by Yvonne Aburrow

Introduction

An increasing number of people are beginning to identify themselves as belonging to more than one spiritual tradition – not merely in the sense of selecting attractive ideas from each tradition, but trying to be faithful to the ethos of both traditions.

This practice may seem like a new development related to the massive 'subjective turn' identified by Heelas (2005: 2) and others, but it seems to be much older, as some form of syncretism may occur whenever two or more distinct spiritual traditions come into contact (Grayson, 1992: 199).

Questions that might arise about dual or multi-faith practice are whether and how it is possible to combine them, especially if there is potential conflict between their worldviews, or their worldviews are mutually exclusive; how a particular person came to follow more than one tradition; what constitutes membership of a tradition; whether identification with a tradition is sufficient; and whether practising more than one faith is merely part of the 'subjective turn' of modern culture. There has been criticism of dual-faith practitioners (e.g. Thurston, 1994), and this may also shed some light on these questions.

In many religions, the idea of practising more than one tradition is uncontroversial – for example, many people practice Wicca and Druidry alongside each other (Carr-Gomm, 2002), or Paganism and Unitarian Universalism (Sealy, 2006), or Buddhism and Shinto (Kuroda, 1981: 3) – but for those faiths which claim the exclusive loyalty of their followers, practising more than one tradition may be seen as deeply problematic.

Combining worldviews

Hayes (2003: 8) identifies four models for an encounter between a missionising religion and an indigenous one:

1.      Rejection. The traditional knowledge is rejected as purely evil.

2.      Dvoeverie. Two incompatible beliefs or worldviews are held side by side, with little or no interaction between them.

3.      Syncretism. The two different beliefs are mingled, to make a third, and new belief, which is different from either component.

4.      Inculturation. Where the original local culture is transformed, and the Christian belief becomes part of it.

He is writing from the perspective of Orthodox Christian missionary endeavours, which seek to respect as far as possible the pre-Christian beliefs of the culture being evangelised, and acknowledge that there is good in indigenous traditions. Nevertheless there is a fifth possibility, that instead of trying to convert people of other religions, the traditions agree to co-exist, whilst engaging in dialogue.

A similar example of an encounter between a missionising religion and an indigenous one can be found in the interaction of Buddhism and Shinto. According to Kuroda (1981: 3), Shinto was not a distinct religion prior to the arrival of Buddhism (Shinto was originally a Chinese word signifying any and all folk religion in China, Korea and Japan). In Japan, it is possible to be both Buddhist and Shinto at the same time, because neither world-view necessarily denies the other. This is perhaps similar to Hayes' (2003) model of inculturation, whereby the incoming tradition transforms the indigenous one (though I suspect the process is actually one of mutual transformation).

Examples of religious encounter range from explaining one religion using the symbolism and terminology of another, to a full-blown mingling of the two traditions. The original meaning of dvoeverie (double faith) – a term describing “the syncretistic religious practices of ordinary believers who, in their daily lives, blended elements of Eastern Orthodox doctrine and practice with pre- or non-Christian folk beliefs and rituals” (Crummey, 1993: 701) – has been recently disputed (Rock, 2001), as it may have meant simply people who were wavering in their Orthodoxy, and was generally meant pejoratively. Nevertheless, it may be a useful concept for understanding contemporary dual- or multi-faith practitioners.

There have been various historical instances of rejection, syncretism, dvoeverie and inculturation. An example of rejection is the Protestant evangelisation of indigenous cultures, where there is a tendency to view the indigenous culture negatively (Hayes, 2003: 8). An example of dvoeverie is the simultaneous belief in Christian and Pagan entities allegedly held by many Russian peasants (Crummey, 1993: 701). Examples of syncretism are the mixing of Buddhist and Shinto themes in Japanese culture (Grayson, 1992: 202), or the practices of Santeria and Voudun. Examples of inculturation include the continuation of pre-Christian ideas within Christianity (McGinn, 1999: 282), or the incorporation of Bön practices within Tibetan Buddhism (Kvaerne, 1972). Of course, the boundaries between these four models will be rather blurred.

It seems that, whenever a religion encounters another religion, a need is felt to make some form of accommodation with the truth claims of the other religion, sometimes by denying them, sometimes by recasting them in the language of one's own tradition, and sometimes by assigning the other religion's holy figure a position in one's own tradition; for example, Hindus regarding Jesus as a supremely religious soul (Woodburne, 1927). The outcome of this process depends on the willingness of the faith communities to co-exist. At the level of the individual, religious belief is always more 'messy' than a cursory examination of the creeds and teachings of the religion would lead one to think:

Inter-religious encounters and the changes that they bring are, of course, wider than those between individuals and through conferences. They are part of the whole social and political ambiance of the world in which we live. Intensive meetings can influence and affect religious positions and bring about long-term change to the religions themselves. People's maps of belief are complex and they are shifting all the time. Interfaith encounter is one factor in those shifts, in the mutation of religions. People listen and try to explain. (Morgan, 1995: 163)

More than one form of syncretism can be identified, depending on the relative political and cultural status of the two systems being syncretised:

Figure 1. High and low syncretism. Grayson (1992: 204)

Grayson (1992: 200) defines syncretism as the accommodation made by a world missionary religion (in the context he is discussing, Buddhism) to an 'autocthonous religion' (in this case, the indigenous folk religion of Korea). He further defines two forms of syncretism, 'high' and 'low'. High syncretism is when the core values of the indigenous religion are retained, with only a veneer of the foreign religion; low syncretism is when only the surface trappings of the indigenous religion are retained, and its core values are replaced by those of the foreign religion; this latter form seems similar to Hayes' (2003) idea of inculturation.

Reverse syncretism (Grayson, 1992: 205) is when an indigenous religion begins to voluntarily incorporate elements of foreign religion into its practice (rather than the missionising religion making a compromise with the indigenous religion).

Another form of syncretism is 'coinherence' (Corless, 1994: 182), where two religions that both make sense to the practitioner are followed side-by-side. In the case of Corless (1994: 181) and other Christo-Buddhists, this seems to be because of the similarity of the two faiths. Corless (1994: 183) holds the two traditions in a creative tension, an internal dialogue. This may sound superficially similar to dvoeverie, but in dvoeverie there is said to be little or no interaction between the two faiths in the mind of the practitioner, whereas in coinherence practice, the two are held in dialogue.

There have also been examples of deliberate syncretism, such as Ryōbu Shinto, a formal mixture of Buddhism and Shinto (Grayson, 1992: 202); the reorganisation of Roman paganism in response to Greek and Etruscan paganism (Grayson, 1992: 201); the Romanisation of indigenous deities, for example the cult of Mercury and Rosmerta (Webster, 1997: 326); and the creation of the syncretistic Din-I-Ilahi religion by the Mughal emperor Akbar (Lawrence, 1973: 61).

Modern examples of syncretism include Unitarianism in the UK and Unitarian Universalism in the USA, which draws on a number of sources. According to the British Unitarian (GAUFCC, 2007) website, “Unitarianism has its roots in the Jewish and Christian traditions but is open to insights from world faiths, science, the arts, the natural world, and everyday living.” The Unitarian Universalist statement of principles and sources acknowledges six sources and seven principles (UUA, 2007) which include a number of strands and make for a liberal tradition, affirming the worth of all religious traditions (but not accepting them uncritically).

In a global and post-colonial culture, encounters between faiths no longer occur at the boundaries of their traditional heartlands, but everywhere. The interfaith movement is growing, both in order to make peace between conflicting traditions and to explore the idea that all religions are honouring the same Divine, or numinous (Morgan, 1995: 163). There is a huge amount of information and opportunities for interaction and discussion available on the internet, especially with the growth of social networking tools such as blogging, Facebook, forums and mailing lists.

At the same time (possibly due to biases in media reporting), there seems to be a widening polarisation between liberal, tolerant and inclusivist views of religion, and ecstatic or evangelical practices which are frequently associated with fundamentalist and exclusivist views. Heelas and Woodhead (2005: 146) say that

congregations of experiential difference have an advantage over other forms of congregation in that they may be able to attract those who seek the sacred in external obligation, but those who also wish to encounter the sacred in the depths of inner experience. They seem to have secured a competitive edge by virtue of the fact that they both resist the subjective turn by offering clear normative guidance and cater to it by offering intense personal experiences of the sacred.

Congregations of experiential difference are usually charismatic and evangelical (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 19). The people who are attracted to such congregations tend to long for a stable and ordered society but also want to feel their faith inwardly; however there is evidence for a decline of such congregations in England since the 1990s (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 146). Church-going in general has sharply declined in both Britain and the USA (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 56), whereas subjective-life spirituality in the holistic milieu has been on the increase (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 42). Perhaps the increase in fundamentalism in parts of the congregational domain is due to fear of its own decline, fear of secularisation, and fear of the inner-directed view of spirituality?

Fundamentalists do not simply believe; they fight to defend their beliefs against those who seek to dilute them. (Munson, 2005: 342)

So it seems there are a range of possible responses to diversity: to embrace it and celebrate it; to tolerate it; or to reject it and seek to impose norms. However, no matter how a particular tradition responds to it, it is impossible to ignore it:

In modern and recent times, confronting the enlarging pluralism within the religious world, we can no longer easily dismiss the variant forms of religious practice and cultivation. Religious pluralism, like other forms of diversity, must be taken seriously, and the spiritual horizons and understandings of all religious traditions must be expanded to account for the wide variety of beliefs and practices. (Bloom: 1994: 164)

One way of predicting a particular group's response to diversity is to apply Heelas and Woodhead's (2005: 17-23) model of the different types of congregational religion.

Congregations of difference are those where there is a strong emphasis on the difference between Creator and created, the moral disorder of the world and the divine order of things; authority is derived from external sources. (These are more likely to reject diversity.) Congregations of humanity are those which stress service to others as the highest moral good. (They tend to stress corporate values over individual values, but to be tolerant of other faiths.) Congregations of experiential difference are more charismatic and tend to stress that an inner experience of God is possible, but must be checked with the authority of scripture. (These are also likely to reject diversity.) Congregations of experiential humanity also stress inner experience, but steer subjective-life in a humanitarian direction. (These are likely to embrace diversity.) They contrast all these forms of congregational religion with subjective-life spirituality, whose practitioners tend to form small groups, and who are interested in developing subjective well-being (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005:24) rather than obedience to an external authority (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 63). It should also be borne in mind that there is a broad spectrum between complete obedience to external authority and complete subjectivity. 'Subjective-life' spirituality can often seem like a 'pick and mix' approach, where someone with no particular faith 'shops around' to find the kind of spiritual practices that appeal to them, whilst ignoring the context of the traditions they are drawn from. Dual-faith practitioners, however, generally begin in one faith and then adopt an additional one (Corless, 1994; Chapin-Bishop, 2007).

The 'subjective turn'

Can the practice of syncretism and dual faith be explained simply by the theory of subjectivisation?

The theory of subjectivisation proposes that “'the massive subjective turn of modern culture' favours and reinforces those (subjective-life) forms of spirituality which resource unique subjectivities and treat them as a primary source of significance, and undermines those (life-as) forms of religion which do not.” (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 78)

'Subjective-life' is life lived as an unique individual with an emphasis on self-expression, whereas 'life-as' is life lived according to a specific role or identity (wife, mother, Christian, etc.) The turn towards subjective-life has affected not only religion and spirituality, but also the world of work and the family (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 79).

However, 'subjective-life' spirituality is often characterised as a pick-and-mix approach (Stephenson, 2005), whereas practitioners of dual faith appear to desire fidelity to the traditions being followed (Corless, 1994: 182). Clearly, in feeling a vocation to follow both faiths, such practitioners are responding to a subjective inner feeling, but trying to do so within the framework of a tradition.

The practice of coinherence is, for me, what Christianity calls a vocation. I did not sit down in a cool hour of the day and rationally decide to practice Buddhism and Christianity simultaneously, in precisely measured proportions. I found myself equally attracted to the truth of, and therefore equally at home in, both traditions. (Corless, 1994: 182)

Heelas and Woodhead (2005: 144-5) suggest that the decline in congregational and traditional faiths may be halted if they start to cater for subjective-life approaches, and that the growth in Eastern Orthodoxy in Britain is “due to its attracting 'cultured' inner-directed selves”. The same seems to be true for 'congregations of experiential humanity' such as the Unitarians and the Quakers, whose attendance figures rose during the 1990s (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 66).

Heelas and Woodhead (2005) make much of the oppositional tension between 'subjective-life' spirituality and 'life-as' religion, but Thomas (2000: 42) suggests that the distinction between spirituality and religion – the “assumption that whereas religion deals with the outer life, that is, institutions, traditions, practices, doctrines, and moral codes, spirituality treats the inner life, which thus tends to be individualized and privatized” – may in fact be a false dichotomy, arising out of Western discourse. Taylor (1989: 111) explains:

In our language of self-understanding, the opposition "inside-outside" plays an important role. We think of our thoughts, ideas, or feelings as being "within" us, while the objects in the world which these mental states bear on are "without."

. . . But strong as this partitioning of the world appears to us, as solid as this localization may seem, and anchored in the very nature of the human agent, it is in large part a feature of our world, the world of modern, Western people. (cited in Thomas, 2000: 42-43)

Thomas (2000: 43) adds that there is both a tradition of inwardness and a tradition of outwardness in Christianity, but argues that the outward should be considered primary, and a major source of the inner.

'Subjective-life' spirituality seems mainly focused on the inner as the primary source for validating experience. Hence it is likely to conflict with solely outward-focused religions (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 18).

However, dual-faith practitioners seem to be answering an inner call whilst attempting to be faithful to the whole package and spirit of their chosen traditions. Corless (1994: 181) says:

Both Buddhism and Christianity recommend that practice be done for others rather than oneself, and speak of some way in which one's true self is not oneself as ordinarily experienced. ... The witness of the traditions is, then, unanimous that the true or ideal practitioner-subject is not the limited, sinful, or suffering self that senses a lack and that longs for salvation or liberation. Insofar as the coinherence practitioner looks for the practice to aid him- or herself on the way to salvation or liberation, or to be of benefit to oneself in any way whatever, just to that extent is one's practice faulty, deficient, or sinful. Insofar as the coinherence practitioner seeks only to be of service to the Christian and Buddhist traditions, and whatever aims they wish to set forward, just to that extent is one's practice meritorious, authentic, and righteous.

