Nimue Brown's Blog, page 410

What makes a religion?

About eighteen months ago I read Alain Du Botton’s Religion for Atheists. I’m not an atheist, but I like exploring philosophy from different perspectives. It’s a fascinating book, and I recommend reading it. The most important thing is that it considers religion as a social phenomenon. What do religions do for people that atheists miss out on? What could atheists learn from religions? Good questions. That got me thinking about the relationship between religions as structures, and spiritual practice.

What is a religion? In essence, it’s an organised human response to the idea of divinity. Ways of thinking about deity, ways of relating to it, pleasing it, serving it and so forth accumulate around a religion. Habits of behaviour, ways of thinking about the world, dress codes and all manner of other things get drawn into the mix. Things that started as a way of connecting to the divine (I assume!) can turn, over time, into ways of participating in a system that is all about other humans and has precious little sacredness in it. When a religion becomes more about its own structure than about spiritual experience, something has gone wrong.

I’m fascinated by religions, by ideas and practises from all over the world. I’ve read widely, and been lucky enough to meet people from all kinds of backgrounds. I see quite often a disconnection between the spirituality of the individual, and the institution of the religion. Mark Townsend’s struggles with the Anglican Church are a case in point. Mark is a deeply spiritual man with a deep love of Jesus and a troubled relationship with the Church. One only has to look at Mark’s work to see the separation of belief from formal religious structure.

Religions offer us off-the-peg ways of expressing and exploring faith and spirituality. They make it very easy to show up and look the part without ever needing to engage meaningfully at all. In fact, the way in which spiritual experience takes power away from authority figures puts spirituality at odds with religious structure. If you can experience the divine directly, you don’t need the religious structure. There are financial implications to that. Big organised religions tend also to be financially busy, and independent believers are less likely to fund them. There’s a huge tension between the financial needs of a religious institution and the spiritual needs of the individual sometimes.

Whether your path is shaped by a formal tradition or not, I think to be spiritual you have to do a lot of figuring out on your own terms. You need to explore what it means to you. Spirituality is about experience and seeking the divine. You can do that in a religious framework, but entering a religious framework does not guarantee that you will be walking a spiritual path. If all you engage with is the surface, you’ll miss out on a lot, irrespective of which religion you are drawn to.

Following on from that line of thought, I set about trying to unpick what it is that religions do, from a spiritual perspective. How do they function? What does a spiritual person making their own path need to know? Most Pagans are, to some degree own-path folk and we don’t have the same structures as many religions, but we can learn by looking at them. There’s also a lot more diversity of religion out there than exposure to Judeo-Christian traditions might suggest so I’ve tried to give a sense of the range and plurality. There are many ways of being a spiritual person, inside a religion or purely on your own terms. If you feel some tools for deliberately working on your own path may be helpful, do saunter over and have a look at Spirituality without Structure http://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Portals-Spirituality-Without-Structure/dp/1782792805/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1383822624&sr=8-1&keywords=spirituality+without+structure

A place in the tribe

Wanting to belong seems to be a pretty fundamental human thing. Most of us want to feel accepted somewhere. I look around at the people who need to assert someone else isn’t a proper Druid, or isn’t a proper some other thing, and I wonder about the motives. Perhaps it is when we don’t feel secure in our own place that we get those urges to marginalise other people, as though by pushing them out, we can secure out own position.

We measure people by material success, by income, resources, job status, size of car and house. The more focused we are on superficial signs of success, the more anxious we may feel about our place in the tribe (chicken and egg, I suspect). Those worldly things can be stripped away. Ill health, misfortune, an accident, a mistake, and the whole lot can vanish like mist.

We measure people by skill and utility. It can be easy to feel that your place depends on your usefulness and on what you can bring to the table. So long as you are able to bring, that may be ok, but we all have bad days, bad years even. Some people have not been well taught or innately gifted, or have yet to find what they might bring. How do they approach the table?

