The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain (1) is a modern English translation, first published in 2019, of the medieval Welsh collection brought together under the name The Book of Taliesin. It is translated and introduced by Gwyneth Lewis, National Poet of Wales 2005-6, who teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont, and Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury and later Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Both are native Welsh speakers. I highly recommend this version to anyone who wants a translation tailored to a 21st century readership, and to improve their knowledge of the history and culture from which these poems spring.
The Song of the Wind, from which I present extracts, is an example of the Dyfalu (guessing) mode: the poet creates a sequence of riddles, metaphors and fanciful tropes in order to describe an object. When – as here – the answer is given by the title, the result is a performance of inventive paraphrase, designed to display the poet’s virtuosity. The evocation of the wind is connected to the part of Taliesin’s story in which Elffin, his patron, is imprisoned by Maelgwn Gwynedd in Deganwy Castle. Taleisin’s poetry conjures up a gale that demolishes the castle and frees Elffin. Evidently a capable bard could do that, back in the day.
“Guess who it is:
Made before the Flood,
A mighty creature,
No flesh, no bone,
No veins, no blood,
No head and no feet.
No older, no younger
Than he was before.
He’s not turned aside
By fear, nor by death.
He doesn’t experience
The needs of creatures.
…..
“He’s in fields, in woods,
With no hand, no foot;
Feels no age, isn’t struck
By pain or bad luck.
…
“And he wasn’t born,
So he can’t be seen.
He’s at sea and on land;
He’s unseeing and unseen.
…
“He’s brave, he’s bold
As he crosses the land.
He’s mute, he’s loud.
He’s full of sorrow,
He’s the noisiest one
On the face of the earth.
…
“He’s evil, he’s good,
He’s here, he’s there,
Creates a mess,
Makes no redress.
He makes no amends,
Because he’s blameless.
He’s wet, he’s dry;
He often comes by.”
(1) Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain Penguin Random House UK, 2020 (First published in hardback Penguin Classics in 2019)
A circle is cast on sand. It is almost complete. The image is that of the Wheel, tenth major trump in the Druidcraft Tarot (1). Arianrhod, as Goddess associated with the Wheel and the Milky Way, is casting the Circle of Life. The adjacent cave has resonances of both womb and tomb. The seashore is a liminal space. The Celtic Otherworld is often linked to the sea and what lies underneath its surface. This image as a whole is associated with harvesting. Arianrhod carries a flail as well as a wand and a symbolic eight-spoked wheel.
It is Lugnasadh/Lammas, the first harvest-related festival of 2023. I am sitting with the notion of ‘winnowing’ in my inquiry. In agriculture, winnowing involves blowing a current of air through grain to remove the chaff remaining after threshing. We find a reference to winnowing towards the end of the medieval Welsh poem The Hostile Confederacy from The Book of Taliesin (2):
“I have been a grain discovered,
Which grew on a hill.
He that reaped me placed me,
Into a smoke hole driving me.
Exerting of the hand,
In afflicting me,
A hen received me,
With ruddy claws, (and) parting comb.
I rested nine nights.
In her womb, a child,
I have been matured,
I have been an offering before the Guledig.
I have been dead, I have been alive.
A branch there was to me of ivy,
I have been a convoy.
Before God, I have been poor.”
It seems that winnowing (or being winnowed) is far from an end point to our journeys. The processes of life go on, very likely in unexpected ways. Any state of peace has to be found within these processes, rather than in efforts to halt or break out of them.
At Lughnasadh 2023 I find myself at ease within Druidry, though I do also continue to refine lessons from other paths that enrich my practice of Druidry. The most significant, and the best embedded, is ‘interbeing’ as a spatial relationship and its temporal equivalent ‘impermanence’. It is like a kernel of grain I have winnowed from Mahayana Buddhism to grow into another life in my Druidry. The Druid soil is fertile for this purpose, as indicated through the image of the Wheel drawn on sand, and the passage from The Hostile Confederacy in The Book of Taliesin. For me, Thich Nhat Hanh simply provides a particularly persuasive languaging of this perspective.
