We hope to return to the important work [...]]]> As you may have noticed, we haven’t come out with a new issue of Voices of Pagan Pacifism in quite a while. As it turns out, we’ve had our hands full with career and family changes – not least of which is our upcoming wedding this fall!

We hope to return to the important work of this project in the near future, however, with some exciting changes to come. One of the most important changes will be transforming VoPP into a viable social network for Pagans looking to cultivate community-based peacemaking using the tools available to us through digital and social media. If you notice this website looking a bit disheveled, please don’t mind our mess as we work to integrate forums, user profiles, news feeds and other social networking tools into the site!

We thank you for sticking with us this far, and we hope you’ll hang on for the exciting ride to come!

We have a fantastic issue for you this Samhain! As the world turns towards the dark half of the year, our thoughts turn towards [...]]]> Welcome to Voices of Pagan Pacifism, a website dedicated to showcasing and celebrating all the diversity and passion that dwell within the souls and songs of peacemaking Pagans throughout the world.

We have a fantastic issue for you this Samhain! As the world turns towards the dark half of the year, our thoughts turn towards the role that death, destruction, chaos and decay play in the Pagan approach to peacemaking. Yet we also seek the wisdom of our ancestors and beloved dead, the insights they unearthed during their lives and the actions of love and inspiration that are their legacy.

In the spirit of the season, we here at VoPP are pleased to feature excerpts from an article on the origins and folk customs of Samhain by the late Alexei Kondratiev, who crossed the veil and joined the ancestors earlier this year. Kondratiev explores the relationship between order and chaos, light and dark, and the ways in which we can delve into the fecundity of the Otherworld to reinvigorate and renew our lives on this side of the thinning veil.

In a similar vein, Starhawk shares some personal reflections about the death of one young peace activist, and what his death — and his life — meant to the community. As Pagans, how do we confront death and violence in ways that give them meaning? How do we honor the dead and the sacrifices they have made?

As the landscape sheds its colors and withers to shades of brown and gray while the wind howls through the bare-limbed trees, our musings naturally turn inwards to our own fears and uncertainties echoing back to us through the dark. Alison Shaffer explores the work of fear and courage through the retelling of a dream-vision of unseen monsters and a moonlit sword.

Meanwhile, Jeff Lilly investigates a vision of his own from back in 2006, as part of a review of Frank MacEowen’s The Mist-Filled Path that confronts the history of violence in Native American and European relations and asks how we can honor the ancestors of the land while respecting cultural diversity and integrity.

And last but not least, VoPP features Pagan author Brynneth in an interview about her personal approach to peacemaking, along with some helpful advice about how to bring peace work into our rituals, our home and our work environments.

In addition to these wonderful pieces, I’d also like to point you towards several articles off-site in keeping with this issue’s theme. First, Christian writer and peace activist Gareth Higgins shares his thoughts on the recent suicides of gay teens and asks some difficult questions about the role that we each play in a modern culture of violence and intolerance. Also, although Isaac Bonewits has also crossed the veil to join the beloved dead this past year, his work still lives on through the articles and essays available on his website. In particular, his essays “A Call to Arms” and “Some Thoughts on Terrorism” are well worth reading and reflection.

As the nights lengthen and the leaves take on their autumn colours, many of our cities prepare for a seasonal festival dominated by dark and frightening imagery.  Ghosts, skeletons, hags, nocturnal creatures such as cats and bats, and grinning monster faces peer out at us from shop windows.  Much of it is [...]]]> Alexei Kondratiev

As the nights lengthen and the leaves take on their autumn colours, many of our cities prepare for a seasonal festival dominated by dark and frightening imagery.  Ghosts, skeletons, hags, nocturnal creatures such as cats and bats, and grinning monster faces peer out at us from shop windows.  Much of it is just commercialism, yet there is no denying that the atmosphere of the holiday still has a profound effect on the modern psyche — as we can see from the spontaneous outrageousness of Hallowe’en parades, the creative expressions of death-related themes, and the general surge in mischief-making.  All these customs, however, are a diffuse reflection of the beliefs and practices of the Celtic populations of Europe, for whom this feast was a crucial turning-point in the flow of time.

