Druidcraft: The Magic of Wicca and Druidry

that I could learn the magic of the Ancients.

Oh that the secrets of the Druids and the Witches

could be whispered in my ears

that I might know their beauty and their power -

that I might love again this land

and hear the voices of the Goddess and the God

in the trees and in the rivers.

If you ever travel to Avalon in the south-west of England, you will find, tucked between the crouching beast that is Glastonbury Tor and the rounded breast that is Chalice Hill, a magical garden surrounding a well steeped in legend. Here, between the two hills – one so strongly ‘masculine’ and the other so clearly ‘feminine’ – the well and its garden exude an extraordinary sense of peace and deep resonant power. If you were to enter that garden now you would pass lawns and flower beds, low hedgerows and gnarled yew trees until, following the path that slopes gently upward, you would arrive at the wellhead. And there you would find the well itself, protected by a finely wrought iron cover depicting an ancient symbol – the vesica piscis.

In this symbol, two circles overlap and in doing so create an image which for some depicts Christ, for others the philosopher’s stone, and for yet others the Holy Grail or the sacred vulva of the Goddess. The symbol depicts the union of two principles, two beings, two powers. Each circle remains intact, complete and whole, but where they meet something different and unique is created from their union.

This book takes two worlds which are complete and whole in themselves, and brings them together. It is at the point where they meet that we can, if we wish, find a path of great depth and power.

The worlds that are brought together in this book are those of Witchcraft and Druidry, and I have called the path that they create together Druidcraft, from the Irish word Druidecht, and from the inspiration of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who uses this term in his poetry.

Many people now practise either Druidry (also known as Druidism) or Wicca (as Witchcraft is often called today) and find within their paths all that they need. Each tradition is complete in itself, and I am not suggesting that either way is incomplete or inadequate. However, over the years I have noticed that many Wiccans have become interested in Druidry, just as many Druids have become interested in Wicca. The fact is that the two circles of Druidry and Wicca now overlap, as many people start to combine their knowledge and experience of each path to fashion their own ‘craft’ – their own spiritual way. For these people the synthesis explored in this book is already happening.

Some time ago there was a real difference between the concerns of Wiccans and Druids. Wiccans were interested in magic and spells, while Druids were more interested in history, the old Celtic myths and a ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘magical’ approach to life. But in the last few years this has changed. Many Wiccans have become interested in the history of the Druids, in Celtic myths, and in Druid animal and tree lore. At the same time, many Druids have become interested in the more intuitive and magical approaches to life that are found in Wicca. If you talk to people who are interested in Wicca or Druidry you will find that most of them are drawn to these spiritual paths for the same reasons.

In the past, subjects and disciplines were kept within defined boundaries. Today, we understand the value of synthesis, synergy and interdisciplinary studies. This is the spirit in which this book is written – to contribute to the field, not to detract from the uniqueness of each approach. I respect both paths deeply and I believe that each is complete in itself, but this does not mean that their relationship and connections cannot be explored, and we may even discover that Wicca and Druidry have gifts to offer that we can combine in creative and beneficial ways.

Most people think that Druidry and Wicca, as they are practised today, represent two streams of pagan tradition that have evolved separately over centuries, or even millennia. In reality, the modern versions of these traditions were originally developed by two friends, Ross Nichols and Gerald Gardner, only 50 years ago. Because of their exchange of ideas and knowledge, the two paths share many similarities and points of connection and, to a great extent, the differences between them are related to the differences between their characters, even though over the last half-century both paths have evolved considerably, creating many different varieties and styles of both Wiccan and Druidic practice.

Druidry and Wicca are now strong and vibrant spiritualities, and if either of them provides you with all that you need, no further exploration is necessary. But if, like me, you can’t resist the urge to explore a hidden valley where two lands meet, then however great the risks, you might well choose to put on your hiking boots, throw a pack on your back and set off!

Loaded Words and Dangerous Cults

The words Witch and Druid evoke a longing in many of us for the wisdom of the past and of the ancestors. They evoke images of mystery and magic, of ancient knowledge of the Earth and her seasons, of star-lore and herb-lore, of primal wisdom and inner knowing. But they are words that can also evoke anxiety. Some people believe that Witches and Druids are members of dangerous cults, and even though we may know that this is nonsense, there is no point in pretending that the words ‘Witch’ and ‘Druid’ are not loaded. Some people think at once of sorcery and Satanism – they see the Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth tossing bats’ wings into bubbling cauldrons, and Druid priests raising gleaming blades above the bodies of virgins sprawled across the ‘Slaughter Stone’ at Stonehenge.

These negative images of Witchcraft and Druidry come mostly from the scaremongering of fundamentalist Christian groups and from the tacky products of the movie and publishing industries. The genre of the horror movie needs constant feeding, and Shakespeare, together with later writers about ‘spooky Witchcraft’, have provided them with ample material.

It is true that Roman writers talked of Druids being present at human sacrifices, but we need to put this in context: Christian priests are present at executions today, and in ancient times human sacrifice was a feature of many societies. The Romans themselves sacrificed people until the first century BC. After that, they secularized the activity, built the Colosseum, and turned death into public entertainment.

