17th March 2024 - Druids, etc.

 Druidical Bath:

I enjoyed the talk yesterday afternoon, Suzanne Owen gave a good lecture.  It made me pull out all my blogs and books.  I have read a lot on the Iron Age, the Celtic Age and the gods of this time.  Here I would recommend Anne Ross - Pagan Celtic Britain, and Miranda Green - Symbol and Image in Celtic Religious Art.  It was discovering the prehistory round the city of Bath my hometown for 27 years that introduced me to our own native gods that lived in the landscape and in stone statues and carvings.

We can never know the real story of the religious beliefs and myths that dominate people's thinking but the Druids were captured in the imagination of people through the ages.  For a quick read on the subject, and images of people burning in wicker baskets try Stuart Piggott - The Druids or for a longer read Professor Ronald Hutton - Mistletoe and Blood.  William Stukeley for instance fashioned part of his garden into an imitation of a stone circle with an apple tree in its centre with mistletoe growing through its branches.

Stukeley took up a post in Lincolnshire as a vicar, he was by now married but unfortunately his wife had suffered two miscarriages, he had apparently left London in a huff, as his ideas were the butt and ridicule of his friends and mentors. But when he settled in to his new home he created a garden and here part of his 'mystical' relationship to Druidry and the ancient monuments comes to the fore, for it was in his garden that he created a 'sacred landscape'. It included a Temple of the Druids, which consisted of concentric circles of hazels and evergreens modelled on Stonehenge, an apple tree with mistletoe growing in its branches was at the centre of the circle. Apparently he also had a 'tumulus' beside the temple and a little chapel which contained a roman altar. One of the babes from the miscarriage was buried in the camomile lawn that faced the altar. A rather sad footnote to end on, this man possessed by an illusionary religion that coloured his viewpoint of the 'old stones', but perhaps all the paraphenalia in the garden was an expression of the vision he had invoked from a long gone history, none of which was true, a human desire to create a belief system once removed from the Anglican church he was avowed to.

Debby mentioned the other day that she loved oak trees and of course the story of the word Druid is supposed to come from the word oak - oak seeker or the Irish-Gaelic Doires.  We have Tacitus with his wild Druidical people dancing amongst the blood spattered groves of Anglesey.  Was Tacitus a good journalist;)

I wanted to ask questions but deferred doing so.  My one question was 'what about the Coligny Calendar?'  where did it fit in both Celtic and Druidical landscape.  Suzanne Owen had said and it is known that there is no literature from the Gallic and Brittonic people but surely is because it has all disappeared with time.  The calendar, or at least what remains of it is complicated, you can see it here.  Of course the neodruids of today have taken it up, it is a solar/lunar calendar and only partly recovered.

Coligny Calendar

Suzanne covered all that I had remembered hearing about such as Arthur Pendragon and his fight to have Stonehenge as a temple for his interpretation of his pagan beliefs. Also of course Emma Restall-Orr for her campaign of Honouring the Ancient Dead.

Thinking of ancestors, there is a furore (well only a little one) about a church in Todmorden, or to be more specific the graveyard to this redundant church.  Volunteers have been tidying the gravestones but some are very upset about the neighbouring primary school which has had an extension over part of the hallowed ground, presumably moving some of the gravestones.  Of course reinstatement is called for.

But I only learnt last week when I asked my daughter had she been to the graves of her grandparents in Switzerland.  She had said no they were probably no longer there.  In Switzerland you are only allowed 25/30 years in your grave and after that it can be reused.