Category: Religion

By Ramona Louise Wheeler

Enchantment, conjuring, mesmerism and levitation have their momentary charm. The most powerful magic has been and always will be the power of self-control. The hero of every story is the one who can rise to any occasion, however fantastical, unexpected or mundane — living fully in the moment, ready and able to do whatever must be done.

Yogis who can produce real oranges out of thin air will tell you that it is, by far, easier to buy oranges in a market. Real hero-magicians do not draw attention to themselves with love potions or levitation — the goose who lays golden eggs is slaughtered in pursuit of her internal wealth. That is not just a fairy tale; the metaphor is fully functional today.

If levitation, conjuring or love-charms are your goals, however, even these require first that you learn to control your own nervous system, your own psychic energy. Conscious control of your mental tools is the pre-requisite of every magical act.

“Who then is this? In Other Words:”
The roots of this requirement are deep, and reached their first and greatest flowering in the teachings of ancient Egypt. The surviving stories of the magician who could transform his wooden staff into a living serpent and back again are very old, some from the earliest dynasties. There are two important clues to the nature of Egyptian magic in those stories: the power of metaphor, and the metaphor of the serpent.

Egypt’s wealth may have been the gift of the Nile, but her powerful and long-lived civilization was the gift of metaphor. The average Egyptian was educated by metaphor. The higher the degree of education, the more eloquent and imaginative the use of metaphor. They used metaphor with endless delight and deliberate intention. They were the first culture to use illuminated texts to impart spiritual and psychological realities and patterns. Egyptians lived with the imagery and value of spiritual metaphors in every gesture of their culture and with every artifact of their lives. Every ritual and recitation was the conscious and intentional activation of the power and mystery that lie beyond the metaphor, that greater revelation toward which the metaphorical image is directed. The mystery of being, the mystery of divine essence toward which the Egyptians’ metaphors were directed was, however, quite different from our modern perceptions. Divine power was not separate from humanity in some distant, self-contained God. Osiris lives at the core of every being. The gods and goddesses are metaphors of the functions and powers of the immortal soul within. Re (earlier spelled Ra) is not the Sun up in the sky, but rather the divine light of consciousness which illuminates the inner dimension of the divine and immortal soul. “He is Re. In other words, he is Osiris.” (Hymn: The Awakening Of Osiris.) Magic comes from within. Identity is the source of divinity. When Egyptian magicians invoked the power of magic, they reached down within their innermost selves to find it. In the Egyptian worldview the most powerful force in the universe was a fully illuminated human being.

The Serpent Staff
A serpentine staff is a symbol of the magician. The ancient Egyptians perceived soul and consciousness to consist purely of light and energy. The link between this immaterial stuff and the substance of the body is the serpentine nature of the human nervous system. Living nerves burrow and writhe throughout our flesh just as snakes burrow within the Earth. The limbless snake moves by sheer willpower. Re-consciousness communicates with its biological container using the psychic energy which flows through the nervous system. The countless serpents which swarm through Egyptian religious iconography, from the mighty Apophis to the least ornamental detail of cobras in rows, are metaphors of the profound potential and power of the human nervous system. They are constant reminders of the necessity for conscious control. Just as the serpent is deadly if out of control, an out-of-control human being is dangerous, not only to him or herself but also to everyone around them.

There are hints everywhere in their writings and art of a specialized secret training, known as “The Coiling Pathway Of The Serpentine Embraced.” The imagery and language are to similar the disciplines of Yoga: meditation focusing on the flow of energy from consciousness through the spinal column, with the goal of gaining full control over biological existence. Hindus and Buddhists use the same serpent-metaphor to this day in teachings of the seven chakra. Contact between ancient Egypt and the Orient goes back as far as 1700 B.C., via the trade route known as “The Silk Road.” The primary symbol of the “Serpentine Embraced” is the origin of the caduceus symbol we use today to represent the healing arts. The wings at the top of the caduceus represent “winged thought,” by which consciousness communicates with its biological container. Self-healing through conscious stimulation of the immune system has even become an acknowledged, documented fact of our modern lives. “The light bulb has to want to change,” is more than a punch line.

