It is fitting that this first level or grade of Druid training should so encompass both the Ovate and the Druid work. It seems that the Druid would concur with the opening words of John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. The way in which the Word could create, command, nourish, heal, cut through, purify, invoke, unite, provoke, deter and bind was a power that the Bard through long training came to know and utilise in the service of their patron, their king or queen, their Druid, and their god or goddess.
O Hear the voice of the Bard
Who present, past and future sees
Whose ears have heard the holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees . . .
(William Blake, first ‘Song of Experience’)
Now that we know something of what the Bards did and how they were trained, we can ask ourselves what relevance Bardic work might have for us today.
In the training of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, we begin our study in Druidry with the bardic grade – and this is deeply meaningful. Bardism is understood in its widest sense as the development of the artistic and creative self, and its importance as a foundation for our lives and character and spiritual development is no less significant than it was thousands of years ago. Indeed, it could be argued that it is even more essential today than it was then. The clue to understanding why this should be so lies in the realisation that the historical Bards worked with record and with inspiration. One of the prime reasons for modern humanity’s sense of alienation lies in the fact that we have cut ourselves adrift from both the natural world and from the roots of our past. Practising Druidry is about healing this alienation – reconnecting to our past and to the world of nature. In the bardic grade we open ourselves to the inspiration of the natural world, and we allow the mandala of the eightfold seasonal cycle, explained in the next chapter, to be grounded in our beings. Working with record means working with heritage, lineage, and the mythology and stories of the tribe – it helps us reconnect to the past.
Working with inspiration means opening ourselves to our innate creativity. Many of the problems that we suffer from in the developed world result from our suppression and denial of the artistic – in all its forms. Modern brain research shows that for most of us, our primary mode of functioning comes from the dominant cerebral hemisphere, which mediates the function of analytical thinking. The opposite hemisphere has less of a say in our current way of living – it is the hemisphere that mediates the synthesising, non-analytic forms of thought and expression: it is the part of the brain considered responsible for artistic expression. It is generally agreed that to become complete we need to allow both sides of ourselves adequate opportunities for development and expression. This truth was expressed by the alchemists (and there is a strong tradition of alchemy within Druidry) and later by Carl Jung (whose work first began to influence modern Druidry through Ross Nichols). Jung developed his theory of the personal animus and anima – male and female aspects of the psyche – which for our development need to relate and periodically conjoin. Alchemists knew of the importance of this conjunction, and they termed it the mystical marriage or the mysterium coniunctionis.
Our education has, for the most part, concentrated on developing our skills of analytical and mathematical thinking, but when we enter the bardic way, we begin a process that develops our less dominant hemisphere. We open ourselves to the artistic, the creative self. This is no simple task, and in a way typical of Druidry, the work is undertaken in an apparently roundabout fashion. Through working with the eightfold festival scheme, and with the power of the four elements that are allocated to the cardinal points in the sacred circle of Druid working, the Bard is brought to a stage where they have acknowledged and worked with the four aspects of their being – represented by earth, their practicality and sensuality; water, their receptivity and feelings; air, their reasoning; and fire, their intuition and enthusiasm. As these four elements and parts of the self are explored and harmonised, the Bard finds him- or herself naturally opening to their inner creativity. Gradually the resources of body and heart, mind and intuition become more fully available to guide and inspire them.
By working in this way we learn to by-pass the rational mind, which so loves to create limits to understanding. To be able to operate, the intellect creates distinctions, categories, mental constructions – through which experience can be comprehended and acted upon. This is essential for our survival and progress in the world. The problems arise when this ability to create frames of reference is not counter-balanced by the ability to transcend these frames and open oneself to the transrational – the inexplicable in words but no less true. Poetry and music are supremely competent at helping us to go beyond frames and viewpoints. Sound – spoken, sung or played – stretches our boundaries, opens horizons, invokes energies that the intellect alone cannot grasp or categorise with its workings. Here is the power of the Bard – to dissolve our boundaries, our frames of reference — even if only for a moment.
Take this poem, by the modern Bard Jay Ramsay:
Fathomless unknown,
Behind and in everything –
Valley – kestrel – celandine:
You nowhere, and in everything –
And being nothing, being silenced,
Being unable to speak
You see everything,
And I see You
And I see l am
The core I am seeing:
The sun closening
To meet the man
Who has crossed the line,
Who has walked out of himself
Stands ahead there,
Naked in the light.
One’s mind cannot fully grasp the power of such a poem – one is struck by the force of the words and imagery in a way that defies description or explanation. This is the work of poetry – of the Bard. To go beyond. To travel. To bring back.