The Coligny Calendar’s division of the year into two halves associated with summer and winter is still very strongly reflected in Celtic folk practice, where the yearly cycle consists of a dark half beginning on Samhain (November 1st), mirrored by a light half beginning on Bealtaine (May 1st).  The rituals surrounding Samhain and Bealtaine are closely related to each other and make it clear that the two festivals are linked, but also that they deal with opposite energies within the unfolding of the year.  What is explicit and active in one is implicit and dormant in the other, and vice versa.  This is often expressed as the notion that what disappears in our world at once becomes present in the Otherworld, and it has even been suggested, on this basis, that Samhain’s “summery” name^[*^] was originally intended to designate the beginning of an Otherworld summer!  Whether this is plausible or not, it remains certain that while Samhain began one kind of yearly cycle, Bealtaine began another, and both could be construed as a kind of “New Year”.  In ancient Ireland the High King inaugurated the year on Samhain for his household (and, symbolically, for all the people of Ireland) with the famous ritual of Tara, but in nearby Uisneach, the sacred centre held by the druids in complementary opposition to Tara, it was on Bealtaine that the main ritual cycle was begun.  In both cases sacred fires were extinguished and re-lit, though this happened at sunset on Samhain and at dawn on Bealtaine.  Bealtaine was a time of opening and expansion, Samhain a time of gathering-in and shutting, and for herd-owners like the Celts this was expressed with particular vividness by the release of cattle into upland pastures on Bealtaine and their return to the safety of the byres on Samhain.

Which of these two dates, then, should we think of primarily as the “Celtic New Year”? Although both deal with the beginning of a cycle, Samhain begins it in darkness, and there is no doubt about the pre-eminence of darkness in Celtic tradition.  In De Bello Gallico Julius Caesar notes that the Celts began their daily cycle with sunset (spatia omnis temporis non numero dierum, sed noctium finiunt; dies natales et mensum et annorum initia sic obseruant, ut noctem dies subsequatur — “they define all  amounts of time not by the number of days, but by the number of nights; they celebrate birthdays and the beginnings of months and years in such a way that the day is made to follow the night”), and this is confirmed by later Celtic practice.  Darkness comes before light, because life appears in the darkness of the womb, all things have their beginning in the fertile chaos that is hidden from the rational mind.  Thus the year begins with its dark half, holding the bright half in gestation as the seeds lie in apparent death underground, although the forces of growth are already at work in Otherworldly invisibility.  The moment of death — the passing into the concealing darkness — is itself the first step in the renewal of life.

On Samhain, the moment of the year’s death, this world and the Otherworld become equivalent to each other, classificatory boundaries are removed from all categories, no barriers exist between the dead and the living, so both can authentically come together  in one place to share a ritual feast.  Individual Celtic communities have preserved a wealth of different customs related to the way this feast was actually celebrated: one can still discern some distorted elements of them in modern urban practices, such as Hallowe’en parties and trick-or-treating. 

Renewing social links with the dead and feeding the Land-spirits were both ritual means of ensuring a safe future.  While Samhain (and the phenomenon of death which it celebrated) was obviously the end of a cycle, it was more importantly the start of a new one.  Because all true novelty springs from the chaotic freedom and vitality of the Otherworld, a new cycle could be inaugurated only by dissolving all of the structures of the old one — just as the moment of death dissolves our identity in this world, allowing the fresh energies of the Otherworld to impel us towards new life.  This meant that, as happens in the feasts of renewal of many different cultures, certain types of social disorder were actively encouraged during the period of the festival, because they promoted the renewing influence of the Otherworld at the point in the yearly cycle where it would be most beneficial.  Customs originating entirely in the world of cultural values — such as those relating to social rank or gender-appropriate behaviour — were the most likely to be violated.  Disrespect could be shown to elders or to members of the upper classes.  Cross-dressing was one of the most widespread and popular ways of expressing the dissolution of social categories, and in parts of Wales groups of young men in female garb were referred to as gwrachod (“hags” or “witches”) as they wandered through the countryside on Calan Gaeaf, indulging in all kinds of mischief.

But the disorder, of course, was only the prelude to the return of order in a strengthened form.  The structures that had been dissolved had to be re-created in order to channel the new energy from the Otherworld in the desired directions.  While local communities would have had their own diverse methods of accomplishing this ritually (often through the extinguishing and re-kindling of household fires), more elaborate ceremonies were conducted by religious specialists at the sacred centres of a territory, in the name of the entire population.  In pre-Christian Ireland the ritual of Tara, focusing on the High King in his role as linchpin of the social order, was the means for re-creating the world on Samhain. 