What is significant about this passage is the way in which Corless denies that the practice is intended to be of benefit to himself, as is characteristic of subjective-life spirituality (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 30); instead it is about benefiting others – a characteristic of 'congregations of humanity' (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 18).

In a discussion of her dual-faith practice of being a Quaker and a Pagan, Cat Chapin-Bishop (2007) says:

But that's just what keeps me Quaker--we center down, and I can find you, Friend, in the shining place: you and the sea of limitless Light. And that's what keeps me Pagan--I go out into the woods, and the trees are not things but friends, and the moonlight makes what is sacred shine out all around me.

I can't prove love. I can't prove music. I can't prove I'm Quaker, or Pagan, or anything else I deeply care about: a good parent, a good teacher, a good friend...

But that isn't the point, really. No matter how the labels fit or don't fit, my job is to keep walking... just keep walking. Herne on my right hand, Jesus on my left (if the Spirit should so insist!). Just... keep going the way I'm led.

("But I wanna be in the Quaker club, too, dammit. Why don't I ever get to sit at the cool kids' table?" A small voice asks. Shut up, voice. This isn't about that. Keep walkin'.)

Here, it seems, the emphasis is on the path rather than on the one walking it, and on making connections with others (whether trees or Friends) which is as important as the inner sense of vocation.

Peter Chapin-Bishop (2007), also a Quaker Pagan, echoes the idea that the Divine is outside and permeating inwards, and is more important than the social norms and conventions of the respective faiths, and that the core or defining aspect of belonging to the tradition is that a connection to the numinous happened in that context:

God (the Divine, the Gods…whatever you want to call Him/Her/It/Them) calls to us. Divinity “bleeds through” from the realm of the Divine into our world. Pagans invoke it loudly, Quakers listen for it quietly, both have to work at discernment but can usually recognize sooner or later when it whacks them upside the head. And both groups have formed enduring, vibrant communities centered on the experience of the Divine. Like all communities, Quakers and Pagans have social norms and expectations, and they each have their interplay between the group's values and the values that individual members bring. But Pagans and Quakers also share direct input from Outside, and this changes EVERYTHING. ... When I say I am a Quaker, it is because I have been a conduit for the Divine in that context. Once I'd had the experience of…well, call it “drawing down the Light,” the rest was just a formality. My clearness committee tested that leading and concurred, but I’m not a Quaker because they said so. I’m a Quaker because I listened for the presence of Spirit in the silence, and It spoke through me, and that’s what Quakers do. Just like I’m Wiccan because I invoked the presence of the God in circle and He came to me, and that’s what Wiccans do.

What the Chapin-Bishops and other Quaker Pagans, or Corless and other Christo-Buddhists, are doing does not seem to be 'pick'n'mix' spirituality, or even dvoeverie (the practice of two faiths side by side without any mutual feedback – if this is even possible). It is much more like Corless's idea of coinherence, whereby the two traditions mutually inform and enrich each other, and somehow this is of service to both communities, or in the case of the Chapin-Bishops, of service to the Divine, which encompasses both people and nature. Cat Chapin-Bishop is very clear that she is being led, and her job is to keep on walking; Peter Chapin-Bishop is very clear that the call comes from outside. Corless makes it clear that the practice of coinherence is painful, not something that anyone should choose deliberately (Corless, 1994: 181). The concept of walking a path, or being led, crops up several times in these writings. Their spirituality is not merely eclectic or inner-directed ('subjective-life'), nor is it entirely outwardly directed ('life-as'): it is about the connection of inner realities with outer numinosity. This sense of the inner being connected to the outer is an essential part of Quaker spirituality, which “rests on a conviction that by looking into their inmost hearts people can have direct communion with their Creator.” (Religious Society of Friends, %5B1985%5D 2003). Heelas and Woodhead (2005: 156) identify the Society of Friends (Quakers) as a religion of experiential humanity.

From the evidence of people's explanations of what they are doing in their coinherence practices, it would seem that they may well be evidence for the 'subjective turn', but that the practitioners are not entirely subjectively led or inner-directed, as they still feel the need for a community of practice and have a sense of the external promptings of the numinous.

The rise of feminism, the gay liberation movement and concerns about the well-being of the Earth are all factors in the emergence of new forms of religion and spirituality (Harvey, 1997: 72 and 202). Pagans in particular are concerned with embodied spirituality, not the cultivation of a 'higher self' (Harvey, 1997: 202 and 214). People's understanding of the world can shift as they encounter new ideas and experiences, especially if these do not fit within the framework of the tradition they are following.

Criticisms of dual-faith practice

Much of the criticism of dual-faith practice seems to revolve around the issue of authority, and whether this is derived from the individual, the group, the tradition, or the Divine.

Other possible criticisms include the idea that each tradition is complete in itself and does not require input from outside (Bloom, 1994: 164-5); and the possible danger of 'pick'n'mix' spirituality, which might mean that the dual-faith practitioner chooses only the parts of each tradition that appeal to him or her, and avoids aspects which seem difficult or repellent now but may later turn out to be useful, or which the tradition insists are necessary. Brooks (2003) writes:

There is minimal intellectual or moral rigour to "bespoke belief" that knits together the cosiest aspects of the systems on offer and ignores any broader inconsistencies.

There are also issues like loyalty to one's tradition and to the martyrs who died for the principles espoused by that tradition (Thurston, 1994: 178).

The degree of difficulty in combining two or more traditions depends on how exclusive the truth claims of each tradition may be. Bloom (1994: 164-5) distinguishes between exclusivism (claims of completeness) and sectarianism (claims to sole possession of the truth):

Exclusivism may appear to be a negative feature of religious faith. However, I believe it can be distinguished from sectarianism, which is more an attitude that denies any validity or truth in other views. On the positive side, the exclusive character of a religious faith may indicate the conviction that the faith is comprehensive, complete, needing nothing from the outside to justify itself. It is my personal observation that religious traditions are integral wholes, growing up out of the experience of founders and members and evolving through the centuries. Though they may appear to outside observers as lacking in some dimension, the participants in these traditions may not experience that lack. What appears to be lacking to some observer may, for historical or other reasons, be latent, though not fully articulated within a tradition.

People who have had direct mystical experiences of the numinous often find it difficult to fit them into the norms of the traditions they are following. Various mystics, particularly women (Herzig, 2006: 25), attracted the attention of the Inquisition to determine whether or not their mystical revelations fitted in with Catholic doctrine, or whether their miracles or stigmata were genuine (Herzig, 2006: 31). Some revelations cannot be accommodated in the existing paradigm: new religions were founded on the teachings of Buddha and Jesus because they were not accepted by the traditions from which they emerged (Case, 1913: 64). Sometimes people will break away to form or join a new tradition because of dissatisfaction with some feature of their existing tradition; this may involve a total rejection of the existing tradition, and/or a return to an earlier tradition – as, for example, Goddess feminists' rejection of Christianity on the grounds of its patriarchal associations and their creation of new traditions (Harvey, 1997: 74). Alternatively, the new tradition may be a syncretic amalgam of the old with the new, as early Christianity was an amalgam of the new insights of its founders with its Jewish heritage and the Graeco-Roman religions that were contemporary with it (Case, 1913: 66).

Another possible criticism of dual-faith and syncretistic practice is the charge of cultural appropriation. This issue was first raised by Native Americans in objection to the 'borrowing' of Native American ideas, rituals and practices. They objected that this was just another form of imperialism. If using ideas from other cultures is not done respectfully and with a sensitivity to their original context, it can seem like theft to the originators of those ideas (Harrison, 1999: 11).

Membership and identity

Dual and multi-faith practice can also bring up questions of membership and identity.

Many people identify as being of a particular religion; but what constitutes membership? In Christianity, the boundary between membership and identity is fairly blurred – it could be measured by attendance, baptism, belief, or adherence to the Nicene Creed. Traditionally, Christianity has expected a clearly demarcated religious identity (Thurston, 1994: 177). In Paganism, identity and membership of the community are largely negotiated at festivals, which people attend both to discover the self and to develop the self (Griffin, 2001: 499):

Festivals bring followers together and create a community defined, in great part, in opposition to the outside world. Pike explores how this provokes criticism and sometimes conflict with neighbors and other religious communities. The fact that Neopagans are so diverse often causes conflict within their own community as well, as they struggle to create individual autonomy embedded in the interconnectedness they revere.

Peter Chapin-Bishop (2007) is clear that membership in a tradition consists of having received divine communication in that setting. Liz Opp (2007) writes that identity is a sense of one's personal values being close to the group identified with, whereas membership is participation in that group, its norms, values and social life. She adds that identity is the ground of a person's being, and may come into conflict with membership of a group. In her formulation, identity seems more important than membership, which might suggest that she is advocating a subjective-life approach rather than a life-as approach; but she also talks about experiencing an inner call. Like other members of 'congregations of experiential humanity', she seeks to balance the inner and the outer – perhaps even to bridge the apparent gap between the two (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005: 21). There is clearly a subtle balance between membership and identity whenever people participate in a group. Perhaps people join groups because they admire the values of those groups and want to become more like those who are in them. Perhaps people join because they admire the practices of the group, but then find that the values are different to what they are expecting, or that they are expected to transform their own identity, values and insights to conform with that of the group and its traditions to a degree which violates their identity. Either way, the formation of a person's identity happens in a social context (Edwards, 2005: 116), and groups that someone becomes involved in will reflect that identity.

Cat Chapin-Bishop (2007) comments:

Pagans, I think, look to bestow membership where identity as a part of a group already exists. Quakers, at least to judge by Liz and Marshall's discussion, look to develop identification with a group through the formal relations of membership. It's probably a chicken and the egg type of issue, really--membership shapes identity shapes membership.

It seemed to me that Liz Opp's view was that identity was the most important thing, and membership sometimes changes to accommodate it; but clearly membership involves dialogue among the members of a group, to ascertain what the core values of the group are, and how those are played out in the lives of its members – and often this does involve some kind of formal commitment to the group.

The issue of membership and identity is important in any discussion of a dual or multi-faith practice. A person may identify with a group, but if the membership requirements of that group are that its members do not belong to other groups perceived to be in conflict with its values or beliefs, can that person be said to be a member of the group? It could be argued that if a person identifies with a group, the criteria of membership need to expand to include that person; on the other hand, it might be held that the person has to adjust to the mores of the group in order to belong. However, if the practices of the group contradict its stated ideals and values, perhaps the newcomer is the very person best placed to call attention to that contradiction, since they are bringing a fresh perspective.

Furthermore, the exclusion of certain categories of people from membership of a group may be of disservice to the group, as Cat Chapin-Bishop (2007) points out:

To the extent that my spiritual community does not accept my membership, or discounts it as merely individualistic "self-identification", I will be cut off from exactly what Marshall sees self-identifiers as withholding from their communities: that interdependence, the right not so much to make demands on the group or to shape it to my liking, as to serve the group, offer it my gifts, and be transformed by the experience of that mutuality.

A high-profile conflict of membership and identity is that between LGBT Christians and the churches that seek to exclude them. This is often seen as a clash of tradition and modernity (Tamney and Johnson, 1988: 246), but it could also be explained as a conflict of membership and identity. Both sides in the conflict are drawing on Christian values and virtues, but interpret them differently, and place emphasis on different aspects of the tradition to support their stance. LGBT Christians identify as Christians, but a lot of other Christians do not want to accept them as members of the tradition.

Identity seems to be approximately equivalent to 'subjective-life' and membership seems to be approximately equivalent to 'life-as' – but clearly membership and identity are closely intertwined, which does not seem to be the case with Heelas and Woodhead's (2005) definition of 'subjective-life' and 'life-as'.

The process of “conversion” (a rather loaded term) often plays a part in a change of religious allegiance. However, if the person finds truth in both their new group and their previous group, and the old group emphasises one thing that the person finds worth in, and the new group another thing, it will be difficult for the person to make a choice to leave the old group and join the new group; indeed, such a choice may not even be considered (C. Chapin-Bishop, 2007).

Lewis Rambo's (2000) model of conversion is more complex than the "road to Damascus" experience that most people think of when they think about conversion. In phase one, he says, people go through some kind of crisis (which could be dissatisfaction with their current belief system, or a mystical experience). In phase two, they go on a quest to find something that fits their new model of the world. The third phase involves interaction (learning how to do their chosen religious practice). The fourth phase is commitment ("rituals that create a new identity, a new set of relationships, a new set of roles that lead to a new and different kind of life"), and the fifth stage is consequences - the transformation effected by the commitment (which could be lifelong development in the chosen faith, or it could be disillusionment and going back to phase one).

In the case of dual or multi-faith practice, the conversion process may be experienced as an expansion of understanding, rather than a change of direction. Michelle Guinness (1994: 15), who was brought up Jewish, read the “forbidden bit” of the Bible and decided that Jesus was the Messiah – but when she became a Christian, she introduced many Jewish ideas and practices to her family and her church, feeling incomplete without the Jewish side of herself:

I wanted to feel as well as trust, use my body as well as my brain, every second of my existence, so that believing was like breathing. And that is the essence of Jewishness, the ideal. Shalom, the wholeness of body, mind and spirit I believed to be my birthright as a Christian, would elude me until I acknowledged and embraced the Jewish in me. Integrating a Jewish and Christian spirituality became a great adventure, spanning the years of childbearing and raising a family, discovering a career, the mid-life crisis and the beginnings of bodily disintegration. There have been dizzying, dazzling heights and endless, flat plains, craggy, skin-tearing climbs and gentle, lush valleys. I have been at odds with the Jews and at odds with the Church. (Guinness, 1994: 21)

The contrast between the life-affirming Judaism she grew up in and the asceticism of the Christianity she joined was too great; she had to find a compromise.