Red-headed Egyptians
Among the many curious corollaries between Egyptian and Celtic magical iconography are the loop, the circle and the knot. String technology is very, very old. The Pyramids themselves were measured out by “string-stretchers,” the surveyors of Egypt. String technology is more than weaving, knitting, bowstrings, wicks, nets and measurements. The uses of string provided ancient metaphors for binding forces of every kind, physical, spiritual and emotional. DNA itself, the key that unlocks living identity, is a “magical string” with profound potential. The knots and loops and circles of DNA activate the creative forces of biological existence, binding our flesh and consciousness together. Scientists today, high priests of Thoth in the Twenty-first Century, theorize that the ultimate nature of reality is a structure of cosmic strings weaving and unweaving through multiple dimensions of being. The Egyptians would have agreed.

Egyptian priests and magicians used the sacred circle as the beginning of many rituals, from the start of a building project to the birth of a child, enclosing human actions within a sacred, sanctified space. Priestesses of Neith and Sashetta invoked their divine counterparts for the opening rituals, establishing sacred boundaries and recording the event for eternity. The magical knot of Isis was the “security code” that sealed up the magic circle, activating the power within. Many different rituals were sealed with such sacred knots. Priests and magicians functioned as partners rather than antagonists: priests defined and maintained the divine landscapes in which all humans lived and breathed together; magicians reached down into the private places of the individual soul and brought forth the heart’s desire.

Another symbol linking Egyptian and Celtic magic is the pentagram /pentacle. The ancient Egyptian form is the hieroglyph for a star — but with a very specific metaphorical intention: the Egyptian pentacle is a circle with a dot in the center, emblem of Re-consciousness, with five symmetrical limbs arranged equally around the center, and enclosed within a circle. This is an idealized abstraction of a conscious soul shining in the sky. The night sky was believed to be the visible portion of Duat, a place that was both heaven and the underworld, that place of eternity that was beyond every horizon, the goal of the deceased soul on its “great journey” to the next life. Duat was the partner dimension to waking reality, the “other shore” of the river of time. Thus the original intent of the pentacle symbol is to mark out a fully individualized luminary, a “Golden Horus” shining over the world. The Celtic use of the symbol to hold supernatural beings reflects this same concept, an idealized container for a being that is pure energy.

Just Wave Your Wand
Practitioners of the Serpentine Pathway used iron wands in the shape of a serpent, either in a long wave, or coiled. Other kinds of magicians used wands carved of white stone, from which dangled small carvings of sacred animals. Ivory wands, boomerang-shaped, were used by local magicians, engraved with figures of Bes and an individually chosen menagerie of animals, some real, some fantastical; frogs and snakes evoked the first stages of creation, when frog- and snake-headed deities divided the land from the waters. Also used were sacred birds, representing divine thoughts; giraffes and antelope with entwined necks were images from the earliest days of the Egyptian culture. These wands were used to create the ritual gestures that defined sacred spaces, and opened passageways between the two dimensions of reality. The animal theme invokes the natural forces of the landscape, drawing on their powers of magical protection. Surviving examples of these various wands suggest that the images on the wands were chosen by the individual magicians themselves, invoking their private muses and spirit-guides.

The Egyptians invented the concept of the written contract, and many magical formulae were, in effect, contracts between the magician, the client and the divine powers involved. Such contracts were sealed with magical knots, using materials that provided their own sympathetic magic.

Heka is the Egyptian for “magical speech.” It is reflected in the Roman goddess of magic, Hecate, and root of the word “hex” and related concepts. Egyptians had an even more powerful word than heka: hu, meaning the power of both royal and divine commands. The power of the spoken word and ritual chanting were essential to Egyptian magic; many rituals and charms involved forms of self- or auto-hypnosis — neurological self-control empowered by the spoken word. The counterpoint was the term monach, “chiseled in stone,” that had the power of eternity. Commands given by divine powers, such as Isis, were “chiseled in stone.” “Monument” is actually an Egyptian word; it means to be made permanent in stone. In the Im Duat, we encounter the image of the four stone stela, labeled the “Four Terms” of Osiris. On these are written: “To control Osiris, (Soul.) To control Tum, (Time.) To control Khopry, (Enlightenment.) To control Re, (Consciousness.)” In the Medieval text, Rosarium, we read: “Our stone is from the four elements.”

Religion and psychology are deeply entwined in Egyptian sacred writings and art because, in their world, divinity was securely planted within each human body: Osiris, the divine soul, lives at the core of each person. They did not turn outward to the divine, but inward. Thus every act and gesture of being human was part of a divine landscape.