The Middle Irish text entitled Suidigud Tellaig Temra (The Settling of the Household of Tara) describes the essentials of the ritual and relates some of the mythology that explains its symbolism (albeit with a somewhat Christianised background), while Geoffrey Keating, the seventeenth-century encyclopaedist of traditional Irish lore, provides us with additional explanations of some of the elements.  Since the Land itself, as a ritual entity, was conceived of as a square, so was Tara, for the purposes of this ceremony, seen as a four-sided space.  Each of the directions was associated with one of the three functional classes of society (and with the divinity who was seen as the ruler of that function), the South being devoted specifically to the power of the Land and to the goddess who gave energy to the exercise of the social functions.  The High King occupied the centre of the ritual area, while around him, strictly ordered by social rank, were representatives of the four provinces. 

Thus, when the New Year actually dawned, the magical heart of Ireland would contain a model of the entire social order of the country in miniature, engaged in the solemn feasting whereby all social links were strengthened, and all parts of the country would then benefit from the influence of this ritual. 

Alexei Kondratiev (1949–2010) was an author, linguist, and teacher of Celtic languages, Celtic folklore and Celtic culture. He taught the Irish language and Celtic history at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, New York from 1985 until his death. His writings on Celtic religion and spirituality, which included the ground-breaking book The Apple Branch: A Path to Celtic Ritual, were highly influential on both Celtic-oriented Druidic groups and the nascent Celtic Reconstructionist movement. He was a passionate defender of Celtic language and culture, and regularly advocated that Pagan religions that drew from Celtic culture should immerse themselves in the living Celtic languages and communities.

Copyright © 1997 Alexei Kondratiev. All Rights Reserve.

This article was originally published in An Tríbhís Mhór: The IMBAS Journal of Celtic Reconstructionism, volume 2, issue 1/2, Samhain 1997/Iombolg 1998. The entire article is available at IMBAS.org.

It’s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community’s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, [...]]]> Starhawk, www.starhawk.org

It’s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community’s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, Reclaiming, creates throughout the year, with intricate altars, a full chorus, dancers, singers, acrobats doing aerial invocations, and a spiral that might include a thousand people. Into all this, we weave some deep magic, both personal and broader than personal, involving the mystery at the heart of our spirituality — death and regeneration.

Each year I take on different roles. Some years I lead the trance, other years I might simply invoke the spirits of the land or play the drum and leave the ‘bigger’ roles to others. This year my role seems to involve carrying a lot of heavy objects and buckets of sand, building altars and decorating the front of the house. Or not so much actually building and decorating, as providing the materials and suggestions for others to do the creative part.

And this year I’m calling the Dead. So I’ve been thinking a lot about death, and singing the song we will use to sing the Dead over into a place of renewal. Just before bed, I check my email, and I learn that a young man has died, shot to death in Oaxaca where he has gone to cover the teachers’ strike and the people’s insurrection for Indymedia. His name is Brad Will. I stare at his picture, trying to remember if I know him from all the demonstrations and mobilizations and meetings we have undoubtedly been at together.

In Miami, my friend Andy reminds me, after a wild ritual collaboration between the Pagan cluster and the black bloc, a young man stepped forward with a guitar and began singing Desert Rat’s song about Seattle, “When the Tear Gas Fills the Sky.” That was Brad — alive, singing, defiant. “I will wash the pepper from your face, and go with you to jail, And if you don’t make it through this fight, I swear I’ll tell your tale…”

I didn’t know him well, but I know so many like him — mostly but not all young, sitting in long meetings in warehouses or donning respirators to gut flood-ruined houses in New Orleans, standing shoulder to shoulder as the riot cops advance, or as the bulldozer moves forward to destroy a home in Gaza. Filing stories at midnight on electronic networks set up by young geniuses with duct tape and component parts in dusty, third world towns, eating cold pasta out of old yogurt tops and sleeping on floors. Hitching rides into war zones and crossing borders. It’s as if a whole cohort of souls had arrived on this planet imbued with the unquestioned faith that they were put here to somehow make a difference, to interfere with injustice, to witness, to change the world. Ragged, intemperate, opinionated, passionate, and above all, alive.