Ann Holmes Redding is an Episcopalian priest who became a Muslim (Tu, 2007). She was drawn to Islam after an introduction to Islamic prayer; she was profoundly affected by seeing a Muslim man in total surrender to God.

"At the most basic level, I understand the two religions to be compatible. That's all I need."

She says she felt an inexplicable call to become Muslim, and to surrender to God — the meaning of the word "Islam."

"It wasn't about intellect," she said. "All I know is the calling of my heart to Islam was very much something about my identity and who I am supposed to be.

"I could not not be a Muslim."

Many Christians and Muslims cannot accept that she can be both; others (including her local church and the Muslim centre she worships at) are happy for her to be both. Clearly, however, her experience is not exactly 'subjective-life' spirituality (she is looking for her identity in who she is supposed to be, not who she currently is). She says, "when God gives you an invitation, you don't turn it down." Rambo's conversion model is a better fit for her situation than Heelas and Woodhead's model; she was experiencing dissatisfaction with Christian doctrine, and then had a profoundly moving encounter with Islam (the crisis phase); this led to a quest for a new paradigm, and making a commitment; now she is experiencing the consequences of that commitment. However, her conversion experience is clearly an expansion of her worldview to include the truth claims of both religions, rather than an abandonment of one in favour of the other.

Cat Chapin-Bishop's crisis moment was the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Centre in 2001:

It was the morning of September 11 that I first knew in my body as well as my mind that deep and absolute conviction that war was just not the answer for anything. In a world where a half-dozen men armed with box-cutters can kill thousands, it becomes clear that no amount of force or the threat of force will ever save life. All killing will do is pile the bodies higher.

Today, I say it with words. On September 11, I felt it in my marrow, in my spine.

Between September 11 and that Columbus Day (ironically, the weekend when the bombing of Afghanistan began) I found the Quakers. I have been a Quaker ever since.

However, the crisis was an occasion for the expansion of her worldview, not a change of direction; she says, “I am still Pagan--my love for the earth and the Old Gods does ]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:55:56 +0000 add http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Is%20it%20possible%20to%20follow%20more%20than%20one%20distinct%20spiritual%20tradition.2009-10-01-13-55-56 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles email@hidden (Yvonne) Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:49:45 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles.2009-10-01-13-49-45 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles email@hidden (Yvonne) Interfaith dialogue by Yvonne Aburrow
Is it possible to follow more than one distinct spiritual tradition? by Yvonne Aburrow
Monotheism and polytheism by Alain Danielou (1964)
Metapantheon by Pitch
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:49:26 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles.2009-10-01-13-49-26 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Christian Druid Order
CUUPs (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans)(USA)
Hindu Wicca
Jewitchery - a blend of Judaism and witchcraft
Shakti Wicca (a blend of Hinduism and Wicca)
Tel Shemesh (Hill of the Sun)
Unitarian Earth Spirit Network(UK)
Wicca in India
Interfaith
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:46:28 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-46-28 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:43:49 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-43-49 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Syncretic traditions
Celtic Buddhism
ChristianWicca
Christian Druid Order
Tel Shemesh (Hill of the Sun)- celebrating and creating earth-based traditions in JudaismHindu Wicca
Jewitchery - a blend of Judaism and witchcraft
Jewitches and Jew-U's - Jewesses with Attitude (a Jew-U is a UU Jew)
Celtic Buddhism
On being a Pagan and a Buddhist
Shakti Wicca (a blend of Hinduism and Wicca)
Tel Shemesh (Hill of the Sun)
Wicca in India
Interfaith
International Association for Religious Freedom
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:42:48 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-42-48 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Celtic Buddhism
On being a Pagan and a Buddhist
Interfaith
International Association for Religious Freedom
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:37:11 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-37-11 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Jewitches and Jew-U's - Jewesses with Attitude (a Jew-U is a UU Jew)
Celtic Buddhism
Interfaith
International Association for Religious Freedom
Contemplative Practices
John Hallwas, Nature and the Sacred (Talk to the Macomb Unitarian-Universalist Church, Nov. 14, 2004) - on pantheism, panentheism, and mysticism
Buddhist and Pagan Dialogue
Miscellaneous
Psycho-spiritualprofileforWicca - for Wiccans to give to therapists to explain where you're coming from
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:35:28 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-35-28 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Tel Shemesh (Hill of the Sun)- celebrating and creating earth-based traditions in Judaism
Jewitchery - a blend of Judaism and witchcraft
Jewitches and Jew-U's - Jewesses with Attitude (a Jew-U is a UU Jew)
Interfaith
International Association for Religious Freedom
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:29:01 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-29-01 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism email@hidden (Yvonne) Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:17:31 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism.2009-10-01-13-17-31 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism email@hidden (Yvonne) John Hallwas,Nature and the Sacred(Talk to the Macomb Unitarian-Universalist Church, Nov. 14, 2004) - on pantheism, panentheism, and mysticism
How does Unitarianism bring about spiritual transformation?byStephen Lingwood
Making contact with other UU and Unitarian Pagans
CUUPs chapters(USA)
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:16:56 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism.2009-10-01-13-16-56 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism email@hidden (Yvonne) Earl Morse Wilbur (1946), A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and Its Antecedents, Harvard University Press
Further reading
John Hallwas,Nature and the Sacred(Talk to the Macomb Unitarian-Universalist Church, Nov. 14, 2004) - on pantheism, panentheism, and mysticism
Making contact with other UU and Unitarian Pagans
CUUPs chapters(USA)
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:15:03 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Pagan%20tendencies%20in%20Unitarianism.2009-10-01-13-15-03 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) DragonEnvironmentalNetwork: Eco-magic - A heady mix of Paganism and Environmentalism.
Other religions
ReligiousTolerance - comprehensive resources on a lot of religions
Adherents.com - world religion statistics
Individual faith links
OnlinecollectionofteachingsyllabifromtheAmericanAcademyofReligions
LGBTgroupsinotherreligions
Theopoetics
Syncretic traditions
ChristianWicca
Christian Druid Order
LGBT & Queer issues in religion
TheLGBTReligiousArchivesNetwork
Stonewall Faith Resources page
About.com: Lesbian Life: Religion and Spirituality
Other religions
ReligiousTolerance- comprehensive resources on a lot of religions
Adherents.com- world religion statistics
Individual faith links
OnlinecollectionofteachingsyllabifromtheAmericanAcademyofReligions
LGBTgroupsinotherreligions
Theopoetics
Syncretic traditions
ChristianWicca
Christian Druid Order
Tel Shemesh (Hill of the Sun)- celebrating and creating earth-based traditions in Judaism
Interfaith
International Association for Religious Freedom
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:12:38 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-12-38 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links email@hidden (Yvonne) Theopoetics
Syncretic traditions
ChristianWicca
Christian Druid Order
LGBT & Queer issues in religion
TheLGBTReligiousArchivesNetwork
Entheogens
Apantheistgrace
ChristianWicca - I really don't know where to put this, but it's interesting, so it's here
Wikipedia article on Gleb Botkin, founder of the Church of Aphrodite
Pagan-friendly charities
]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:11:04 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Links.2009-10-01-13-11-04 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne) Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:32:28 +0000 com http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life.2009-09-29-16-32-28 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne) If you would like to comment on this article you can do so at the Pagans for Archaeology blog.
See also:
Human remains
]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 10:42:46 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life.2009-09-28-10-42-46 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne) Natural law, on the other hand, is the only unaltering, unalterablelaw, by virtue of its being permanent truth, and I for one would liketo expect such an appreciation of natural law to be what informs thediscourse of self-styled pagans. Natural law says to me that allorganic life in time disintegrates and returns to its components. Iwould infer that the vital essence obeys, ultimately, the same law,albeit not necessarily in planetary terms. If anyone thinks they canprove otherwise, I think now would be a jolly good time to do so– preferably before October 17th.Then, perhaps, HAD could move on to discussing whether an overtly speciesist attitude toward the particular veneration of human (as opposed to non-human animal), remains, is really appropriate in these enlightened times.
Pagans For for Archaeology.The views expressed herein are entirely his own. He does not presume to speak for anyone else, living or dead.
If you would like to comment on this article you can do so at the Pagans for Archaeology blog.
]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:56:09 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life.2009-09-28-08-56-09 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne) Nick Fordis a formerly self-styled pagan who has studied and practised archaeologyincluding the interpretation and deposition of human remains. Despite his reluctance tocontinue toshare a spirituality label withmany towhose beliefs and practices he does not subscribe, he nonetheless remains a member of Pagans For Archaeology.The views expressed herein are entirely his own. He does not presume to speak for anyone else, living or dead.
If you would like to comment on this article you can do so at the Pagans for Archaeology blog.
]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:55:23 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life.2009-09-28-08-55-23 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles email@hidden (Yvonne) Hermeneutics of the left-hand path: viewing modern occultism as a contemporary spirituality by Tristram Burden
'Honouring the Ancient Dead': The Care of Elderly Souls and the Rights of Bone Fragments to a Quiet Lifeby Nick Ford
Interfaith dialogue by Yvonne Aburrow
Monotheism and polytheism by Alain Danielou (1964)
]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:46:49 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/Featured%20articles.2009-09-28-08-46-49 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne) Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:43:33 +0000 mod http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life.2009-09-28-08-43-33 http://pagantheologies.pbworks.com/The%20Care%20of%20Elderly%20Souls%20and%20the%20Rights%20of%20Bone%20Fragments%20to%20a%20Quiet%20Life email@hidden (Yvonne)

'Honouring the Ancient Dead':

The Care of Elderly Souls and the Rights of Bone Fragments to a Quiet Life

by Nick Ford

It seems that, in advance of the "Honouring the Ancient Dead" (HAD) Conference 2009 in Leicester on 17 October, HAD have been addressing the meaning of respect (apparently regarded as synonymous with 'honouring') as a criterion for the desired treatment of ancient human remains. So far, the best consensus they appear to have come up with is this:

"Returning to the topic of finding a definition of 'respect' that HAD can adopt, we would like to put the following to you.

The Oxford Dictionary includes the following definitions of Respect:

noun - 1. a feeling of admiration for someone because of their qualities or achievements 2. due regard for the feelings or rights of others

verb - 1. avoid harming or interfering with… if we think of respect in the particular context of the previous inhabitants of these isles, does this not imply that (regardless of one's personal metaphysical perspective) respect for their physical remains should embrace all of the following:

i)recognition of the achievements and contribution made by the individuals whose remains we hold, their place in our history and their role in shaping all we are and the land around us;

the necessity of according the right to treatment of their remains that demonstrates this recognition;

ii)an acknowledgement of their continuing rights to care that avoids physical or spiritual harm as a result of the above?

From this we conclude that display, excessive intrusive physical sampling and non-essential separation of human remains from their original burial context are, in general, all disrespectful and should be avoided."

Do the dead have a right to our admiration expressed by our doing nothing with their physical remains?  Well, it seems to me that you can admire someone for their qualities and achievements, irrespective of what you do to their corporeal leavings. In some cultures, you eat them, for instance. However, we do not know what the personal achievements of the ancient dead were, nor do we have any idea of their individual qualities, except very occasionally in questionable legend or pseudo-history, both of which have often been appropriated to serve some latter-day political or ideological agenda. Admiration is, therefore, not a relevant definition of respect.

What is 'due regard' in this context? That consideration which an assumed, current, cultural consensus believes to be appropriate?  If so, we have that already, since I think it fair to say that the majority of people in our society don't consider the issue of the treatment of millennia-old bones as having any importance. What right does a bone have? Or an urnful of ashes? What right does a neo-pagan have, or any person similarly espousing a set of socially atypical beliefs, to have his or her views privileged above those of the prevailing social consensus? Is it a principal social duty to do nothing that risks the engagement of the negative emotions of another?

We know little or nothing about nearly all long-dead people - and generically, what can one say of them? That - just to take one example - the Neolithics are the people who gave us climate change and soil erosion through deforestation and over-grazing? The ones who invented open-cast mining?

I see no necessity at all of according the right to treatment of ancient human remains that demonstrates this assumption that the remains of the long-dead are inherently worthy of the kind of romantic veneration advocated by HAD, but rather a question of its arguable desirability. I do not believe there is an epistemology of positive recognition of the long-dead, whether individually or collectively, and remains do not have rights, even if their deposition was accorded a high profile (often, quite literally) at the time. Has anyone ever heard of a patient suing a hospital for custody of an amputated limb, or a dentist for an extracted tooth? (And this, with an indisputable right of possession of the inanimate by the animate).

As for "an acknowledgement of their continuing rights to care that avoids physical or spiritual harm", what is 'care' in this context? Do we mean custodial care, preservation, or what? How would one weigh an assumed individual right to bodily biodegradation, for example, against a countervailing, assumed individual right to bodily preservation? And these against another assumed social right of possession as (e.g.) heritage, i.e. for cultural display and/or scientific analysis?

We might also ask ourselves what  'spiritual harm' could feasibly ensue, especially in respect of people who are already long dead, but who are assumed still to exist non-corporeally with an ego-consciousness similar to that which they had when incarnate in the centuries-old or millennia-old body of which the remains in question are a residue.  

- I cannot, for one, conclude that display, excessive intrusive physical sampling however that is defined) and non-essential separation of human remains from their original burial context are, in general, all disrespectful and to be avoided, from the arguments thus far advanced by HAD. Display, for all we know, might have been an impracticable but desired option for some of the ancient dead.

Back to rights again: I think that none of us, as participants in this debate, has any right to assume that any opinion not founded on fact deserves privileged consideration over any other. Legal rights of individuals are frequently unenforceable and may in many cases be abnegated in law in the interests, or assumed interests, of a society generally; moral rights are merely non-consensual opinion whose embodiment in law is subject to the vagaries of fashion in thinking; human law attempts to embody in statute a society's temporary mores - ephemeral truths held to be self-evident but invariably disregarded in the past and questioned by posterity.

