15 posts tagged “druidry”

Imbolc30

I have a confession to make.  It's a terrible, embarrassing confession for anyone who's a Druid or any kind of Celtic Pagan.  Please don't judge me, I can't help myself.  Here it is: I don't celebrate the goddess Brigid at Imbolc.

Ever since I first became interested in Druidry and Celtic Neopaganism, I have tried to cultivate a relationship with Brigid, the great threefold goddess of Ireland.  She is the daughter of the great god Dagda, the goddess of poetry, healing, and smithcraft, the protectress of hearth and household, the giver of milk and butter.  She was so widely worshipped that She refused to go away but simply converted to Christianity along with the people, and Her sacred fire at Kildare (which is Cill Dara, the shrine of the oak) was tended by nuns in place of priestesses, but it was kept alive until the Reformation.

The flame at Kildare was re-kindled in the 1990s by an Irish Catholic nun, and it has been tended ever since.  All around the world, devotees of Brigid as saint and as goddess take their turn tending Her flame, lighting it on personal shrines and altars, praying to the creative, nurturing, healing Lady of the flame.  As She was widely honored before the coming of Christianity into Ireland, so She is widely honored now, by Druids, Wiccans, Christians, Pagans of all sorts.  But not by me.

I've tried.  I've been a member of at least two flame-keeping orders.  I've written Her poems.  I've prayed to Her.  I've hung Her woven wicker cross around the house and at my workspace.  And despite all my efforts, I've never felt a response from Her, nor have I felt more than a mild affection for Her.  Once I had made contact with deities who were actually interested in me, it became apparent how tenuous and one-dimensional my relationship with Brigid had always been.

So every year at this time, when the feast of Imbolc rolls around, I've felt vaguely grumpy, vaguely guilty, and more than a little confused, because everyone around me is celebrating Brigid--even the Church--and I am not.

This year, however, I think I've finally figured out what Imbolc means for me.

Reconstructionist pagans like to point out that "the Wheel of the Year" is a 20th-century invention and that no pagan culture of the past celebrated all eight of its festivals with equal emphasis on each.  Even in Celtic cultures, Imbolc, Beltaine, Lughnasad, and Samhain were not all equally important in all regions at all times.  However, the Wheel of the Year works for us Neopagans, and I think it does so for three reasons: One, each of its festivals *has* been celebrated in European culture; two, each festival corresponds to regular climatic changes, though not the same changes in every environment; and three, each festival corresponds to an astronomical/astrological event.  The old Celtic festivals, also called the "cross-quarter days", correspond to the Sun's arrival at fifteen degrees of what are called the Fixed Signs of the Zodiac: Imbolc in Aquarius, Beltaine in Taurus, Lughnasad in Leo, and Samhain in Scorpio.

Sometime in the past year, I began to make an effort to look around, pay attention, and sense what is really happening at those eight points of the year, in my environment, in my neighborhood, in my relationships, in myself.  I determined to base my celebrations of the seasons not on traditional explanations, not on what other people were doing, not on what The Book said (no matter how helpful and reliable That Book seemed to be), but simply on What Was Happening.  While I was slogging through the mild depression that often comes for me this time of year, I somehow noticed a number of important things.

The first is that February is often the coldest month of the year in my state.  November and December can be very mild; we may not see snow till January.  But in February, just as the days are getting longer and brighter, when you start to feel better because you're not leaving for work *and* returning home both in the dark, the temperatures drop, the wind picks up, and snow, sleet, and ice arrive to coat the ground.  Fire and ice, extremes of creation.

Despite the chill, the first flowers typically come up.  I saw some hardy dandelions first, and by the end of last week, the crocuses in the neighborhood park had returned, purple and yellow.  I greeted them like old friends back from vacation.

There's an old legend that birds choose their mates on Valentine's Day.  As with so many old legends, there's truth behind this notion: At least some species of birds in my neighborhood begin showing courting behaviors as early as Imbolc.  Actual nesting may not take place till after the vernal equinox, or later, but a bird's fancy may turn to thoughts of love while the days are still cold and fairly short.  (Chaucer, who mentions birds mating on the feast of St. Valentine, was also right about birds sleeping "with open eyen".  I wonder how he knew.)