It is also true that during the witch-hunts of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people confessed to being Witches, cursing others and having sexual intercourse with the Devil. But only the most obtuse people fail to see a connection between these confessions and the fact that they were extracted by torture.

Every religion or spiritual path has its share of insane and unpleasant people, and there are likely to have been some malevolent Druids and Witches, just as there have been malevolent Christians. But with the Inquisition and the Crusades, a body count would undoubtedly stack up unfavourably towards the latter.

Another misconception is that Druids and Witches practise Satanism. To do this you must believe in a being called Satan, and to practise it involves performing a reverse Christian ritual known as a Black Mass. Druids and Witches do not believe in an entity called Satan, or one who acts in the way he is supposed to act. They certainly do not perform reverse Christian ceremonies of any kind. In fact, some Druids are Christian and for several years I have attended conferences on Druidry and Christianity held at an abbey in Gloucestershire, England. There have also been conferences where Witches, Christians and Druids have shared their ideas in a spirit of tolerance and understanding. The two seminal thinkers who developed Druidry and Witchcraft in the modern era, Nichols and Gardner, were both ordained Christians. So, if you want to be spooked, you need to look elsewhere!

The World of the Wise Folk

Wiccans call their tradition ‘The Craft of the Wise’, and the historic figures with whom many people identify most strongly are those in a community who were called upon to offer cures, help deliver babies and assist those dying, find people or objects with psychic sight, and to help in times of individual or communal difficulty. Your spouse is sleeping with another person; there has been no rain on your land for months; your cattle are dying from a mysterious disease; your best knife has been stolen; your baby’s cough will not go away; you know you are dying and are frightened – all these are problems that needed to be faced in the past, just as they need to be faced today. Nowadays we turn to scientists, counsellors, doctors, vets, police officers and priests. In the old days, we went to those men and women who knew about the mysteries of life, who were called to heal and to help. Through their own experience, through communion with spirits and teachers from the Otherworld, and through training from those who had been drawn to the Ways before them, they would each come to be known and respected as the local wise woman or man of their community. In parts of Britain they were known as Cunning Men and Women, from the root word ‘con’ or ‘ken’, which means ‘to know’. They were the wise ones, the people with ‘Knowledge’.

Historians now believe that it is unlikely that these people ever met together in ‘covens’ to work magic in the way that witch finders and modern writers have described. Instead, it seems far more likely that they worked as the local wise person, using their knowledge of spellcraft, herbalism and natural magic to help the local community in the ways described. It is also likely that they trained one or two other people in their craft, often from within their own family. Clearly, the Cunning Folk were in positions of great influence within their community. They seemed to possess the power of life and death, and of secret knowledge, and if they failed to save a life or if a villager grew worse under their care, one can imagine the hatred this might have provoked. Powerful people evoke respect and admiration, but they can soon be turned upon with a fury that matches in intensity the awe in which they are held. To become a Cunning person required devotion and courage, as well as both practical and psychic skills. As with all professions that require the use of power, there are always unscrupulous practitioners who will prey on the gullibility and superstitions of others, and who will do anything for money or favours, hence the fear of ‘wicked Witches’, ‘evil magicians’ – people who will, for a price, use their abilities not to heal but to harm.

The World of the Druid

While the Cunning Folk worked alone or in small groups, and were the local wise people and healers in rural communities, the Druids were an organized elite, exempt from warfare and paying taxes, and they acted as judges, teachers, philosophers and advisers to chieftains, kings and queens. They appear very different to the image that we hold of Witches, until we examine them in more detail.

The origins of Druidism are lost in the mists of time. All we can say is that gradually, as successive migrations of peoples from as far away as Anatolia and Caucasia arrived in Ireland and the British Isles, their spiritual beliefs and magical practices mingled with those of the indigenous population, and at a certain time these became focused within the great stone circles. Later, as more migrations occurred, tribes which have come to be labelled as Celtic settled in these lands, and Druidism evolved as both a spiritual and cultural force that existed from Ireland in the West to Brittany in the East, and possibly as far as Anatolia, now Turkey. Druidism flourished for over a thousand years until the arrival of Christianity. By the sixth century it had ceased to exist in its complete form, and it was only revived after another thousand years, in the seventeenth century.

During the time that Druidry flourished, the classical writers tell us that they were organized into three groupings – Bards, Ovates and Druids. The Druids were teachers and philosophers; the Bards were poets, storytellers and musicians, who used their knowledge of the power of the word and of sound to inspire and enthral, to entertain and to charm – and even to bewitch.

The Ovates were seers and diviners, and it seems likely that they were also healers, herbalists and midwives. They have been variously termed by classical writers as Vates, Uatis, Euhages, and the word ‘ovate’ may derive from the Indo-European root uat, ‘to be inspired or possessed’. The classical author Strabo described the Ovate as ‘an interpreter of nature’. It was the Ovates who were skilled in reading omens and divining auguries – whether from the flight of birds, the shape of clouds, or the behaviour of animals or the weather – and it was the Ovates whose task it was to heal, using their knowledge of herbs and spells to cure disease in humans and livestock. The Ovate seems, in numerous ways, identical to the type of person many people would describe as a Witch. But what became of the Ovates?

