Can you really learn Druidry?
(Nimue)
Spend any time in online discussion spaces and you will run into people keen to tell you that you can’t learn Druidry.
The most usual reason is because the Druids are all long dead and didn’t write anything down. Therefore anyone claiming to be a modern Druid is fake, a scammer, or deluded.
There are also the people who feel that the only way to learn Druidry is directly from nature. They never elaborate – do they watch the rain falling? Are they learning Druidry from trees, from yeast, from the tiny worms who live in their skin? They don’t say, because then they’d be teaching Druidry which obviously you can’t do because you can only learn it from nature…
I suspect quite a few of them are simply bad faith actors who like to come along and rubbish things. They can be annoying, frustrating and demoralising to encounter, which is why I wanted to write about it.
Modern Druidry exists. It is inspired by what we know about the past. Many modern Druids do not claim to be doing anything ancient, while the genuine reconstructionists put in a lot of work trying to be as informed and authentic as they can be. A tradition doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid. If something works for you, then it doesn’t really matter if it was thought up last week, or a thousand years ago. Equally, age doesn’t make things good, there are plenty of old things (human sacrifice for example) that are not made good simply by being old ideas.
It’s fine to be a modern Druid working with modern ideas and inspiration. There are many ways of doing your Druidry, and many ways of learning. I’ve learned a lot from people, but also from direct experiences of the land, the seasons and other living beings. You can learn in whatever way suits you,
It seems entirely pointless to me to devote time to telling people that what they do isn’t real, or valid. To me it seems to miss the way that the essence of spirituality is one of reaching after the impossible. Faith is intrinsically about what we don’t know, and any quest for meaning in this life is about resisting the apparent lack of meaning.
To follow the Druid path is to make your own peace with what we do and don’t know about ancient Druids. It’s to choose something here and now, for whatever reasons that speak to you. For most of us that’s a journey we undertake with all the integrity we can muster. We learn from each other, from our own explorations and from whatever inspires us.
In all aspects of life, there are people who will come along simply to tear you down. They do it because they have nothing better to bring, and because it gives them some small feeling of power. No matter what capacity you encounter them in, you owe them nothing. They are not entitled to demoralise you, or to take anything you value from you. They will claim their destructiveness is helpful realism, but they are wrong about this and I think some of them know that. Useful criticism helps a person grow and do better. If someone knocks you down, it doesn’t prove anything except that they are not kind. It doesn’t make them right, or useful.
If you find yourself in spaces where people tell you that you cannot be a Druid, leave, and find better spaces.