Natural law, on the other hand, is the only unaltering, unalterable law, by virtue of its being permanent truth, and I for one would like to expect such an appreciation of natural law to be what informs the discourse of self-styled pagans. Natural law says to me that all organic life in time disintegrates and returns to its components. I would infer that the vital essence obeys, ultimately, the same law, albeit not necessarily in planetary terms. If anyone thinks they can prove otherwise, I think now would be a jolly good time to do so – preferably before October 17th. Then, perhaps, HAD could move on to discussing whether an overtly speciesist attitude toward the particular veneration of human (as opposed to non-human animal), remains, is really appropriate in these enlightened times.

Nick Ford is a formerly self-styled pagan who has studied and practised archaeology including the interpretation and deposition of human remains. Despite his reluctance to continue to share a spirituality label with many to whose beliefs and practices he does not subscribe, he nonetheless remains a member of Pagans For Archaeology. The views expressed herein are entirely his own. He does not presume to speak for anyone else, living or dead. 

This purpose of this article is to set down  the information we have about Taliesin as clearly as possible, and the first thing to grasp is what our sources are. 

In historical order, they are:

c. 830 AD

A mention of Taliesin in the 9th century Historia Brittonum, as one of the men who ‘flourished in British poetry’ during the reign of Ida, King of Northumbria, at the end of the 6th century AD. It is no more than a mention, and Taliesin is not the first on the list. He is given no title, whereas other poets in the list get fancy names like ‘Wheat of Song’ and ‘Father of the Muse’. Together, these facts suggest that the author of the Hisoria Brittonum did not think of Taliesin as having been the preeminent poet of the late 6th century.

c. 1050 AD

Culhwch and Olwen

This narrative tale mentions Taliesin briefly as ‘Chief of Poets’ and a member of Arthur’s court. The perception of Taliesin's status had clearly altered since the 9th century.

c. 1100 AD

Branwen Daughter of Llŷr

Taliesin is mentioned as one of the seven survivors of Bran the Blessed’s expedition to Ireland. 

c. 1325 AD

‘The Book of Taliesin’

A collection of medieval Welsh poetry, prophecy and religious verse, probably intended as a compendium of material associated with Taliesin. Altogether, it contains some 62 poems. The scribe was extremely good, and throughout it is written in a good, clear hand. (We must throw out fantasies of crumbling volumes full of hard-to-make-out arcana.) The manuscript was written c. 1325 AD, but the relative dates of the various poems inside are hard to ascertain, as I discuss below. The ‘youngest’ material in the compendium may be as little as a hundred years younger than the manuscript itself. 

c. 1550 AD

The Tale of Taliesin

This is the earliest surviving version of the late folk-tale, with which we are all familiar. Very briefly, the story opens with the witch Ceridwen brewing a cauldron of knowledge for her son Afagddu. By mischance, a little boy called Gwion, who is stirring the cauldron, tastes the brew and becomes all-knowing. Ceridwen chases him through a series of shape-changes until eventually she swallows him, and nine months later, gives birth to him as a little baby. She casts the child adrift on the ocean, and he is found caught up on a fishing weir by a chap called Elphin, who names him Taliesin, 'Shining Brow', and adopts him.

* * *

Now – how do we makes sense of all this? The great Celtic scholar Sir Ifor Williams (1881-1965) argued that what we need to do first is bifurcate Taliesin. 

He proposed that the original nucleus of the Taliesin material was a genuine historical personage, namely the late 6th-century poet Taliesin referred to in the 9th-century Historia Brittonum. Williams believed that a number of the poems in the early 14th century Book of Taliesin were in fact the original Old Welsh compositions of this early medieval bard, whom he understood to have been the praise-poet of king Urien of Rheged. Rheged was the Brythonic kingdom around present-day Carlisle and the Eden valley. Williams, who was a linguist of genius, thought he could identify twelve genuine 6th century poems amongst the 60-odd pieces in the Book of Taliesin. He published these with scholarly notes in his Canu Taliesin/The Poems of Taliesin, available from the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.

Such a wide gap between date of composition and the date of our only surviving manuscript (seven centuries!) gives scholars the willies, and modern Celtic scholarship has whittled Williams’ twelve poems down to ten or so. Further, linguistic scholarship now shows that the language of the Britons finally transformed itself from late-British into proto-Welsh only around 550 AD, so if Taliesin was a historical person creating verse at the end of that century, he must have been one of the very first wave of poets to compose in the ‘new’ incarnation of the language. However, Williams’ thesis is still pretty much generally accepted in the field. These poems are, therefore, taken to be the very earliest surviving literary works in the Welsh language. 

The other Taliesin Williams termed the ‘mythological’ or ‘mystical’ Taliesin, and he is to be identified with the character who appears in the late folk-tale. Many of the poems in the Book of Taliesin are full of bombastic descriptions of shape-changing, claims of identity with many substances and of encounters with many different historical, mythological and scriptural beings, staccato volleys of questions, and boasts of omnipresence and omnicognisance. Though only some of these are explicitly put in the mouth of Taliesin, it is pretty clear that they are all in the same persona. Williams argued that this ‘persona’ is obviously to be identified with the Taliesin of the late folk-tale, the shape-shifter, the infinitely-knowledgeable super-poet. It is clear that the basic outline of this tale, broadly, was well-known in Wales long before our earliest surviving version was written. 

So what we have now is, as I said, two Taliesins. The first is a late 6th century praise-poet, continuing the tradition of the praise-singers whom classical writers describe attending on Gaulish chiefs, and of the bards of Maelgwn Gwynedd, who were famously vituperated by Gildas in the early 6th century.* Thus this Taliesin is heir to a very ancient tradition of panegyric, which flows from the ancient Celts all the way down into the late Irish and Welsh Middle Ages and beyond. Our second Taliesin is the ‘mystical’ shape-changer. 

Williams used the poems which he considered genuinely 6th-century to construct a plausible narrative of the historical poet’s career, and as Williams was a very great scholar, his interpretation still makes much sense. (But I don’t rule out the possibility that some enterprising researcher may radically revise Williams’ theory in the future. The recent demonstration that at least one of the supposedly ‘historical’ poems is a 10th century ‘forgery’ is worrying for the authenticity of the rest of Williams’ cache of poems. But until then, his theory still holds good.)

Now a word on the character of this poetry: it is highly formulaic, full of mentions of Urien’s lavish generosity and skill in battle, and with remarkable emphasis on the poet’s own feelings. One of the poems is a moving elegy for his lord’s son, Owain son of Urien, again praising his generosity and military valour as the highest virtues. The poems tend to be of loose 8- or 9-syllable lines, ornamented with rhyme and lots of alliteration. They are paeans of praise, elegies, requests for reconciliation, not narrative poems. The language is fearsomely difficult – we normally teach people this poetry only when they have been reading Middle Welsh intensely for at least a year. Many lines are obscure and have to be emended, as one would expect for very old poetry which had passed through centuries of textual transmission.

What they are not, in any way at all, is ‘mystical’ or ‘druidic’. I’ll say that again – the earliest poems associated with Taliesin, which were written only a couple of centuries after the general conversion of the Britons to Christianity – have nothing pagan, druidic, or magical in them. The ‘Elegy for Owain’, one of the best poems, explicitly refers to the Christian God, asking that he consider the soul of the fallen hero.

The rest of the material in the Book of Taliesin, in the mouth of the ‘mystical’ Taliesin, is later. It must date to a 300-year period between about 900 AD and 1220 AD. Some individual poems in the manuscript can be dated precisely – the ‘Prophecy of Britain’ can be exactly dated to 930 AD. You may ask, quite reasonably, why the hell we can’t tie these other poems down any more precisely. The reasons are several. The first is that we often use references to contemporary political and social events to help date medieval poems. (This is, for example, how we know the date of the ‘Prophecy of Britain’ so accurately.) ‘Mythological’ poetry tends to be an inward-looking genre, which makes little reference to outer, worldly events and so in this case this approach tends to avail us nothing. Secondly, this kind of poetry, with its short lines and deliberate opacities, is rather unlike the rest of the verse which was being composed in the period – the religious verse and exalted praise-poetry of the poets known as the Gogynfeirdd, the 'Fairly early poets'. Thus it is difficult to compare it directly with other works surviving from the period, which might have helped us date individual poems. Finally, the skills required are highly specialised, and you need an expert in Welsh literature, linguistics, history and poetic forms to sit down and devote a decade or so of research-time to the material. Such people are few on the ground, but we are fortunate that Marged Haycock of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, has recently published a magisterial edition, commentary and introduction to the poems that are most of interest to pagans. She is undoubtedly the world expert on this poetry. (She also examined my PhD thesis - I was very honoured.) Her book is Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2007), with a companion volume, Prophetic Poems from the Book of Taliesin, forthcoming. Anyone who has a serious interest in Taliesin and the traditions associated with him cannot do without this book.

It’s safe to say that there is a spread of dates represented in the ‘mystical’ Taliesin poems in the Book of Taliesin. Some, like the famous ‘Spoils of Annwn’ are probably from 900-950 AD. Certainly it is one of the older poems in the voice of the ‘mystical’ Taliesin. Many others may be 12th century or later. Haycock suggests that some of them may – may – be the work of Llywarch ap Llywelyn, a poet who bore the sobriquet ‘Prydydd y Moch’, ‘the Poet of the Pigs’. He was active between 1174 AD and 1220 AD, in the Gwynedd court of Llywelyn ap Iorweth. There are certain persistent resemblances in diction to poems which we can ascribe to him with confidence, and Haycock makes a good case that many of the ‘mythological’ poems may in fact be his compositions. Just to add a bit of termporal focus – this means that many of the poems that druids and John Matthews look to for deeply archaic, ‘shamanic’ material date in fact to a century after the Norman Conquest of England, fifty odd years after Geoffrey of Monmouth’sHistory of the Kings of Britain and Life of Merlin, and only a century or so before Chaucer and Dafydd ap Gwilym were writing. They look like creations of the Welsh high Middle Ages, not the obscure Pagan/Christian borderland of the early Dark Ages.

So. What we have so far is a kernel of non-mystical, historical praise-poems by a flesh-and-blood Taliesin, from the end of the 6th century AD, and a slew of weird and wonderful poems in the voice of a shape-changing, time-travelling, all-knowing, rather insufferable ‘Taliesin’, dating from the period 900 AD to perhaps 1220 AD, probably clustering towards the end of that period, with a significant proportion perhaps the work of the great gogynfardd Prydydd y Moch.

Here’s the problem for pagans. If you want the later, ‘mystical’ poems to be the relics of druidic doctrine, why are they later, and not earlier?! One would expect the most apparently archaic and pagan poems to be the closest to the actual pagan period. If they in fact dated from the 6th century, when there presumably were still some non-Christians about in the wilds of Britain, and there were certainly still real druids in Ireland, there might be a case to answer. But they don’t. They’re centuries too late. A poem written in 1200 AD is intrinsically rather unlikely to convey accurate information about the beliefs of a class of people who were destroyed or driven underground eleven centuries before. Neither can one get away with the argument that these poems might have been handed down orally for centuries, and only written down for the first time between 900 and 1200 AD. This won’t wash, because the poems usually rhyme, and as languages change over centuries, word-endings change and this tends to abrade rhyme. (Rhyme is one of our most useful tools when it comes to dating medieval Celtic verse.) An oral poem that rhymed in 575 AD would no longer rhyme in 1200 AD, because the nuts and bolts of the words had shifted and altered. (To Chaucer, ‘breath’ and ‘heath’ rhymed. To us, they no longer do. Something similar happened in Welsh.)

Instead, what we need to ask is: ‘What the hell happened to the name of Taliesin between the historical poet’s death around 600 AD, and around 1050 AD, when we suddenly see the ‘mystical’ figure taking shape? Why would Welsh poets from 1050 AD – 1200 AD be so interested in creating such a figure?’ As actors say, ‘what’s my motivation in this scene?’ It must have happened in the latter half of the 9th century, since to the author of the Historia Brittonum around 830 AD Taliesin was simply a historical poet of the 6th century (not the most important of the period, either), and not a magical, shape-shifting psychonaut. So this vogue for fashioning the ‘mystical’ Taliesin is probably something that got underway in the late 9th and early 10th century.

It seems to me that at this period Taliesin, as a name, was like the string dipped in a glass of sugar solution, about which crystals form. It is very likely that Taliesin was developing a legend by the year 1050 AD at the very latest – we can see that the authors ofCulhwch and Olwen and ‘The Spoils of Annwn’ were happily associating him with Arthur, and that the redactor of the Four Branches places him among the retinue of Bran the Blessed. (The historical Taliesin must have lived 150-odd years after Arthur, if the latter ever existed.) There is some evidence that at this stage, in the 10th and 11th centuries, there was a kind of ‘antiquarian’ vogue amongst Welsh literati – an interest in the Old North, its kings, dynasties and poets. This may have kick-started a process of mythologizing around the core of poems which had been transmitted under the name of Taliesin, and speculation about the power of the ancient poet. 

A little later, Welsh court poetry during the 11-13th centuries was reaching one kind of climax of complexity and sophistication, and the professional court poets were often, it seems, rather full of themselves. Self-dramatisation was a career requirement. They had a high opinion of their own learning, considering themselves masters of not only native lore, poetic forms, topography, history, genealogy and story (the complex of lore which the Irish called senchus), but also of the mainstream ecclesiastical intellectual curriculum. They were inordinately proud of the fact that they were experts in ‘book-learning’ - the Bible, the apocrypha, hagiography, the Latin language, school-texts like Orosius and Isidore, and to a certain extent medieval science - as well as the native lore which was the natural inheritance of their order. We can detect a certain boastful jockeying with clerics and lesser, rival poets for social position, patronage, and prestige. (If you want to sample this kind of poetry in translation, I recommend Rhian Andrews’ Welsh Court Poetry.)

