Drawing Down the Moon (56 page)

Since we live in a culture that makes a great distinction between “seriousness” and “play,” how does one confront the idea of “serious” religious groups that are simultaneously playful, humorous, and even (at times) put-ons? How
seriously
can we take them?

The relationship between ritual and play has long been noticed. Harvey Cox, in
Feast of Fools,
develops a theory of play, asserting, like others before him, that our society has lost or mutilated the gift of true festivity, playful fantasy, and celebration. In 1970, when an interviewer asked Cox about the “rise of the occult,” he replied that astrology, Zen, and the use of drugs were “forms of play, of testing new perceptions of reality without being committed to their validity in advance or ever.” When the interviewer observed that sociologist Marcello Truzzi had called the occult “trivial” because people were not serious about it, Cox replied, “That's exactly the reason it's
important.
People are playing with new perceptions.”
³

The classic study on play was written in 1944 by Johan Huizinga. “Human civilization,” he says, “has added no essential feature to the general idea of play.” Both animals and humans play, and play is irrational, defying logical interpretations. Yet the “great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start.” Further:

Huizinga writes that play and ritual are really the same thing and that all sacred rites, mysteries, sacrifices, and so forth are performed in the spirit of play, that poetry is a play function, and that all these things may well be serious since “the contrast between play and seriousness proves to be neither conclusive nor fixed . . . for some play can be very serious indeed.” In addition, “The outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings.”
⁴

In the light of these words we can look at two Neo-Pagan groups that have combined seriousness with play: the Reformed Druids of North America and the worshippers of Eris. These two groups, while differing in almost every way conceivable, illustrate the idea that once you embark on a journey of change in perception, even when you start this journey as “play,” you can end up in waters far different from those you may have originally intended to enter.

 

The Reformed Druids of North America (RDNA) began in 1963 at Carleton College as a humorous protest movement directed against the school's requirement that all students attend a certain number of religious services. Since “attending the services of one's own religion”
⁵
was one way to fulfill this requirement, a group of students formed the RDNA to test it. The group was never intended to be a true alternative religion, for the students were Christians, Jews, agnostics, and so forth and seemed content with those religions.

In 1964 the regulation was abolished but, much to the surprise—and it is said, horror—of the original founders, the RDNA continued to hold services and spread its organization far beyond the college campus. One of the founders, David Fisher, who wrote many of the original rituals, is now an Episcopal priest and teacher of theology at a Christian college in the South, having apparently washed his hands of the RDNA. Many of the original founders considered Reformed Druidism not so much a
religion
as a philosophy compatible with any religious view, a method of inquiry. They certainly never considered it “Neo-Pagan.”

The original basic tenets of Reformed Druidism were:

These tenets were often shortened to read

The original founders seemed to hold the fundamental idea that one should scrutinize religion from “a state of rebellion,” neither embracing traditional faiths nor rejecting them. They intended RDNA to avoid all dogma and orthodoxy, while affirming that life was both spiritual (Be'al) and material (the Earth-Mother) and that human beings needed to come to a state of “awareness” through unity with both spirit and nature. The founders also seemed to distrust ritual and magic, sharing the prejudices and assumptions of most of the population.

RDNA has always had a sense of humor. The
Early Chronicles
of the Druids, as well as many later writings, are written in a mock biblical style. Here, for example, is a description of how the regulations at Carleton were abolished:

 

Similarly, the original “Order of Worship” has many similarities to a Protestant religious service, complete with invocations and benedictions. Reformed Druids are not required to use these rituals and—as is true of so many Neo-Pagan groups—participants have created new rituals to take their place. I did attend a RDNA ritual in Stanford, California, that sounded not much different from a number of liberal Christian services I have attended, despite its being held in a lovely grove of oaks. But when I described this ritual to another leader of a Reformed Druid grove, he merely laughed and remarked, “It all depends on who's doing the ritual. A service by Robert Larson [Arch-Druid of an Irish clan in San Francisco and a former Christian Scientist] often sounds like Christian Science. My services are influenced by my own training in Roman Catholicism. Besides, most religious ceremonies follow the same kinds of patterns. It is natural to find similarities.” The Reformed Druid movement is extremely eclectic, to say the least.

The festivals of the Reformed Druids are the eight Pagan sabbats we have come across before: Samhain, the Winter Solstice, Oimelc (February 1), the Spring Equinox, Beltane, Midsummer, Lughnasadh (August 1), and the Fall Equinox. The rituals are held (if possible) outdoors, in a grove of oaks or on a beach or hill. The officiating Druids often wear robes—white is traditional, but other colors are acceptable. During the ritual, which can include readings, chants, and festival celebrations, the waters-of-life are passed around and shared to symbolize the link between all things and nature. (During the ritual I attended in Stanford, California, the waters-of-life was good Irish whiskey. Whiskey in Gaelic means “waters of life.”) All worship is directed toward nature and various aspects of nature retain the names of the Celtic and Gaulish gods and goddesses:

The “paganizing” of the Reform Druids came as a great surprise to many, and some of the originators regard it as a regression. But from its inception there has been much in RDNA that is Neo-Pagan in nature. The “Order of Worship” includes hymns to the Earth-Mother, to Be'al, and to Dalon Ap Landu, lord of the groves, as well as ancient Welsh and Irish poems. This is fertile ground for anyone with a love of nature, an interest in Celtic lore and myth, and a love of poetry, music, and beauty.

