Each place has its spirit. Think of the spirit that lives at Avebury or Stonehenge, at the Great Pyramid, or in the mountains of the Himalaya. Even the corner of our garden has its spirit, and these spirits all form part of the great Spirit of Place. In astrology, our chart is determined by the time, but also by the place in which we are born, as determined by its longitude. A noon birth in Sydney, Australia produces a birthchart different from one made for a baby born at noon on the same day in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is the conjunction of a particular time and place that creates the chart and which produces the planetary configurations which influence us. When we celebrate the festivals, we likewise work with a meeting of a particular time with a particular place. Our sacred circle of working, whether for a festival or for individual or group work in a grove, has its Spirit of Place, and by being aware of this, we heighten our sense of its sacredness.
Some people are drawn to working with the Spirit of Place to help purify the environment. There are now groups who pray, visualise, dowse and meditate to cleanse and clear particular areas. They claim considerable success with reduced incidents of crime and accidents in areas worked upon. Dowsers also often work on an area which is renowned for its high incidence of accidents – an accident ‘black spot’ on a particular road, for example. Here too they are working with the Spirit of Place.
Those who visit sacred sites with intent are engaging in an age-old activity which honours the Spirit of Place. They make pilgrimages to holy sites – and this activity is known throughout the world and at all times – it is a fundamental recognition among all peoples of this spirit and of the necessity to honour and respect it, and to draw sustenance and encouragement from it. In Islam, pilgrimages are made to Mecca. In Buddhism to such places as Mount Kailas in Tibet, and the Temple of the Sacred Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka. Hindus go to the Ganges and to Benares while in Christianity pilgrimages are also a strong feature of religious life – whether for healing, as to Lourdes, or for spiritual nourishment, as to the Holy Land, or Canterbury, Rome or Glastonbury. Leaving aside the major religions, we see amongst the earth religions such as Druidry a similar feature – wells and rivers, hills and mountains, burial sites and stone circles, lone trees and clearings in the forest, all these were and are considered sacred and were and are the goal of conscious, dedicatory pilgrimage.
An interesting exercise is to become aware of the Spirit of Place in your room or as you read this book. What does it feel like? What is its quality? Then become aware of a wider area – your town or surrounding countryside. What does it feel like now? What is its quality, its vibration? Then widen your awareness to include the whole country, asking yourself the same questions, before sensing the whole world in the same way. You can even continue it to include the whole universe, for the Spirit of Place can be seen fundamentally as Space itself. Science currently estimates that the cosmos contains three trillion galaxies – more than enough for each one of us to evolve to a position of responsibility for a galaxy of our own. The Spirit of Place is truly vast, for she counts all this for her realm.
In our circle we can allocate this spirit to the line that links east and west – for our sense of space is governed to some degree by our awareness of the rising and setting sun. The east represents those lands which are far distant and from which enlightenment comes. The west represents the ‘Isles of the Blessed’ – that place to which we go after death, and which is the Summerland, a haven and a place of rest and contentment.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SPIRIT OF TIME
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What else influences and helps to create who we feel ourselves to be? Time. The times we live in represent a fundamental influence upon who we are. Just as ‘the Spirit of Place’ is sensed so strongly by so many people that it has entered our common vocabulary, so too we talk about the Spirit of the Times, and it is clear that someone living in the twenty-first century is under an entirely different set of influences than someone living in, say, the fourteenth century.
There is every evidence that time was, for both the Druids and the megalithic culture out of which they emerged, an immensely important factor. Many of the stones in the stone circles are positioned so that they act as time-stones – marking the rising or setting of the midwinter or midsummer sun, for example. Groups of stones act as systems for other measurements – for instance to predict the times of lunar or solar eclipses.
One of the likely tasks of the Druid was to calculate the times for the festivals, and the times of impending eclipses. The calendar was considered extremely important, and from France we have evidence of a Druid calendrical system in the Coligny calendar, although scholars are divided as to the degree we can consider it purely Druidic, since it is engraved in Roman letters, leading some to believe it represents the product of an attempt to Romanise the native religion. Dated to the first century AD, it consists of fragments of engraved bronze which have been carefully pieced together to show a system which reckoned the beginning of each month from the full moon (a sensible idea, since a full moon is always noticeable when it appears). Each month was divided into two periods of a fortnight, rather than into weeks. To account for the extra days which always accumulate in any calendar (we use leap years to absorb ours) they had a thirteenth month which appeared in some years and not in others. The names of the months are wonderfully evocative of a time when humanity lived closer to nature:44
Seed-fall October–November
The Darkest Depths November–December
Cold-time December–January
Stay-home time January–February
Time of Ice February–March
Time of Winds March–April
Shoots-show April–May
Time of Brightness May–June
Horse-time June–July
Claim-time July–August
Arbitration-time August–September
Song-time September–October
The names of the first eight months are self-evident – from the Seed-fall month of October–November when the nuts and seed-cases fall from the trees, to the Time of Brightness – when the sun reaches its maximum power at the summer solstice in June. Horse-time indicates the month in which people went travelling – in the good weather, and Claim-time indicates the month in which the harvest festival of Lughnasadh falls, and at which time marriages were contracted and disputes presented before the judges. The following month, Arbitration-time in August–September, represents the time when the disputes and claims had been adjudicated and when the reckonings were given. At Song-time in September–October the Bards completed their circuits, and chose where they would settle for the winter season.
