366 Celt: A Year and A Day of Celtic Wisdom and Lore. Carl McColman
abundance and the king’s largesse. From this we can get a clear sense that, to the ancient Celts, the goddess is more than just a kind of female version of the Almighty—she is a powerful presence who stands for the spirit of charity, generosity, and care for others, qualities that lead in turn to the blessings of abundance and prosperity from the land.
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THE PATH OF SOVEREIGNTY
Why does the link between the goddess, the concept of sovereignty, and the concepts of generosity and hospitality matter to us today? After all, no society today (Celtic or otherwise) inaugurates its leaders by performing a symbolic sacred union with the goddess! But the importance of these concepts resides not so much in their political implications, as in their spiritual relevance to each of us as individual persons. After all, I may never be the leader of a nation, but I have “sovereignty” over my own life. As a follower of Celtic wisdom, I can see that my personal freedom is related to how I choose to relate to my environment—to the land on which I live. I can also see that I am only truly free if I can freely choose to be generous and practice the virtue of hospitality. In other words: in today’s world, each one of us can be called to the role of “king”—to enter into intimate relations with the goddess of the land, and find in her spirit of Sovereignty the power to foster a life that is spiritually meaningful and rewarding; in other words, a life of generosity and hospitality.
If there’s one word firmly associated with Celtic mysticism, it is “druid.” And yet probably no other concept connected with the spirituality of the Celts is less understood, or more frequently consigned to the mists of fantasy. We have only a handful of written records from ancient times (when the original druids were still active in the Celtic lands, prior to the coming of Christianity), and the druids themselves wrote none of these. Instead, Greek and Roman authors like Julius Caesar and Pliny have given us what little information we have about the earliest druids—and when you consider how some of these classical authors were biased against the Celts, it’s easy to see how this source material is not only scanty, but unreliable.
We’re not even entirely sure what the word druid means, although the popular notion that it has to do with “oak wisdom” is as good a theory as any. Seen this way, a druid is a natural philosopher, one who discerns the innate wisdom of the earth and interprets it for the good of the community. So when modern folks dismiss the druids as “tree huggers,” they’re probably not too far from the truth. But a druid would reply in an ironic tone of voice, “You say that like it’s a bad thing?”
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THE PATH OF THE DRUID
The ancient writers who comment on the druids say that they were the spiritual and intellectual leaders of the Celtic world, and that their function in society included not only presiding at religious ceremonies, but also serving as scientists, philosophers, counselors, mediators, and seers. In other words, they were not just otherworldly dreamers, but collectively served as the “think tank” of the ancient Celtic world. In the modern world, it’s easy to forget the intellectual/scientific dimension of the druids, but in ancient times such mental skill would have been an essential part of a druid’s life. The druids were not driven by intuition or psychic hunches (attending to those kinds of stimuli would have been the job of the seer, another specific function in Celtic society), but by knowledge, reason, and wisdom. That this mental agility was embedded in spiritual activity would not have been considered odd, for throughout the ancient world, science and religion had not yet undergone the divorce that would separate them at the dawn of the modern world. In the world of the druids, true wisdom meant being knowledgable about inner matters and external realities in a holistic and integrated way.
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THE PATH OF THE DRUID
Much of what the classical writers had to say about the druids smacks of propaganda that would have been useful to Roman generals seeking support for their military excursions in the Celtic world. After all, if the druids are really so barbaric as to perform massive human sacrifices where dozens of hapless victims are burned alive, wouldn’t it be a service to civilization to put them out of business?
Truth be told, it does appear that druids performed human sacrifice, although evidence is not widespread and so such practices may have been considered an extreme measure, at times of severe famine or imminent invasion. And it seems a bit disingenuous that representatives of a society that entertained itself with gladiators would dismiss the druids as barbaric!
So at the end of the day, we really know very little about the ancient druids, their beliefs, and their rituals. Later folklore and mythology of the Celtic world offers some ideas as to what these ancient philosopher-priests (and -priestesses) would have been like, but these sources date from a time when druidism had already been extinct for centuries. Meanwhile, a colorful assortment of “revivals” of druidism over the last 250 years tell us more about modern spirituality (and romanticism) than about the ancient wisdom they are supposedly reconstructing.
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THE PATH OF THE DRUID
The Roman historian Pliny provides us with one of the most memorable of images associated with the druids—the collecting of mistletoe. On the sixth day after the new moon, the druid would climb into an oak tree and cut the mistletoe with a golden sickle, dropping it onto a white cloak held by others on the ground—it was unlucky for the mistletoe to touch the ground. It would then be prepared and used as a healing herb. Meanwhile, the ceremony would culminate with the sacrifice of two white bulls. This unusual ritual has become one of the most popular images of ancient druidry, and I know of at least one organization of modern druids that duly performs a “Mistletoe Rite” every month on the sixth night of the moon. But no one other than Pliny discusses the ceremony, leading some to question whether it had any grounding in reality. Perhaps it was a one-time event that Pliny witnessed, or for that matter, perhaps he (or his source) fabricated the entire affair. The take-away: we never know how others will view us. We never know how accurate our perception of others really is. These are points worth keeping in mind.
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THE PATH OF THE DRUID
The ancient druids were said to believe in reincarnation. They were soothsayers and diviners, and were as necessary for the performing of ancient Celtic sacrifices as a Catholic priest is to the consecration of the Eucharistic host. They were knowledgable about the planets, and the natural world, and moral philosophy, and yet they taught by the use of riddles and enigmas. If all of this is beginning to sound like a hodgepodge, well, it is. So little information is available to truly shed light on the earliest Celtic priests. In her book Druid Shaman Priest, scholar Leslie Ellen Jones suggests that succeeding generations have reinvented the ways we think about the druids, in ways that make this mysterious order of magical intellectuals relevant to our modern world.
There’s a lesson in there. It’s not only the druids that we constantly reinvent. We reinvent God (such as the notion of the Divine Feminine—the Goddess). We reinvent our understanding of what it means to be Celtic, or to be spiritual, or to be wise. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this—but it seems like it would be a good idea to remember that such processes of revising how we understand our world and ourselves are perpetually going on.
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THE PATH OF THE DRUID
Beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, antiquarians and amateur archaeologists began to explore theories about the prehistoric stone circles and other ancient monuments in the British Isles. Their pet theory? That such sites were originally the temples of the druids. Today we can easily dismiss the inaccuracies of such speculation—we know that Celtic culture only arrived