In the past couple of weeks, I realized for the first time that I always, annually, reliably have a creative surge around Imbolc.  New creative projects suggest themselves which I may spend the rest of the year pursuing.  This year I returned to writing practice, as taught by Judy Reeves and Natalie Goldberg, pulled out and read over stories I wrote in my late teens, found the germ of a new idea there, and began re-writing an early work.  In addition, I've been playing the harp we were gifted at Christmas, and, as you can see, I'm starting to blog more frequently.

The creative surge rising up in me is the same surge that pushes the crocuses out of the ground and urges the birds to pair off--"the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age," as Dylan Thomas so memorably put it.  There is something in the ground, driving upward; my Grand ArchDruid calls it "the telluric current", R.J. Stewart calls it "the Rising Light Below", other traditions have other names.  It is a force of creation and creativity, and I said to myself, quietly, that the chief meaning of Imbolc, for me, is creativity, creative idea, energy, and action.

But there was more.  I found myself looking up at the stars, spotting Orion and the Big Dipper, watching the orange twinkle of Mars creep from east to west overhead.  I found myself thinking about the current running through the ground, rising up in creation and procreation, and the currents of the stars.  And every Monday I lit incense in honor of a goddess who told me to call her Dana.

Others, I think, have called her Danu and Don.  She is the goddess of the night sky, of space, and of the stars.  The Milky Way belongs to her, that river of white light overhead which is how we see the galaxy of which we are a part.  She is also the goddess of rivers; the Danube notably bears her name.  I associate her with the river that runs through my state, through my city, that caused European settlers to build here; much diminished, much polluted, it is still swift, still numinous.  The tracks of the light rail line run along its banks to the north of the city, and on a recent trip, I heard a man my age who sounded suspiciously Pagan talk about how he used to fish there and even ate what he caught, and how that wasn't possible any more.

The same current that runs through the earth also runs through the sky, and vice versa.  Druidry, whether ancient or Revived, knows this, as does the Hermetic tradition, which epitomized it in the famous dictum, "As above, so below."  The Milky Way in the sky, and the milk of lambing ewes on earth; the rushing of the rivers, and the rushing of the stars; the creative urge to write and make music in me, and the presence of Dana in the night, creating goddess, mother of stars and waters.

It all came together in a marvellous piece by the Irish choral group Anuna called "Shining Water" :

Shining water, silent daughter, face turn from the sun
Guiding light through silver night, your songs blend into one
Crystal morning dew is forming, falling through the trees
Deep inside your simple guidance whispers on the breeze

Danú, danú, danú, danú Dé
Danú, danú, danú, danú Dé

Danu, Don, Dana, the giver--however you pronounce her name, under her guidance, I have finally discovered Imbolc.

Firenice

It's been a whole season in pagan time since I last updated: Alban Arthuan, the celebration of the Winter Solstice, has given way to Imbolc, the first wakening of the earth, commemorated by the Church and popular culture as Candlemas, the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, and Groundhog Day.  While my part of North America has had unseasonably warm and even humid weather during this time, I've been undergoing an appropriate hibernation, a cold and dark winter of the spirit that I think is just beginning to lighten.

I dislike using the words "dark night of the soul".  St. John of the Cross, who coined that term, meant something specific by it, specific to his type of Christian mysticism. While I don't claim to understand what he meant, I do feel sure that a good many people who use the phrase are not having the experience Fray Juan had out of which he coined that description, especially if they are using it to mean a depressed and sleepless night in a comfortable bed.  So I won't say I had "a dark night of the soul".  "A winter of the spirit" seems to work, however.  If the external weather was more like late fall than deep winter, if even January was warmer than it's wont to be, my internal weather has been pretty bleak.  Magical work has ground to a halt.  The gods who seemed so present, so communicative, for most of last year, fell silent and seemed to disappear, as if they'd gone south with the birds.  There were days I did not know how much longer I could bear getting up before the sunrise, waking my companion birds in order to feed and water them, working in a windowless office, then coming home after dark.  The one bit of leaven in this heavy loaf was that I began writing in a notebook again, keeping a journal on paper, doing Morning Pages a la The Artist's Way, and generating lots of raw creative material in daily writing practice.