Marged Haycock argues, and I agree, that the ‘mythical’ or ‘mystical’ Taliesin isn’t a ‘worn-out old druid making a last stand for paganism’, but should be seen as a kind of self-congratulatory totem of the top-class professional court poets of 11-13th century Wales. With his challenges and harangues, he is a kind of boastful symbol of their self-confidence and power, endlessly rattling off their range of knowledge, vaunting the ability of poetry to penetrate the past and future with immediacy and power. Professional poets were, after all, expensive for a prince to maintain: they required board and upkeep, and due acknowledgement. As a result of shelling out liberally, every so often you’d get a praise-poem or an elegy, in very difficult, high-faluting language. There must have been an urge on the part of some aristocrats to patronise less exalted, less expensive, less difficult forms of poet, who were not proper professional bards. ‘Taliesin’ may, on one level, be the professional poets’ way of saying: look what we can do - our power, our closeness to the past and the future, our huge, all-encompassing repertoire of knowledge. In essence, ‘Taliesin’ is a symbol of the 11-12th century poets’ sense of their own professional mystique. 

Haycock has carefully analysed the poems in the Book of Taliesin for their sources and analogues. She has turned an expert eye on all those poems which drove old boys like poor J. Gwenogvryn Evans off their heads with druidical fancies a hundred years ago. Her basic assertion – brilliantly, meticulously sustained – is that the kind of lore we find in these ‘mystical’ poems is perfectly ordinary medieval legend, science, school-learning and folklore dressed up: exactly the kinds of material you’d expert the learned literati of high medieval Wales to be conversant with. It’s things like the tides, the planets, the divisions of the earth, the elements, the Venerable Bede’s On the Nature of the Universe, classical stories of Hercules and Alexander the Great, biblical Apocrypha, apocalyptic prophecies, characters from Irish literature, the kinds of legends we see referred to in the Triads, stories about the family of Dôn, materia medica, and tales about Arthur. Incidentally, shape-shifting, one must remember, is one of the most ubiquitous story-motifs the world over (think of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and occurs frequently in medieval Welsh and Irish literature. Linking it to druidic beliefs in reincarnation or to ‘Celtic shamanism’ simply isn’t necessary or probable. ‘Urbane, international and learned’ (as Haycock describes this poetry), ancient druidic wisdom it ain’t. 

For example, in the poem ‘The Great Song of the World’, Taliesin describes how he is fashioned by God, who formed his ‘seven consistencies’:

Of fire and earth,

Of water and air,

Of mist and flowers,

And the fruitful wind.

Druids have inevitably seen these as ‘the ancient druid elements’, and no doubt some OBODite somewhere has duly incorporated mist, flowers and wind into their circle-casting. This list begins, of course, with the orthodox four elements of the ancient and medieval worlds. However, in a number of medieval texts from the 8th century onwards man is often visualised as a microcosm, fashioned from flowers, cloud, and so on, as well as earth, air, fire and water. (Often salt as well, for tears and sweat.) There is no doubt that the author of this poem was drawing on this kind of material. In essence, almost everything that looks weird and wonderful in the poems in the persona of the ‘mystical Taliesin’ turns out to be from the mainstream of medieval European lore and knowledge. This has led to some delightful ironies: the ‘seven senses’ described in the same poem have been incorporated into chants for use by John Matthews-style ‘Celtic Shamans’, but Haycock shows that they derive in fact from the Biblical Apocrypha and classical sources. The very question-and-answer format of many of the poems can be shown to derive from popular medieval dialogue texts, which often discuss much the same material. (‘What supports the world? What are human beings made of? What is the wind? Into how many regions is the earth divided? What man never died and what man was never born?’) This all sounds terribly mysterious and druidical, but in fact these are the sort of questions that apprentice monks used to tease each other with for entertainment. 

So. Celtic scholars look at neo-pagan descriptions of Taliesin with a mixture of pleasure and polite bafflement: pleasure that this medieval figure is still of interest and importance to many modern people, but bafflement because they have no truck for the ‘druidic’ or ‘pagan’ Taliesin, because it just isn’t borne out by the actual texts on which our understanding of the figure and his context must be based. The neo-pagan habit of reading the Book of Taliesin poems in the expectation that they will tell us something about the pagan 1st century, instead of the Christian 12th century, is a chronic disaster. What’s worse, scholars have know that this was a wrong tree up which to bark for 150 years. (In 1858, the scholar D. W. Nash referred in his book Taliesin to the forgeries and fantasies of Iolo Morgannwg as a ‘monstrous imposture’.) The problem is that high-level Celtic scholarship and popular writing decoupled around 1900, and so a slew of writers such as Lewis Spence produced highly imaginative and wholly wrong accounts of druidic beliefs and so on, drawing on poor translations of this poetry. These books (Spence’s The Mysteries of Britain is a classic of the genre) were wildly popular with English readers, and in turn heavily influenced people like Ross Nicholls, and thus, eventually, filtered through into the flowering of neo-pagan druidry. In the 90s a lot of these books were cheaply reprinted and many neo-pagans must have had the same reaction I did – I remember reading Spence aged about sixteen, in Cornwall, utterly and completely entranced, and believing every word. To re-emphasise: no one who works professionally on the history, language or literature of medieval Wales has believed any of this old tripe for well over a century, so it is a melancholy thing to find it still (still) being regurgitated by enthusiastic, well-meaning neo-druids. 

One of the saddest episodes in this protracted ‘Does the Taliesin poetry tell us about the doctrine of the druids or not?’ battle involved a scholar called J. Gwenogvryn Evans, whom I mentioned above. In 1910, he produced a simply magnificent facsimile of the Book of Taliesin, and a transcription notable for its scrupulous textual accuracy. It is so good that it was only superseded by the digital facsimile now provided by the National Library of Wales. But he fell in with the druidical-mysteries school badly and inexplicably, and in 1915 published his colossally-misguided Poems from the Book of Taliesin, which was his ‘reconstruction’ of the material according to his theories. This second volume had the misfortune to be reviewed by Sir John Morris-Jones, the greatest Welsh scholar of his time, in a book-length article in the journal Y Cymmrodor. Morris-Jones savaged Evans, demonstrating at great length and in cruelly eloquent detail precisely why Evans’ volume was completely and utterly worthless. ‘That all this trash’, purred Morris-Jones, ‘should be printed in the best ink on the finest paper, is sad indeed.’ Much the same might be said (and is) about the modern heirs to Evans’ Poems, such as John Matthews’ abysmal Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman. (An jolly half-hour can be spent comparing Matthews’ ‘translations’ at the end of this latter volume with those of Haycock, which represent perhaps the finest Welsh scholarship of our day.)

So far so good. There is another aspect to this material, however, which complicates matters. The fact is that some aspects of the late folktale about the ‘mystical’ Taliesin look like rather archaic ideas. Transformations, the acquisition of poetic inspiration, the association of poetry and prophecy, this weird stuff about an ugly boy and a beautiful one – much of it can be paralleled from Irish medieval literature. Ideas which are shared over Ireland and Wales tend to be old, and both the Irish and Welsh words for ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ show an etymological link to prophecy and seership. (There’s nothing especially ‘Celtic’ about this – many of the same ideas are found in Norse texts.)

So the mystical Taliesin material, both in the Book of Taliesin and in the late folk-tale, does seem to preserve some pretty ancient concepts. One can instantly see why the court poets of the 11-13th centuries might well have been interested in this kind of stuff, concerned as they were to bolster the prestige and mystique of their profession. (Patrick Ford's Ystoria Taliesin, an edition of the folktale, has examined this material in most detail.) Though the ideas are ancient, their hitching to the name of Taliesin, the 6th century historical poet, was not. 

It’s not immediately clear why Taliesin – and not any of the other poets mentioned in the Historia Brittonum – became the ‘hook’ for this material, to which, as we saw above, much fairly commonplace lore has been added, along with a penchant for the riddling questions which formed part of several well-known and understood medieval genres. I personally think the poets of the 11-13th centuries chose Taliesin as their symbolic figurehead for the following reason. It’s possible that they simply didn't have much early poetry apart from what we now call the ‘historical’ Taliesin poems, and the Gododdin of Aneirin; in other words, that they were in much the same situation as us, being sadly short on poetry from the 6th and 7th centuries. Now the historical Taliesin’s poetry is intensely ego-focused: he’s always talking about himself, pushing his own persona to the fore, and occasionally says things like: 

I saw Easter

With its myriad candles 

And myriad plants.

I saw leaves as they are wont to sprout;

I saw branches equally laden with flowers.

I saw the attributes of a most generous king…

This tendency to emphasise the poet's subjectivity is akin to the boasting 'I have beens' which fill the 'mystical' poems, and may well have inspired them. The Gododdin is quite different: Aneirin makes almost no authorial impression. He leaves no feeling of character. So, if the court poets were looking for a bombastic figurehead dating from the dawn of their tradition, Taliesin the bard of Urien of Rheged was the obvious choice. To his name was hitched some ancient traditions about the nature of poetry and its acquisition, and gradually he was elaborated into the symbolic, multifunctional persona whom we find in the ‘mystical’ poetry. 

He appears to have been a popular character. Much medieval poetry was all about performance. The Taliesin persona afforded great scope for entertainment – boastful and inflated, he was a poet, a warrior, a sage, a shape-shifter, a traveller in time and space who consorted with biblical figures and the characters we know from the Mabinogi. (A faint parallel with Doctor Who suggests itself...) His questions, which may seem weird and resonantly esoteric to us, would have been less confusing for a medieval audience familiar with the texts on which the authors of these poems were drawing. Many of these poems have long been understood by pagans as arcane and hallowed semi-scripture, behind which one may catch an echo of druidical incantations. But the figure of ‘Taliesin’, so loved by neopagans for his shamanic air, may in fact have been designed to provoke a sophisticated, high-medieval courtly audience to laughter and cheerful head-scratching. Instead of imagining these poems as the eerie chaunting of a bearded sage hidden away in some Welsh cave, preserving the rites and legends of the ‘Old Gods’, we should imagine a finely-dressed reciter or court-poet declaiming them to a merry audience of aristocrats, nobles and diplomats around the year 1200 AD. As a bravura, prestige-bolstering exercise by court poets taking a rest from their usual stock-in-trade of praise and lament, poems in the voice of this uber-poet would have provided splendid entertainment, testifying to the professional poets’ breadth, vitality and inventiveness. 

* * *

* One of Gildas' best purple-passages. Rhetorically addressing Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd, he splutters: 'When the attention of thy ears has been caught, it is not the praises of God, in the tuneful voice of Christ's followers, with its sweet rhythm, and the song of church melody, that are heard, but thine own praises (which are nothing); the voice of the rascally crew yelling forth, like Bacchanalian revellers, full of lies and foaming phlegm, so as to besmear everyone near them.' This is our earliest description of vernacular praise-poetry in Britain. 

Our sources cover a few pages of description, some secondhand, from various classical writers, and a very few scraps of material from early medieval Ireland. (On the whole we are safer not to take the literary druids of medieval Irish saga as historical sources; if we must do so, then extreme caution is needed.) None of it is in a druid's own words. From this ramshackle dossier, we can say one thing, and only one thing, with confidence. Ahem. 'The druids were the magical and religious specialists of at least some Celtic-speaking peoples in Northern Europe in the centuries immediately either side of the birth of Christ.' Beyond that, we are in the realms of supposition, speculation, informed guesswork, dream, and ultimately outright fantasy. 

The ancient druids have been on the receiving end of a growth industry of the imagination since the early modern period, lending them a vast literary, artistic and spiritual afterlife. With his usual eloquence, Ronald Hutton has shown how selective reading of the classical authors has brought about several different but overlapping ways of thinking about druids: as noble patriots, as wise natural philosophers, as proto-ecologists, as demonic and bloodthirsty idolaters. The influence of one or other of these templates tends to be present unconsciously even in people who think they are being objective and scholarly about the druids. The contradictory variety of these images serves only to underline how very little we know about them, and thus how versatile they are historical figures onto whom contemporary concerns can be projected. 

But the druids from their rediscovery have attracted people who want to adopt their name and mantle, usually imagining them in either their guise as noble patriots or as a combination of the natural philosopher and green guru. It is worth pausing over quite how remarkable a fact this is: you don't get people wanting to be flamens or vestal virgins or Etruscan haruspices, on the whole. (Don't write in.) It may even be the very paucity of known facts about the druids that allows people to want to imitate them: if we knew more, I think it likely that they would emerge as less attractive figures. One can play the game of Cleopatra's nose with this - how many more facts would we need to know about them for the historical impulse to play at being druids to have failed to take?

Anyway, as a result, within the enormous body of writings since 1500 about the druids, there is now a large subsection of material by and for people who regard 'druidry' as their spiritual path. But the exiguousness of our knowledge of the ancient druids (I reiterate that it amounts to next to nothing) has meant that neo-druidic authors have had to employ great cunning to use up all that ink and paper. 

The usual strategy until the 1990s was a maximalist one. Absolutely everything that could possibly be related to the ancient druids was brought in. Romantic Celtic pseudo-scholarship was repeated as fact, and prehistoric monuments of all kinds were interrogated until they yielded up Pythagorean doctrine. A dash of eastern philosophy went in, folklore and Frazerianism lent a hand. The best example of this sincere if sententious approach is Ross Nicholl's The Book of Druidry, which is full of evocative twaddle like the following:

From the trees Teut draws out many beautiful spirits with healing, cathartic and defensive powers, whose chief is Esus. Into the stones Teut writes the records and infuses the messages of the higher worlds. (The Book of Druidry, p. 127).