Once the initial protest was over, the most important aspect of Reformed Druidism had to be that it put people in touch with a storehouse of history, myth, and lore. Isaac Bonewits, who was Arch-Druid of the Mother Grove of the NRDNA in Berkeley (see below) and certainly an avowed Neo-Pagan, told me, “Over the years it grew and mutated, much to the horror of the original founders, into a genuine Neo-Pagan religion. There were actually people who were worshipping the Earth-Mother and the old gods and goddesses, who were getting off on it and finding it a complete replacement for their traditional religion.” Bonewits, Larson, and one or two others played a large role in this change in direction.

As of 2006, the Reformed Druids of North America have about fifty groves and proto-groves in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Besides members of groves, there are about three thousand solitary RDNA members. The grove at Carleton has existed on and off to this day as a philosophic path open to members of many different religions. Over the years there have also been a number of offshoots, Norse Druids in San Diego, Zen Druids in Olympia, Wiccan Druids in Minneapolis, Irish Druids (with services in Gaelic) in San Francisco, Hassidic Druids in St. Louis, and various Eclectic Druids in Oakland, Berkeley, and Los Angeles. These groups come and go. For example, the Hassidic Druids formed in 1976; the group was made up primarily of former Jews who wished to keep certain aspects of Hebrew and Yiddish culture, but wanted to avoid what they considered a patriarchal theology. They added Yiddish and Hebrew scriptures to the Gaulish and Celtic ones. They had a set of additional scriptures called the Mishmash and the Te-Mara, which, in Reformed Druid tradition, satirized, in a good-natured way, the scriptures—this time the Talmud. Most of it was both humorous and somewhat profound. I could not locate the group in 2005, and I assume it no longer exists.
⁸

Some Druid groups are Pagan; some are not. Isaac Bonewits often publicly stated that Reformed Druidism could only survive if it recognized its own nature, which was that of a Neo-Pagan religion.
⁹

Since the RDNA was not Neo-Pagan, per se, Bonewits started the New Reformed Druids of North America (NRDNA), which was avowedly Pagan. He described his grove as:

Over the last fifteen years, contemporary Druidism has undergone a stunning renewal. In 1985, when the last serious revision of
Drawing Down the Moon
took place, most of the Reformed Druid groups were moribund. There was a Druid group in Seattle, and a lively group in Berkeley, California—the Live Oak Grove, which published
A Druid Missal-any.
Then, after a long absence from the Pagan scene, Isaac Bonewits started Ár nDraíocht Féin (Our own Druidism), as well as a new journal,
The Druid's Progress.
At the time, Bonewits told me, “It started out as a simple network for a few dozen people who wanted to coordinate research on the old religions of Europe. Then more and more people wanted rituals and clergy training. Now it's a collective act of creation. With the help of 200 people we're creating a new religion.”

Bonewits said that he came to realize that the Reformed Druids was not an appropriate vehicle, at least not for him. “Most people in the RDNA were Zen anarchists,” Bonewits said. “They had a philosophical approach, applicable to any religion. Most of the RDNA were not Pagans. They resented me and felt I was infiltrating their group.”

In
The Druid's Progress,
Bonewits laid out his vision of Ár nDraíocht Féin. It would be an attempt to reconstruct, using the best scholarship available, what the Paleopagan Druids actually did, and then try to apply such knowledge to creating a Neo-Pagan religion appropriate for the modern world. It would use the scholarship of authors like George Dumézil, Stuart Piggot, Anne Ross, and Mircea Eliade. It would create rituals and liturgy and would set up a complex training program to achieve excellence. It would “keep nonsense, silliness and romanticism down to a dull roar,” he told me. “After all, the Druids had some unpleasant customs which I have no intention of perpetuating. They were headhunters, for example. But it is important to know where you are coming from if you are going to claim you are connected to certain ancestors or traditions. If you say you are a ‘Druid' you ought to know what kind of people they were and what kinds of thoughts they had. Then you can pick and choose what parts make sense in modern America.”

Bonewits' vision of Druidism was not entirely Celtic or even Pan-Celtic, but Pan-European. It included all the branches of the Indo-European culture and language tree—Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, even pre-classical, archaic Greek, and Roman. While most people are aware that fragments of Druidism seem to have survived in parts of Wales and Ireland, some of them surviving in disguise through the institutions of the Celtic Church and among bards and poets, research done by Russian and Eastern European folklorists, anthropologists, and musicologists, writes Bonewits, “indicates that Paleopagan traditions may have survived in small villages, hidden in the woods and swamps, even into the current century! Some of these villages still had people dressing up in long white robes and going out to sacred groves to do ceremonies, as recently as World War One!”
¹¹
Much of this research had been published in Soviet academic literature and had never been translated. Much of it is coming to light today. Bonewits believes that this material, combined with Vedic and Old Irish sources, will provide many of the missing links in reconstructing Paleopagan European Druidism.