I spent a lot of time thrashing around, internally, flailing helplessly, starting things and not finishing them, and asking the gods Why? and Where are you? and What have I done?  I didn't make any progress flailing and thrashing, and I haven't gotten any answers to my questions.  But as so often after these periods of trying to save myself from drowning by an agonized dog-paddle that has me going round in circles, I find myself back where I started, ready to get  my feet under me.  I always come back to quoting "Little Gidding", from Eliot's Four Quartets:

In the personal Druid calendar which I follow, this is the month of Ruis, pronounced "rweesh", the month of the elder tree.  In the Ogham-based lunar calendar which I and many other Druids follow, it is the last month of the year, and the cycle begins again with the moon that waxes after the Winter Solstice.  (Obligatory disclaimer: the Ogham lunar calendar is not an Ancient Druid Tradition, but a useful modern innovation mostly inspired by the poetic musings of Robert Graves in The White
Goddess.)

John Michael Greer, the Grand ArchDruid of my Order, calls Ruis "a few of resolutions, fulfillments, and endings".  My daily meditations on the attribute of this few, its traditional word oghams, its associated color, bird, animal, and so forth, have led me to see that this year, the secular year which is also about to end, has been a year of endings for me.

The most significant ending I experienced was the death of my father-in-law, after a year and a half of his slow decline from pancreatic cancer.  His sudden passing after falling in the night and injuring his head was a relief to all of us, but of course I still miss him terribly.  I sang with the choir at his elaborately formal Anglo-Catholic funeral and knew that what we did was a magical act; by our ritual, by the music we sang, we opened the gates to the Other World for him, ushered him through, and saw them close behind him.  His ashes are interred at the church where he was such an important member, and frankly, I wonder how the parish will get along without him.  He was an educator, an administrator, a performer, a prankster, a dear parent to me.

The other significant ending that dominates my thoughts in these last days before the solstice is not unrelated to my father-in-law's death.  This year, 2007, will stand out for me as the year that I finally left the Church.  I have been trying to leave the Church since I was thirteen, when I read the newly published The Spiral Dance, and realized that some people did still worship the old gods I had read so many stories about, and not just in India or other "backward" countries.  Like a woman in a bad marriage, with a husband by turns solicitous and abusive, I have left the Church and the Christian religion over and over again, only to come back when I needed something--structure, community, reassurance--that Neopaganism could not give.

This year, I finally realized that the Church was not actually giving me anything.  It was no longer a question of there being some missing element in my Pagan spiritual practice that only the Church could provide.  It was a question of feeling my Christian spiritual practice actually sucking the life out of me.  I also realized that the Church as I knew it, the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and its Anglican cousins around the world, had changed drastically, in ways that left me feeling irrevocably an outsider.  On the one hand were conservatives who clung to the heritage of music and Prayerbook liturgy that I loved, but rejected the personhood of women, homosexuals, and anyone not inclined to agree with their highly literal, highly un-Anglican interpretations of the Bible.  On the other was the American Church, boldly ordaining women, gays, and lesbians to the priesthood and the episcopate, speaking out for justice, yet ready to throw out the baby with the bathwater and jettison the old prayers, the old hymns, the old customs without critical examination.  I reached a point where I looked at the traditions of my Druid Order, at the history of the Druid Revival, at the respect for music, poetry, creativity, and nature, and realized that the Druids were more Anglican than the Anglicans.

I became a Druid, in other words, so I could keep on being an Anglican.  However, I also became a Druid, and ceased to be a Christian, because I discovered polytheism.  Thanks to Greer's book A World Full of Gods, I saw that polytheism could make good intellectual sense as a description of the world; in fact, it often provided a better description of how things work than monotheism does.  And thanks to certain spiritual experiences, I saw that it was possible to have a real, functional relationship with a being who can only be contacted through meditation and imagination, a thing which decades of Christian prayer and meditation had not demonstrated.  In the space of a few months, I have developed more vital and more intimate relationships with a particular set of deities than I ever had with Jesus.  Gods and goddesses whose existence is known to us principally by monuments with Gaulish inscriptions and remains of Roman-influenced temples and statues became more real to me, and more helpful to me, than the exalted figure who is the subject of four canonical sacred biographies, at least that many non-canonical ones, and countless numbers of books from the first century of the Common Era right up to the twenty-first.

