"Hone your shapeshifting skills so you can picture yourself... as a weasel if you are suffocating."
— Druid Magic (Llewellyn, 2000), p. 117.
Alas, reading this badly structured, badly written book I found my interest choking, unweasellike, completely suffocated. Try as I might, I could not shapeshift myself into a being that could read Druid Magic happily. By the time I located some scraps of wisdom, it was too late. My poor, innocent, little animal reading-enjoyment self was breathing its last gasp. I had to read all three Harry Potter books in a row to revive it. My interest in Druidry had gone off snickering into its robe-sleeve long before.
I wanted to like this book. The authors seem sincere, and I'm willing to believe they have both magickal ability and a background of serious Druidic study. Maya asserts she has second sight, and based on her anecdotes, I believe her. Further, both she and Nicholas seem to have undergone deep, life-changing experiences that have given them wisdom. This wisdom particularly comes out in Chapter 8, "Self-Initiating as a Peregrine Druid," which holds a lot of valuable information and to my mind is the best chapter in the book.
But these experiences don't make Maya and Nicholas writers. Although perhaps, like innocent weasels, they were tied up and suffocated by an evil editor who forced them to write in a style suitable for dull eight-year-olds. And a malignant copy editor sprinkled their sentences with exclamation points, up to four a paragraph! But they should have rebelled when the editor stole their book and restructured it in a way that made it gibberish.
The book is set forth in three parts: Part I — Applying Druid Lore; Part II — From Past to Present; and Part III — Advanced Training. Maybe you see the problem already. How can we apply Druid lore before we know anything about it? It seems as if the discussion of magickal application was set up front as a teaser: You too can put on a Druid bird-cloak and become invisible. But this approach makes for text that's nearly impossible to follow. Within Chapter 1, we jump from "Curses," to "By Earth, Sea, and Sky" (a far-too-brief description of using these powers), to "The Heron Pose." What's the connection? I couldn't tell. Having as yet no authorial instruction in Druid practice, how am I supposed to use this information? I can't. With no context, what ought to be juicy material doesn't read as even interesting — it's not a teaser but a turn-off.
Chapter 1 is probably the most egregious example of this book's Frankenstein-monster structure. But Druid Magic suffers throughout from not starting with basics and then building to more complicated concepts. Because you don't learn the basics first, the information given does not cohere and thus is both hard to apprehend and hard to use.
For example, bits and pieces strewn throughout Druid Magic show that Maya and Nicholas regard understanding trees as essential to Druidry. In Chapter 13, the second paragraph of the "Declaration of the Sandia Mountain Grove of Druids" (Maya's and Nicholas's grove) says: "The Sandia Mountain Grove recognizes the central role of the trees in the teachings of the Druids.... The Sandia Mountain Grove expects those who initiate into the Druidic Native European Tradition under its auspices to hold a station of a tree and bring its qualities and powers to the Grove for at least one year and a day." Great idea, especially since Maya and Nicholas say Druid means "tree-wise." But then why is it not until Chapter 11 that we discuss trees in any depth, and then only as leadup to the concept of the World Tree? Not till Chapter 16, "Learning the Druid Path from Nature," does the book address getting to know trees as a subject to itself. If trees are essential, it seems you should learn about them much earlier, and the book certainly shouldn't split this core learning into chunks in chapters 11, 16 and 17.
In similar frustrating fashion, divination by Ogham is discussed in Chapter 4, but Ogham itself isn't described until Chapter 17. Two different in-depth discussions of the Cauldron of Cerridwen occur in chapters 5 and 19. Sometimes you'll find topics in completely anomalous places — a discussion of the written sources of Celtic myth is located in Chapter 13, "How Do You Form a Druid Grove?" I also think the defining chapters "What Is a Celt?," "What Is a Druid?" and "What Is Druidry?" belong earlier than chapters 9 to 11.
Neither can the authors decide what audience to write to. We start out with a simplistic definition of magick appropriate at best for beginners, then within a few pages dive into the aforementioned "Heron Pose," which seems to me requires magickal experience to use. With clever structuring, Maya and Nicholas could perhaps have presented information for multiple audiences. This book is not the way to do that.
