Nimue Brown's Blog, page 434

Food for thought

We’ve had the horse meat scandal in the UK, with horse DNA turning up in processed food. As I see it there’s no reason to be sentimental over one endearing mammal (horse) and happily scoffing another (cows), but people do. What we should be talking about is why this has happened, and whether the cow DNA came from properly sourced cows. Were we getting healthy cows, or sick rejects in those burgers? No one seems to be asking, much less checking. It is the pressure from supermarkets to push down the prices they pay farmers that has lead to this. Quite simply, if we want it very, very cheap, we cannot also expect to have it be very, very good.

We keep animals in crowded, unnatural conditions as it is, to answer western demand for a high meat diet. 50% of the grain grown in the world goes to feed animals for the meat market (according to the BBC this morning). At the same time European advisors recommend we should not eat more than 20 grams of processed meat a day. That’s about one slice of ham, if you aren’t metric. We’ve known for a while that processed meats increase risk of heart disease and cancer. Processed meats use up all the stray bits you wouldn’t buy if you could see them ‘in the raw’. Lips and arseholes and all that. Now, my feeling is if you are going to kill an animal to eat it, you have an ethical obligation not to throw bits of it away, so that puts me in favour of processed meat, and it tends to be your protein for the poorer consumer as well. Cheap unwanted bits have been with us for a long time, and that could be made to work. I assume it’s not the meat content of the processed meat that causes the issue here because officialdom says that non-processed is fine. For the sake of argument, let’s assume they’re right. Processed foods however, are loaded with salt, and chemicals – especially preservatives.

I should mention that I’m a vegetarian. Not out of any particular ethical principle, I have too strong a sense of plants as living individuals too. I’m a vegetarian because when I ate meat, it made me very ill, all the time. I react to it like it was a toxin, without going into the grim details. I suspect it has nothing to do with the flesh and everything to do with the chemicals pumped into the flesh, both during the lifetime of the creature (I get sick on antibiotics too) and in the processing part. But, we’re not talking about identifying and clamping down on dangerous chemicals in our food that cause heart disease and cancer. Oh no. We’re talking about your 20 grams a day. That makes me uncomfortable.

I strongly believe that as a culture we consume too much meat. It isn’t environmentally sustainable (go back to that grain statistic), it create greenhouse gases, the animal suffering is increased dramatically as well. If you assume your meat comes from happy free range creatures, that’s a lot more comfortable than picturing the misery of battery farming, the endless pens, the animals that are turned into units of production and not allowed to be animals at all.

All that said, I recognise there is blood spilled regularly for vegetarianism, and that veganism would mean no more spring lambs in the field and radical changes to a British landscape that evolved around keeping animals. There’s a whole other essay to write there. However, in an ideal situation, animals get to live as animals in good conditions that allow them to be themselves up until we eat them. Animals contribute to the fertility of the land, when you do it right, are farmed where you can’t grow crops anyway, live on locally grown hay and grass, not imported grain, and are part of a holistic and functional system. Current demands don’t allow that. A percentage of people going vegan and vegetarian helps to bring demand down, and if that works for you, excellent. For everyone else, a low meat diet is, I think, the best option. That means thinking about how we ate say, 50 years ago, where it wasn’t a case of meat every day, and potentially at every meal. Having some days off from meat each week is evidently better for your body, with the whole heart failure and cancer issues to consider.

We’ve come to associate eating meat with wealth and luxury. We associate it with status, with being macho, and we still have people claiming that you need meat for a healthy diet. We don’t. We need protein. We don’t need meat so much that its worth having every bargain basement cow of uncertain provenance sneaking into the food chain. We don’t need chemical poisoning either. What we do need, is a radical rethink of our whole food culture.

What makes me a Druid?

