Druidry and the ancestors – some excerpts
Druidry and the Ancestors is a wander through the challenges and possibilities of working with our ancestors. Ancestors of blood, of land and tradition. Also the ancestors we imagine, or long for, and what they can tell us and how they can help us.
In some ways it is easier to explain what this book isn’t, than to begin by pinning down what it is. This is not a history book in the sense of having lots of dates and hard, dependable information about the history of Druidry in it. It definitely isn’t a linear narrative history of Druidry at all. It is, however, a book about history, with the emphasis on the story. This is an exploration of how we imagine and construct our ancestors, and what the implications are of the ways in which we think about them. Anyone interested in the history of Druidry, I would suggest reads both Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe and Graeme K Talboys’ The Way of the Druid, which are highly informative and offer very different understandings of the subject. It’s not the facts of history I want to explore, but what we do with them.
This is also not a book designed to teach a person how to do Druidry. It is, I hope, something that would be of use to anyone exploring a Druid path, to people in the wider pagan community, and to anyone with an interest in the ancestors. We all have ancestors and, for most of us, that can be a complicated issue. This is a book about making peace with the ancestors, understanding their legacies and their ongoing presence in our lives, and exploring how ancestry impacts on community, and ideas of race, nation and culture. For someone looking for a book that will help them begin the study of Druidry, I recommend Graeme K Talboys’ The Druid Way Made Easy and Robin Herne’s Old Gods, New Druids.
One of the things I do want to do is raise the issue of how we access history. Many pagan readers and authors alike are self taught people. Working outside formal academia, dependant on what we can find and not always aware of where the cutting edge is, we are a community vulnerable to misinformation and being horribly out of date. Mistakes made by authors fifty or a hundred years ago still surface in pagan writing and new examples of that surface all the time.
Most of us know who our immediate ancestors were, but the precise details soon peter out, leaving only a vague impression of those who lived as little as a few hundred years ago. Although genealogy is a popular hobby, for most of us, those people before our immediate ancestors are an uncertain, amorphous lot, colored by whatever we learned of history at school, who we imagine our people were, and the odd focal story – a famous predecessor, a family legend, some speculation based on names.
I have a huge family tree, mapped out by my uncle and delving deep into the past. Names, dates, jobs and occasional details are in the mix. It’s interesting, but beyond those tantalizing glimpses, it tells me relatively little about how they lived, felt and thought. There aren’t many facts, and the facts are not that informative. Unless people leave detailed letters and diaries, this is often the way of it. The ancestors remain mysterious. For many of us, ideas held about ancestry are intimately connected to ideas of race and culture. Those on the far right believe in ancestry as a contained, defined thing, linking certain groups of people whilst distancing them from others. This seems to me a rather short sighted view of the past. Humans have been mobile and interbreeding for a very long time. We are all humans. But even for people who do not hold overtly racist views, race is important, perhaps connecting them directly to the history of a country, an area of land or a religion. The trouble is that recorded history is actually sparse, and as a percentage of human history, represents a very small bit. The further back you
go, the less there is by way of written record. The countries and religions we have are relatively recent innovations, but our most recent history is inevitably the most resonant, and the most divisive. For anyone wanting to uphold the idea of division and separateness, recent history must be treated as more important than the ambiguous millennia preceding it. For anyone wishing to work with ideas of commonality, it becomes necessary to push
past recorded human history in search of a time when perhaps ideas of race and culture did not divide us. A past we can only really imagine and can never hope to prove.
More about the book here – http://www.moon-books.net/books/Druidry-Ancestors