Alchemy: Egypt’s Legacy To The Future
“The highest technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
~ Sir Arthur C. Clarke

“Egypt” is not an Egyptian word. It is, rather, the Romanization of the Greek word for the ancient empire of the Nile. Ta Mery, meaning both “Land Of Love” and “Beloved Land” was used, as well as “The Two Riverbanks,” and Khemmit, meaning “Black Land,” referring to the wealth of Nile mud that made the land so fertile. It is from Khemmit, via Arab scholars of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, that we have inherited the word and concepts of Alchemy.

One of the earliest and most influential works on the evolution of alchemy was the Hieroglyphica, written in the sixth century by a Greek monk, Horapollo, (Horus Apollo) on the island of Andros. The book was rediscovered in 1419, and eventually published in Venice in 1505. It subsequently went through many translations in the Sixteenth Century, and, despite its cryptic nature, was a major influence in the subsequent evolution of alchemy into modern science. One of the most famous, the Monas Hieroglyphica, was translated by the English astrologer and mathematician, John Dee, and published in 1564. This work made the Egyptian symbol, the ankh, sacred to Isis, important in alchemical circles. Many astrological symbols were evolved from the ankh in combination with the hieroglyphs for Re, for Thoth, for Earth and water. The Eye Of Horus, symbol of wholeness and integrity was later streamlined into Rx symbol for pharmaceuticals and health care.

Scholars of the Middle Ages may have had access to some now-unknown papyri of the sacred books of ancient Egypt, known collectively as Shat Im Duat, “Writings About Duat.” These were the very first illustrated manuscripts: books of breathing, the sky, days, and hours, all based on the story of the divine being making the journey through time and between dimensions of reality. Perhaps elements from the Egyptian texts survived in oral tradition provided by Coptic Christians and Arab Scholars. Egyptian books were destroyed in the early Fifth Century A.D. by the Catholic Church’s decree, yet their themes and images turn up in alchemical art as early as the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries:
· There are ladders to heaven, thresholds to pass over, divine gateways, and putrid matter that produces divine energy out of itself.
· In the alchemical works, Egyptian deities and divine figures are replaced with “philosophers,” and angels, arranged in groups of nine and twelve similarly to Im Duat texts.
· The procession of Re-If, “Body Of Re,” through the transformations of the hours is reflected in alchemical distillations and processes.
· The steps leading up to Osiris’ throne in eternity became the steps leading up to the ultimate secrets of alchemy.
· The creation of the Golden Horus, expressed in Egyptian hymns and poems as the goal of the journey to the Next Life, is the root of the metaphor of the creation of gold in the alchemical vessel. Both refer to the distillation of self-identity.
· Alchemists also recognized the necessity of “cutting up the body” of the base, material form in order to release the immortal energy at its core. Tapping this immortal energy source was the ultimate goal of the alchemical process. Becoming that immortal energy source was the goal of the ancient Egyptian sacred texts.
· The progression of the calendar was potent magic in ancient Egypt. They assigned individual divine guardians to the hours of the day and the night, and to the days of the month, and this practice was converted to alchemical sequences of angels. Just as the ancient Egyptian “horoscope” told what days and hours were best for ceremony, ritual and magic, the angels of the alchemical calendar told what magical activities were permitted in which hour, or day of the week. The basic concept of divine eternity interfacing with the progression of time remains in the alchemical metaphor.

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the fathers of the modern scientific method, was a secret alchemist, a fact only recently revealed. By the time of Newton, alchemy was an illegal art, and its practitioners risked prison and hanging. Much of their scientific research was couched in highly metaphorical terms for that reason, but the sources remained true to their Egyptian roots. Alchemists use altered vocabulary and purpose from the ancients, but at the core of alchemical work lies the same impulse that developed both the ancient Egyptian nation and modern science: the belief that the universe around us and within us is a “picture book” whose secrets are there to be unlocked by the human mind.

By Divine Decree: Go Ye Forth And Play The Game!
There is a modern corollary to both the sacred texts of ancient Egypt and the secret works of alchemy: the magical world of electronic games.

The storylines of most games run on a surprisingly similar path to the ancient texts of Egypt and of alchemy. The sense of solving puzzles and unlocking secrets is a powerful motivating force in both. Most work around a similar structure: a series of scenes, chambers or passageways which have to be mastered and traversed before moving on to the next level. Gateways, doors and dimensional thresholds must be passed. There are obstacles and adversaries, magical helpers, magical objects, divine protagonists, mysterious advice and poetry offering fabulous clues. Rewards draw the player along against every manner of opposition: the crowns of pharaoh and the Sun, the crowns of the royal elements, the crown of Middle Earth, and so on. Variations among the players and settings fit into similar patterns.