And now another one of the tribe is dead, shot down in Oaxaca where a five-month teachers’ strike became a full-blown insurrection, the kind that radicals dream of, with streets full of barricades and ordinary people rising up against a rigged election and a corrupt, dictatorial governor. It hasn’t been much reported in the U.S. papers. But Brad Will was there, with camera and computer, to be a set of eyes.

Now his eyes are closed, forever. I put his name on our list of the Dead. At the Spiral Dance, I see someone has set up a shrine to him on our North altar, where the dead are honored. I meet another activist friend there, who tells me how he remembers Brad: running into a barrage of sound bombs in a demonstration in some foreign city. “I couldn’t explain to people that they were harmless,” he’d said. “We didn’t speak the same language. So I had to show them.”

I didn’t know him well, but I know how it is to walk into a situation that is dangerous, even life-threatening, how it feels to weigh the risks, to accept them, to tell yourself that you can be at peace with any consequence, and then to walk out into the street in the firm if unconscious belief that you will be lucky that day, once again. I can only imagine how it feels when the bullets rip through flesh, and your severed spirit stares back at a broken body, and in a blaze of light a different journey begins.

We Pagans have no dogma, no official Book of the Dead to outline the soul’s journey. If we share any belief in common, it is simply this: that death is part of a cycle that includes regeneration and renewal. That just as the falling leaves decay to fertilize the roots of trees, each death feeds some rebirth.

Death transforms us. The tribe of world-changers has its list of martyrs — the short list of those who are known in the first world — Carlo Giuliani, Huang Hai Lee, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall — and the much longer list of names in some other language — Spanish, indigenous, Arabic, and so many others — who die every day. And the world’s religions each have their concept of that transformation, for those whose death is somehow special, powerful and meaningful: martyrs, saints, boddhisatvas. We Pagans don’t like to glorify martyrs, but we know that ‘sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred.’ In an instant, that ordinary comrade you remember singing at the fire or arguing at the meeting, someone you might have been charmed or irritated by or attracted to, or not, someone who showed no mark of doom or prescience of what was to come, becomes uplifted into another realm, part symbol, part victim, locus of our deepest love and rage.

William Butler Yeats expressed it best, writing about the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the friends he admired and the ones he disliked, shot by the British.

“Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn,
All changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born…”

And death transforms the living. When someone close to us dies, we become someone else. When my father died when I was just five years old; my mother was transformed from a beloved wife to a grieving widow. I changed, overnight, from a blessed, fortunate child to someone set apart, marked by a tragedy, missing something deeply important that other children had.

And so one day you are someone with a job and a family and a neighborhood in which you and your kin have lived for generations — and a day later the waters rise and you are homeless, a refugee in a strange place dependent on the kindness of strangers. One day you are a mother filled with hopes and dreams and pride, and the next day you are bereft, with a gaping hole in your heart that can never be filled.

Yet we, the living, have some choice in how we respond to death, and what transformation we undergo. My mother, out of her grief, became a counselor, a therapist, an expert in loss and grieving. Cindy Sheehan, out of her grief for her son Casey, killed in Iraq, became a woman on fire, a modern prophet calling the powerful to justice, who galvanized the movement against the war. Mesha Monge-Irizarry, mother of Idriss Stelley who was shot dead in the Metreon by the San Francisco police, became an advocate for all the victims of police violence. Rachel Corrie’s parents took up the cause of justice for the people of Palestine. Grief can open the heart to courage and compassion; rage can move us to action. Out of loss comes regeneration: a terrible beauty is born.

A death like Brad’s calls us all to deeper levels of courage, to be eyes that refuse to shut in the face of oppression, voices that sing out for justice, hands that build a transformed world.

Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and the award-winning Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Her latest is her first book for children: The Last Wild Witch.  She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work.  Her web site is www.starhawk.org.



Copyright (c) October 31, 2006 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk’s right to future publication of her work. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.

We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.

There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might [...]]]> Alison Shaffer, Meadowsweet & Myrrh

We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.

There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.

The sword was long and thin, curving in to a point like a blade of grass. It shimmered a silvery blue, its hilt and edge etched with curling, spiraling abstract forms. It cast a pale light about it that bit into the night.

This was not the first time I held, in dream, a blade of moonlight in a dark wood. Years ago there had been a cabin on the edge of a forest, casting warm orange shadows long between the trees. And I had left that cabin to walk out into the darkness carrying nothing but a small knife carved, on one side, in the figure of the Christ outstretched on the cross, a sweet sad smile in his eyes, and on the other side, the triumphant, open and upraised arms of a woman strange and wild with leaves and flowers in her hair. The knife had burned with a cool, illuminating fire as I held it aloft to guide the way — not a weapon, but a star.

