who moved into the mists when they got sick of the invading people who were just so wrapped up in their own self-conscious humanity. The little people are the people I work with most in terms of the other folk. And then there are the devas and the dryads and the spirits of the earth and the spirits of place; you shift through all the spirits of nature until you get into the spirits of our ancestors.
I started to learn how to communicate with them, and apart from periods when I was too sick or too wrapped up in drug abuse, I carried on. It never left me, as it does for most people when their first teeth fall, or when they go through puberty.
M: How did you work with them when you were a child?
E: In the beginning, I learned how to make a deal, which in my experience is the most important thing with the sidhe. People think that if I sit here and I do what I'm supposed to do and maybe I take a few mushrooms, I will be able to see the fairy folk. But they are not human-friendly entities.
I think people who think that are still coming from a Christian concept, or a New Age concept, that deity or spirit means unconditional love. It's just not the same wavelength.
The first thing I did was learn how to make a deal, and then I started to learn how to actually give and take, and then I started to learn how dance with it, until eventually I learned how to share joy with the little people.
But getting to a point where you share joy, in my experience, you have to go through a point of grief, of when they moved through into the mists. That's all about our separation from nature, and how we are stuck out here in these clumsy bodies making a mess, and how they, when they were still a part of the air and the trees and still had more of a physicality, didn't do that. And now there is a grief and a lack of separation, because they don't have that physicality. We have physicality, but we're struggling with our separation.
But again, I think it's really important to understand that there are little people who are just not friendly, who are out to cause chaos, as well as the ones who are out there with great music and sunlight and dancing. And the same with the tree folk, the dryads. It's about respect and caution as much as it is sharing the dance and the songs of the land.
P: One of the things we try to be aware of is the interactions of spirits, when we go to a place. In some people's practice, they forget that there are people there as well, and that they have spirits, and you have to be aware that there's an interaction going on between the people, as well as between the spirits of the place.
E: We must honor our parents and our grandparents when we search for our ancestors who we think are better. Even though our great-grandfather might have abused and raped his wife, we're still, Oh, great ancestors. Honoring our parents is an important part.
A: How are the fey different here, from your experience, than they are in Europe?
E: Very different in some ways. How do you describe it? The climate describes the difference; the colors describe the difference.
I suppose they seem a little less refined here. I use that word really carefully. They are less processed, less human. They have existed for longer without human energy in the air, without breathing human thoughts. Their songs seem to be slightly less tuneful, slightly darker, muddier.
A: Do you find them more antagonistic here?
E: More antagonistic to humanity, but not necessarily more aggressive. I've come across more aggressive little people in England.
Also, as I've said, we work very much with animal spirits. I've been working with cats all my life, and Philip's been working with his wolf for the last two or three years. That's something we work with with other people as well, very strongly.
But this whole thing about shamanism is a bit of a scam, really. Again, anyone who wants to be a shaman is out to lunch.
P: Seriously, seriously out to lunch.
E: We work with various aspects of what we would call shamanistic Druidry, working with the powers of life and death, working with spirit, working on the other side. Very much what we define as the Druid aspect, shifting into different expressions of spirit. Working with people to allow them to reconnect into nature in terms of the forest, in terms of the fields, in terms of the cropland, but also in terms of their own instinct and allowing them to get involved with their own natural animalistic instinct. Whether that is just your empathy, whether it's actually the psychic, or whether that actually means that they can shapeshift right through, depending on their experience and the breadth of their consciousness.
M: When you say you work with cats and wolves, do you mean specific cats or wolves, or your own cat spirit or wolf spirit?
E: Both. If you put it back into witch form, I have a familiar. My familiar is a cat, it always has been, and it taught me how to become a cat. I have a rheumatic disorder, which makes it very difficult for me to function sometimes. I just slide into cat, because the cat manages to break through the constraints of my own physical body. (To Philip:) But you do it with your emotion, don't you?