He says (3): “The insight of interbeing is that nothing can exist by itself alone, that each thing exists only in relation to everything else … looking from the perspective of space, we call emptiness ‘interbeing’ [NB ’emptiness’ here = empty of a separate self] ; looking from the perspective of time we call it ‘impermanence’ … to be empty is to be alive, to breathe in and breathe out. Emptiness is impermanence, it is change. …When you have a kernel of corn and entrust it to the soil, you hope it will be a tall corn plant. If there is no impermanence, the kernel of corn will remain the kernel of corn forever and you will never have an ear of corn to eat. Impermanence is crucial in the life of everything”.
There is another level to this year’s inquiry harvest. Recently I have engaged more fully with the challenge of Thich Nhat Hanh’s understanding of the Mahayana emptiness teachings, which stand behind the interbeing/impermanence insight. In the light of this understanding he finds neither an individual nor a cosmic self – and hence no ultimate reality or ground of being. “Our notion of emptiness should be removed. It is empty”. Many teachers I have worked with in the past are on the other side of this debate, finding the Divine in ‘Presence’ (Eckhardt Tolle), Pure Awareness (Rupert Spira), and the ‘Clear Awake Space’ of Douglas Harding’s Headless Way. They find God as ‘No-Thing’. For Thich Nhat Hanh, no-thing is simply nothing.
I have been all over the place on this question, developing a language and practices compatible with both views, as I slipped and slid between them. This is fine in its way, but I have wanted some kind of resolution, if only to avoid the energy drain of uncertainty around something that matters to me and to many spiritual traditions. Tomas Sander, co-writing with Greg Goode (4) has also explored the Mahayana ’emptiness’ texts. He reports that “as a person who had been seeking truth and ultimate reality” he finds a “greater sense of ease” in the approach of these texts. Unlike Thich Nhat Hanh, he does not take away an active disbelief in a cosmic ground of being. Instead, he arrives at a relaxed unknowing, a place of ‘joyful freedom’. He says: “spiritual teachings tend to have notions of absolutes, which by their very nature seem to trump everything else. None of them can claim to have an absolute, transcendent truth on their side”.
Tomas Sander finds that “it was a wonderfully freeing moment to recognize that there is no one way that reality ‘really’ is, and therefore no way to miss out on it”. So he adopts different criteria for evaluating spiritual paths. “They need to prove themselves on the level of ordinary, conventional reality with practical questions like: who does the view serve and who is being marginalized? Is the view helpful, compassionate or humane?’ I have known of and entertained this view for some time, but it has only recently clicked with me as a good way of settling this question. Metaphysical speculation will no longer be part of my inquiry. This does indeed feel like winnowing, like blowing away the chaff. The promised harvest? Druidry as joyful freedom.
(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druidcraft Tarot: Use the Magic of Wicca and Druidry to Guide Your Life London: Connections, 2004 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)
(2) William F. Skene The Four Ancient Books of Wales Forgotten Books, 2007 (First published in Edinburgh 1868
(3) Thich Nhat Hanh The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2017
(4) Greg Goode and Tomas Sander Emptiness and Joyful Freedom Salisbury: Non-Duality Press, 2013 (Section written by Tomas Sander)
This post looks at Animism as the guiding principal of my Druidry. The term itself comes from nineteenth century anthropology, and is somewhat problematic. Scholars from European and North American backgrounds , formed by a mix of Christian and secular ideas, were studying, and labelling, the traditional practices of other people. The people themselves were mostly in the process of becoming colonial subjects and living in cultures under stress. So ‘Animism’ started out as a top-down classification, which gave Animists a lowly position in the hierarchy of cultural and spiritual life. A stigma persists to this day.
Despite this dubious history, the word ‘Animism’ is now being turned around by people from the global north itself, spiritually hungry in our now palpably faltering 21st century world. Some years ago, research by Graham Harvey distinguished two positive uses of the term Animism among modern western Pagans. “Some Pagans identified Animism as a part of their religious practice or experience which involved encounters with tree-spirits, river-spirits or ancestor-spirits. This Animism was metaphysical. … Other Pagans seemed to use ‘Animism’ as a short-hand reference to their efforts to re-imagine and re-direct human participation in the larger-than-human, multi-species community. This Animism was relational, embodied, eco-activist and often ‘naturalist’ rather than metaphysical” (1).