A study of the Coligny calendar gives us a good feel for the Celtic people’s attunement to the life of the land around them – and of the way they integrated the human affairs of travelling, adjudicating and entertaining within the yearly cycle.
Each of the eight festivals that we looked at in the previous chapter marks a conjunction of place and time, and it marks a special moment in the yearly cycle when the forces of nature are at their strongest in a particular way. At the winter solstice these forces are accumulated deep within the soil – the seeds are fertilised by the reborn light in the darkest hour. At Imbolc the forces of growth begin to be called upward by the sun, and by the time of the spring equinox they are blessed with equal durations of day and night, and equal intensities of earth and sky power. At Beltane the call is to couple and to repeat the inexorable demand of nature that the species might flourish and continue. At the summer solstice the forces of the sun are at their most potent – bringing forth a burgeoning of growth at the time of maximum light and energy. At Lughnasadh, the in-gathering begins, the first of the harvest is brought in, and we accept that the energies of nature are drawing themselves back into the earth in preparation for the coming winter. At the autumnal equinox we sense a continuing of this process – we attune to the setting sun and the golden leaves of autumn, and feel the warm glow of recollection as
we survey our lives and our year. At Samhuinn, the forces gather in completely and open out into the Otherworld. Time is no more, for if time was important to the Druids, then No-Time, the world beyond time, was vital too.
How do we honour the Spirit of Time in modern Druidry? Firstly, by working with the eight festivals, and by relating our own life-cycle to the natural life-cycle. In that way we slowly begin a process of reconnection to and synchronisation with nature. That harmony which our ancestors once had with the earth we can build again. Once this new sense of time and of our place within the scheme of time is firmly established during our period of study as Bards, we are able to move on to the Ovate grade, in which we approach time in another way. One of the purposes of working with time is to discover not only how to co-operate with it, but also how to transcend it, or travel within and through it. Why this work should be the sphere of study for the Ovate becomes clear when we realise that it is the Ovate who works with divination and prophecy – both skills which require a particular familiarity with time and an ability to render it transparent.
Time is often considered our enemy – so often we are racing against it – trying to fulfil our seemingly endless commitments within the limitations imposed by the day and its schedule. The Druidic approach suggests that instead of treating time as our enemy, we should befriend it, so that it becomes our ally. In the training of the Order we learn how to create moments in our day or week when we can enter the peace of our sacred grove and move out of time for a moment into the vastness and depth of No-Time and No-Thing. And although it takes a while to learn how to do this, the benefits that we reap are enormous.
In the sacred circle we can relate the Spirit of Time to the vertical line travelling from the winter solstice to the summer solstice – the line that bisects the horizontal line of space. Where the two lines meet – there is the moment of transformation – of infinity and eternity – for the Spirits of Time and Place are manifestations in the physical world of the Spirits of Eternity and Infinity respectively.
If we are keen to be of value, to be of service to the world, we can discover what is needed from us, by becoming aware of the agenda that the Spirit of Time has for humanity and for the world during our lifetimes. Each period of history has had its agenda in relation to the evolution of human consciousness. We tend to think of certain individuals who stand out as great innovators and as agents for the advancement of humanity – but they have become so precisely because they have been aware of the needs of the time and have succeeded in articulating what was already fermenting in the collective psyche.
The Spirit of Time clearly has a powerful agenda for us at the moment – events are moving at an astonishing pace. By attuning to the Spirit, by observing what it is that is needed, and where humanity has reached in its evolution, we can follow the advice of Bernard Shaw, a friend of the old Druid Chief, George Watson MacGregor Reid, when he said: ‘Find out what the life force, the creative force, is working for in your time and then make for it too. In that way you become more than yourself and a part of creative evolution.’
Figure 2. The Spirits of the Circle and their relationship to the Self
THE FIVE FORCES AND THE ENTRANCE TO THE MYSTERY SCHOOL
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So there we have it – five spirits which are perhaps not really spirits at all in the way that most people would understand the term, although some of us may sense them as mighty beings. Who are we to say, after all, whether or not they are spirits? Is there a being – a Spirit of Time – or are there several: Lords of Time as some call them?