P: I'm in this perpetual shamanic crisis. I've had a few dramatic ones that were enough kill me and bring me back to life again, so I worked with those. I work with one particular wolf spirit, and I work with the spirit of wolf generally. But this is stuff you get seriously beaten into, it's not something that you make a decision about. It's not like a career move.
L: There's something I'd like to ask. What do you think you are doing in America? Why did you come?
P: I was wondering when you were going to get to that. (Laughs).
E: We've come to convert you. (Philip laughs.)
P: (Jokingly) We're on a crusade! We're bringing the Holy Spirit of British Druidry to this great land, and we're going to show you the True Way, folks!
L: Amen!
P: We're going to show you the path so that you can pass underneath the great glory of that great Druid money tree! And that great Druid money tree is going shed its green leaves down upon you! And you're going to find enrichment come into your life! Because the gods, they don't like poor people. The gods, they like rich people! (Laughs.)
E: Part of the reason we're in America is because Leon invited us.
P: Plus part of why I came here was because of Native American teachers coming over to Britain and to Europe and sharing what they do in different ways.
E: And our getting very pissed off with it, actually.
M: Why?
E: We have areas in English modern earth spirituality which don't understand that we have a native tradition of own, which are still stretching across the ocean to Australian aboriginal spirituality and Native American spirituality and, god help them, Mayan spirituality and all this kind of stuff.
It's infuriating to watch people who are searching for a place to belong, and they're doing it in just the same way people went into Hinduism and TM and Oriental spirituality 20 years ago, but now they're going into Native American stuff. And it's just infuriating to watch because we have a spirituality of our own earth, of our own soil, of our own blood, of our own culture and heritage.
If it was okay with the Native American people, en masse, as a group of nations, for this to be happening, then it would be okay. But it's not, and there are so many problems among the Native American people with the teachers who are teaching, that we don't know who is a good teacher and who is stealing and selling the wisdom.
P: It sits unhappily in Europe to have people using stuff in their practice that they actually brought over from the States. So all of the feathers that they work with, the skins that they work with, the beadwork that they work with, all come from America.
E: It's totally offensive to the spirits, to the sidhe of the land that we live in, to have that happening.
Essentially what we decided to do in America was to offer the kind of Druidry we work in England, which is weaving the spirits of our ancestors with the spirits of place. And we're calling to the American Druids that we've met who are working with the spirits of their ancestors, and calling back to a spirit of a place they don't live on, so they're not honoring the land that they're working on. And we're talking to people who don't understand that there's a European tradition and are still leaping straight into the Native American ancestry, which is not their own. So we're just giving a way of working together.
P: Also, I wanted to explore from a personal point of view how I could relate to Native American traditions on their own soil.
One of the first experiences I had was in Boston in the house where we were staying. Just before I went to sleep, I had a vision of a turtle. I've never really worked with turtles, so I thought, What's this about? So I asked, as you do when you're not sure.
And two things happened. The first was that I started to sink down into the ground and got down through the earth and down to the rocks, and I'm going down with my human mind still thinking, Wait a minute, turtles don't live underground, unless there's some strange species of mole turtle I've never heard about. At the same time, I got these two words, "Turtle Island." I thought, What's Turtle Island?
So the next day, we were doing a workshop. People brought along objects that were sacred to them to put in the circle. And this guy brought along a turtle shell. This turtle shell is right near where I'm sitting, and I keep looking at it, thinking this is an extension of the message.
Eventually, I just could not keep it in any longer, I said, "Look, you guys, can somebody please tell me, what is this Turtle Island thing?" So everybody chortled and said, "That's where you are. America. It's Turtle Island."
E: One of the reasons that's it's important for me to be in America is the healing of American side of my childhood. I lived in Chicago for three years when I was a kid. But I just couldn't cope with all that grief. I felt the land to be so scarred. It was easier to live in a land which had been worked and abused and worked again and again than to live in a land which had been so recently raped. The whole process with the grief of America and the grief of the Indian nations is something I've been working on for years.
This is the first time that I've been asked to come to America, and everything has been given to me to come to America, where I feel that I have enough to give back to the land so that I'm not taking from this land. For me, it's an expression of the healing process having happened.