I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to lay out what it is that makes me feel entitled to use a hefty word like ‘Druid’ in public places. When I started out as a student, I definitely did not feel able to claim druidhood, it took years of learning, regular ritual attendance and interacting with people who definitely were Druids to get me to that point. The key transition points for me were, completing the three levels of the OBOD course, and being involved in running a group. I’d now add to that the occasional celebrant work, teaching, book writing and blogging. If it quacks like a Druid and waddles like a Druid, it may of course be an outsized duck in a robe…

Well, I don’t have any robes, I have no beard, no staff, no wands, no sword, not even a cloak at present… very little surface detail that screams ‘Druid’ apart from a Victorian style army jacket with the words ‘Secret Order of Steampunk druids’ embroidered on the back but I rather imagine most people would read that and assume I was joking. I’ve never believed that the aesthetic makes the Druid, because anyone can latch onto a look. It’s what we know, what we do, how we think that really defines who we are.

The bard path has always been central to what I do, even back when I didn’t know that was the word for it. I’m not doing public performance in the way I was a few years ago, nor am I holding spaces to support other people to the same degree, but that remains part of my consciousness, and the creativity is a daily feature.

Service is important to me. Currently that manifests as informal teaching, and volunteer work at my son’s school. There have been occasions of tree planting, again not as much as there used to be. Arguably reviewing other people’s books counts as service too, I think.

Honourable behaviour, upholding justice, seeking for balance, green living – there are many concerns that derive from the idea of honourable relationship and shape how I live from day to day. From the outside those aren’t discernibly ‘Druid’ but from the inside I know that’s what powers my whole approach to living and being.

Where there’s been an increase in my Druid work in recent years, it’s been in prayer, meditation and communion. I’ve been a bit of a hermit and living very close to nature. I have close encounters with the natural world many times through the course of a day, and many opportunities to contemplate and experience. At the moment this is the heart of my practice. I’ve been pushing at the edges of what I understand and can do, with both meditation and prayer, and have the first murmurings of a rethink about my whole understanding of what magic is and means. I’m increasingly feeling that experimental Druidry and research through doing will be the mainstays of what I’m about as I move forward.

The names in which I do things, the whispered prayers and specific encounters I increasingly feel are personal. I’d much rather define my Druidry in terms of what I do, than get into issues of belief. No one else really needs to know what I truly believe in my heart of hearts. I rather think that, no matter how devoted I might, or might not be, for everyone else that’s pretty irrelevant. It’s what I do that counts, assuming that has any particular use in it for anyone else. I think being an experimental Druid has possibility on that score. Whether or not anyone else sees me as a Druid has become increasingly irrelevant. When I started, I really cared about that and wanted recognition, I think that’s normal, but over the years I’ve come to realise that the only person who can really judge me is myself, or whatever I choose to stand before. It matters that I do the job of the Druid, not whether anyone notices and ascribes it to Druidry.

A Druid economy

Of course these days as a Druid you do not get to talk sense to those in charge in any kind of structured way, so I’m just going to vent theories on the blog.

Austerity. It doesn’t work. The UK is still borrowing a lot of money and not paying off its debts, and at the same time the poorest are suffering. Apparently millionaires are poised to get tax breaks, because we all know how much those folks are hurting… (gah). Now, the poorest people in the UK are not just unemployed or too ill to work, but also include a lot of people in part time and low paid employment. Rising rents and council tax, rising fuel costs and amenities (while companies make profits) put the squeeze on incomes that are not rising. People pay for the essentials, and they buy cheap because they have to, in order to survive. The more pressure you put on the poorest in society, the less economically active they become. Oddly enough, high streets are increasingly dominated by pound stores and charity shops, while big chains close an average of 20 stores a day across the country. Every store closed represents more job losses, more people needing a hand, and having less money. And so the squeeze extends.

The way things are set up, economies depend on movement of money. GDP is simply a measure of movement. The faster the money moves the more everybody appears to have. It’s a funny old world. However, reduce the incomes of the poorest, and they stop buying those luxuries like books and music. They stop going down the pub, for a night out. When enough people stop doing that, pubs close, and ooh look, HMV has just folded. (Music, for anyone unfamiliar with them.) In this climate, only bargain basement stores selling dodgy horse burgers are going to thrive.