The purpose of working consciously with the idea of the spirits of the circle is to fulfil the injunction written on the portal of the entrance to the Mystery School at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself’. By coming to know ourselves better we gain the ability to be self-directed, and feel less driven by forces that we do not understand. In summary, we become more conscious, more self-aware, more responsible. Psychologists have found, through research, that people can be roughly grouped into two categories: those who are outer-directed, who feel that their lives are controlled by outer circumstances, and those who are inner-directed, who feel that they are in control of their lives and for whom outer circumstances are subordinate. George Bernard Shaw provides us with a splendid quotation for inner-directedness: ‘Circumstances?’ he once said, ‘I don’t believe in circumstances. If you don’t have the right circumstances in life, go out and create them!’ If we can come to know the Spirits of the Circle and the part each one of them has played in the creation of who we have become, then we have a greater chance of being inner-directed, and of creating the circumstances we need around us.
Working with Druidry can help us become sensitive to the influence that each one of the five forces has on our lives, and it can also help us to overcome any difficulties we experience as a result of their influence. It would be a mistake to view the rites of the ancient Druids as undertaken solely for propitiation – trying to make peace with the gods of time and place, lineage and environment through sacrifice and offerings. The sophistication of Druid philosophy points to the fact that whilst propitiation may have been a feature of their relationship to these forces, it must also have included attunement and the acquisition of power and wisdom. It is one thing to engage in propitiation as a kind of bribe in the hope that the spirit will not harm you, and quite another to make offerings in the spirit of thankfulness and respect – recognising and honouring a potent force, and hoping too that you will be energised and empowered by them.
Many people are not fully conscious of these forces, which shape their identity and destiny, and as a result their conscious minds are disconnected from the sources of their power. The Druid, however, relates to them as storehouses of energy – acknowledging these spirits and observing their effects, recognising the limitations they impose and their negative influences, as well as the riches and benefits they have given. Druids connects themselves back into the genetic life-stream of the ancestors, the cultural life-stream of the tribe, the power of the earth through the Spirit of Place, the power of the times through the Spirit of Time, and the purpose of their lives through the Spirit of the Journey.
This work cannot be accomplished in a day. In the Order, it is part of the training of the Druid that is undertaken with the method that has been called ‘fractional analysis’ by Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, who built on the work of Freud and Jung to develop a psychology that includes an understanding of the spiritual dimension. With fractional analysis we do not attempt to understand, face and integrate everything at once. We periodically face a particular aspect of ourselves, or in this case a particular spirit, and gradually, fractionally, come to analyse and integrate more and more of its riches. In the course of this we move from being at the mercy of the family and culture we were born into, and of our geographical and temporal location, and instead we become increasingly empowered, as we are fed by:
The Richness of Place
The Richness of Time
The Treasures of the Tribe
The Treasures of the Ancestors
The Joy of the Journey
EXERCISE
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Which do you think has had the most influence upon who you are today – the genetic influence of your parents and ancestors, or the influence of your upbringing and the culture that you have lived in? Or has the Spirit of the Times had the most formative influence, or perhaps the spirit of the land beneath you? Or is it your sense of your own inner self that has travelled through many lives that gives you your strongest sense of influence on who you feel yourself to be? To get a sense of how you perceive the varying strength of these different influences, try drawing a circle and without too much interference from your logical mind, turn it into a pie-chart, apportioning slices to each of the five influences. Let your intuition guide you to work out the size of each portion.
If this way of understanding your identity appeals to you, you might like to spend some time
exploring the gifts of each of the five spirits. Start with the one that appeals to you the most and over the coming days think about the influence it has had on your life – you might want to write about this, or even paint a picture or write a poem that illustrates the part it plays in your life. Notice points of difficulty – with some effort these can provide gateways to transformation. A common point of difficulty has been mentioned already – relating to the Spirit of Time as an enemy. With this, or any other, you could hold in mind the question ‘How can I transform this relationship?’ Gradually, over the coming weeks see if you can work with each of the spirits, bearing in mind that insight alone is not enough to make a fundamental difference, and that insight needs to be followed through with specific and often practical changes to one’s way of being in the world.
CHAPTER NINE
CIRCLES AND STONES, TRACKWAYS AND STARS
Archaeologists for some unapparent reason had been struggling hard for many years to break the popular association of megalithic monuments with Druidism, when suddenly science restored the Druids to their old temple, Stonehenge, wiser and more venerable than before.
John Michell, A Little History of Astro-Archaeology
WE HAVE SEEN how the circle is a primal symbol for the Druid – representing the self, the wholeness of life, its seasonal cyclicity, its completeness. We have seen how at points around the circle we can station the spirits that influence us, together with the four seasons, cardinal directions and elements, and the eight festivals.
Druid Mysteries Page 13