Of course, while I’m talking about a place in the tribe, I’m also very aware that we don’t have those. Most communities have a transient element. People come and go, by choice, by mistake, unwillingly… people who are in crisis and don’t have time to engage with their community of old can often find their community doesn’t bother to engage with them anymore, either. Membership is so often conditional on showing up.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling that any place I could have is dependent on my contributing, and contributing well, continually and to a significant degree. Most of my early experience left me pinning self-worth to achievement, and personal value to utility. It’s not that unusual, I’ve come to realise. I’ve had a bit over a year now of not being subjected to vast amounts of external pressure, and some months of living in a less stressful space than the boat. I’m starting to settle into the experience of just being liked by the people who live with me. Not for what I do, not for use or ornament, just for being me. It’s a bit of an emotional and intellectual revolution, slowly dismantling almost everything I had believed about myself.

Last night I went to a knit and natter. The only conditions were a willingness to turn up, a small donation, a fondness for wool and I assume not actually spontaneously combusting or anything. A mix of all ages, a gentle space, lots of wool. I’m less rubbish at crotchet than knitting, so took that instead. The standard of some knitting there was stunning, but it didn’t matter that I’m not very good. The conversations were wide ranging and engaging, and it didn’t seem to matter that I was tired and not sparkling. A place just to be. A place to be good enough.

I remain a believer in the importance of striving and a desire for excellence, but we all have bad days. I am starting to experience, and appreciate being able to just show up and sit in a corner, or being able to just huddle in bed, and it be ok. It’s a life changing thing, that I might be able to feel I am good enough as I am. Sure, I can do better in all manner of things, and hopefully will, but ‘good enough’ is such a firm and affirming place to stand. It makes it easier to strive and to flourish, not harder. I don’t have to be good enough for everybody. I don’t have to please all commers. I can shrug and not worry about the people for whom I am never good enough (well, it’s a theory). So long as there is a place where its ok to be me, the rest can, perhaps, take care of itself.

Author Envy

After much soul searching, I’ve realised that I am indeed envious of the folk who do NaNoWriMo. Not on account of the quantity produced, but the confidence and self-assurance with which it appears to be done. Those enthusiastic facebook postings of word counts, lives happily rearranged to fit it in. Perhaps I had that once, but it was a very long time ago.

Writing for yourself is a safe kind of pleasure. The only person who has to enjoy it, is you, and that can work well. However, until you attempt to put your work in the public domain, you have no real measure of how good you are. It takes a lot of belief in your work and your qualities as an author to start putting yourself in front of agents and publishing houses. Many big houses won’t take you without an agent, and many agents aren’t interested in unpublished authors. There are exceptions, but the odds of you being one of them are pretty slim. How many rejection letters, or telling silences can you take before your faith in your own work starts to waver?

There are of course plenty of smaller houses who may well let you in, and there is self-publishing. They can say no. The editing stage is a shock for anyone who believed their work was pretty much perfect. Been there, back at the start. I’ve also seen it lots of times as an editor, with a lot of authors over the years who could not handle editing as an emotional experience. It was awful for them, and I felt for them, but if a paragraph doesn’t make sense, or a scene is full of continuity errors, there’s work to do.

The work goes out, and you get reviews from readers, and maybe from professionals. Some of them will be awful. All well known and successful authors get bad reviews now and then, no one is universally loved and respected. For less prominent authors, the bad reviews can be pretty damning and demoralising. One bad review can rip your guts out, even if the other ten were excellent. Worse still is the absence of reviews, because no one was interested. That happens. Putting a book out does not guarantee that anyone at all will buy and read it. The reality of tiny and non-existent sales causes a lot of aspiring authors to quit, or to give up on what they cared about and make the professional decision to write something more obviously lucrative. I’ve done that one, too. Even if you self publish your work and give it away for free, this can all still happen. As soon as you share, you are exposed and if you care about your work, it’s going to hurt sometimes.