All three mythological systems — ancient Egypt, alchemy and electronic games — are structured on the same pattern, that of the universal human being evolving by means of the universal human nervous system through to a state of unique, conscious identity — the hero-magician. Electronic games allow each of us to be the hero of our own story, taking Egyptian magic full circle back to Osiris, the hero-magician of everyone’s soul.

There is a caveat: Ancient Egypt sustained an empire for five thousand years by knowing the difference between inner and outer reality, by knowing how to control both. Alchemy brought forth modern science by separating inner realities from outer realities, and focusing on control of the material world. Electronic games are only magical if they make you a better driver, a better pilot, a better listener, a better problem solver — an illuminated human being. You cannot win if you do not know when to turn off the game, and listen to life.

Resources:
Translations of the Hieroglyphica have been posted online. The John Dee translation, Monas Hieroglyphica is available at: http://www.netnik.com/emblemata/#Hiero. A wonderful book, with a wealth of alchemical art from the earliest days of alchemy, was recently published by Taschen Books: Alchemy & Mysticism by Alexander Roob. It is available at Barnes and Noble, $12.95. I highly recommend it, especially for the visual delights of medieval paintings that are rarely seen in art books. Translations of the Shat Im Duat are available in textbooks on Egyptian literature. (The most famous, known incorrectly as The Ancient Egyptian Book Of The Dead, was titled: Por Im Hru, which means “Emerging While Awake.”) My most recent translations are at: “Walk Like An Egyptian: http://hometown.aol.com/tokapu/ . Carl Jung’s writings on alchemy, Symbols Of Transformation and The Mysterium Coniunctionis, are in-depth explorations of the psychological values of alchemy. They are, however, densely written, requiring a scholarly and committed approach. Contemplation of the images themselves will always be the most effective and personal way of discovering the magical action they invoke.

About Ramona Louise Wheeler
Ramona Louise Wheeler is the author of Walk Like an Egyptian, My Daily Horus Scope, and more. Visit http://www.ramonalouisewheeler.com to learn more!

By Ellen Evert Hopman, Druidess, Order of the Whiteoak (Ord na Darach Gile)

“Gaine daughter of pure Gumor,
Nurse of mead-loving Mide,
Surpassed all women though she was silent;
She was learned and a seer and a Druid”.

(From “The Metrical Dinsenchas” – a history of the places of Ireland, compiled by medieval monks)

Most modern Pagans are Wiccans or Witches, according to the few surveys that have been done; we Druids are still a tiny minority. Women of Celtic heritage have told me that they did not pursue the Druid path because “the Druids were all men”. But as more and more women study Celtic history, get degrees, do research, write books and teach in the colleges, the word is finally getting out that this is not so. But for millennia it has been a well kept secret.

Some of the blame for this misconception can be placed on the Roman historians who reported on Celtic culture, even as they decimated the Druids who were the intelligentsia. The Romans tended to ignore, downplay or overlook the true status of the women of the tribes.

The next groups to document Celtic society were male Christian monks who also tended to ignore and downplay the status of Celtic women while capturing the tales and oral histories in their scriptoria. Finally as modern archaeology and scholarship focused on Celtic artifacts and history, scholars until very recently were almost all men, who downplayed or ignored the role of powerful women in ancient Celtic times. But the evidence was always there for those who cared to find it.

The word “Druid” derives from the Indo-European “deru” which carries meanings such as truth, true, hard, enduring, resistant and tree. “Deru” evolved into the Greek word “drus” (oak) and referred over time to all trees as well as the words “truth” and “true”. “Id” comes from “wid”, “to know”, related to both “wisdom” and “vision”. A “Dru-id” is a truth-knower and a true-knower, one with solid and enduring wisdom, a tree-knower, and an expert.

The Proto-Indo-European word “dru” meant oak, and is related to “Druid”, so “Druid” also means “oak-knower”. Oaks are the most balanced of trees; their roots grow as deep as the tree is high. They give the hottest fire (excepting the ash tree) and provide medicine via their leaves and bark as well as food (acorns) for humans, pigs, and deer. They attract the attention of the Gods (via lightening) and survive to live up to a thousand years.