There’s no political will to cap rents. We hear a lot about how people on benefits are scrounging off the state, and nothing at all about how much public money ultimately finds its way into the pockets of private landlords. So run that past me again about who is scrounging here? People in work get tax benefits because in the current climate, the minimum wage is not enough to live on. We’re not talking heady luxuries, we’re talking bare essentials. No one is talking about how private employers ought to be paying workers a living wage rather than the state picking up the tab. Remind me about who the scroungers are, please. In the last decade or so the private sector has not invested in growth or jobs. It’s just paid fat dividends to shareholders and ever more obscene bonuses to management while the people who do the work struggle on a not-living wage. Then, thanks to that lack of investment, business in the UK does not thrive, jobs move overseas, businesses fail to pay their fair share of taxes. The rich underpay the poor, decline to pay their own taxes, pay themselves huge bonuses… Meanwhile those with no hope, no prospects, no opportunities and no money sink into despair, and when the government notices the total apathy out there, they ascribe it not to depression or futility but to laziness.

If we had a level playing field and all you needed to do was work hard and you’d succeed, then berating the poor for not making an effort would be fair enough. That’s not the score. But it’s not at all clever, because the more money you take out of the pockets of the poor, the less money you have moving around. Those people sat on huge wads of cash are not spending it to drive the economy. Squeezing the poor does not make for a healthy economy. How about paying a living wage, providing work opportunities, having business invest in business rather than creaming off the profits all the time… we could have something that works passably well.

Perhaps David Cameron wants to bring back feudalism, picturing himself as mighty ruler of Great Britain. The trouble is Mr Cameron, go on this way and you will have total power over all your serfs, but all you’ll get is to be King of a pile of dirt, dressed in a ragged and filthy robe of state, with a crown made out of rusty spoons. We got rid of feudalism for a reason – we were tired of the Dark Ages. Go back there if you want to, get into re-enactment or something, but for pity’s sake, stop trying to take the rest of us with you.

Why death is good for you

It’s generally claimed that awareness of our mortality is what sets humans apart from other animals. I’m wholly convinced elephants have some pretty good ideas about death, and I’ve no reason to think any species of mammal entirely oblivious. I find it harder to make any kind of guess about what creatures other than mammals are thinking, there’s so much less to go on.

Thinking about people though, most of us, most of the time clearly do not live with a consciousness of our own mortality. As the saying goes, no one lies on their deathbed wishing they had spent more time at the office. Come the end of your innings, all the material wealth is of little account. I do not believe the culture I live in is particularly aware of death. We see it as something to delay and avoid (although we won’t drive slower to avoid it for ourselves or others). I think mostly we assume death is for later, or for someone else, and we act accordingly.

I gather (New Scientist article last year) people who are conscious of their mortality tend to move away from rampant materialism and towards a more spiritual way of life. Thinking about death, properly, will make you more willing to enjoy each precious moment you have, not squandering it on worthless things. Death makes you care for your loved ones more. The death consciousness can bring life into focus, making us work out what matters and what does not.

Looking at the consumerist culture I live in, where politicians preach long work hours and adverts sell materialism at every turn, I do not see an intrinsic awareness of our own mortality. Quite the opposite. I see a lot of distractions designed to help us forget that we were all born to die. We’d be so much better off if we gave a bit of thought to how we might feel in that death bed scenario. What might we regret? What will we look back on joyfully? That’s one of the best guides to living you could find. If anything, the animal kingdom is more death conscious than we are. They don’t go around repeating actions that are likely to kill them, whilst convincing themselves that it will be fine. (Binge drinking, drug taking, driving too fast, too tired, to drunk, never getting any exercise, courting heart attacks and diabetes etc).