Professor Michael Harner, a world authority on shamanism, speaks of the shamanic way as one which is best defined as a method to open a door and enter a different reality.30 This is precisely what happens with powerful and effective poetry. The difference between ‘secular’ poetry writing, reading and reciting and the same activities undertaken in the spirit of bardism is that in the latter this shamanic process is consciously acknowledged and worked with. Creativity and inspiration are seen as gifts of the gods, as powers entering the vessel of the self through the superconscious. Appropriate preparation, ritual, visualisation, prayer and meditation create the channels through which such generative, creative power can flow. In Druidry this power is known as ‘awen’, which is Welsh for ‘inspiration’ or ‘flowing spirit’.
The relevance of this work to the contemporary artistic scene is clear: when art became secularised, what it gained in freedom of expression it lost in depth of inspiration. Now we have turned full circle and are able to spiritualise our art once again – freed at last from the limitations of religious dogma. The potential for enhanced creativity is immense when we recontextualise our creativity in terms of the sacred. Previously this involved being bound by Christian themes and dogma. Now it means recognising the sacredness not only of the spirit, but of the earth and the four elements, and of our body and sexuality too.
The Bardic stream is not simply a body of knowledge we once possessed and which we attempt to regain – it is a spiritualised mode of artistic creative consciousness which is dynamic and living – the future holds as much promise, if not more, than the past.
In addition to reciting poetry and story-telling, the Bards undoubtedly made music and danced. There are intriguing stories of Druid dances remembered in Brittany, and it is possible that traces of this early sacred and celebratory dancing is contained within morris dancing, the Abbot’s Bromley horn dance and other folk dances. Our challenge is to rediscover the music, chants and dances of the Druids – by contacting the archetypal sources of inspiration within. These sources are transpersonal and out-of-time. They fed the Druids in the past and th
ey can feed us now. We know some of the instruments they probably would have used: in the early days of animistic proto-Druidry they would most likely have used flutes made from birds’ bones (eagle-bone flutes have been found in Scotland). They would probably have banged stones on hollow ringing rocks to produce a bell-like sound. The dord, a form of horn with a sound like the Australian Aborigine’s didgeridoo, was clearly a sacred instrument of the Bronze Age, as were almost certainly an animal-skin drum which later evolved into the bodhran, and the claves – two sticks of wood which were banged together to produce a rhythm alone or counterpoised with that of the drum.31
Those who choose to explore Druidry by entering the bardic course of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids open themselves to what it means to be living on the earth with the ability to be creative. Although this is the first stage of Druid training, its purpose reaches to the very heart of Druidry – which is the development of an intimate knowledge of the powers of generation – at the bardic level this involves the generation of creative works – of music, song, poetry and art in all its forms.
In common with oral indigenous spiritual traditions the world over, the ancient Druids encoded their teachings in story form. The Bards learned these stories and were therefore able to preserve the memory of the teachings across the centuries, despite the fact that they were never written down. Fortunately for us, the Christian scribes recorded these tales, and even though some details may have been omitted or distorted, we can still discern the teachings of the Druids encoded within them. One such story is the Tale of Taliesin, which recounts the progress of a young boy who eventually becomes the finest Bard in the land. He does this by drinking three drops of awen – inspiration – from the cauldron of the goddess Ceridwen.
In the distance-learning programme of the Order, as we enter the bardic grade we are told this story and then are invited to explore it in depth over a year, since encoded within the tale is an entire curriculum that shows each of us how we can become the ‘finest Bard’. The story of the young person’s journey towards a full flowering of creativity interacts with our own personal story, gradually helping to release the Bard, the creative self, within.
The tree which represents the bardic grade is the birch – appropriately it is the first tree of the Druid’s Ogham tree-alphabet, and the tree which represents new beginnings, pioneering and giving birth. The west is the place of the Bard. It is from the west that we enter the circle in Druid ceremonies, and the west is therefore the place of entrance, of beginnings – the receptive, feminine west that faces the east of the dawn ray. The times associated with the bardic grade are the spring and dawn – times when we are fresh and ready to begin a new cycle of learning and experience.
OVATES
* * *
To you alone it is given to know the truth about the gods and deities of the sky . . . The innermost groves of far-off forests are your abodes. And it is you who say that the shades of the dead seek not the silent land of Erebus and the pale halls of Pluto; rather, you tell us that the same spirit has a body again elsewhere, and that death, if what you sing is true, is but the mid-point of long life.
(Lucan, Pharsalia, circa AD 60)
Lucan, in the above quotation, is addressing Druids generally, but it is an appropriate quotation to open our study of the Ovates, for it was they who, to the greatest degree, were responsible for understanding the mysteries of death and rebirth, for transcending time – for divining the future, for conversing with the ancestors – travelling beyond the grave to bring augury and counsel to those still living on earth.
If the Bards were shamans in Michael Harner’s understanding of the term because they opened doors with the power of the Word, then the Ovates deserve the term shaman even more so – for they open the doors of time.