Leaving the Church, leaving Christianity, leaving Jesus has been very much like getting a divorce.  Even though I have new deities, a new tradition, and a new community in my life, in the form of my pantheon, Revival Druidry, and AODA, I've gone through grief and mourning, anger and bitterness for what I left behind.  I can keep the anger to a minimum by avoiding news of the shameful and heartbreaking controversies in the Anglican Communion, but the grief and the sense of loss remain.

My comfort at this time of endings is in one of the chief things that Druidry teaches, in company with other Neopagan traditions: No ending is final.  The days are getting shorter, but they will not contract forever until we live in an endless night.  We know when the cycle begins anew and the days begin to lengthen once more.  The moon that rises ever later as it shrinks will eventually catch up with the sun and begin to wax again.  In some ways the old year ended at Samhain, and the six weeks from then till now have been a time of waiting in-between--much like the Christian Advent season with which I grew up.  Now the solar year and the lunar year as well as the secular, Gregorian year are about to begin again.  As I wait for the solstice, which we Druids call Alban Arthuan, I am also waiting to see what will begin anew in my own life.

Our understanding of the roles of the ancient Druid prompts us to follow them in an involvement in the academic, artistic and social justice arenas, as well as in purely spiritual and religious matters.

Acorn

Druid Order of WhiteOak

Aoda

It’s been almost a year since I received my First Degree in the Ancient Order of Druids in America, at Alban Elued, the autumnal equinox. It’s been about six months since I began to think of myself as working on my Second Degree requirements, so this seems like a good time to review what those requirements are and how I’m doing at them.

The first requirement, the Earth Path, recapitulates the requirements of the Candidate year leading to the First Degree: nature awareness, seasonal celebration, and meditation. My home in a very green urban neighborhood and my regular walk to work continue to provide me with lots of opportunities to be aware of nature, to observe it, and to learn about it. I still don’t read enough about natural history or science, but I flatter myself that direct experience counts for a lot in my tradition. I observe the sun and moon, wind and weather patterns, plant and tree growth, and the habits of birds, first-hand.

I also continue to search for ways to diminish any negative impact of my lifestyle on the Earth. One good thing I began to do was to save bottled drinks I consume at my desk at work and take them to the recycling bin in the lunchroom. I’m trying to drink less bottled stuff, period, and more water, but I do enjoy my Diet Pepsi so.

I’ve observed a full cycle of Druid holy days at least once, more like one and a half times, but I’m still tweaking my ritual forms. I’m essentially confined to my home for ritual space; in order to hold an outdoor rite, I’d have to pack up all the necessities and carry them on public transportation, and then hope I could walk far enough to find a private spot. I can do very simple, very basic offerings outdoors near my home, or I can satisfy my urge for pomp and splendor with a more elaborate indoor rite, but I can’t have it both ways. Still, I’m lucky to have a handsome tree right outside my front door.

I’ve been meditating on the Ogham for nearly a year now. The Ogham is often referred to as the “tree calendar” or “tree alphabet”, but while it can be used in those ways, it’s better seen as a Druidic equivalent to the Tree of Life in Kabbalah: a magical filing system which connects everything and to which everything can be connected. While each individual few or letter of the Ogham has a corresponding plant (some are trees, some not), it also has a bird, an animal, a color, a tool, an art, a castle or fortress, and other equivalents, according to the varying sources. Meditating on the Ogham is a way of organizing what I already know about Celtic lore, the Druid Revival, magic, deities, and wisdom stories of all kinds into a coherent whole.
“The element of Water represents the emotions, and in the Druid tradition it also relates to growth and the development of wisdom.” The Water Path is about learning to mentor, learning to help others find a viable spiritual path. I haven’t done much toward these requirements, but I’m about to take a workshop that I think will go a long way toward them. Back in 2005-2006 I studied the New Hermetics system of magical training with its creator, author Jason Augustus Newcomb, as my mentor. This training was one of my qualifications for my AODA First Degree; it also qualifies me to take the Advanced workshop that is being offered this month, at the fall equinox. An amazing coalescence of circumstances, motivated by the generosity of several persons, has made it possible for me to attend this workshop; once I have, I will be certified to train new students myself, under Jason’s supervision, and that should cover my Water Path requirement.