Some people are only in it for the money and a vision of fame, and don’t seem to care who hates their stories. Some people are so confident in their work that they won’t hear criticism. The first set do produce successful authors now and then, the second set hardly ever, if at all. There’s a really hard balance to strike here. You need enough faith in yourself and your work to keep going in face of all the inevitable setbacks. You need to be able to hear the feedback and criticism so that you can grow and learn. It is not easy, and seldom comfortable.

So yes, those distant memories of a time when I did it just for love and without fear, leave me envious of NaNo folk. The time before reviewers, before editors, before people who hate my blog, before putting myself out here in front of all the people who are at liberty to knock me down any way they like. The days before I lost my nerve, lost my faith in my ideas, my skill and the point of what I was trying to do. The days before I hadn’t come to hate my work, and when I hadn’t been subjected to the judgment of those around me. Most people don’t care whether you make good art, they care whether you make good money, and there’s only so long you can spend writing books before you’ll start to hear about what an irresponsible waste of time your hobby is. I’ve done it all, got up and tried again.

And yet, the project I have that’s been most commercially successful is the one I made purely for love. The man who inspires me most, believes enough in my writing to keep encouraging me to do it. I can’t imagine feeling any pride in simply having written two thousand words, or fifty thousand words, or a hundred novels, come to that. I am envious of the people who do. I probably sound very bitter and cynical to anyone who has not walked this path. It’s easy to stand in a place of inexperience and know you’re the special one, the super gifted talent who will break through with an instant best seller just as soon as you put yourself forwards. Being able to imagine that is not the measure of you as an author. Whether you make or break, eventually, is probably going to depend on whether you can keep dreaming even when every dream you ever had has already been trampled on.

And in spite of it all, I am still here.

Druidry in a crisis

While I’m mostly going to take the Druid angle for this blog, it could equally be about parenting, or being an author, an artist, or learning to cook. The same broad things apply (I think) to all areas of human endeavour.

There are always setbacks. If you care about what you’re doing and how well you are doing it those setbacks can be brutal. The point of finding out how little we know about ancient Druids is a classic crisis moment for many. The ritual that is a depressing failure. The first time someone calls you out over what you believe and how you express it, the second time… Life experience at odds with spiritual expectation can give us crushing blows. There are a number of ways to go at this point.

You might put belief, including belief in your own rightness before everything else. That can leave people disturbingly at odds with reality. You might be so overwhelmed and distressed that you quit. As possible for parents as for Druids. Neither of these are good outcomes. All that exists on the other side, is getting in there and wrestling with the problem.

When we start anything, we tend to see the bits we’re naturally good at. I have a lot of bard skills, which gave me a mistaken degree of confidence in my ritual skills. It took me a while to learn how to take care of a circle; there were people skills I only later realised I needed. I think this is often the way of it. Only when things go awry do we start to see what we always needed to know but weren’t aware of. That can be a huge confidence blow. There is always more to learn and more to know, and a consciousness of that creates a good degree of insulation from the pain of hitting one of those setbacks. If you know there will be some, you can at least recognise it when it happens, and get on with coping rather than flailing about. It is often only when we start doing things that we get to see where our weaknesses are, and what we need to swot up on. There is no one way of being a Druid, a parent, an artist, so no one can tell you upfront what you ought to try and learn before you start.

That said, trying to learn something, anything, before you start confers significant advantages. Not least, when you hit a crisis, you’ll have some idea where to go to find what you need for moving on. You’ll be more aware of the myriad ways in which other people are doing things, so you won’t expect one right answer, either. That helps. A knowledge base isn’t the same as wisdom, but it is useful!