To be a Druid was and is to perform a tribal function. No king or queen could function without a Druid at their side, the ruler and Druid were described as “two kidneys” of a kingdom. It was the Druid who knew the laws and precedents without which a ruler could not pass judgment.

The Druids were poets and prophets, astrologers and astronomers, seers, magicians and diviners. They memorized the laws and kept the tribal histories and genealogies in their heads. They were ambassadors, lawyers, judges, herbalists, healers and practitioners of battle magic. They were sacrificers, satirists, sacred singers, story tellers, teachers of the children of the nobility, ritualists, astronomers and philosophers, skilled in natural science and mathematics. They specialized in one or several of these callings and spent twenty years or more in training. We know that Druids from all areas went to Britain, specifically to present day Wales, for regular gatherings and so their practices and beliefs must have been somewhat uniform.

What we know of the Druids comes to us from the written accounts of eye witnesses, from literary tradition and archaeology. Greek and Roman historians documented the Druids that they met; Julius Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Ammianus Marcellinus, Pliny, Diogenes Laertius, Suetonius, Pomponius Mela, Lucan, Tacitus, Dion Chrysostum, Lampridius, Vopiscus, Decimus Magnus, Ausonius and Hippolytus and others wrote their versions of Druid history.

Pliny gives us the only description of a Druid ritual that we have (the Druids preferred to keep their teachings in oral form, feeling they were too sacred to write down). He describes a white clad Druid climbing an oak tree on the “sixth day of the moon” to harvest mistletoe with a “golden sickle”. Of course gold is too soft to cut herbs with so any sickle would probably have been made of bronze, and we can only guess that the “sixth day of the moon” means six days after the first appearance of the new moon.

Tacitus gives us the vivid account of the slaughter of the Druids by Roman soldiers on the island of Mona (Angelsey) in Wales. He says there were cursing black clad women there defending the island. Since the island was the most sacred stronghold of the British Druids one can assume that these women were Ban-druid (female Druids) though since he does not say this outright we can never be sure.

Strabo describes a group of religious women living on an island at the mouth of Loir River but he does not call them Druids. In the Historia Augusta (a late Roman collection of biographies, in Latin, of the Roman Emperors from 117 to 284 CE) we learn that Diocletian and Aurelian consulted with female Druids as did Alexander Severus.

In Irish traditional accounts there are references to “bandruid” (female Druids) and “banfilid” (female poets). Fedelm is a female seer and Accuis, Col and Eraise are female Druids mentioned the Tain (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). Eirge, Eang, and Banbhuana are Druidesses mentioned in the Siege of Knocklong, and Dub and Gaine are mentioned in the Dinsenchas.

Fedelma was a woman in queen Medb of Connacht’s court who was a “banfili” (female poet) trained in Alba (Britain). The death of female poet Uallach daughter of Muinechán, who was the “woman poet of Ireland”, is mentioned in the Annals of Innisfallen for the year 934 and the Brehon Laws describe heavy penalties for illegal female satirists (whom they compare to female werewolves!). It is clear from these accounts that at least some women had attained the rank of Druid.

To shore up the evidence it will be helpful to look at the status of women in Celtic society before the Roman and Christian incursions and after. The marriage laws are an interesting place to start. The ancient Brehon Laws recognized nine types of marriage. In the first degree (the most desirable) both partners came to the union with equal wealth and status. In the second degree the husband came to the union with more wealth so he was in charge. In the third degree the wife came with more wealth so she was in charge. In all cases divorce was available to wives and in the first two degrees of marriage the husband had to pay a bride price to her father the first year and every year after that a large portion of the “coibche” went to the bride herself so that she could remain independent if the marriage failed. In the event of a divorce each spouse could claim any property they had brought to the union and the wife kept all the coibche she had accumulated. (Christian women would not see this kind of fair treatment again until very recent times).

Plutarch in “On the Virtues of Women” states that Celtic women participated in assemblies, mediated quarrels and negotiated treaties, for example one between Hannibal and the Volcae (this kind of ambassadorial work is a specifically Druidic function). Strabo says that Armorican priestesses (in modern day Brittany) were independent of their husbands.

We know that Celtic women wore trousers (the Celts invented trousers and there is a statue of a woman so dressed in the British museum). Gallic females went to war with their husbands and Irish Celtic women fought alongside their men. In some Roman reports they said the women were even fiercer than the men! (It took a series of laws issued over several centuries after the Christian missionaries arrived to wean Irish women away from weapons, indicating problems with compliance).