It should be absolutely clear that this has no relation at all to an accurate understanding of Gaulish religion, whence come the deities Esus and Teutatis. With the arrival on the druidic scene of Caitlín and John Matthews in the 1980s, the use of medieval Celtic sources became commoner. But unfortunately, their ahistoricist approach meant that they worked in isolation from the Academy, where research then in full swing was demonstrating that medieval Irish sources in particular were less transparent pictures of the pre-Christian world than had once been thought. Instead they were in fact early medieval creations of great artistry, and needed to be read firmly in that context. Medieval Celtic sources were seized upon as new material from which to (re)construct druidry, and this inclusive spirit is represented by books such as Maya Magee Sutton's Druid Magic. This throws conception and misconception alike into the mix to produce a fat, glossy tome for the New Age market. As a primer for today's seeker, I'm sure it's delightful. It's also almost entirely pseudoscholarly fantasy. Inevitably, there's a confident chapter called 'Divining with Ogham', the mystical and arboreal nature of the ogham alphabet being an article of faith among Gaelicising neo-druids - ideas long shown by scholars of early Ireland to be built on very shaky foundations indeed.

And so it goes on. But there have been other attempts to get to grips with the fact that we know rather more about, say, ancient horticulture than we do about the druids. The fashionable response to this quandary in recent years has been that of Emma Restall-Orr and her erstwhile colleague Philip Shallcrass, who have a surer grasp of the Reality Principle than many of their forebears. Theirs might be termed a minimalist approach, in that they do not attempt to use sources to reconstruct ancient druidry, whereas writers from Nicholls to Sutton firmly believe that they are meticulously unearthing a dormant western wisdom-tradition. 

Shallcrass founded the British Druid Order in the early 1980s, and he and Restall Orr made the idea of 'inspiration' central to their version of neo-druidry. The Welsh word awen is frequently pressed into service to denote this concept, though neo-druids with an Irish bent often prefer the term imbas. In Restall Orr’s usage, the word is used to mean something like the axé of Brazilian Candomblé: the élan vital, the life-force of nature experienced as spiritual, even divine, energy, bringing about a state of ecstasy that is both intoxicating and clarifying. 

This is certainly an expansion of the word’s Welsh meaning, where it refers primarily to the poetic inspiration of the professional poets, the quasi-divine afflatus of the Muse. It possesses a long and noble history in Welsh poetics, in which it is difficult to assess to what degree the term itself is a rhetorical figure. Such niceties of literary and cultural history, however, are a little lost on the majority of modern druids. Restall Orr has, to be fair, emphasised that awen when properly experienced results in creativity, although medieval Welsh poets would have found the idea of needing awen for non-poetic purposes absurd, and the modern expansion of its range of application is an anachronism. In recent times, the former emphasis on the creative products of awen has faded into the background somewhat, especially with regard to poetry; one wonders, basely, whether this is an act of discretion given the quality of so much neo-pagan verse. Awen is most often presented now as a kind of flow of imaginative connection, rather than the Castalian draught than allows one to fashion a poem.

Shifting a term drawn from a medieval poetic vocabulary to the centre-stage of a neo-pagan religion is also a bit of a fudge. (I entertain fantasies of Wicca adopting the literary conventions of amour courtois to describe the relationship of the devotee with the Goddess.) It is well-known that there was a degree of connection between the ancient druid and the professional poets of Gaul, so that they formed in a sense one order. That much is uncontroversial. What is much more controversial is the question of to what degree there was historical continuity between the ancient druids and the poets of medieval Ireland and Wales. It used to be thought, for example, that the Irish fili, or learned poet (a title which etymologically means ‘seer’) was merely a druid under a threadbare Christian cloak. This view cannot be maintained, and has been under strong critique in the Academy for many decades. Still less can it be said of the medieval Welsh pencerdd or bardd teulu. My own view is that the poetics of medieval Wales and Ireland show certain shared features suggestive of Celtic antiquity, and reminiscent of what ancient authors tell us of poetry among the Gauls: an emphasis on somewhat impersonal elegy and eulogy as the dominant poetic modes, a strong link between the nobleman and his praise-poet, the stress laid on memorised genealogies. How much that had to do with what Caesar’s druides got up to is wholly unknown. It has become increasingly hard to maintain that the kinds of obscure knowledge boasted of by medieval Irish and Welsh poets possess any real continuity with the world of the ancient druids. Upon expert examination, such vaunted knowledge usually turns out to be in the mainstream of the medieval European curriculum, or, in Ireland, to draw on the vast body of learned pseudo-history created under ecclesiastical influence after the conversion. 

I strongly suspect, however, that the relationship between the professional praise-poet and his patron did bear certain similarities to that between the ancient Celtic chieftain and his druid. It would have been rhetorically presented as uniquely intimate, for example. Such an arrangement would perhaps have persisted over many generations, successive sons and grandsons of a particular druid serving the successive descendants of a given chieftain. (Note that I say ‘sons’ – I find the evidence for ancient female druids to be extremely thin. If they occurred, then like female professionals in early medieval Ireland, I suspect that they would have been very much anomalous exceptions brought about by a druid failing to have male heirs. Ideas of early Ireland as a kind of feminist paradise are nonsense.)

However, placing awen – poetic inspiration - at the centre of neo-druidry in this way has one great advantage. It elevates the unbidden and subjective intuitions of the individual to the status of sacred revelation. The neo-druid, by following inner promptings, by chanting, by creative responses to sacred sites and the natural world, can as it were weave the very bolt of cloth from which their personal spirituality is to be cut and tailored. The resonance and suggestiveness of ancient fragments, whether of words or in the landscape, when duly mortared by the imagination, thus bypass the awkward question of continuity between ancient and modern and cause religion to condense out of the air. As awen was important to the poets of medieval Wales (for which Shallcrass et al. encourage us to read ‘the Druids’), it is suggested that this modus operandi somehow represents being true to the ‘spirit’ of ancient druidry. (A spirit of which, needless to say, we know nothing.)

In fact, it is an ingenious strategy for coping with the fundamental problem of modern druidry, which is that it is an inverted pyramid in time. As we have seen, a vast body of modern material – books, blogs, workshops, courses, camps - depends on a smaller corpus of Romantic writing, which in turn depends upon, ultimately, only a tiny number of passages from classical authors of varying knowledge and attitude. Thus any attempt to return ad fontes means that one slips down the underside of the inverted pyramid and is left, at the final remove, with next to nothing. Shifting ‘inspiration’ to centre-stage neatly solves this problem, because anything at all can be made use of and labelled ‘druidry’, so long as it ‘inspires’.

To live this kind of spirituality requires an immense amount of personal responsibility, and - dare I say it - character. One has to continually inspire oneself to keep working at it and deepening one's perceptions, and if Restall Orr's books are anything to go on, she does this with great single-mindedness and a curiously paradoxical kind of ascetic sensuality - lingeringly smelling apples instead of eating them, for example. When one depends on inspiration alone, I fear that the Scylla of sentimentality will raven on one side whilst the Charybdis of monomania yawns on the other. As a result, many people who follow neo-druidry end up closely imitating Restall Orr, whether consciously or unconsciously. 

Restall Orr’s agenda – and she has been quite explicit about this – is to create a kind of British animism or shamanism whilst still sheltering under the lea of the term ‘druid’. Ultimately, her version of druidry resembles the religion of the Algonquian tribe heart-breakingly depicted in Terence Malick's The New World, say, far more than it does any realistic picture of Iron Age belief. Indeed, in this kind of neo-druidry there is no temporal focus on the historical period of the real druids at all. The entirety of the pre-Christian past of the British Isles and Ireland - from the neolithic to the Norsemen - is co-opted and incorporated under the heading of 'honouring the ancestors', and because, inevitably, it is found to be 'a source of exquisite inspiration'. 

It is clear that one should applaud the creation of a new and tolerant eco-spirituality; but what is less clear is what on earth any of it has to do - has ever had to do - with our ancient Celtic magico-religious functionaries, apart from the use of that evocative name. After all, sometime in the 8th century, that last Irish druid died peacefully in his bed, or fell off a roof, or his horse, or had his throat cut by brigands. Since then, there have been no others, and there cannot be.

A lot of neo-Druidic interest in history and literature is very narrow. At worst, many druids are interested in the literatures of medieval Wales and Ireland (priceless world treasures) only for what they might tell us about the pre-Christian religion of the Celts. ('Not much' is the short answer, as I'll discuss below.) This strikes me as a shame. The literatures and cultures are so very interesting in and of themselves that it's sad to get stuck with an erratic, Peter Berresford Ellis view of them and not explore more deeply and with greater sensitivity. I dislike the strip-mining of the past, with semi-understood elements of medieval texts being used to cobble together neo-druidic rituals.

2) The ogham alphabet was not a druidic tree-calendar.

The Old Irish word properly refers to an native Irish alphabet of strokes or notches designed to be incised on stone, and probably wood, attested as inscriptions from the 5th to the 6th centuries in Ireland, and perhaps also from the late 4th. The origin of the letters has been much-debated: the current scholarly consensus is that the distribution of the letters in the system is derives from the classification of letters found in Latin grammarians of the 1st-4th centuries AD, and thus is an imitation of Latin literacy, as indeed is the custom of inscribing stone monuments. The inscriptions, usually border markers or grave memorials, occur in a broad band across southern Ireland and areas of Irish settlement in southern Wales, always in the Irish language. The writing of other Celtic languages in ogham is completely ahistorical, with the exception of occasional examples of Pictish use of the script. The name was related by the medieval Irish themselves to Ogma, one of the champions of the Tuatha Dé Danann or Irish gods, who was supposed to have devised the alphabet.

Due to the eccentric theories of the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948), it is common among druids to regard the script as a mystical or occult ‘tree alphabet’, because a minority of the letters are named after trees. The tree-link is probably a red-herring: Damian McManus showed in A Guide to Ogam (Maynooth, 1991), pp. 35-43, that most of the names are not, in fact, trees, and never have been. Further, the idea that the alphabet is a tree-calendar, in which each tree/letter corresponds to a lunar month, has developed, and even spawned a kind of ersatz Celtic astrology, in which the ‘tree-months’ are imagined as resembling the signs of the zodiac. All these are modern concepts. There is also nothing to link the script to the pre-Christian druids of Ireland, though it is not unlikely that as the pagan educated class they were familiar with it around the time of conversion. In all, the concept of ogham as a sacred, druidic alphabet and calendar is deeply-entrenched among modern pagans and almost entirely fictitious. 

3) The poet Taliesin was not 'the last Celtic shaman'. Likewise, the Book of Taliesin is not a repository of ancient druidical wisdom.

I could beat my head against the wall until little bits of blood and tissue went flying but still this idea wouldn't sink in. (Pagan readers, restore my faith in humanity and please prove me wrong.)

I went so far as to write a whole article about this issue here.

4) The bloody texts haven't been bloody 'bowdlerised' by Christian monks.

This view is trotted out almost everywhere, and is my No 1 druidical bromide. One is supposed to imagine, I suppose, a story-teller or druid reciting some tale about the gods or the Otherworld, c. 700AD, whilst a scowling man in a musty old habit with a tonsure and a quill pen scribbles it down. Every so often, our monk hears some overly sexual or 'Pagan' detail, and says to himself: 'Oh, goodness me, no! We can't be having that!' and alters the story to something more suitable. You might as well give the monk a black cape and a big twirly moustache, and have him tie the poor druid to some train-tracks.

In short, this view is way, way out of date. It can only be maintained if one remains in total ignorance of the last 70+ years of work on these texts, and shuts one's eyes to the whole nature of early medieval Irish literary culture.

This requires a brief history of 20th century work in the field of early medieval Irish writing. The old-fashioned view was that the Irish myths and sagas represented written versions of immemorial pagan oral tales, somewhat altered, and that they were a good quarrying ground for reconstructions of pre-Christian Irish religion and culture. (Comparative mythology and so on was very 'in' during the first part of the last century.) According to this view, the scribes who produced the ancestors of our extant texts were recording more-or-less dodgy versions of the pre-Christian tales of their ancestors.

Then a new wave of scholarship broke, led by James Carney but followed by scholars such as Donnchadh Ó Corráin and Kim McCone, among many distinguished others. Their approach reconsidered the very nature of early Irish culture, revisioning the societal matrix in which these tales took shape. Essentially, they have argued that the native poetic class, the filid, were in no sense druids après la lettre*, but were instead part of a single, complex, synthesised culture with Christianity at its heart. According to this view, a fusion between native and ecclesiastical learning took place early, in the 7th century or so. Literacy – inseparable from ecclesiastical, scriptural learning – rapidly became a prerequisite for the filid. It seems we are wrong to imagine a kind of ‘two cultures’ situation, with the native poets continuing with their orally-transmitted and essentially pre-Christian tales, whilst the monasteries educated their inhabitants in scriptural exegesis and a variant of the standard syllabus of late antiquity. Rather, they overlapped a great deal, and the native culture was pressed into the service of the Church. 

Unusually for medieval Europe, there was a high opinion of the vernacular; though compositions we have start out in the early period as mainly Latin, as time goes on they become mainly Irish. Indeed in a text called ‘The Scholar’s Primer’ originally from around 700 but added to over the centuries, we find an extraordinary origin legend for the Irish language. In this story, after human language is confused at the Tower of Babel, a man called Fénius takes all the best bits from the various new tongues and creates a constructed language out of them – namely Irish. This bizarre legend places Irish not only as effectively superior to the sacred languages of Hebrew, Greek and Latin, but makes Irish a re-creation of the perfect language spoken before Babel, and thus in Paradise. It’s a very bold move.

So. We now think that the filid and the ecclesiastical scholars are on the same, literate educational continuum. It's perfectly possible that they were often, in human terms, relations: of two noble brothers, one might go into the Church, and one might become a professional poet. Both would have shared knowledge of scripture, Latin, and Christianity. Both shared in the creation of a wonderfully complex pseudohistory for Ireland (inspired in part by Eusebius), in which the pagan past of Ireland could be imagined as 'their' Old Testament, with the arrival of Patrick parallelling the career of Elijah, or, more daringly, the advent of Christ.

It’s absolutely clear that the ecclesiastically educated – the literate mandarin class of the monastic townships – valued their native culture highly. But not like a modern anthropologist might do – rather they aimed and succeeded in absorbing the pre-Christian past into the Christian present, by, for example, remodelling once-mythic tales on Biblical patterns. A favourite topos was to have pagan figures from the ancient past miraculously live on to encounter Christian saints or historical personages, which authenticates and finds a valued place for their stories under the new dispensation. So St Patrick encounters Cú Chulainn, the poet Senchán encounters Fergus Mac Roich. 