If you feel the overwhelming need to raise your awareness of death, or someone else’s, I’d like to try and sell you a thing. (Yes, I know what I said before about materialism, and that there may be some irony here, but we all need to eat and I promise, this is a good thing!) It’s the tale of a girl who murders her family for money. This does not go well for her. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412864360/clemency-slaughter-and-the-legacy-of-death

Clemency Slaughter and the Legacy of D’Eath: A Grim Gothic Tale without a Happy Ending, written by Steampunk author Jonathan Green and illustrated by gothic artist Tom Brown. (Tom being my other half). Having read it and seen the art in progress, I can vouch for this being both lovely, and full of dead people.

Whose universe is it?

In the last week or so, a collision of two books has got me thinking about the nature of reality and how we relate to it. (Jack Barrow’s The Hidden Masters and the Unspeakable Evil, Jo van der Hoeven’s Zen Druidry, if you were wondering). For the magician, the self is the centre of the universe, and the will / imagination can direct said. I’m a long way from being an expert, but as I understand it, holding that belief is rather necessary if you want to go about doing magic. Now, on the Zen side, Jo points out there is one universe and we’re not the centre of it and if we can learn to see ourselves as part of the flow we’ll be able to get along a lot better.

I find both ideas compelling, and after some serious pondering I have come to the conclusion that these things are probably both true. One universe where you are not the centre, another where each of us the centre of his or her own universe and able to shape it by force of will. The life we live, the way we experience things, the choices we make – come down so often to our perceptions and beliefs. If I believe the universe is out to get me, I’ll see proof of that in every setback, and will resolutely ignore the opportunities that came with the setbacks, potentially to my own detriment. If I believe that I am divinely inspired with a special job to do, I’ll look around me and see proof of that in every rainbow and cupcake that comes my way. We see what we want to see.

What’s probably least helpful is bumbling through life without any deliberate choice about how to engage with the world. I don’t mean a ‘go with the flow’ attitude here, I mean a total lack of engagement with anything. The kind of blinkered view that makes it impossible to connect outcomes to actions, to predict how what we do today might shape our options for tomorrow, and to be able to see how other people’s motives might affect things. I’ve encountered that kind of wilful blindness, that refusal to see how what we do influences what we get, often coupled with an inability to imagine that other people are different from us, want different things and react in different ways.

I’m not sure it entirely matters what your relationship with the universe is. I am utterly convinced of the importance of having a considered approach to living and being. Even if that doesn’t fit into an existing idea about how to do things. But then, I’ve also seen so many human relationships conducted with no consciousness of cause and effect, or the implications of difference, too. Things work better when we pay attention to them, think about them, and do not take them for granted.

I am the centre of my own little universe. I am also aware that everyone around me is the centre of their own little universe too, no one of these any more important than any other, all of them able to influence how my bit of reality functions for me, all of them potentially influenced by what I do. Perhaps it could be a lot simpler than that, but I find this perspective works enough for me, so it’ll do for now.

A funeral for Mary

We’ll have a funeral for Mary

Who was buried in the jail

Procession now and fine tombstone

With mourners come to wail.

Who spoke for you, dear Mary,

When you languished in the cell?

The world bar one accused you

Promised you the fires of hell.

Only Henry, ever trusting

Only Henry, your sweetheart

Did not doubt in your virtue

Stalwart, steady, took your part.

Plain Miss Jones declared against you

Thinking she would claim your man

If they punished you for murder

Jealousy would see you hang.

Old Miss Blunt, forever sleeping

Cannot say who struck the blow

If a thief came through her window

Or her servant from below.

Storm and strife struck you that evening

Plans and dreams all stripped away

As you old mistress was slaughtered

For your blood the neighbours bray.

Only Henry, ever faithful

Would not think the worst of you,

Fought to keep you from the gallows

Never doubted, ever true.

They took you to the scaffold

You sought mercy at each turn

Blamed for a brutal murder

But your truth they did not learn.

Now they’ve found the men who slew her

Eagerly did they confess,

And Miss Jones is chased to exile

Your poor bones do others bless.