The Fire Path requires me to study and master the standard form of Opening and Closing a Grove and the Initiation of a Candidate. I’m nearly there with the former, but the latter falls under the “still to be done” heading. I’m also required to design my own set of seasonal rituals, and I have a feeling that may be happening soon.

The Air Path requirements are for various kinds of study, backed up by short academic papers, as are the requirements of the Spirit Path. All of those requirements are still in the future, but the Second Degree must take a minimum of two years, and it can always run longer.

Finally, there is the Spiral requirements. The Spirals are seven arts or disciplines traditionally associated with Druidry since the Revival: music, poetry, divination, healing, magic, sacred geometry, and earth mysteries. I covered magic in my First Degree by taking the New Hermetics course; I’ve finally settled on music and divination for my Second Degree. I’ve been doing a daily reading of the Ogham for several months now, and this fall I’m returning to the church choir where I used to sing. I expect the fairly heavy demands of that position will spur me to do some reading about music and thus fulfill all the requirements for that Spiral.

The secret of the AODA curriculum for the degrees is not to look at the requirements and puzzle out how to fulfill them, but to look at your spiritual life and practice and see how it meets the requirements. That’s what makes this curriculum so great. Now that I’ve done what I just recommended, I feel much better about my life and my druidry.

The other day I sat down to do some long-postponed computer maintenance.  My home computer is a Windows PC that is now about five years old—a feeble senior citizen in the world of computers.  I went through my personal files of pictures and documents and deleted a great many things, then ran the defragmentation tool for the first time, with some trepidation.  I hope the computer is happier; so far, I have not seen any enormous improvement in performance, but I suppose time (and repeated defragging) will tell.

While clearing out files, I opened and looked at a lot of documents to determine whether to keep or discard them, most of which were writing practices or extracts from my old longhand notebooks.  Almost all of the dubious documents I skimmed to evaluate were either snippets of erotic fiction that I had hoped to incorporate into some longer work or reflections on my religious orientation and spiritual state of being.  Much of both types of writing dated from late 2004; I must have been determined then to start archiving longhand material on the hard drive and to use the computer more, the notebook less (a thing which has now come to pass).

That was two days ago.  This morning one of those spiritual-state-of-being snippets is still with me: a reflection on two of my favorite writers, Ursula K. Le Guin and Gary Snyder.  Snyder and Le Guin are both long-time residents of the Pacific Northwest, and much of their writing, poetry, fiction, or essay, is grounded in that terrain and shows an intimate concern with it, ecologically, politically, spiritually.  In that snippet from October 2004, I lamented that both these writers, living on the Pacific Rim, were oriented toward cultures across the Pacific; Snyder toward Japan, China, Zen, and the other traditions of Buddhism, Le Guin toward Taoism and its literature.  I, on the other hand, was firmly and continuingly oriented toward “the West”—that is, toward European culture, European literature, Christianity, and specifically Anglican Christianity.

“Orient” means the east.  To be oriented is, at root, to be facing east.  The writers I described as being oriented to “the Orient” are looking westward across the Pacific.  The culture I called the West, the Occident, is located to the east of me, across the Atlantic.  Orient, Occident, east, west—ultimately, these terms have little meaning to people who live on a turning globe where printing, publishing, and the Internet can make the language, literature, religion, and culture of people thousands of miles away accessible, available.

The greater irony behind this is that now, two and a half years later, I, too, am looking East (or is it West?)—looking toward “Eastern religions” to provide me with something that my “Western” European heritage does not. 

I am looking to Shinto, the indigenous, pre-Buddhist religion of Japan, to provide me with models of what a living polytheism looks like in a world of cars, computers, and pollution, a world where “religion” is defined in ways antithetical to the Shinto experience.  Shinto has no founder; it has sacred texts, but no scriptures; it focuses on ritual, on action, rather than devotional feeling, intellectual agreement on dogma, or ethical codes; and it remains inextricably grounded in place, in nature, in mystery.  Here we will build a shrine, for here people have encountered that mysterious aspect of nature which the Japanese language calls kami,and two thousand years later, people are still visiting that shrine, that place, and having that encounter with mystery.