Sometimes, natural talent is the most destructive thing to live with. If all the evidence says that you are naturally brilliant at a thing, it won’t occur to you to study and craft, to consciously try and develop that. It’s so easy to coast when you think you have natural genius. As far as I can tell, there is only so far anyone can get with that coasting. For some it’s a long way, but always finite. The further you go, riding the wave of innate brilliance, the harder it is when you hit the wall that is your natural limit. The person who expects to have to work, study and practice will get plenty of small bumps along the way, but they tend to be more survivable, and less traumatic.

For aspiring writers, the first crash is usually the first novel. Either unfinished, or eventually loathed, the first novel teaches a person exactly how much they do not know about writing a book. Usually it’s too short, there weren’t enough ideas, its clichéd and overtly a fantasy-autobiography. Doing it can make apparent that you haven’t found a voice yet, don’t have a style, don’t know about pace, or how to handle perspectives or a hundred other things. Hours of work, for something you want to burn. I’ve done it, and seen people do it, and convince themselves that it means they can’t be an author. The awful first book is actually a rite of passage. If you’ve already written a lot of short fics, or poetry, or worked in another form, or have the nightmare of a natural gift, you might skip this, but there’s much to be said for going through it.

This is one of the reasons focusing on superficial measurements of success doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. What you learn about how you need to develop is more important than word counts, or nice robes. There is much to be said for feeling uneasy about what you’ve done and having to go back and find out about all the things you didn’t know. Sometimes, it is good and helpful to fail. The first rejections, the first gaffs and humiliations, the rituals that go wrong because you didn’t know and hadn’t thought, the people who get angry, the mistakes made… these things teach us. They remind us that failure is always an option and that there is always more to strive for. They remind us to try and be patient with other people who fail, and never to get comfortable imagining that we have it all sussed. We never will.

Plastic and Disposable

I hate disposable plastic throwaway culture. I hate the environmental impact it has, with all the worthless, use once tat we make just to send it to landfill. Disposable plastic bags, because it’s too much hassle to take one with you. Throw away cameras. All that packaging. All the vast array of resources, energy, land and human effort just to chuck it in the bin. It makes me want to cry.

I feel exactly the same way about much contemporary pop music, television, films, games, food products, clothing, gadgets… a whole human culture premised on making things to have them for a little while and then chucking them out in favour of the next must have.

I like handmade pottery, although I can’t afford it. I like handmade clothes, although I lack either the talent or the budget. I can at least make my own food out of raw ingredients, that’s something, I do not have to eat the plastic. I stay away from televisions, and commercial music stations. I don’t buy and read disposable fiction, either. Anything that looks like a means of killing time, I leave well alone. I’m not interested in killing time. I’m interested in living. I want things that are rich, vital, engaging and inspiring.

I care about quality. I think things made with love, passion and dedication are worth more than mass produced, careless things meant to be thrown away. I think if you set out to do anything, be it clean a toilet, make a soup or write a novel, that needs to be done with a heartfelt desire to do it well. Otherwise, you get this drab, mundane life in which nothing matters and nothing means anything. I don’t want that life, and so I choose to care about everything. My choice. My right to choose. This is not about whether you do it for money, or have status. This is a basic choice about how to live and how to relate to your life. Most of the things I do, and care about, I do not do professionally. Often, I don’t even do them well. I’m mediocre at a lot of things. Middling and striving, and not asking anyone to take me even a little bit seriously with those.

I’ve been told off along the way more times than I can count for taking things too seriously. I’ve been told off a fair few times for being elitist, and snobbish and self-important. I’m passionate about creativity, and about encouraging and enabling it, but I don’t think we achieve that by undermining the forms and ignoring the issue of quality. I offend people when I say this. So be it. Every time we champion that which is shoddy and mediocre, or excuse carelessness, we disempower the good stuff, we take away from the people who are genuinely brilliant and who deserve far more attention than they get. I’m not talking about me. I am talking about a lot of other people.

I care about quality and integrity and because I think it matters to at least try and do a thing well. I have all the time in the world for people who care about what they do, who are driven, and passionate and interested, who strive and study and want to do the best they can, at whatever level they can, in any aspect of life. It’s all fair game.