In the first century CE Tacitus wrote that “the Celts make no distinction between male and female rulers” and powerful Celtic women appear in the tales. By tradition Macha Mongruad founded Emain Macha (Navan Fort) in Ulster. The two most famous warriors in Irish history; Finn MacCumhail and Cú Chulainn, were both trained by women. Finn was raised by two females; a Druidess and a warrior woman who taught him the crafts of war and of hunting while Cú Chulainn learned the arts of war from Scáthach who had her own Martial Arts school.

Boudica was a Celtic queen who led the last British uprising against the Romans in 60 AD. She was a priestess of Andraste, Goddess of Victory. Saint Brighid of Kildare (Kil-Dara, Church of the Oak) had a different kind of power. She was the daughter of the Druid Dubhtach and according to the Rennes Dindsenchas was a “bandrui” (female Druid) before she converted to Christianity. She had both men and women in her religious community and she and her nuns kept a Fire Altar which was tended continuously until 1220 when an archbishop ordered it quenched. This Fire Altar mirrored the perpetual fire of the Ard-Drui (Arch-Druid) that had burned at Uisneach for centuries (thankfully the fire has been re-lit in modern times and is now being tended once again by nuns and lay folk in Kildare and all over the world).

Archaeology gives us more evidence for female Druids. An inscription was found in Metz, France, that was set up by a Druid priestess to honor the God Sylvanus and the local Nymphs of the area. It was found on the Rue de Récollets; “Silvano sacr(um) et Nymphis loci Arete Druis antistita somnio monita d(edit)” (Année Epigraphique 1983, 0711)

Two famous burials, the Vix burial and the Reinham burial point to very powerful women of their time. The Princess of Vix (who may have been a priestess) dates from the late sixth to fifth centuries BCE in present day Burgundy, France. She was a woman of wealth and authority whose rich grave goods came from as far away as the Mediterranean Sea. Her wood paneled chambered grave held a huge bronze “krater” (a large ornamental urn used to mix wine and water for banquets), elaborate jewelry of bronze, amber, diorite, and serpentine, and a golden torque (a neck ring), symbol of noble status. She had fibulae (brooches) inset with Italian coral.

Many other female burials have been discovered between the Rhine and the Moselle rivers, where the women are laid out on wagons with rich jewelry and more impressive grave goods than some of the warrior chieftains of the time. The Reinham burial dates to the fourth century BCE by the river Biles in Germany and was an oak lined chamber filled with precious objects and jewelry. The body was laid out on a chariot with food and drink provided for her Otherworld sojourn. She was also buried with a torque on her chest, symbolic of her noble status.

So what happened? Why did an indigenous culture that featured educated and powerful women devolve into a culture where women were demoted to the status of chattel?

By the first century CE in Britain the Romans were actively and deliberately suppressing the Druids who were the intellectual elite, the advisors to the nobility and the glue that held the kingdoms together. Roman propaganda campaigns claimed that the Druids were the perpetrators of “savage superstition” and of horrific human sacrifice (at the same time that the Roman Circuses were going on). Druidesses were described as seers who were working on their own, rather than as powerful royal advisors and clergy. A policy of deliberate extermination was carried out, brought to conclusion by the terrifying slaughter of the Druids at Angelsey.

The Romans never conquered Ireland and the worship of the Pagan Gods continued there officially until the death of king Diarmat in 565 CE. (Unofficially it goes on to this day). But as Christianity gained power in all areas Roman ideals of matronly behavior and womanhood took over, though in the few centuries that it was allowed to flourish the Celtic Church continued to exalt powerful priestesses such as Brighid of Kildare and Beaferlic of Northumbria. As the Roman Christian church gained ascendancy female Druids were labeled “evil Witches” and “sorcerers” as a way to smear their reputations and make people fear them. Religious orders founded by women were systematically dissolved upon their founder’s death, preventing continuity of female centered orders.

The Druids were demoted in the laws to figures of ridicule – mere magicians, stripped of their sacral function and status. Women in Celtic areas were forbidden to bear arms and their status dropped in most areas of life and society.