P: What we're trying to do is to find ways in which we ourselves relate to spirit of place. And then offer them if other people want to use them.
E: There's a good story that Philip was told about a Native American corn ceremony.
P: Just before we came over here, I had a letter from an American Druid group called the Church of Rhiannon. For the last 11 years, they've been performing their version of a Native American corn ceremony on a traditional site. They started doing it because the ceremony was no longer happening, and they felt the loss of the ceremony to the site. So they found out how the corn ceremony was conducted, and they made a version of it that fitted in with their vision of Druidry, and they merged the two.
At the end of the letter, the guy said, I think we've done the right thing. He was obviously still nervous about it, still working on it, which is a good thing. He said, We've been working there for 11 years, and every time we work there, the spirit of the place grows stronger.
M: So have they gotten any flack from the tribes who used to live there?
P: No, they haven't.
W: What is your vision for Druidry?
E: I'd like to see the spirit of Druidry becoming accessible to everybody, so there's an attitude in culture, in schooling, in politics which involves that Druid attitude of honoring the flow from our ancestors and of honoring the spirits of place, so everything is done within that.
That sounds huge, obviously, massively long-term. But in some ways it isn't, because the growth of Druidry is incredibly big, incredibly fast.
Particularly I say Druidry and not paganism, because within Druidry there are the tenets of total tolerance of deity and, again, weaving ancestors with the spirits of place. Within the spirit of Druidry as we celebrate it, there is Christianity, there is Hinduism, there is Buddhism, as well as all the pagan traditions.
So that I think is what Druidry offers, and that's what I'd like to see spread. Prince Charles has a statue of Nemetona in the garden of his house. We might bring back a pagan king to England and see where it goes from there.
-
"For more information about the British Druid Order, or its local chapter the Gorsedd of Bards of Caer Pugetia, contact Leon Reed, Northwest U.S. representative, at Wortcunning, P.O. Box 9785, Seattle, WA 98109. Or write the BDO at BDO Office, PO Box 635, Halifax, HX2 6WX, UK, or send e-mail to: Sparrowhawk, Sparrowhawk@BritishDruidOrder.co.uk ; Editor 'Tooth & Claw', Web Master of www.druidry.co.uk
For $25, made payable to the British Druid Order and sent to either address, you can receive their introductory book Druidry: Native Spirituality in Britain and the next four issues of the newsletter Tooth and Claw. You can also subscribe to the next two issues of The Druids' Voice: The Magazine of Contemporary Druidry, for $30, payable to The Druids' Voice at the BDO address in England.
BDO publications A Druid Directory: A Guide to Contemporary Druidry and Druid Orders, The Story of Taliesin, and The Passing of the Year: A Collection of Songs, Poems, Spells and Invocations, by Philip, are available from the BDO at $12 each.
Black Lizard Forest: Poems from Nemeton, by Emma Restall Orr, are available by contacting her on bobcat@druidnetwork.org Website: http://druidnetwork.org ; General Equiries to: office@druidnetwork.org
The books The Druid Renaissance, edited by Philip Carr-Gomm, and Paganism Today, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, are available in pagan bookstores.
The Druid Network is an international organization that provides the opportunity for Orders, Groves and individuals within the Druid tradition to come together. With a website rich in resources, from book reviews and courses to ethical/environmental living and Druid events, The Druid Network offers an opportunity for sharing skills, teachings, inspiration, experience, encouraging the creative active expression of living Druidry. Its magazine, The Druids' Voice, is published twice yearly.
Headed by author and priest Emma Restall Orr (aka Bobcat), former joint chief of The British Druid Order, and run by a growing staff of project co-ordinators around the world, The Druid Network is open to people of any spiritual tradition who are interested in and respectful of the history of Druidry and its practice as a modern Pagan spirituality. Its magical heart is the Order of the Yew, an Order open to those who have dedicated their lives to the Druid tradition."
Many thanks to Bonnie for her hard work transcribing this interview.
[Home Page | Other Articles in This Issue | FAQ | Local Resources]