Quality is not a drab, joyless, miserable po-faced thing. Joy, beauty, happiness and delight are all valuable qualities. It’s just that if all you’ve ever eaten is Turkey Twizzlers, you may have trouble enjoying food that has some nutritional value and a discernible texture. If your only reference for music is the Chart Show, you may struggle with not only anything interesting in the mainstream, but all the more complex music genres as well, and by that I mean the popular genres that are just outside of plastic pop. Taking things seriously does not mean failing to enjoy, or inability to play. It means valuing, daring to love, treating like it matters. Laughter matters. Pleasure matters. Real things matter, and all too often we are sold hollow, empty soulless things that take our time and give us nothing in return.

No to NaNoWriMo

In January, everyone should try and choreograph a ballet. In March we should all write an opera, and in June everyone should paint a fresco. Sounds ludicrous, doesn’t it? And yet the idea that everyone could write a novel in November gets a good deal more acceptance. Why do we assume that, while these other forms would require skills, knowledge and practice beyond most people’s experience, anyone can write a book? It drives me round the bend.

Getting people to explore their creativity is something I’ve always considered important, but I think that should begin with a respect for whatever form you are working in. To start by assuming the form is easy, requires no study, research or insight, is to set yourself up to fail. I don’t think that benefits anyone. So, here are a few counterarguments.

Fifty thousand words is not really a book; that’s rather short. Seventy five thousand plus is a better bet, and that’s half as much again. Fifty thousand words written in a month are also not a finished book. At best what you have is a first draft. Most authors working professionally expect to go through a few drafts. The only one I know of who doesn’t is Mark Lawrence.

The most prolific professional authors who are also able to get into book shops – the Terry Pratchetts of this world (and there aren’t many) typically do not put out more than a book a year. There are reasons for this. Before a book goes out, it will go through extensive edits. Before the editing stage, the author will most likely have been through a number of drafts and re-writes. Before that, and perhaps during it, there will be research, planning and consideration. Even authors who do not start with a plot plan have to do research. I see online that many NaNoWriMo folk actually do start this process ahead of time, because you can’t do it all in a month.

National Write a first draft for a very short novel Month would not be so catchy a title, but it would be a good deal more honest. That in turn would give participants more realistic expectations. Because of course if you don’t manage it, you haven’t failed. Fifty thousand words in a month may be possible, but that doesn’t make it necessary or desirable. I probably write that in blog posts alone, between this one, Patheos, Sage Woman, Ruscombe Green and Moon Books. A novel is more than a big pile of words. It is character and story, themes and style, it has structure and continuity. If you care at all about the beauty of your language and want just the right turn of phrase, of course you can’t reliably bang out fifty thousand words in a month. Then there are the rest of life issues. If you have a job or a family, and especially if you have both, the time involved isn’t viable.

If you need NaNoWriMo to give you permission to try and write a book, please ask why that is so. If this is something you want to do, then do it because you want to do it. If you need the driving force of a big national campaign to get you writing, maybe you aren’t as driven by the desire to write a book as you think you are. Perhaps the buzz of putting your word count onto facebook each day is a motivator? As though number of word written actually means something.  As with all creative forms, a lot of people are more drawn by the scope for fame, fortune and attention than by love of the craft. Write a book because you have a lot of ideas. Write a book because there is something you want to share with the world. Do it to give voice to something never before spoken, for the originality of your story, the brilliance of your word craft, the need to share something. Not because someone decided to make November into novel writing month.

If this sounds like sour grapes, well, yes, maybe it is. Not an envy of the people who can write fifty thousand words in a month, though, because I can and do. Some years ago I was commissioned to write a novel in six weeks. The money was good. Seventy five thousand words, including redrafts. Mercifully I’d already done some research and gathered a few ideas when the job came in. I pulled it off, but it made me very ill, and it took a long time to recover my creativity afterwards. I don’t want to see authors treated as just another commodity to exploit, expected to churn out work at this rate no matter the personal cost, or the impact on quality. Stuff that! So no, I won’t be doing NaNoWriMo and I won’t be encouraging anyone else to, either. If you want to write a book, do it, but do it as best you are able and for the right reasons, please.