From a study of the classical authors, a general categorisation of the three different grades accords the arts to the Bards, the skills of prophecy and divination to the Ovates and philosophical, teaching, counselling and judicial tasks to the Druid.
The Ovates, then, were seers and diviners, travellers in time, and it seems likely that they were also healers, herbalists and midwives. The English word ‘Ovate’ comes from the various terms used by the classical writers: Vates, Uatis, Euhages, which 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 probably was to heal, using their knowledge of herbs and spells to cure disease in humans and livestock. The Ovate seems, in many ways, to conform to the type of person most people would describe as a witch, and it is certainly possible that when Druidry went underground with the coming of Christianity, the Ovate stream may have become a source that fed later generations of healers and followers of the Old Ways, until they came to be known as the Cunning Folk – healers who could still be found in villages in Britain up until the 1930s. And it is quite possible that these cunning people were in fact the witches of modern popular perception.
The Ovate as master or mistress of prophecy and divination needed, and still needs today, a reorientation in relation to time. To travel within time – to read the Akashic records as some would term it — requires a conception of its nature and dynamics that is radically different from post-Enlightenment thinking, and more akin to the understanding now being offered by the New Physics.
The belief in the cyclicity of life, as we shall see in the next chapter, was fundamental to the worldview of the ancient Druids. In common with Eastern religions, the Druids believed in reincarnation. Caesar, in De Bello Gallico, says of the Druids: ‘The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest invective to valour.’ Diodorus quotes Posidonius when he says that the Druids held that ‘the souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a second life when the soul passes to another body’. And Philostratus of Tyana in the second century noted that the Celts believed that to be born in this world, we have to die in the Otherworld, and conversely, that when we die here, our birth into the Otherworld should be celebrated.32
Now we can understand how the Ovates were able to conceive of time-travel. The realm of the ancestors was not the realm of people dead-and-gone – it was the repository of tribal wisdom – the realm in which the ancestors lived whilst awaiting reincarnation and to which the Ovate could turn for guidance and inspiration on behalf of the tribe. The experience of the shaman is one in which they undergo some type of death but return to life – only this time knowing the inner soul-geography. In the past, this experience of returning to life from the realm of death was a rare occurrence. With today’s sophisticated resuscitation techniques, the experience is becoming more frequent. A growing academic interest in the subject means that we now have an enormous amount of data on these near-death experiences. Out of the thousands of such experiences recorded a clear pattern of experience emerges: the dying person experiences cracking, clicking, or rushing noises, or sometimes wonderfully harmonious sounds; this is followed by an experience of leaving the physical body – observing their physical body and surroundings from a distance; they then feel themselves drawn through a dark tunnel out of which they emerge into brilliant light. This light assumes an almost personal quality and frequently encounters occur with spiritual helpers or protective beings and the ancestors – friends and relatives who have died previously. There then often follows a rapid review of their life in which they realise instantly where they acted rightly or wrongly. This experience of self-judgement is followed by an entry into a state of being in which past, present and future merge into one reality – a world filled with ecstasy, radiant colours, and immensely beautiful landscapes.
We know nothing more, with such certainty, of the post-death state, for those who reach this realm of beauty are then brought to a being who tells them that they must return to their body – their visit, this time, has been only temporary.
What does this tell us of the Ovate work? Firstly that the realm of the ancestors does exist, and that it can provide support and guidance. Secondly that a realm exists in which our experience of time is transcended, or fundamentally changed. It is to these realms that the shaman travels, to bring back guidance from past souls and insights into the future.
In megalithic times the early Druids were probably not distinctively classed into three branches of learning. The Druid shaman would probably have been the doctor and priest and repository of tribal lore all in one. The bones found in the chambered cairns such as West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury would almost certainly have been used ritually in the way bones have been throughout the world, to summon the protection of the dead, to ward off evil and to offer augury.
It is the Ovates’ particular connection with the Otherworld, with death, which makes them officiants in the rite of Samhuinn – the feast for the departed on 31 October. But it is only in the naive imagination that this concern with death is viewed as morbid, for in reality the Ovate is concerned with new life, with regeneration. They know that to be born they have to die – whether that means in the literal sense or in the figurative sense, as the death of one way of being and rebirth into a deeper experience of being alive.
In working with the processes of death and regeneration, the Ovates’ particular study is – fittingly – tree lore, herbalism and healing. The plant world is a great teacher of the laws of death and rebirth, of sacrifice and transmutation, and the tree is the supreme teacher of the mysteries of time, with its roots for the most part invisible in the past and the subconscious, and its fruit and leaves likewise mostly hidden from us in the heights of the superconscious – holding the potential of the future in the seeds that will in due time fall.
Druid Mysteries Page 7