Being a modern English Druid

(Nimue)

I think it’s increasingly important to be clear about the ’English’ part of my Druidry. I’m not part of a living tradition in the way that some Druids are. I come to this path as a modern person inspired by the past. I am not a reconstructionist. I do not claim that what I do is historically accurate. I’m not personally much invested in the idea of my Englishness, but I still think it needs flagging up.

There are issues around what non-Welsh, non-Scottish and non-Irish modern Pagans do with those traditions. If this is something you want to know more about then your best bet is to find Druids who are deeply involved with those lands and cultures and take on board what they have to say about appropriation and people talking over them and misrepresenting their stuff. I’m not in a position to speak for them.

However, I live in a landscape where Druidry was practiced historically and where revival Druidry took root. I don’t think that being a Druid depends on either your ancestors of blood or your ancestors of place, and that the path should be open to anyone who wants to walk it. We can balance inclusion with respect. We can recognise that some of us come to this with ancestors who were oppressors. Most people, like myself, will have a bit of both. 

For me, my relationship with the landscape I live in is the bedrock of my Druidry. My local museum has figures of local Iron Age deities in it, and there are pre-Roman godds associated with this landscape. As I’ve talked about before, there is ‘Welsh’ mythology set in Gloucester, because the borders haven’t always been the same as they are right now. Boudicca was right out in the east of the UK – Celtic peoples were everywhere here, so in the UK we all have that as part of our landscape history.

My local Roman villa was most likely to have been Romano-British, Plenty of ‘Celtic’ people willingly adopted Roman ways of doing things. There are no hard lines between the two cultures, as further evidenced by how the Romans treated local deities, usually associating them with their own and continuing use of the same shrines. People have always been mobile, intermarriage between groups of people has always been a thing. None of us are ‘pure’ anything and notions of purity underpin a lot of fascist thinking so it’s important to take that into account.

You can be a Druid on your own terms. All you have to do is be respectful of people who may have closer and deeper ties with landscapes and deities than you do. If your personal experience of a deity makes you feel entitled to talk over or argue with people who belong to that deity’s landscape, history and traditions, take a good, hard look at yourself. Ask why you think you are so special and so important, because trust me, that’s a ‘you’ issue and has nothing to do with the godd in question.