Nicholas and Maya also have a bad habit of asserting things without backing them with scholarship or their experience. "The Picts co-existed with the Indo-European Celts in Britain for over 1,000 years, and doubtless the older group taught the Celts in that time the significance of tattoos and also of shape-changing into battle frenzy" (page 26). Says who? "Our European ancestors from the last Ice Age knew about shapeshifting through the magic of animals, and depicted this in painted caves of France and Spain" (page 27). Cave paintings show men dressed as animals, but can you really deduce the guys are shapeshifting? "The use of (hallucinogenic) mushrooms may have provided the Druids with visions of the Otherworlds, but this was within a sacred and guided context which enabled the experience to be mastered" (page 282). If we can't know for certain that the Druids took mushrooms, how can we know for certain in what context mushrooms were used?
Some of the authors' assertions are just plain weird. I have a very hard time taking seriously anyone who writes, "It is important to give our brain clear words to use for building up concepts, so that we understand everything from the first moment on. If we practiced this perfectly, each of us would be able to understand nuclear engineering" (page 14).
Y'all lost me there, Maya and Nicholas. Your authorial authority flew right out the window in its Druidic bird cloak.
Is this material really Druidic, though? The authors take some care to identify what comes from Celtic sources and what doesn't, but I wish they had been still more careful. I find this particularly problematic early on. For example, in Chapter 1, Maya and Nicholas assert their ward-setting practice is Druidic — but no Celtic origin is cited. A lot of the book's core wisdom is not that of the Celts. The rituals in Chapter 7 are nice, but about half their imagery is generic Europagan. And sex is always a fun topic, but Chapter 6, "Living Your Sacred Sexuality," resembles known Druidry only by the greatest stretch. The Druidic Kama Sutra has yet to be found, and this chapter is not it.
The book becomes more Celtic, and more careful in noting its Celtic sources, as it goes along — unfortunately, it may well have lost its readers before that.
Along the True Celt line, I must say also that, as far as I can tell, Maya and Nicholas do not know any Celtic languages well enough to perform translations. (Neither do I, but then I'm not a Ph.D. running a Celtic Studies department.) I deduce this by seeing that all translations used in the book are directly from or based on those of other writers. The authors do tremulously assert one translation, of the phrase "the truth of sovereignty," two-thirds of the way through the book, but by then I wonder how deep their understanding is of the original Celtic texts.
This is an obstacle. Maya and Nicholas themselves write that the handful of texts left us by the ancient Celts are one of the few ways we have to know Druidry. If Maya and Nicholas truly engaged these works, I find it hard to believe that they didn't want to retranslate at least one original text to get at its heart. As they say themselves, "This book relies on the Celtic myths in the form they have come down to us.... The authors believe that these sources give the best opportunity for the ancient Druid tradition to speak for itself." I wouldn't ask the authors to be scholars, except they themselves think they should be.
It's a shame the book has these problems, because scattered through it you'll find lots of excellent information. The activities ending each chapter include many well-thought-out exercises toward mastering Druid practice. I liked the rituals presented in Chapter 7, especially Samhain's. I liked too the authors' ideas on how to approach and how to create a Druid nemeton, and I appreciated their tactful but just overview of the current state of Druid scholarship. Nicholas seems to have made a rewarding study of the tree alphabet and calendar, and he judiciously parses others' studies on the topic to date. I also appreciated the exposition of three forms of poetic divination, imbas forosna, teinim laida and dichetul dichennaib. Various other nuggets of wisdom shine throughout, gold that begs for panning: a way to find lost objects through second sight, why you should learn to shapeshift into your guardian, information on how the Celts related to their gods and heroes, more.
To me, the book's greatest strengths are two, one being the description on creating your own course of study — marred only by being called, coyly, "Becoming a Ph.D. (aka Practicing Holistic Druid)." The other strong section is Chapter 8, "Self-Initiating as a Peregrine Druid." Both Nicholas and Maya describe their own initiations, narratives I found really valuable. Their instruction here makes it clear they're willing and able to guide a young Druid through initiation's deep changes.
I think Maya and Nicholas are wise and serious Druids. I think they had the material to write a good book. This isn't it, though. And I resent their suffocating my weasel.
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