Tag Archives: Druids

Massive 2015 Year-End Link Dump! Something for Everyone!

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This is a Druid knife. It says so.

Some of the links that I saved that never turned into blog posts . . .

• The Internet loves quizes, so “What Kind of Witch Would You Be?” (answer: hearth witch). I always suspect that the answer is based on just one question, while the others are there just for fluff and decoration.

• I saved this link from the Forest Door blog because I liked this thought:

This is, indeed, one of the roots of many problems in modern polytheism – people being unwilling to wait and let things naturally evolve. My biggest concern here isn’t the specific examples of mis-assignment (though they do exist, and are indicative of a serious lack of understanding in some cases). It is the fact that these folks are sitting around trying to artificially assign gods to places and things as if it’s just a game, or at best an intellectual exercise.

• Local cultus is the new kale.

• Is a knife named for Druids meant for Druids? (Echoes of allegations of human sacrifice?) Just what does “Druid” mean here?

• I did like John Halstead’s post on “the tyranny of structurelessness.” See also “Reclaiming.” See also “The Theology of Consensus.”

• Turn off the computer and play a 1,600-year-old Viking war game.

• From last July, a Washington Post story on Asatruar in the Army.

• A photography book of modern British folklore. Not an oxymoron.

• More photography: “Earth Magic – Photographer Rik Garrett Talks About Witchcraft.”

What if witches hadn’t changed that much since medieval times and were still fairly close to the popular imagery conveyed by their early enemies during the classical witchhunts?

• So you’re a Pagan? Here are ten ways to show respect for your elders. It’s the Pagan way.

• Philosophy should teach you how to live. “Why I Teach Plato to Plumbers.” Also, it’s Pagan.

• Reviewing a book on Greek and Roman animal sacrifice, which was, after all, the chief ritual back in the days when Paganism was the religion of the community.

• Was it the bells? Morris dancers attacked by dogs.

• Camille Paglia’s definition of “Pagan” is not mine, but she still kicks ass. Also, “Everything’s Awesome, and Camille Paglia Is Unhappy!”

• Embiggen thy word-hoard! Visit the Historical Thesaurus of Engish.

• But if you really want to go down the 15th-century rabbit hole, follow The Great Vowel Shift.

• The New Yorker covers psychedelic therapy. To learn more, follow and donate to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Also: “How Psychedelics Are Helping Cancer Patients Fend Off Despair.”

• Looking good for an academic interview.

• A review from last year of Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll.

• From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “How to Be Intoxicated.” Not surprisingly, Dionyus figures in more than does binge-drinking.

• Apparently the Yakuza, the Nipponese Mob, planned to call off Halloween due to a gang war. So how did that work out?

Irish Druids Now Officially “Indigenous” — They Say

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That is how the Celtic Druid Temple frames government recognition as an “official charity.”

The Celtic Druid Temple is a full member of the World Druid Order and now has legal and formal recognition in Ireland as a religious charity with a CHY number 20684 issued by the Dept of Finance.

I assume that is roughly equivalent to an American religious group getting 501(c)3 status as a tax-exempt nonprofit group.

To these Irish Druids, there are larger implications:

The Celtic Druid Temple is now recognised by the Irish Government as Ireland’s indigenous religious tradition with Nature as the Supreme Being. Nature based spirituality has once again achieved full recognition in Ireland after a lapse of many centuries.

Indigenous. Does that word mean what you think it means? I have seen some (mostly white) academics twist themselves into knots to explain why they themselves cannot be “indigenous.”

Some of them argue that you have to have been colonized by an outside power to be “indigenous.” The Irish would have a lightning-quick comeback to that.

And some of my English Pagan friends say, “What about the Romans? They colonized us.” (Or does the magic power of being colonized expire after some set amount of time?)

Other Pagan writers equate their ancestors’ often-forced conversion to Christianity as being psychologically equivalent to colonization.

It must be possible to become indigenous over time; otherwise, the only truly indigenous humans would be those living in East Africa, and everyone else would be a nasty invader and colonizer.

On the Keeping of Pet Hermits and Druids

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Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners were in fact characterized as “Druids.”

Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone’s hermit – a hereditary post – may have survived into the twentieth century. The impecunious Charles Hamilton reputedly advertised for a hermit for his Gothic hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, offering a fee of 700 guineas (some reports say 500) to anyone able and willing to meet his stringent conditions over seven years: to go barefoot in a woollen robe, never to cut beard or nails, or to speak with the servant who brought his food. Although the advertisement cannot now be traced, the hermit undoubtedly existed, and Campbell’s exhaustive enquiries confirm how ubiquitous hermits were in Georgian Britain.

Maybe there is still a niche waiting to be exploited here, for either philosophy majors or designers of animatronic hermits.