Now your Henry, always loyal

Leads your funeral parade

Your wronged corpse resurrected

Only finds another grave.

This is a true story, Mary from Littledean was hanged in Gloucester jail for a crime she was adamant she did not commit. Some years later the real murderers were found, but of course by then it was too late for her. When I read the story in Lyn Cinderey’s ‘Paranormal Gloucester’ I thought it sounded like it should be a folk song. Perhaps one day I’ll put a tune to it. In the meantime, my thanks to Lyn for the inspiration. I’m anti capital punishment, for all the reasons this poem flags up.

Initiation or Dedication?

There are not enough teachers in any of the Pagan traditions to properly support in person all of those who wish to learn. The consequence is that most of us end up doing some, or all of our learning alone. For Druids, there are a number of Orders that provide distance learning and mentoring in a way the wider community recognises, which is very helpful. Still, to a large extent you have to manage your own path.

The issue of self-initiation most often comes up for Wiccans, where the idea of initiation is very much part of how one learns and progresses. Can a person initiate themselves? Many do, so arguably the answer has to be ‘yes’. I don’t feel it’s my place to invalidate anybody else’s choices. However, I do have my own doubts about how we can, from inside ourselves, take ourselves deliberately forward into new stages of awareness and being. Of course the lone learner is on a constant progression, can make huge and sudden breakthroughs and will experience life initiations too, but initiation within a tradition is a formal thing. To me, it’s all about a group of people recognising where you’re at, and offering you the keys to the door of the next bit.

I’ve run bardic initiations, as they are usually called, but in practice I didn’t feel like I was initiating anyone really. To be a bard takes a lot of individual work, and all I can do is lay out what it means and hold the door open a bit. People have to make their own way through. Increasingly the word that came to feature in the ritual was ‘dedication’.

A dedication is an offering of self, and an expression of intention. We can do that privately, before whatever powers we honour or we can do it in circle with our fellow Druids as witness. We can dedicate to each other in handfasting, in teacher/student bonds, in the fellowship of a grove and as parent to child. We might dedicate ourselves to living more greenly, to peace work, or sitting down and writing that book. The act of dedication focuses the mind on the chosen task, sanctifies it and, if done publically, gives you some people who will notice how you do. When it comes to getting people to study, and adopt greener ways of living, those dedications made in circle bind and empower in equal measure. Once you’ve said it, you’re honour bound to give it your best shot.

We all want recognition, and in spiritual terms being initiated to the next level is a bit like passing a test, or getting a reward. There’s kudos. Dedications can be more private, less dramatic affairs, but I think for Druidry they work well. We pick our own and make them when we are ready, holding responsibility for our own journey. Many people who step up to ‘initiate as a bard’ at big gatherings are not, as far as I have seen, in a place of completion that means they are initiated, they are at a place of starting out, needing the focus and recognition to commence the work. A dedication seems more appropriate at this stage. You don’t begin with initiation, you are initiated into the next stage when you are ready. You begin with dedication.

I don’t think this is just a semantic issue, it’s a pragmatic one too, having everything to do with how we see ourselves and how we see our traditions. Initiations have a lot to do with power and status. Dedications don’t have the same aura of formal structure to them, they are more personal, more flexible, and I think that makes them good Druidry.

Rites of passage

Celebrant work tends to focus on the biggest and most obvious rites of passage – birth, marriage and death are most commonly dealt with ceremonially, we might also mark coming of age and entry into being an elder. However, life is full of rites of passage, or life initiations, as I’ve heard them referred to (Chaos Magician Barry Walker first coined the term, I believe).

The first time I was really conscious of this I think, was when I was heavily pregnant. There is only one way forward from there – by some means, the baby will leave your body, hopefully alive, possibly not. You too could die. Pre-birth it is impossible to realistically imagine what the birthing process will be like. There’s also the huge change of having a child, which again I don’t think anything truly prepares you for. Everything changes.