My Animism draws primarily on the second of the two accounts above. But it is deepened by a Buddhist influence, especially that of the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh: “There is no absolute dividing line between living matter and inert matter. If we took the so-called inanimate elements out of you and me, we would not be able to live. We are made of non-human elements. This is what is taught in the Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text that could be considered the world’s first treatise on deep ecology. We cannot draw a hard distinction between human beings and other living beings, or between living beings and inert matter. There is vitality in everything. The entire cosmos is radiant with vitality. If we see the Earth as a block of matter lying outside of us, then we have not yet truly seen the Earth. The Earth is also alive” (2).
Thich Nhat Hanh follows an old tradition. In thirteenth century Japan, Zen Master Eihei Dogen had taught that enlightenment is just ‘intimacy with all things’. Elsewhere in his own text, Thich Nhat Hanh says: “Just as a wave doesn’t need to go looking for water, we don’t need to go looking for the ultimate. The wave is the water. You already are what you want to become. You are made of the sun, moon and stars. You have everything inside you”. Thich Nhat Hanh explains that a flower is made only of non-flower elements. We can say that the flower is empty of separate self-existence. But that doesn’t mean that the flower is not there. “When you perceive reality in this way, you will not discriminate against the garbage in favour of the rose” (2).
This Buddhist wisdom doesn’t seem to me to come directly out of the four noble truths or eightfold path. The Buddhists of south-east and east Asia were at ease with the traditional Animism of their cultures, and the views expressed above appear to me to be at least partly a cultural gift from the Animists. Japan, for example, was intensely influenced by Buddhism without any thought of displacing Shinto, and the traditions readily interwove.
It was otherwise in the west. Already, In the first century CE, the Roman philosopher Plutarch wrote of the death of Great Pan, after the time of Jesus but before the rise of Christianity. James Hillman comments: “With Pan dead, so was Echo; we could no longer capture consciousness through reflecting within our instincts. … The person of Pan the mediator, like an ether who invisibly enveloped all natural beings with personal meaning, with brightness, had vanished. Stones became only stones – trees, trees; things, places, animals no longer this god or that, but became ‘symbols’, or were said to ‘belong’ to one god or another. When Pan is alive, then nature is too – the owl’s hoot is Athena and the mollusc on the shore is Aphrodite … Whatever was eaten, smelled, walked upon or watched, all were sensuous presences of archetypal significance”.” (3).
James Hillman, after service as Director of Studies as the Jung Institute in Zurich, went on to develop his own form of archetypal psychology. He was a strong proponent of Panpsychism, a world view very similar to forms of Animism being articulated today. Panpsychism literally means the ensoulment of everything (from the Greek), though the sound ‘Pan’ also associates us with the god. At the same time this view broadly fits with the understanding of Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, described above.
‘Animism’ is for me a word, not a thing, or a another religious banner to raise. It points to a wide range of experiences, understandings, and articulations. Pinned down to a single, dictionary definition, it would lose its power and energy. Yet Animism has become the word that best describes my way of being a modern Druid, both as view and as practice. I find it grounding and regenerative to have decisively adopted this word.
(1) Graham Harvey (ed.) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism London & New York: Routledge, 2014 (First published by Acumen in 2013)
(2) Thich Nhat Hanh The Art of Living London: Rider, 2017 (Rider is part of Penguin Random House)
(3) James Hillman The Essential James Hillman: A Blue fire London: Routledge, 1989 (Introduces and edited by Thomas Moore in collaboration with the author)
Streatham’s Rookery (1) is a formal garden within Streatham Common, one of south London’s many remarkable green spaces. I made a connection with it in 1992 when living close by.
About a year before I discovered OBOD Druidry, I was working with R. J. Stewart’s The Way of Merlin (2). This taught me, first of all, about sacred space. “Sacred space is space enlivened by consciousness. Let us be in no doubt that all space is sacred, all being. Yet if humans dedicate a zone, a location, something remarkable happens within that defined sphere of consciousness and energy. The space talks back”.