Now again, I held the blade in my hands, this time no small dagger but a great sword flaming blue and flickering as I turned and whirled at every startling sound. My terror rose as strangers around me floundered in the darkness.

But underneath my inexplicable panic was also the sure knowledge that fear connected all of us — like a current of feral power, weaving through the trembling flesh and white bones of our bodies. Everyone was a stranger, and there was real threat among us — but I could not see it, and surfacing through my own terror was a new fear that I might hurt an innocent by mistake. A snap of a twig behind me could set my reflexes moving in that instinctive flinch, and in a moment I could run the blade right through the meat of some unknowing, frightened being with wide-open eyes as fearful and confused as my own.

I held the sword above my head and closed my eyes against the busy, writhing dark.

“Stay back,” I cried out, “I am very afraid, and I do not want to hurt you.”

I tried to breathe deeply, listening to the calm unfolding within me, opening up inside the sloshing panic of nightmare and uncertainty. I breathed as I listened to the shuffling footsteps of those around me moving cautiously away. “I am very afraid,” I said again, keeping my eyes shut, owning the interior darkness as it washed out in ripples. A noise behind me, and I almost flinched — but reined my body in like a nervous mare balking in the night, muscles bunching and tense beneath skin that was cold with barely-checked terror.

Then words rose up in a mantra from that inner dark. I began repeating them aloud, sword still held above my head. “Love is the law,” I murmured, “And the whole of the law is love.” My voice grew stronger as the quiet spread out around me and the dark unseen beings slowed their shuffling and scrambling over root and broken stone. “Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love,” I said again. And again. “Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love.”

A gentle movement behind me, and I felt the press of a warm body against mine — someone standing back against my back, their breath rasping and slowing, circling in on a center like a hawk slowly wheeling closer and closer to home. I continued to call out into the darkness, my eyes still shut: “Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love.” Another voice joined mine, barely audible and quaking over every word. “Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love.”

It seemed to go on forever, this mantra rolling over itself, tumbling out into the night among the thickly-growing trees. The hush and rustle of movement grew gentler and more cautious. Every once in a while, I thought I heard another voice joining my own. But still I was afraid of what panic might come rushing back to overtake me, and so I kept my eyes closed. I sought the soft and vulnerable interior of my dark, working heart.

And all the while, I held the hard, shimmering sword like a warning and a beacon above my head.

Just as the dream was ending and the dawn was brightening outside my window in the waking world — just as my breath was easing and my courage rising to meet my fear — I finally opened my eyes. All around me, strangers were clustered, arm linked in arm, backs pressed to backs, a warm, gently-swaying mass of bodies in the middle of night. Some of them listened with eyes still closed, others gazed around at one another wondering — the forest was stilled and the dawn was coming. Rippling through the small company was the growing understanding that we were all here, together, and whatever monster or nightmare had stalked the obscurity had finally gone. I saw in my hand the sword, the only weapon among us, faintly glowing and sharp as ever. In the dark, I could have become a monster, lashing out in panic, I could have killed and become the terror that in the confusion would have made these people enemies and killers, too. But the words were still rolling over me in a murmur echoed on the lips of others, “Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love….” I had held my fear as a light, and sought with closed eyes in my black heart the source and center of peace. The nightmare had passed, the war had not come, and I opened my eyes to discover the quiet stillness of the night was giving way to a sunrise among the trees. And the words were still rising, drawn from me like breath, a prayer unceasing.

Love is the law, and the whole of the law is love.

And then, I opened my eyes again.

Alison Shaffer lives, moves and practices her Druidry in the lovely, thrice-rivered city of Pittsburgh, where she dwells on the edge of a wooded park with her fiancé, her cat, her pet frogs and her houseplants. A member of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, her spiritual studies revolve around a fascination with theology, peacemaking, ecology, Celtic mythology and ritual aesthetics, as well as a love of song and a great deal of poetry. She writes frequently on these themes on her blog, Meadowsweet & Myrrh as well as contributing essays to publications such as Sky Earth Sea, Patheos.com, Pagan+Politics and The Witches’ Voice.

In this article, I’d like to share an odd little sequence of synchronicities in my life. They led me to think long and hard about the spiritual path I’ve chosen and how it relates other paths people are following these days.