There are many other life events that you can see coming and know are going to bring the unimaginable. Moving home, changing job, entering and giving up on relationships, the deaths of family members and loved ones, and many other tests and trials. A significant number of the challenges we face come out of nowhere, and it may not be until much later that you get to sit down and make some kind of sense out of what happened to you. These upheavals are dramatic and taking the time to honour and recognise them can help make the process more coherent and palatable. In celebrating, we may also make public, and that can bring the benefit of advice from others who may have gone through something similar. It’s not until you’re an initiate of certain life rites that others will tell you they’ve been there too. The women who also lost babies. The men who were also abused… and the good stuff as well. Once you know, there are things that can be shared because there’s no need to explain, and some things can only be understood once they’ve been lived.

Not everything is event, either. Not all transitions are sudden and dramatic, puberty and aging are not events really, parenthood is a work in progress and so forth. Sometimes it pays to stop and look back to see where you’ve been, because often it’s only then you realise that you have come a very long way, one step at a time.

There aren’t any formal ways of marking these passages, but I think it helps to take them seriously in your own, private practice.

Too Liberal for my liking

In the last week we’ve heard a lot in the news about a senior Liberal in the UK inappropriately behaving towards women junior to him. I don’t know the ins and outs. What I want to respond to is remarks made by the deputy leader of the party Simon Hughes on the BBC yesterday. He felt that as many of the women affected were robust and capable individuals they would have easily seen off any inappropriate behaviour and that it should not be made too much fuss over, consequently. This made me utterly furious. Other liberals have made much better noises about listening to evidence (http://www.libdemvoice.org/allegations-regarding-the-conduct-of-lord-rennard-and-the-partys-response-33364.html#utm_source=libdemvoice.org&utm_medium=redirect&utm_campaign=url) , but this attitude of Simon’s is made of wrong and needs dismantling. His assumptions about what is ok, what is an issue and what is an affront, I found downright offensive.

First up, a person holding a position of authority has a moral duty not to abuse their power by using it for any personal gain. This includes not using your status to give you sexual access to other people (neither gender nor orientation matter). M Hughes was not talking about one romantic proposition gone awry, we’re talking lots of complaints from lots of different women. This did not seem to strike him as being much of a problem. Not okay. Not professional, not responsible, not what anyone should consider reasonable. As a workplace attitude, those in power making advances to those of inferior status should not be acceptable. It creates a culture, where power equates to sexual power, and that’s not healthy.

Unwanted sexual advances can be threatening, especially if you start to feel your job or career may be going to depend on your willingness to put out. Even if you are robust enough to fend off the advance, it is still an insult. Inappropriate sexual advances are rude. Again, there is nothing of gender or orientation in this issue. To make sexual advances in inappropriate situations, to people who have shown no interest, is not polite. Again I raise the issue of the kind of culture you create if you tolerate such behaviour. It is not okay to be repeatedly insulting to those who work for you, and this kind of behaviour is, at the very least, insulting.

About the only people who can be let off the hook for not knowing how to conduct themselves in matters of amorous relationship, are teenagers. They are still learning, some slack must be cut, but not too much! Someone who wishes to be considered an adult of sound mind, must be able to control their sexual behaviour in public. Also, come to that, in private. I demand that this be considered necessary adult behaviour, not an optional extra, not a thing that doesn’t matter, but essential. Anyone who cannot control their sexual behaviour evidently cannot control themselves and most certainly should not be allowed to hold a position of power or authority.

The ability of a victim to defend themselves does not, in any situation, make the crime somehow acceptable. Ever. If I fend off a mugger, I have still experienced an attempted mugging and I can still go to the police. If I escape from someone who is attempting to rape me, I have still had someone attempt to rape me. If I am insulted in my workplace, or sexually harassed, it doesn’t matter how well I cope with it, from a legal perspective IT STILL HAPPENED.