I was an urban seeker and used what the city gave me. From an early age I had been fed by imagery of secret and magical gardens. The Rookery, built in the then Spa village of Streatham (1) became my sacred space. Towards its centre, a wishing well testified to the power of healing waters. It was a good place to begin my journey. The space became more alive, and I, included within the gestalt, became more alive with it.
After establishing a sacred space, I was asked to begin a relationship with a spring and a tree. Stewart said: “we need to relate to such locations. This is a physical relationship first and foremost … we are one with the land, and trees, springs and caves are power points that tap into the energies of the land, and then reach into other dimensions altogether”. I found my spring quite easily (above). But there were almost too many trees to choose from, and I recall hesitating about my choice, to the point even of changing trees on my second or third visit. On my recent re-visit – woven into a rare family weekend in London – I found it easy to find the spring again but harder to remember my tree. I settled on the mature birch below, a good choice for a new, Goddess related undertaking (2). But I cannot vouch for it as my choice in 1992.
Sacred space (“the land talks back”), and befriending a spring and a tree: for me, these were the most powerful lessons from R. J. Stewart’s work. They were a helpful preparation for my later Druid training. I was very pleased to revisit this space in July 2023 and share it with family members.
(1) Streatham was in Surrey before becoming part of the County of London in 1889, and then Greater London in 1965. It began as a settlement around the old Roman road (Street Ham) from London to the south coast at Portslade, Brighton, the site a Roman port long lost to erosion. It appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Estreham. The village remained largely unchanged until the 18th century, when its natural springs, known as Streatham Wells, were first celebrated for their health-giving properties. The reputation of the spa, and improved turnpike roads, attracted wealthy city of London merchants to build their country residences in Streatham.
The Rookery began as a large private house with its own landscaped gardens. Much later, when the house and gardens were threatened with disposal and redevelopment, it was bought by public subscription and laid out as a formal open space, first opening to the general public in 1913. The Rookery is now one of the London Borough of Lambeth’s Green Flag Award-winning parks, directly managed by Streatham Common Cooperative (SCCoop), a local community-led enterprise.
(2) R. J. Stewart The Way of Merlin: The Prophet, The Goddess and the Land London: The Aquarian Press, 1991
Muin (Ogham name for Blackberry) is one of four plants that have a place in both The Green Man Tree Oracle (1) and The Druid Plant Oracle (2). In the latter, from which the illustration is taken, it is called Bramble.
Muin is an important plant ally for me. At times I have identified closely with ‘Mr. Bramble’ (3). He is stubbornly resilient, with deep and extensive underground root systems. Above ground, he can create an almost impenetrable barrier of briars. He digs in. He is a survivor. He tests qualities and intentions. He protects the deep earth and undervalued dimensions of being. Yet he also grows abundant tasty fruit, that can be made into wine or gin.
Where I live, Muin’s time traditionally runs from Lammas/Lugnasadh to Michaelmas/Mabon – essentially the calendar months August and September. This year, as this time approaches, I am thinking of Muin as a teacher. The Green Man Tree Oracle offers words of ‘green man wisdom’ for all its trees. Muin’s words are: “gather in what is dearest to you“. I find “gather in” friendly and relational, very good to hear in a world where ‘harvesting’ is often cold, impersonal and mechanistic. Muin’s more warmly relational note is reinforced by the words “dearest to you”. We are invited to consider “riches of the soul and the things that give us inspiration” as our recommended harvest.
There are obvious questions here: what is ‘mine’ to ‘gather in’? what to I choose? what do I let go? But this is not, fundamentally, a questioning and list-making task. It is more about being open to Muin’s magic. This, I believe, is rooted in an unusual combination of qualities: tenacity, challenge, depth, an invitation to pleasure and, indeed, a certain kind of intoxication. Over the coming weeks, I will draw on Muin’s inspiration as I gather this harvest of the soul*.
(1) Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm The Druid Plant Oracle: Working with the Flora of Druid Tradition London: Connections, 2007 (Illustrated by Will Worthington)
(2) John Matthews & Will Worthington The Green Man Tree Oracle: Ancient Wisdom from the Greenwood London: Connections, 2003
Saturday morning, 8 July. Gloucester, England. I am warm. I am indoors. I am contentedly lethargic. My gaze turns to a balcony door.