Interpretation

Most human interaction has an element of interpretation to it. What we means to express, and what other people make of it, are often very different. As a fiction author it’s something I can exploit. Slightly ambiguous writing gives people room to bring their own stories and ideas to mine, and that can make for a richer reading experience. It’s not all good fun though.

History is full of interpretations, as we ascribe meanings and lines of causality to the past. The culture and assumptions of the interpreter will colour what they see. Across Pagan traditions we are still dealing with the legacy of Frazer, who considered traditional people around the world a viable model for the ‘primitive’ European. His prejudice, assumption and colonial attitude narrowed down Paganism to an idea about fertility and very little more. We also have the legacy of Gimbutas, whose feminist ideas encouraged her to see an organised, matriarchal, Goddess worshipping society, and again to miss the complexities and reduce the history down to something restricted and misleading.

When it comes to religion, all we can do is interpret the past. We are never going to dig up a belief. We can find writing about what people said they believed, but you only have to look at modern newspapers to know that what people proclaim in public is not always what they practice in private. We can’t dig up feelings in the graves of our ancestors, at least, not in any way we can substantiate and agree upon.

Interpretation is not just an academic issue though. We might want to consider how we interpret the causalities in our own history. Where do we apportion blame, or credit? We can read in lines of connection that have nothing to do with what was happening. Coincidence can be highly misleading, and the desire to find ourselves innocent of all offence can incline us to skew the evidence in our favour.

Our lives are full of interpreted data, often thrown at us by politicians. The media is often full of ‘facts’ that turn out, on closer inspection, to be highly suspect. The current education minister here in the UK seems to think that all children should be able to get above average results, for example. A brief foray into the meaning of ‘average’ should ring some alarm bells here. We’re killing badgers based on research that suggests it could make a 16% difference to TB in cattle. Turn that on its head and what you see is more like 84% worth of no difference at all. It’s all in the interpretation and the presentation. 50% of all children are doomed to be below average, no matter how well we teach them. That’s what a mean average is all about.

In our own lives and interactions, how much interpretation do we bring into play? If someone makes an absolute statement ‘never do this’ for example, do we quietly shuffle that round to imagine it means ‘sometimes’ and carry on as we please? Do we hear ‘no’ as ‘maybe’? That’s one of the quick routes to raping a person. Do we say ‘never’ when we mean ‘maybe later’ encouraging the people around us not to hear ‘no’ as an absolute? Do we interpret other people’s words and then hold them accountable, based only on what we think they said? Do we keep doing that even when they try to explain what they meant was something else entirely? All too often, the answer is ‘yes’. It makes for exhausting, impossible attempts at communication, largely doomed to failure and frustration. If we neither speak clearly nor listen clearly, but keep reading in our own agenda, the one thing we cannot have, is truth. Neither our own, nor anyone else’s. Language is an imprecise tool and mistakes are inevitable, but it helps if we’re more interested in communicating than in trying to score points.

I’ve developed a personal preference for people who try to communicate well, who are willing to listen, and are not so caught up in their own story that they cannot consider an alternative. I’ve seen too much of the other thing. I have come to the conclusion that faced with people who are determined to interpret my words to fit their agenda, such that firm statements are bent out of recognition, and vaguer ones pinned down with meanings they didn’t even imply, I shall quit. I’m not on a personal mission to try and save everyone from the consequences of their own actions. I have a finite amount of time and am not going to squander it arguing with people who are always right, no matter what.

And who are no doubt quite capable of hearing that as “of course in your special case I can be persuaded” because that is the nature of the beast.