Early Irish churchmen weren't just guiltily scribbling down some pagan tales, but were consciously engaged in the project of creating a national literature, intrinsically tied up with the acquisition of Christianity. The Christian religion had brought to Ireland not only writing (ogam apart), but specifically Latin writing and Latin literature. The Irish took to Latin like the proverbial ducks to water, and many early Irish Churchmen were accomplished stylists in the language. (Columbanus, for example). So recent scholarship has emphasised that the whole idea of creating written, prose literature is an idea that came with Christianity and was deeply bound up with it. (There were of course oral poets before the conversion.) The tales that survive from early medieval Ireland need to be read in this context - as drawing on ancient material, but cleverly crafting it with great artistry to produce something new and relevant to contemporary educated literati and pseudohistorians, both secular and of the Church. They don't have Christian 'accretions', which can be sloughed off by the determined neo-pagan: the texts are fundamentally products of an unusually self-conscious and creative early medieval Christian culture.

It will be apparent that modern druids don't like this idea much; the whole project of reconstructing pre-Christian Irish religion depends on old, outdated scholarship, and the tiresome, prissy tendency to demonise 'the Christian monks' who composed these texts. It's thanks to them that we have these wonderful tales at all, and it would be nice if druids would read them contextually for what they actually are, rather than for what they would like them to be. If you are interested in these issues, one of my colleagues has a very useful reading list here.

5) The Irish voyage tales are a Christian genre, and not a 'Celtic Book of the Dead'.

This is mere Matthewsisme, as Harold Bloom might say. The relationships between the early Irish wonder-voyages are tricky to sort out, but huge progress has been made. In essence, we have a body of tales from the 8th/9th/10th centuries, which tell of voyages to the Otherworld, conceived of as magical islands over the sea to the west of Ireland.** Analysing their mutual influences requires high-level scholarly skills, and sheds a great deal of light on the development of early medieval Irish literary ambitions for the vernacular. With their dream-like elisions of logic and blurring of the boundaries between simile and metaphor, they are easily some of the most fascinating stories in an altogether fascinating corpus. Many of the episodes curiously anticipate Surrealism with their exploration of unconscious dream imagery. In particular, inconsequentiality is mingled freely with the very dangerous, with no way of telling which might be which. For example, in The Voyage of the Úa Corra, a monster rises from the surface of a lake, leaving each of the voyagers terrified that it will attack him in particular (a nervy, dream-like subjectivity again); but instead, it sinks below the lake’s surface again, as if following some entirely inscrutable imperative and logic of its own. In The Voyage of Máel Dúin's Boat, the mariners come across a giant herdsman, who is unfazed by their appearance; despite the fact that they frighten his charges, he reacts only with mild peevishness, giving the whole episode a mystifyingly inconsequential air. In contrast, in the famous episode on the ‘Island of the Fiery Cat’, the animal is deceptively innocent-looking:

Dollotar isa tech ba moam díb 7 ní rabe nech and acht cat beg baí forsin lár oca chluichiu for ceithrib uaitnib lecdaib. No linged di cach uaitni for araile.

…

‘In dúinne forácbad in so?’ ol Máel Dúin frisin cat. Dosnchachae talmaidiu 7 gabais cluiche arisi.

…

Asbert in tres comaltae Maíle Dúin: ‘In bérsa lium munce dinaib muncaib si?’ ‘Náthó’, ol Máel Dúin, ‘ní cen chomét atá a tech.’ Dobert lais araí sin co rrici lár ind liss. Dolluid in cat ina diaid 7 leblaing trít amal saigit tentidi 7 loiscithi comba luaithred. Luid arisi co ndessid for uaitni. 

(They went into the house which was the largest of them, and there was nobody there - except for a small cat which was in the middle, playing upon four stone pillars. It was leaping from each pillar to the other.

‘Has this been left for us?’ said Máel Dúin to the cat. It looked at him suddenly, and went back to playing.

One of Máel Dúin’s three fosterbrothers said: ‘Shall I take with me a necklace from among these necklaces?’ ‘No!’ said Máel Dúin. ‘The house is not without a guardian.’ Nevertheless the fosterbrother took it as far as the middle of the enclosure. The cat went after them, and shot through him like a fiery arrow, and burnt him up so that he became ashes. The cat went back to sit on a pillar.)

Here, the cat kills curiosity. The sinister atmosphere is conveyed by several brilliant touches. First, the island has buildings but is deserted, with the unsettling perspective and eerie vacancy of a De Chirico painting. Second, the only inhabitant is a seemingly domesticated animal, all the less threatening for being ‘small’, but which is unsettlingly self-absorbed in its inexplicably repetitive ‘play’. The detail that when Máel Dúin speaks to the cat it looks at him is masterful, because it suggests a degree of cool intelligence in the animal – if it is an animal – and a weird mechanical purpose to its game. Indeed, we are left with the impression that the cat has hopped from one pillar to the other in the empty hall for all eternity and will continue to do so for ever. However, there is a development here, because as the journey proceeds, Máel Dúin learns a caution that is surely related to his eventual forbearance in avenging his father’s death. Bemused blundering leads to unpleasant deaths, as the foster-brothers learn upon their unfortunate fellow’s incineration. Floundering in uncertainty, in a world whose semiotic order has become unreadable, Máel Dúin learns forbearance and a spirit of careful experiment because the effects of carelessness might vary from the merely surreal to the fatal.

One of the main problems with these texts is that the boundaries of the genre - known as immrama, 'rowings-about', and pronounced 'IMM-ruvver' - are extremely porous. Almost every example is in some way odd or exceptional. Suffice it to say, it's not clear that the genre has important roots in pre-Christian Irish beliefs at all. Indeed, one of the most important early tales that contributed towards the genesis of the genre, Echtrae Chonnlai, has been convincingly interpreted as in part, a Christian allegory. That magical woman from the land of the ever-living sinless people, with their wonderful, victorious king? She's Ecclesia, i.e. the Church, not 'the Goddess'. (I accept this view, which is Kim McCone's, and find it convincing. Others don't.) 

The most likely candidate for the earliest of the fully-fledged voyage-tales is in Latin, the Nauigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, orVoyage of the Boat of St Brendan the Abbot. (David Dumville puts its composition in the last decades of the 8th century.) It is utterly obviously a Christian story, an allegory of the monastic life, with the voyage being a metaphor for earthly existence, not one's post-mortem journey to the Otherworld. By undertaking the journey, the mariners undergo a purification and also receive warnings, both literal and symbolic, of the pains of Hell; they also anticipate the joys of Heaven. As it's in Latin, it's clearly designed for an audience of churchmen. The other voyage-tales, which are later and in Irish, redeploy this idea (the voyage as allegory of the religious life) for a secular, aristocratic audience. They are designed both to entertain and provoke wonder, but also to make an audience of noblemen (and women) think about the state of their souls viz a viz Heaven and Hell. For example, in The Voyage of Máel Dúin's Boat, the hero Máel Dúin’s journey gives him the Christian humility not to abrogate God’s vengeance to himself and kill his father’s murderers, which was its original purpose. The voyages are spiritually edifying to the visionary or voyager and to his community. 

The Irish voyage-tales as spiritual allegories are thus Christian through and through, and this is, to be blunt, pretty obvious if you actually read them. (As one can, here).

Alternatively, you could do what Caitlín Matthews did, totally ignore history, and decide that these wonderful stories are a kind of Celtic equivalent of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then you do some (very attractive) cards, and flog the whole thing to credulous druids for a tenner.

6) It is far from clear that there was any such things as 'druidic astrology', and if there was, we know nothing whatsoever about it.

Amongst the Classical sources, there are indeed passages which support the idea that Gaulish druids studied the stars. Julius Caesar in the 1st century BC and Pomponius Mela a century or so later mention a kind of astronomy as part of druidism, in similar language. I quote both passages here:

Multa praeterea de sideribus atque eorum motu, de mundi ac terrarum magnitudine, de rerum natura, de deorum immortalium vi ac potestate disputant et iuventuti tradunt. 

(They also hold long discussions about the heavenly bodies and their movements, the size of the universe and of the earth, the physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods; and they instruct the young men in these subjects.)

Habent tamen et facundiam suam magistrosque sapientiae druidas. Hi terrae mundique magnitudinem et formam, motus coeli ac siderum, et quid dii velint scire profitentur. 

(They have their own kind of eloquence however, and teachers of wisdom called druids. These profess to know the size and shape of the world, the movements of the heavens and of the stars, and the will of the gods.)

These passages may be historically accurate; Caesar in particular had a pressing need to understand where power lay in Gaulish society. On the other hand, both Caesar and Strabo may have drawn on the lost testimony of Posidonius here, and thus it is not certain that either was writing from personal experience. In both passages the ascription of sophisticated natural philosophy to the druids may represent a projection of familiar Pythagoreanism onto a barbarian caste whose customs were largely unknown. 

There is no other evidence that the druids had a zodiac or divined from the heavenly bodies. None at all. (The episode in the First Life of St. Brigit in which Brigit's druid foster-father studies the stars is clearly alluding to the Magi of Matthew's Gospel - a druid is magus in Hiberno-Latin.)

So basically when you buy Helena Patterson's The Handbook of Celtic Astrology, or anything of its ilk, you know you've been sold a pup.

* To coin a phrase.

** The Otherworld over the sea may not be a pre-Christian idea. The very distinguished Celtic scholar John Carey has discussed the transmarine Otherworld’s place or absence of it in pre-Christian Irish tradition at length, in his article ‘The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition’, in J. M. Wooding, (ed.), The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: And Anthology of Criticism (Dublin, 2000). There he suggests that the topos is not a native motif, and that the oldest material suggests an otherworld to be found under lakes or the sea, or inside the hollow hills, with the paradisial island conception of the Otherworld forming a later, purely literary development. 

Prolegomena

I want here to examine critically some of the assumptions which are common in modern Druidry when thinking about the nature of poetry, assumptions which I find all too often to be narrow and ahistorical. This post is some prelimiary thoughts about Paganism and culture - I'll move onto the meat of what I have to say about poetry tomorrow. 

Neo-Paganism currently elevates the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian, distrusting institutional authority, both human or divine, and preferring roiling chaos and irrationalism. This is often highly creative, but also brings with it a general distrust of aesthetics, and an intrinsic resistance to form, clarity and structure. Paganism retains a persistent and curious ambivalence towards history, despite the work Ronald Hutton has done to expose the late-Romantic cultural and literary currents that shaped modern Paganism. A credulous and sensationalist over-concentration on the pop- and pap-History du moment (the Cathars, the Templars, conspiracy theories of all hues, ley-lines, Atlantis, you name it) distracts from the cultivation of the historical reach and broad perspectives which would ground and enrich modern Paganism. 

I suppose I shouldn't grumble. Paganism is still less that a century old, and we've already thrown off some of the more ill-advised impedimenta that we started with. Wicca's occult posturing - at once gaudy and banal - is nothing like as obvious as once it was, for example. We're still hashing out a polytheology and a concept of human nature; and for all that she's found herself the centre of a bit of a cult of personality, Emma Restall-Orr deserves great credit for sitting down and writing on these issues learnedly and with considerable intellectual force. One can only begin a process of dialectic when there is something solid, sustained and in print with which to argue. Restall-Orr’s latest, Living With Honour; A Pagan Ethics seems to have garnered a very positive blurb from the renowned moral philosopher Mary Midgley, which is in itself impressive, and a sign of the greater seriousness with which Pagan religon is being taken. Restall-Orr is, however, the only Pagan thinker with a national profile as yet, the only one who really does discussHeidegger and John Stuart Mill.

Generating a literary criticism and a poetic might therefore, at this stage of Paganism’s development, be considered rather a luxury. But ahead, in the middle distance, I see much work to be done. I ask myself what a robust yet nuanced Pagan reading of King Learmight look like, or of the work of John Clare or Robert Graves, and sense the swirling shapes of ideas as-yet unborn. It is possible, though we don’t want some hideous Pagan version of Eliot and C. S. Lewis’ neo-Christianity applied to a helpless literature laid out upon the slab. 

To give an example of what might be possible, it can be observed that a revived archaic archetypalism is characteristic both of some of the greatest works of the 20th century, and of the new Paganism; the relationship of these two revivals badly needs analysis. By ‘archetypalism’, I mean the Greek tendency to analyse the world and human life in terms of mighty, inclusive and intangible general principles, which are reflected in real objects and events and feelings, but whose existence is in some sense anterior to and realer thanany actual object, event or feeling. This was germane to Greek thought long before Plato. Desire (for example) isn’t a sloshing around of hormones and neurochemicals, but rather the activity of dapple-throned immortal Afrodita and her son, Eros. Theos, ‘god’, wasn’t for the Greeks so much a noun as an adjective – not ‘Zeus is God’, but rather that there, in that activity, that place, that emotion, there liestheos, divinity, engoddedness. 

Literature in the 20th century revived this way of experiencing the world, spurred not only by Frazer’s The Golden Bough but also by the equally archetypal mythologies of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology, in which mother and father are always Mother and Father. We should thus not be surprised that the goddess and god of Wicca (and much non-Wiccan Paganism) are great male and female cosmic principles, arkhai, and all creation is an instantiation of one or other of them. ‘Every woman is Isis’, intoned the occultist Dion Fortune (née Violet Firth), and ‘All goddesses are one Goddess, and all gods are one God, and there is one Initiator.’ The relationship of this kind of thinking to Robert Graves ‘Triple Goddess’, a vision which sustained and gave meaning to his tormented love-life, is clear. But it also lies behind Joyce’s labyrinthine, unreadable Finnegans Wake, in which all human history and culture are collapsed into a polymorphous ‘nightmaze’, a composite dream-vision in a portmanteu dream-language. Every human being, real or imagined, is seen as an aspect of ‘H.C.E’, earth-father, or of ‘A.L.P.’, river-mother, or of cloud-daughter Issy, or warring sons Shem and Shaun. But the sons combine into the father, and the daughter is reabsorbed into the mother, so, ultimately, only two archetypes are eternal: ‘Gammer and gaffer we're all their gangsters…’ The warring sons, one victor, one vanquished, eternally changing into each other but both subsumed into the one All-father, closely approximate the wretched ‘Oak King’ and ‘Holly King’ aspects of the Wiccan male deity. The death and resurrection of the archetypal father (the double meaning of the Wake in the title) is a comic, oneiric version of the dying-and-resurrecting god, which, with Wicca, became re-embodied in cult. (I use 'cult' in the ancient sense, not the pejorative modern one.) Even the book itself is a circle, that most neo-Pagan of symbols, ending halfway through a sentence, which then flows ceaselessly on again into the opening words of the novel.