Western scholars of religion have looked at Shinto and predicted that it will fade away because it is too “primitive”, not intellectual enough, without an ethical code to guide behavior, without substantive teachings on the afterlife and the results of good or bad behavior.  Yet the same Japan that is full of factories, cell phones, anime, Hello Kitty, and all the rest is also still full of Shinto shrines, which are regularly visited by a large percentage of the population.  Clearly, something is going on with Shinto which Western definitions of religion as the experience of a privileged founder, enshrined in a canonical holy text and passed on in dogma and ethical precepts, do not encompass.

I am also looking to Buddhism, particularly to the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions of Tibet.  In a lifetime of being interested in other people’s religions as well as my own, Buddhism is the one religion in which I have never been terribly interested.  Perhaps the Four Noble Truths just don’t make the right impression on a precocious child with more vocabulary than life experience.  But a chance connection of associations led me to start reading about Buddhism last year, for the first time in decades, and I began to find something I didn’t know I was missing: practical instruction in how to deal with nagging negative emotions like anger, irritation, anxiety, worry, and an approach to compassion and service to others that didn’t involve making oneself miserable in their stead.

For years I had been beating my head against a wall of frustration—against the hard truth that Christian prayer, the Daily Office, the Eucharist, were not making me a kinder, more patient, more compassionate person.  I could walk down a city street, fingering my rosary and repeating the profound, inspiring words of my beloved Julian of Norwich, the English visionary recluse whose book of her visions is the first English text written by a woman, and turn instantly from her words about divine love and forgiveness to cursing a driver who threatened me with a careless turn, or sneering at a woman I thought was badly dressed, and then snap back to the prayer, almost without perceiving the contradiction.  A few chapters of Pema Chodron’s remarkable book No Time to Lose had more effect on my general levels of irritability and judgmentalism than decades of daily psalms, and I had to stop and think about that.  I’m still thinking about it, in fact.

When I looked to the Christian tradition for practical help in dealing with anger, anxiety, frustration, and the like, I found three ancient counsels that go back to the earliest monasticism of the Church: prayer, fasting, and vigils.  Prayer meant memorizing and reciting the words of Scripture, especially the Psalms, and meditating on them.  Fasting, of course, means not eating.  Vigils meant staying awake and limiting one’s sleep in order to pray more.  What do you get when you add up not eating and not sleeping in order to repeat, over and over, something you’re supposed to believe, or else?  I think it’s called “brainwashing”.  I decided there had to be a better way of dealing with my negative emotions than brainwashing myself.

I no longer brainwash myself to believe a map of the world that doesn’t match my experience.  Instead I watch my own experience and look for sources that confirm or explain it—in Celtic mythology, in Shinto, in Buddhism, in discussion with other members of my Druid order.  Orient or occident, before me or behind me, to my right hand or my left, above and below, spirit is all around me, and my druidry grows out of my encounters with its mystery and power in daily life.

Aoda

The following is taken from the homepage of my Druid order, the Ancient Order of Druids in America:

Founded in 1912 as the American branch of the Ancient and Archaeological Order of Druids, AODA is a Druid church of nature spirituality, rooted in the Druid Revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and offering an opportunity for modern people to experience the teachings and practices of traditional Druidry in today’s world.

AODA understands Druidry as a path of nature spirituality and inner transformation founded on personal experience rather than dogmatic belief….  It welcomes men and women of all national origins, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and affiliations with other Druidic and spiritual traditions.  Ecological awareness and commitment to an earth-honoring lifestyle, celebration of the cycles of nature through seasonal ritual, and personal development through meditation and other spiritual exercises form the core of its work, and involvement in the arts, healing practices, and traditional esoteric studies are among its applications and expressions.

In other words—

1. We trace our lineage, philosophy, and practices back to the Druids of the Revival, not to the Druids of pre-Christian Celtic cultures.
2. We are not exclusively Pagan, though we have many members who define themselves that way.
3. We are not bound to any one particular culture and its spiritual expressions.

And we all get along exceedingly well.