All Hallows Read

It is Neil Gaiman’s most splendid idea that Halloween should be the time to give someone a spooky book. (You might consider Hopeless, Maine as a good candidate, if you know someone who doesn’t have a copy.) Mr Gaiman himself is the author of The Graveyard Book, which is a fine piece of child-friendly creepiness, and ideal for the season.

Talking about death and fear is important. Acknowledging the unknown and the anxiety of living. We don’t do it enough, our culture preferring to drown out the dread with ever louder background noise and bright shiny things. People who get to grips with death are a lot less afraid to live. A creepy book can be a good way into that, a safe place in which to explore and encounter fear and come to terms with it.

I’m fascinated by the fake and unfrightening ‘scares’ that Halloween puts on the supermarket shelves. Made of plastic, brightly coloured and sanitised, they can scare environmentalists, destined as these objects are for an early burial in landfill. Otherwise what commercial Halloween mostly does is turn horror into something safe and unthreatening. That’s rather counterproductive. We need to fear and respect death in order to live well. We need to look into the darkness now and then so that we can properly appreciate the light. We need to own our fears rather than trying to bury them. If horror stories can tell us anything it is that trying to bury alive things (like fear) is not actually a very good idea. They always come back, the gnarled hand reaching up through the piled earth of the grave, ready for another go.

I love gothic work. I’m not a huge fan of more visceral and bloody forms of horror – it gets dull after a while. There’s only so many severed body parts and unspeakable monstrosities a person can take before apathy floods in. A good creepy story sneaks in, and does not allow complacency. It turns the mundane into the uncanny and unnerving. It reminds us that mystery lurks around every corner and uncertainty abounds. Creepy fiction encourages us not to get too comfortable in our assumptions. Anything could turn out to be other than it is. If we can balance that with the art of not getting too paranoid and frightened, it’s a good lesson to learn.

By way of a contribution to All Hallows Read, I have a free story for you. It’s short and available as a PDF from http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/NimueBrown I wouldn’t give it to a younger child, but it’s no worse than the later Harry Potter books for overt scariness, (children tending to miss the layers…) although there are a few rude words in it! You were warned.

An Absence of Ancient Druids

I’ll confess up front that when I first came to Druidry I knew very little about the history of Druids. There were many things I did know a bit about… Taliesin and Amergin were familiar names, for a start. I was taking an interest in Paganism from late in my teens, exposed, inevitably at that time, to people who claimed ancientness for Witchcraft, and expecting Druids to be to some degree at least, peppered with genuine survivals from the Celtic era. I was young, I ask that you cut me some slack!

I went to my first few Druid-led rituals, rather thinking they would be based on ancient wisdom. No one told me what they were based on. I looked around at the Druid Orders, especially the Ancient Druid Orders, and a niggle of doubt crept in. At what point would an ancient Druid Order have been re-named to remark upon its ancientness? I started reading, and asking, and poking about and slowly got some sense that the idea of modern Druidry as a direct descendent of ancient Druidry, was actually a bit daft. There are fragments we use that are older, but much of it comes from the revival Druids, or more recent invention.

Then I read Blood and Mistletoe, which demonstrates that we really can’t be too confident about anything.

This has led me to several conclusions. The first is to note that modern Christianity looks nothing like Mediaeval Christianity, which is a long way from what people were doing in those first few hundred years AD. Secondly, all religion is made up. Even if you postulate some divine inspiration, religion is a human response to the idea of the sacred. Every word of ritual, every prayer, every rule and idea was made by a person at some point. Those which have been tested over time may have more substance. However if only age confirmed authenticity, then we might all still be Catholics believing in a flat earth. Alchemy is older than science.  Judaism is older than Christianity. Paganism may be older again, but we don’t know enough about what they were doing in the first place. Using age to prove authenticity is not reliably a good idea.