So ideas that Joyce was using to structure the most advanced piece of Modernist literature ever written were at much the same time forming themselves, with thudding literalism, into a new religion. Hutton considers that the roots of neo-Paganism are ultimately to be found in the Romantic movement (itself highly complex, contradictory and multifaceted), and this is undoubtedly so. But what is equally true yet less often observed is that the new Paganism has a great deal to do with some of the most important concepts of high Modernism. (For example, the return to the prehistoric world of the cave-painting is common to both Paganism and Picasso; this shared archetypalism and circularity we have mentioned above; and a penchant for collage and the juxtaposition of eloquent fragments characterises Pound and Eliot, but also Wiccan liturgy. The very difficulty of Modernist poetry is akin to the secrecy associated with early Wicca. Both are like a protective gorgoneion enclosing a clique or cabal whose members are engaged in throwing off bourgeois taboos, but who scarcely trust a new idea unless it is an old one - and who as a result disconcertingly place the very contemporary cheek-by-jowl with the most primitive and archaic. 

Critique

I argued that the growth of neo-Paganism in the 20th century depended on some of the same ideas which were being embodied in the avant-garde literature of the time. These included 'the return to the Archaic', the discordant superimposition of the contemporary and the primoridial, a penchant for circularity and archetypalism, a concern with sexuality, the Unconscious and the relations of men and women, and a certain hermetic obscurity. My point in doing this was to emphasise (as Ronald Hutton has done) that neo-Paganism is not an inexplicable outcrop, marginal and capricious. Rather it is a movement influenced, even animated, by some of the deepest and most important intellectual currents at work in the cultural life of the last century. 

If this is so, and I think it is, the state of poetry in neo-Pagan discourse is rather puzzling. Pagans – and Druids in particular - probably take more notice of poetry that the population at large. But the lack of historical consciousness noted above means that Pagan thinking about poetry tends to be curiously hidebound. We think, and feel; but on the whole we do not yet step back in order to consider ourselves thinking and feeling. In other words, the basic assumptions common in neo-Pagan discourse about what poetry is aren’t yet even recognised as being assumptions. 

For the majority of druids, at least, poetry is conceived of high Romantic terms, as a mysterious Muse-borne wind, blowing in from the Infinite and Absolute. It is awen, a very old Welsh term for poetic inspiration as divine afflatus. This is a perfectly reasonable, time-honoured way of thinking about poetry. A fine book, John Press's The Fire and the Fountain: An Essay on Poetry, captures this conceptualisation: that is, inspiration as mystic communion with the Eternal, drawn from the Castalian spring or some Pentecostal 'Muse of fire'. Poetry, according to this view, is a semi-divine current that flows into the rapt human being, through the emotions, granting access to a higher truth. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth famously called it ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.* For the Romantics, the essence of poetry was thus fundamentally bound up with the human imaginative capacity, or ‘Fancy’, that part of us which is in touch with the hidden and irrational. Shakespeare’s Theseus (one of the two, in fact) says, very famously, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

…

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 

And as imagination bodies forth 

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing 

A local habitation and a name.

This passage, much anthologised, was beloved by the Romantics, despite the fact that the sentiments are in the mouth of one of Shakespeare's less likeable characters, who immediately goes on to argue for a ploddingly unimaginative empiricism. ('If it's unlikely and against past experience, it can't be true.')

This, I think, is the general understanding of poetry among most modern Pagans, and, given the roots of neo-Paganism in the Romantic movement, this isn’t much of a surprise. But this conception of poetry hasn't been universal over the ages. The problem is what you make of a poet like Pope, or Larkin, or bits of Horace; that is to say, what you make of poetry as an essentially civilised art for the careful, urbane and ironic expression of ideas and observations, without all the Sturm und Drang of Romantic titanism and muse-thralldom. I can’t imagine poems as important as, say, Piers Plowman, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella sequence, or The Rape of the Lockmaking much impact on Pagan poetic consciousness. They are simply below the radar.

If we look at neo-Pagan poetry today (see, for example, the Druid Network's 'Bardic Voices' site here, which includes some of my own pseudopoetic ravings) several things are noticeable. The first is - and this is an observation, not a complaint – that on the whole, this is poetry by people who don’t read poetry. (If you look at the section marked 'Inspirational Poetry', you'll find precisely two poems have been submitted - one by Yeats and one by Shelley. No surprises there, given the above.) This poetry is clearly written for personal pleasure, and much of it is directly, unmediatedly inspired by spirituality and nature. It is thus nature poetry in the vein that Schiller termed ‘naïve’ - as opposed to ‘sentimental’ poetry, which was the term he used for poetry as the product of reflection and reminiscence. Neither ‘naïve’ nor ‘sentimental’, according to the Schillerian usage, are terms of opprobrium, by the way. Much of this Pagan poetry aspires to the limpid primordialism of, say, Native American chants in English translation, combining rhythm and repetition with a touching simplicity. Thus 'Dryac''s 'Willow':

I am Saille, 

My touch can bring enlightenment 

My energy can heal 

Come be one within my aura. 

I am Willow, 

My being is not for evil 

My wands are used for magic 

Come flow with the wind and me…

The basic standard is that of a Parish Magazine, some very good, much not so good. Some people write with a whiff of the schoolroom inkhorn - rhyming couplets filled with 'o'er's and 'ere's and 'thees' and 'thous' for example, in a way that no professional poet would attempt today, except by way of pastiche. The degree of confidence also wavers considerably between individuals. Some poems read as though their writers are astonished that they've written anything at all, and good for them. On the other hand, a very few bold individuals are clearly experimenting, quite successfully, with adapted medieval Welsh and Norse metres:

In the wildwoods of the mind, 

Strange beasts rut, conceive new words 

that sing in branches high above, 

At the festival of birds. 

(Robin Herne, 'The Honey Tongued')

But, with exceptions, on the whole this seems to me to be poetry that is not trying to be good, but merely to exist. And why should druids write poetry at all? The answer is bound up with the Classical accounts of the druids and their twenty-year process of training, which may be reflected in some of the archaic traditions attached to poets and poetry in the medieval Celtic world. Tomorrow, I'll move on to discussing these, and will suggest that awen-crazed neo-druids have allowed themselves to see only one of the two sides of poetry in the Celtic literary traditions.

* ‘Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing’, added the American poet Thom Gunn, making a memorably rueful couplet.

He blogs at THE CANTOS OF MVTABILITIE and THE STARRY HUNTER.

In the intensely evocative and paradoxical fragments of his work which survive, the enigmatic Ephesian pre-Socratic Heraclitus articulates a comprehensive insight into the order of nature, its details and particularity, as it functions in both the world and the soul. Even though his work has come down to us in sorry fragments and quotations in other authors, it nevertheless still manages to convey a great deal which is of the first interest. 

'Nature loves to hide', the philosopher says, displaying a characteristic, sobering awareness of humanity's very limited ability to perceive reality as it is. Heraclitus' thought turns on the relationship between the whole and the particular, the baffling tension human beings perceive between the intuited unity of the universe and its ineluctable particularity. How do the constituent parts, continually becoming, being, and passing out of existence again, fit together and form such a whole? Wholeness, oneness (which he identifies with Wisdom) is, for Heraclitus, a mysterious over-harmony of separate, mutually-interopposing forces, which possess their very meaning and identity by virtue of their opposition, and yet whose discord mysteriously gives rise to a deeper concord. (His statement that 'We know health by illness, good by evil, satisfaction by hunger, leisure by fatigue' is proto-structuralist -- meaning inheres in things by virtue of their location within a system of gradations and oppositions.) Heraclitus sees deeply into the paradox thatchange is the one constant -- his never-ending flux of opposites -- and yet the universe seems to consists of a plethora of discrete, self-existent items. He emphasises that what we see as identity is in fact merely contingent and temporary. In this you may detect faint hints of Buddhist thought, though Heraclitus may well have been born before the Buddha, or have been his contemporary. Sometimes his aphorisms sound very Buddhist indeed: 'I have looked diligently at my own mind', for example, or 'One ought not to talk or act as if he were asleep'. 

Humanity for Heraclitus is thus trapped between a sense of our inviolable selfhood, our uniqueness, and the necessary acknowledgement that all things are continually being transformed. Accordingly, genuine insight is very difficult for us to achieve from our circumscribed standpoint. 'Men are not intelligent. The gods are intelligent', he trenchantly tells us. And yet, and this is what I think is perhaps most valuable in the fragments for Pagans, he emphasises the necessity, despite the difficulty, of the continual practice of insight-seeking, astuteness, and discrimination. He advocates a more careful and a more disciplined habit of thought, not less. As he says, 'Knowledge is not intelligence'. Although he emphasises the elusiveness of truth and the limitedness of human expectations, he does not thereby excuse us from trying to move beyond our conditioned ignorance. Heraclitus is a sterling corrective to the irrationalist tendency within modern paganism: his emphasis is always on the indispensibility of rational discourse even as it is held in tension with the difficulty of understanding. We must try harder and with ever-subtler discriminating intelligence, he says, rather than giving in to a superficially seductive but ultimately subhuman irrationalism. He dismisses the siren urge to junk rationality and logic, even in the sacred arena of the Mysteries: 'To one who does not know what's happening, the religious man at his rites seems to be a man who has lost his mind.' Indeed, 'All men should speak clearly and logically, and thus share rational discourse'. But he also says, in a less hopeful mode, 'Many people learn nothing from what they see and experience, nor do they understand what they hear explained, but imagine that they have.' He also emphasises the sheer unexpectedness of metaphysical truth: 'In death, men will come upon things they do not expect, things utterly unknown to the living.'

To me, Heraclitus seems to be an advocate of a kind of implicate spirituality, a yoga of intelligent and unswerving inquiry which by its nature is unending, and which will be undertaken only by an elite, even a philosophical aristocracy.  As he says:

I honour what can be seen, what can be heard, what can be learned.

Inquiry into the nature of the gods, the soul, and the world is not just something that is nice to do, that makes us feel connected, sociable, or important: it is a metaphysical imperative, a clarion call to the sanity of excellence. He maintains the existence of a transfiguring and transcendent divine order, quite separate from human religion and its frivolous vulgarities. This divine order is wholeness, unity -- and is thus intrinsically beyond the conditioned dualisms of our perception: 'To a god, all is beautiful, good, and as it should be. Man must see things as good or bad.' 'Only wisdom is whole', he tells us, and yet even here Heraclitus is paradoxical and wily: this unitary wisdom -- which elsewhere he calls the Logos, the 'makes-sense-ness' of things -- 'is both willing and unwilling to be called Zeus.' The divine order thus both embraces and is identical with the mysterious unity behind the co-operating opposites of the universe's flux:

God is day night winter summer war peace enough too little, but disguised in each and known in each by a separate scent. 

The metaphor of scent is a striking one -- the idea here is of different resins being cast onto a brazier and giving off different odours. Myrrh is bitter, frankincense uplifting, benzoin sweet: yet all are ultimatelyburning. (Fire is one of Heraclitus' favourite images for the ineluctable universal flux, of course, as Hopkins reminded us.) Personally I take this to mean that, say, Hades is dreaded, Apollo revered, and Aphrodite desired, but that all these individual gods are ultimately merely flavourings, playful disguises worn by the universal fire (i.e. divine Wisdom), and which appear cacophonous and contradictory only to our limited, chronically-befuddled perceptions. Their apparent strife really forms a deeper, unified, and harmonious economy, which is Wisdom, and also Justice. This congenital mental confusion Heraclitus usually represents metaphorically as sogginess ('A dry psyche is most skilled in intelligence and is brightest in virtue'), though he sees 'psyche' itself is a kind of vapour arising from wetness, which becomes increasingly dry and sublimated. (I often think of this as logic and rationality arising from the wet, organic mush of our brains.)

'Smell' in fact, in another of Heraclitus' favourite metaphors for psychic, or what we would call 'spiritual', perception--that is, the soul's ability to sense the unseen, implicate, and yet utterly omnipresent spiritual order. The concept is reminiscent of the esoteric idea, ubiquitous in popular culture since the sixties, of 'spiritual vibrations' which are perceptible to the sensitive. The psyche itself, Heraclitus tells us, is a 'smoke-like substance of finest particles', and when shorn of our bodies, 'In Hades, psyches perceive each other by smell alone.' What he means by 'smell' is the pure perception of psychic reality, wonderfully dramatised in ancient narratives of the theoxenia, stories in which gods appear in disguise to humble mortals who feed them and make much of them as honoured guests. (The lovely story of Baucis and Philemon in Ovid's Metamorphoses is the most famous.) At some point in the theoxenia-narrative, one of the humble mortals suddenly realises that their guest is a divinity, usually because of the performance of a miracle: they normally fall on their knees in fear and trembling. This perception of the terrifying, holy vibration of divine numen is what I think Heraclitus means by smell. 

Further reading

• Heraclitus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Heraclitus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Heraclitus Quotes - The Quotations Page
• Heraclitus - Wikiquote

• Fragments - Google Books

  by Heraclitus, T. M. Robinson - 1991 
• The Flux and Fire Philosophy of Heraclitus