Cultures are made up of the people in them. If we let people go round imagining that it’s ok to make inappropriate passes if the recipient seems robust enough to take it, we’re on a slippery slope. We have to hold high expectations of each other or we are going to get this kind of behaviour, and we’re going to accept it. I don’t want to be part of a society that thinks a little groping at work is probably harmless, or that people in power can be allowed to treat female employees as sex objects. We have some pretty clear laws on these issues in fact, we just don’t seem willing to uphold them or take them seriously. This stuff matters, it underpins human interactions, and if we get one aspect badly wrong, I don’t rate the likelihood of getting much else fabulously right.

Revival revival

Much of modern Druidry comes not from the ancient Druids, but from the revival Druids – and that great fraudster Iolo Morganwg in particular. The period of revival Druidry (read Ronald Hutton if this is unfamiliar territory) was both mad and wild. Speculation about ancient sites, mediaeval texts, invention of texts by Morganwg, and a wider culture full of secret societies, curious regalia and funny handshakes made for a crazy sort of time.

These days we have far better scholarship and everything has settled down a bit. While I’m all in favour of the more rigorous scholarship, we have lost something. That energy of mad creativity has gone, on the whole. Now, back in the day if you wanted to get all inventive you’d probably start by inventing an even more ancient and venerable history for you group, book, dining table, than anyone else had in order to establish seniority. I think we all know what the score is now, so those games should not be revived unless you’re being shamelessly tongue in cheek about the whole thing. (With all due reference to my most excellent colleagues, the Time-travelling Order of Ancient Druids, or Toads, definitively more ancient than anyone else!)

It is possible to innovate honestly, without needing to imagine a historical basis. We might look to our relationship with our specific bit of land, to invent a Druidry that is totally about where we are, responding to local flora, fauna, seasons and quirks. We might look at our ancestors of land, and innovate based on them. We might think about what else goes on where we are, and Druid our way into it. This would in turn inform how we do ritual and everything else.

The revival folk went in for costume in a way that puts our occasional white robes to shame. I’m not wild for robes, they aren’t very practical, but the whole ‘robes’ thing comes from a revival mistake about statues of Greek philosophers (Hutton again). We don’t really have a strong, exciting Druid aesthetic, in terms of how we might dress, or what imagery we stick on our book covers, or next to articles. Trees feature a lot, but there is no reason to get comfy with what is, in essence, a pretty dull visual tradition at the moment. We could do something. We could invent something new. We could have a really cool Druid aesthetic.

While we’re on the subject, we don’t have many prayers, or Druidic works of fiction either. We don’t have enough teachers or celebrants, and we don’t do enough real world stuff (yes, I know, I’m blogging….) We’ve settled into this comfy place of 8 festivals, a couple of prayers, a fairly staid way of doing ritual, and optional white robes. We’re rather inoffensive, and if you look at us collectively, we are a lot more bland than our Druid revival ancestors.

About the only thing you cannot safely accuse the revival era Druids of being, was bland.

Which brings me round to Steampunk, anachronism, fakelore and making stuff up. (What is a Secret Order of Steampunk Druids for, anyway?) If you aren’t mad for Steampunk, we can just come back to that central theme of the awen, inspiration and creativity. We can bring all that stuff to how we do our Druidry. We don’t have to get everything we do out of books or from courses. We don’t have to do it the way everyone else does it. Most importantly, that ‘stuff we all do’ the truth against the world and swearing by peace and love to stand, the awen and all that? Revival Druidry, for the greater part. Not ancient Druidry, not unassailable truth about what it means to be a Druid, just people making stuff up. We are people, and we ought to be perfectly capable of making stuff up.

That’s an invitation to listen deeply, to respond, to understand, to see the need and answer it. If Druidry is more, really, than people making stuff up and wearing silly costumes, then it comes from somewhere. It comes from the land and our experience of being human. It comes, I think, from deliberate and soulful interaction with the world. We should be doing that thing. I want to look to the revival folk for the inspiration of their energy and creativity, not to replicate what they were playing with.