I contemplate Elaine’s balcony garden. The flowers are less dramatic than during the solstice period. Their colours are softer. I see more green. I see raindrops on the other side of the door. They are evidence of a gentle rain falling on this tiny garden.
“I am the movement of the breath and stillness in the breath”, I say in my Druid contemplative liturgy. “Living presence in a field of living presence: here, now and home”. This can be true at any time, but some conditions are more helpful than others. Here and now, I become alive to the balcony garden, fully present. Knowing Elaine as creator of this garden extends my sense of connection. A simple nourishing moment.
Hours later, with a flash and a crash, the heavens opened and my world changed, heralding a new kind of experience.
Pagan iconography in mainstream life? Sabrina, goddess of the River Severn/Hafren, appeared in King’s Square, Gloucester on Saturday 1 July. She was part of a civic celebration focused on the renovation of the Square. She was very well received. Responses seemed to range from friendly curiosity to enthusiastic delight. I include two photos I took at the time.
Later on, Sabrina processed through the town to the Anglican Cathedral, amidst music and dancing – captured on video by Nicola Haasz, recognised expert and devotee, on her facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/sabrinarivergoddess
In these hard times, it seems that there is a public appetite for solidarity and spectacle. I hope that Sabrina makes many more appearances, in Gloucester and other places in her extensive Severnside domains.
I have been re-visiting Emma Restall Orr’s ground-breaking work on animism, where she reframes this term for our times and emphasises its value to modern Druids. Much of her book explores the formal philosophy and metaphysics of animism and panpsychism. In this, more lyrical passage, she questions ‘permanent enlightenment’ and advocates freedom from “knowledge-based certainty” and dependency on knowing.
“To the animist, a state of permanent enlightenment is not considered natural. His senses inform him that, firstly, light is sustained by a balance of light and darkness, and, secondly, it is lived for the most part in neither darkness or light, but in varying degrees of twilight and shadow, of half knowing, believing, assuming and concluding.
“The aspiration for fluency and lucidity, another light-derived word, is firmly established in our culture though. Literally and figuratively, in darkness we are denied the safety of certainty. As the dusk comes and the light slips away like an outgoing tide, edges begin to dissolve. In darkness, our senses more easily blur, leaving us potentially deceived. If we are dependent upon knowing, this can leave us confused and fearful. The not-knowing is judged as ignorance; darkness is declared bad, and to be avoided as dangerous. As the deep wellspring of wickedness, any who embrace the darkness must be equally spurned.
“If, however, our aim is not a knowledge-based certainty, what the darkness provides is delicious and necessary release. In the dark, the separation created by edges is no longer relevant to our perception and reality, allowing entirely new parameters of freedom. … We need moments within which we can dissolve all we are and all we know, that we might find the nourishment for new inspiration and realisation”.
(1) Emma Restall Orr The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature Winchester, UK & Washington, USA: Moon Books, 2012
The five images in this blog record a dedicated solstice walk, an evening walk beginning 8 pm on 20 June. For me, the solstice period lasts around a week ending on 25 June. I like to acknowledge the stasis (standstill) element. My festival practice is not about a moment in time so much as honouring an extended pause before the wheel turns, at first slowly, towards the dark.
I sought immersion in the unique and sacred flavour of this day at this time in this place. I do not believe my images ‘capture’ that flavour – now gone with the moment it belonged to. But the pictures do provide a suggestive record of that time. They help my memory. They remind me especially that my experience of this practice in 2023 differs from that of 2022, when I first undertook it as a solo, contemplative form of midsummer celebration. (See: https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2022/06/24/.)
The first image (above) is of Llanthony Priory gardens, dominated this evening by a dramatic sky. Sunlight shines through heavy clouds, dark and suggestive of a storm that we had largely missed in Gloucester. Three canalside images (below) also display the energy of clouds with the sun backlighting them. I find both beauty and power here, indeed a strong sense of powers greater than mine, and indeed of ours collectively. This year, my seasonal immersion has an edge. A modern Druid, I celebrate the seasons and reverence the elements. But I certainly don’t own them, or decide how they are meant to be.