Stone Circles: Not Just for Neolithic People

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“Andy Burnham, who runs the Megalithic Portal Web site and society in Surrey, England, has recorded 253 monolithic circles built in recent decades. And ‘there must be many more in private gardens that we don’t know about,’ he wrote in an e-mail.”

The New York Times profiles a Vermont man who has built more than twenty. And the writer manages to work in the controversial Pagan worship site at the Air Force Academy as well as, you guessed it, Druids — who did not build the ancient stone monuments but who remain associated with them, thanks to antiquarian writers of past centuries.

Ring-Dancing Monkeys and Black Death Rubbish

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At Got Medieval, Carl Pyrdrum re-debunks the persistent, authentic-sounding story that the nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosies” has anything whatsoever to do with the Black Death of the 1340s.

It does not.

As any good English plague survivor********** could tell you, the plague was caused by sin and best warded off by extreme piety and making sure your humours were in balance.***********

His version includes dancing monkeys, a feral cat, and Lancelot.

Here on the banks of Hardscrabble Creek, which is starting to rise as the snows are melting, we are fairly suspicious of authentic-sounding stories about surviving medieval practices. See also St. Patrick and the “snakes” who were not Druids.

Beards and Religiosity

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Religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer begins a New York Times article on the religious significance of beards this way:

Go ahead, picture a religious Jew.

Now picture a Muslim cleric.

Now an Amish farmer.

What do they have in common? Beards. And not neatly trimmed beards, but, in the popular stereotype, long, unruly beards, which connote piety, spiritual intensity and a life so hard at study that there is no time for a shave. The scholar, the mystic, the terrorist, the holy man — they all have beards.

Now who is missing from that list?

Of course, we would not want male Druids to be viewed as in an anecdote passed along by Adnan Zulfiqar, the Muslim spiritual adviser at the University of Pennsylvania:

“I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, ‘I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.’ His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him.”

Quick Review: Caesar’s Druids

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Cover image of Casar's Druids by Miranda Aldhouse-GreenI am a little more than halfway through Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s Caesar’s Druids: Story of An Ancient Priesthood.

As the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott pointed out back in the 1960s, there are no texts written about Druids by Druids. The sum of what ancient writers of the Greco-Roman world wrote would fill a few typed sheets—and many of those writers never saw a Druid.

One of the few who did was, of course, Julius Caesar, and he was busy trying to conquer and then govern their societies in Gaul and Britain, which gives his writing a certain slant.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s approach, however, is to look at the archaeological evidence, chiefly from Britain and France, and then reason like this: If the archaeology shows elaborate grave construction, or evidence of repeated sacrifices (including human) at a special site, or temple construction, or burials of certain high-status individuals who were not necessarily kings or queens, then that level of religious complexity implies that there were religious specialists to administer it.

And if we try to describe those religious specialists—using primarily Caesar’s writings and those of Tacitus, but also other writers who actually met Druids or their descendants in Gallo-Roman society—then we can probably assume that they were the Druids. She writes,

In order to make any sense of the Druids as a powerful class of religious leads we can examine contemporary material culture for, if they did exist in Caesar’s day, the Druids would have operated within a context of regalia, ritual equipment, sacrifice, and sacred places (xvi).

Much of the book, therefore, discusses ancient sacred sites, excavated burials, artifacts, etc., leading to open-ended questions on the line of “Do these artifacts mark this as the grave of a Druid?”

Generally these seem to be reasonable inferences, although even if one could be sure that it was the grave of a Druid, for example, that still says nothing about what that Druid thought, believed, or did.  So often the texts that claim to answer those questions come from a writer who lived at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea from the nearest Druid.

Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking book. I had not realized the extent of the archaeological evidence that could be brought out and associated at least hypothetically with the Druids.

Her evidence of religious practice in the space between Roman and Gallic or British ways is most fascinating, for it would suggest perhaps that “Druidism” changed and evolved when in contact with the Roman world and Roman religion. (Despite what happened on Anglesey  [Mona] in 60 CE, not all Druids were ever killed.)

 

Colorado Pagans and News Media Coverage

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I noticed a couple of instances in the past month where Colorado Pagans seem to be getting fairer coverage in the news. One was the item about the Pagan Student Alliance at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

(But as a former university professor, I have seen clubs come and go. Only clubs with strong support from a department or a particular professor last more than a year or two, typically.)

A Denver Post story today describes the work of a hospice chaplain and contains this paragraph:

Her patients come from all spiritual traditions and have included a Buddhist priest, a Druid high priest and a Sufi spiritual leader. But end-of-life spiritual care, she emphasizes, isn’t necessarily about religion.

So the Druid is one of the exotic Others, but at least the Post did not put “high priest” in quotation marks.

And Tina Dowd sounds like a true priestess herself.

UPDATE: Here is one description of running a university Pagan students’ club.