With the triumph of Christianity over all indigenous faiths in Britain by about the sixth century, the Bardic tradition continued, with schools of Bards existing in Ireland, Wales and Scotland until the seventeenth century. The Druids, being the professional elite, were absorbed into the new dispensation. Nothing more is heard of the Ovates, who seem to simply disappear. Or did they? If you knew how to cure someone, would you stop doing this under a new religious order? Would you refrain from passing on your knowledge to your children, or to your students, so that they too might cure others? The same goes for midwifery skills, for the knowledge of tree, herb and animal lore, and for the ability to do magic, to make spells and potions. It is likely that, with the coming of Christianity, the Ovate stream of Druidry went underground but did not die out: you cannot prevent this kind of knowledge from being passed on – even though it may change in the passing.

It is possible that through word-of-mouth tradition, the Ovate stream of Druidry became one of the sources that fed later generations of healers and followers of the Old Ways, until they came to be known as the Cunning Folk. And it is primarily these Cunning people who are now held as Witches in modern popular perception.

Those who study Druidry today find that as they enter the Ovate period of their studies, they seem to develop and get in touch with precisely those parts of themselves that are now associated with the Witch, and that others associate with the shaman, including the ability to navigate the inner world, and develop seership.

When the two worlds of Witchcraft and Druidry are brought together, we find at the place of their meeting the figure of the Ovate-Witch who presides over a knowledge of the mysteries of Life and Death, whose cauldron offers the wisdom that is known in Druidry as Bright Knowledge.

Ovate and Witch

The words of the Bard lead us into the inner world, the Otherworld, that territory which lies beyond death, and that we visit sometimes in our dreams and our meditations. And even though the images, sounds and ideas that we experience there may seem less substantial than the ‘reality’ of our physical world, they often bring us inspiration and provide us with the guiding ideas and feelings that help us live out our lives. Once we learn how to tread the ways that lead into this Otherworld, we find ourselves in the realm of the Ovate-Witch – a realm presided over by the Goddess with her consort ever-present as the fertile God, Cernunnos as he is sometimes called. It is here that we learn of the mysteries of death and rebirth, and of the force that guides us through this process, the force of life itself – sexual energy. Imagine this force as a crystalline sparkling liquid in a cauldron of the Goddess, stirred by the God. As droplets fall from this cauldron, they bring energy and creative power to whoever and whatever they touch.

Change the image of the cauldron to that of a sacred well – a spring. The water in the well is this same energy, conveys the same power, and you see the water flowing from the sacred pool into a stream, which joins a river, which joins the sea. Water flows through the world, and through our bodies, and brings us life. And in death we are ferried across the waters to the Blessed Isles in the West, until after a time in the Summerlands, we are born again through the waters of the womb into new life on Earth.

This realm of water, of the cauldron, of life force, not only brings sensual pleasure and rebirth, but also healing and deep refreshment. If you gaze upon the surface of this sacred pool on the night of a full moon, you may be able to see beyond time, through time, to gain a deeper knowledge of your own being and of the fate of the world.

This is the realm of the Ovate, and I believe it is the realm of the Witch too. The outer forms of Ovate and Witch, or Druid and Wiccan practice may differ, but it is the same pool, the same wellspring that each hopes to contact. And the way that we can do this is through listening to the old stories, for that is the way, in an oral tradition, that spiritual teachings have always been conveyed.

The Forest School of Druidcraft

With the coming of Christianity to Ireland, many of the pagan ways were not lost – they simply took on a Christian gloss. Luckily, the old art of storytelling did not die. The new dispensation allowed the Bardic schools that were already established to continue taking pupils, and these flourished until the seventeenth century in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, retaining their memory of the old stories and their teachings of the creative power of music and voice.

So there you have the most amazing thing happening – the spiritual tradition of the Druids and Ovates as embodied in the Bards and their tales, is taught for over a thousand years, in modified and Christianized form in the Bardic schools. By the time the last of these schools closed its doors, the old tales were well and truly embedded in the collective mind – in folklore and in the popular imagination. The very landscape of Ireland and the British Isles is steeped in these tales, and all we need to do, to connect once again with their power and the teachings that they convey, is to journey into the land and listen to these old stories once again.

The tales then become our teacher, the wilderness and the forest our school.

An Invitation

Over the next five chapters you are invited to join just such a school, where we can listen to the songs of the Earth and the old tales, and explore that magical territory shared alike by Ovate and Witch, by Druidry and Wicca.

The Bard’s Tale

Each chapter is like a lesson in this Forest School, and begins with a Bard telling a story, just as the teachers of the old Bardic schools told the old stories to generations of students, connecting those gathered around them to the current of ancestral wisdom that was conveyed in the vivid images and extraordinary events described.

In the stories that follow, I have retold some of these old Celtic tales – keeping to the structures and key themes of the old stories, but retelling them in my own way. These tales are meant to be told and retold in many different ways, and are not meant to be read as set in stone. Also, I deliberately refrain from explaining the stories too much. Their power lies in their ability to sneak past the rational mind and too much explanation destroys this power.

The Colloquy