The current Druid revival of modern times began in the early eighteenth century, first in France and then in 1717 in England, the same year that the English Masons were established. The earliest English Druids of the current revival were all Masons and all men; the poet William Blake a prominent example. Gradually over the last few centuries, as more was understood about the actual Druids of history, the Druid Orders became more egalitarian in their membership until today most Orders are roughly half male and half female. Women in most Orders (the only exceptions being the old English based Orders with roots firmly in the eighteenth century) have the same opportunities to be leaders and clergy as men.
Female Druids of today most often look back to our status in ancient times. We view ourselves as the inheritors of a rich ancestral lineage, going back to the Iron Age. That does not mean we have an unbroken tradition, we are actively engaged in reconstructing the ancient indigenous European tribal religion (leaving out the nasty bits such as slavery, animal sacrifice, and head hunting of course!).
I took an informal poll of the women on the Whiteoak mailing list to see why they became Druids and what if any problems they have faced on this path. One said that she was thrilled to find a religious tradition that worships outside in daylight, as opposed to Wiccans who often circle at night and indoors.

All the women who responded said they were voracious readers who upon learning how much of Celtic history and tradition was still out there became absorbed in the topic. The women all reported being scholars of one degree or another; in common with the ancient Druids modern ones tend to be intellectuals (one of the worst insults you can hurl at a Druid is to call them a “fluffy bunny” meaning a dim wit!).

Several of them complained that in modern times Druids are very hard to find. Unless one lives in a large metropolitan area this is almost always the case. To put together a gathering of modern Druids you will have to send notice out to several states.

Some female Druids report that they are Pagans who were not attracted to Wicca, which was after all, invented in the 1930’s by Gerald Gardner (see Ronald Hutton’s excellent book “The Triumph of the Moon”). They wanted something that was more tied in to actual Celtic tradition.

Others had problems with Wiccan theology. Wicca is duo-theistic (it assumes that “all the Goddesses are one Goddess and all the Gods and one God so it hardly matter who you call on in a ritual). The Celts, and every other indigenous Pagan tradition that I am aware of, were and are polytheistic. They see their deities as separate personalities with different and distinct functions though some, for example the Hindu-Vedic religions, posit an ultimate Source for all the Gods and Goddesses and all creation, called the Atma in Vedic scripture. (Many Druids study Vedic texts because the Vedic peoples were the ancestors of the proto-Celts and Vedic ritual and Celtic ritual must have had many similarities. We know that they had many basic principles in common; triple deities, making offerings to sacred fire and sacred water, the primacy of cows, etc.).

Another problem with modern Wicca for some is the so-called “Wiccan rede” (“An it harm none do what you will”). This tenet has been used as an excuse to behave in self-centered ways that no tribal society would tolerate. Druids study the Brehon Laws and we know that the ancients expected strict codes of behavior from all levels of society.

Wicca was revolutionary at its founding because it emphasized the role of the priestess in a way that had not been seen since ancient times. As a result many Wiccan and Witchcraft groups are led by women and composed of mostly women (or all women). Those who became female Druids found this to be unbalanced and not much different from male dominated patriarchal Christianity, Judaism or Islam. They sought a Pagan path with a healthier balance of males and females. Some report that they still have problems with sexism, even after they had attained the title of Arch-Druidess of their Grove (a Grove is the Druid equivalent of a Coven) there were male Druids who would challenge their decisions in a way that they would never challenge a male Arch-Druid. They would continue to nag the Arch-Druidess, figuring that if they did so long enough she would give in to their opinions.

None of these women came to Druidism out of rebellion against another religion. They came to it from a love for nature and the old European tribal ways. I can identify with these reasoning’s, they are all familiar to me and true.

Thanks to Stacey Weinberger (of RDNA), Sín Sionnach (a solitary Druid), and Athelia Nihtscada (of RDNA), for their input.
For an overview of ancient reports see “The Druid Sourcebook” by John Matthews, Blanford, London, 1996
For Brehon Laws and the laws of marriage see Fergus Kelly’s “Guide to Early Irish Law”, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1991
To explore the status of ancient Celtic women;
http://www.unc.edu/celtic/catalogue/femdruids
For links to basic texts, modern Druid groups and Orders; http://www.whiteoakdruids.org

About Ellen Evert Hopman
Massechusetts resident Ellen Evert Hopman has been active in American Druidism since 1984. She is co-chief of the Order of the Whiteoak (Ord na Darach Gile), a popular author of Druidry-related titles, and a master herbalist. She teaches at the Grey School of Wizardry and has contributed to several Pagan journals.

www.elleneverthopman.com
http://www.whiteoakdruids.org
Info on A Druid’s Herbal of Sacred Tree Medicine Click Here
Info on Priestess of the Forest: A Druid Journey Click Here