During my walk I spent a lot of time with my eyes turned upwards and skywards, with hints of both awe and foreboding. I understand how sky god spiritualites work. But I also looked across and down and found new life. A pair of swans and their cygnets were finding space on the water on a busy small marina. It is now surrounded by housing on three sides, yet they seemed flourishing and confident. Storm clouds of many kinds threaten. Life goes defiantly on.
How Pagan Was Medieval Britain? is the sixth and final lecture in Professor Ronald Hutton’s Gresham College series on early Pagan history in Britain (1). The simple answer, according to Hutton, is: not as much as was widely believed in the twentieth century, by scholars and the lay public alike. Some thought that full medieval Christianity was an upper class faith, with commoners, especially in the countryside, being ‘cheerful semi-Pagans’, Christian by day and following the old ways by night. Others thought that the two religions ran in parallel, with the latter being necessarily clandestine whilst some of its iconography was visible. Green Man and Sheela na Gig images, often present in the churches themselves, seemed to indicate the survival of a Pagan sensibility at the very least – canny concessions by the Church to the people. Witch persecutions were seen as evidence of an active, surviving woman centred nature religion. Indeed, such ideas influenced cultural and religious developments in the twentieth century itself – specifically, the rise of neo-Paganism; more broadly, the Feminist and Green movements that were dynamically emerging at the time.
However, turning to the medieval period itself, Hutton, does not find evidence of actually existing Pagan religion in the available sources. Witch trials have been carefully examined in recent years, and the victims don’t fit the profile. In Anglo-Saxon times, the legal codes and church councils stopped bothering to forbid Christian converts their old ways by 800 CE. The prohibitions reappeared in the tenth century, in relation to Viking settlers, but ceased again by 1030 CE. In the later middle ages there was serious concern over Christian heretics (Lollards) and some concern over ale-house cynics expressing anti-religious views. In medieval society people tended be nosy about other people’s business and there was social pressure to conform. There are court cases that draw on this kind of informal surveillance, but none concerned with Pagan religious practice. Hutton traces Sheela Na Gig images to the Church in France, saying that they had an anti-erotic intent. Likewise, Green Man, Wild Man and Jack in the Green figures have specific historical origins not concerned with any Pagan deity. Hutton quite reasonably offers no comment on their widely perceived role as archetypal images, because these are outside the remit of the empirical historian. His focus is on self-defined and organised Pagan religion during a specific period in Britain.
But it is true, according to Hutton, that the medieval church offered religious continuity in other ways. The veneration of saints, who were very diverse and numerous, allowed polytheist habits of mind to continue, especially in the realm of petitionary prayer. Individual saints might be local, or specialists in specific forms of help. For many people they seemed more approachable than the persons of the trinity. However in Britain there seem to have been no saints who had themselves once been gods*. Likewise Christians had holy wells, but they were different from the old Pagan ones, rather than the same ones repurposed. The temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, for example, was left alone. Few temples or ancient religious sites became churches, even though Pope Gregory had recommended this approach when he sent his mission to Kent in 597 CE.
Church attendance was not compulsory in the middle ages. It is estimated that only around 50% of parishioners attended regularly, though they did turn up in much larger numbers for the major festivals. During these, ‘secular revelry’ was allowed, even encouraged, and the festivals raised a lot money for Parish churches, enabling them at times to abolish Parish rates. This widely beneficial outcome was seen as ‘cheating the Devil’. Even on normal days, the Church offered spectacle – with the mass, libations and incense. Local priests came from the people, didn’t have to be literate, and didn’t have to preach. That was done by specialist friars with notable performance skills, often very popular. Additionally, many people belonged to guilds linked to their churches, usually focused around a saint. There were lay religious guilds for both women and men, which had a variety of purposes, officered by their own lay members. Craft guilds performed plays at festival times. This form of Christian culture lasted in Britain until the middle of the sixteenth century, when the old church fragmented into a plurality of new ones over hard-fought time. Different kinds of Christian culture, generally even less Pagan friendly, emerged.
Contemplative Inquiry 