We cannot have authentic ancient Druidry. They did not write anything down. If we did find something written down by ancient Druids, we’d pretty much have compromised the whole process because that basic tenet of their being an oral tradition would have gone. If we did today what Celts of thousands of years ago did in the context of their times and culture, would that be authentic? You only have to glance at the Christians to see that other religions evolve over time to respond to the world. So not only can we not have the past, but we also can’t have the trajectory Druidry would have taken had it been left to continue. It wouldn’t have been called Druidry, that much at least we can be sure of.

At which point the temptation to quit and just call yourself an animist, or go back to ‘pagan’ is huge. Many people who start out as Druids find the language and history so problematic that they leave. This is in many ways a shame because it knocks out the people who often know most about the history and its implications, leaving behind people who know so little that they can still image they really are doing ancient Druidry and the people who get excited about titles. Of course in between there are a lot of people who stay, and who know and who grapple continually with the issue of what it means to use the word ‘Druid’. We should be uneasy about it, that uncertainty stops us getting smug or complacent.

Something about the word ‘Druid’ and the idea of Druids keeps drawing people. Not just for the romance and the beards, but a sense of something deeper, a possibility waiting to be embraced. Beyond the titles and the history, beyond the endless squabbles about who isn’t doing it right, there’s a sense of something. A glimmer of possibility that there may be a real thing out there, intrinsic to the land and the natural world, awash with inspiration and creative potential, spiritual and rational all at once, and just waiting for us to listen. Druidry seems as good a name for it as any other. Names are, after all, just feeble human attempts at making sense of the world. Actual Druidry, is bigger than us and surprisingly tolerant of all our silliness.

The right to challenge

In Taliesin’s myth, his step-father brags about him and he ends up in front of an irate king, having to prove he is as good as his step-father suggested, in order to save the man from being punished. Taliesin then goes on to trounce the king’s bards, proving his superiority over them. It’s not a lone case, there are comparisons to make with the Irish story in which, to substantiate bragging, Macha ends up running against the king’s horses. Then there’s the tale of the boy wizard Merlin calling out and humiliating another king’s Druids, because Merlin knows what they do not.

Myths that come to us from the mediaeval period should not, of course, be taken as clear proof that the Celts did anything in particular, but they do provide inspiration and possibility. I believe in following the inspiration.

What these stories suggest to me is firstly that authority cannot be absolute. Those who take visible roles are not beyond challenge, and if they cannot recognise when the new kid in town outclasses them, they are in trouble. The more arrogant the king’s Druids are, the greater their fall will be. Secondly, everyone has the right to challenge, no matter who they are, but thirdly, they have to back it up. If Taliesin had not known his stuff, the outcome for him and his step-father would have been entirely different. The right to challenge comes with the obligation to prove your worth.

It is good to question everything. Asking questions is the basis of all philosophy. Thinking deeply about things is probably more important than whether that takes you towards the same conclusion as the next person. Deep consideration will be richer and more involved than passing interest.

It is good to question each other, because in doing so we can all learn. I’m blessed with people who spot holes in my logic and arguments I haven’t developed properly, and who flag this, which gives me the opportunity to push further, and to think more deeply. I really value that. Often, I wander into a topic, and someone will turn out to know far more than me, and, generous with their knowledge will share that, so that I can learn. Sometimes I post things that affirm other people’s ideas, and sometimes I come up with things that were less familiar.

Asking questions should be an act of interest. We can do it respectfully – we do, here, and on many other blogs I’m connected with. When you view people as equals, as a starting point, it is easy to approach with respect and ask why someone thinks a certain thing, what they are drawing on, how they came to the conclusion. We might not agree, and that’s fine too. There’s very little in Druidry that can be ‘proved’ in a substantial way. We can respect the diversity of ideas and interpretations, and grow from those, collaboratively. It is one of the many strengths of our community.

It is good to question. It is good to question authority. It is important to show respect, because if you don’t, ye gods had you better be good, or the kings and their now-irate Druids will get a very different ending to the story.