In the summer of 2006, the day [...]]]> Jeff Lilly, Druid Journal

In this article, I’d like to share an odd little sequence of synchronicities in my life. They led me to think long and hard about the spiritual path I’ve chosen and how it relates other paths people are following these days.

In the summer of 2006, the day before our family set out for a trip to South Dakota, I got a phone call from my mother. She asked whether or not I received a book she had mailed me recently, a book about Druidry by Frank MacEowen called The Mist-Filled Path. I said I hadn’t, but I’d heard good things about the book, and I was looking forward to getting it. I should add to that my mother had no idea that we were heading to South Dakota when she sent me the book.

The trip out west was profoundly moving for me. The history of western South Dakota is dominated by the conflict between the First Nations Lakota people (commonly called the Sioux Indians) and the US Army. The size of the Lakota reservations, the historical markers in the national parks, the majesty of the buffalo, the folk tales woven into the landscape, and the irresistible menace of the sacred Black Hills themselves seemed to whisper stories of holy ground defiled and bloodstained.

We were almost home when I had a very strange dream.

Hold Her In Your Heart

I dreamed that I was part of a Lakota tribe. I was good friends with the chief of the tribe, and also good friends with his wife. In fact, I was deeply in love with his wife. He knew it, and she knew it, but they both knew I would never act on my feelings; so they tolerated it, and probably felt some pity towards me because of it.

There came a time when both the chief and I were away from his wife, and she was killed. I think she was killed by an errant hunter’s arrow. We rushed to her side, but she was dead.

Both of us began to grieve. We lifted her body and began to carry her back to the village. But when we had only gone a few paces, miraculously, she came to life again.

Somehow the chief and I knew that it was our love for her, combined, that had brought her back.

I was so surprised I woke up.

I tried to puzzle this out for a few minutes, and couldn’t get anywhere. Finally I decided to try a meditation and see if I could find some clues with that. Since I had so recently woken up, it was easy to get back into the meditation state. The chief from my dream appeared when I asked for a guide.

I asked him what it was all about, but he just said, “Hold her in your heart. Hold her in your heart.”

That’s as far as I got. It was a lot to think about, what with trying to get the family back home in one piece, so I set the whole episode aside to come back to later.

When I got home, I picked up The Mist-Filled Path. Imagine my surprise to find that a goodly chunk of the book concerns Frank MacEowen’s experiences with the Lakota of South Dakota.

The Celt and the Sun Dance

MacEowen’s style of Druidry is heavily influenced by the shamans he’s worked with — First Nations shamans and shamans from other cultures. He works extensively with spirit guides, drumming, and music, in addition to more traditionally druidic practices such as communing with nature, sleeping in ancient Pictish graves, walking the countryside in all weather, and telling fortunes with beer coasters. (Well, maybe that last one isn’t quite so traditional.)

The story of MacEowen’s initiation is a harrowing one, and I don’t want to give it all away here. But a spirit came to him as he lay dying of a terrible illness, and informed him in no uncertain terms that he was to participate in the Lakota Sun Dance the following summer. The Sun Dance can be a terrible ordeal, and MacEowen was afraid; he tried to get out of it a couple of times, but the spirits would not let him go.

The purpose of the Sun Dance (briefly, without doing it justice) is to weaken the veil between the worlds, to permit easier communication between the dancers and the guiding spirits of the ancestors. Dancers see visions of past generations, landscapes as they once were, details of the defining moments in the life of a culture.

MacEowen didn’t really know what to expect. He wasn’t of the First Nations, so he suspected he wouldn’t see First Nations ancestors. But he was not prepared to feel the dry hot earth underfoot turning moist and cool; he wasn’t prepared to smell wet turf; he wasn’t prepared for the bone flutes played by the ritual facilitators to take on the keening wail of bagpipes. He saw visions of his own ancestors: pioneers in 18th- and 19th-century clothing; half-starved children with their tongues stained green from the grass they tried to eat during the Irish Potato Famine; Scots warriors heading into battle again and again against the English.

Since then his path has been defined by guidance from the spirits of his ancestors and by his own research and study into Celtic spirituality. His book lays out a few general principles, each of which is essential to a path that is truly Celtic in character.

Celtic Spirituality

Hearth.

In the oldest times, the hearth was at the physical center of the Celtic home. The houses were circular, yurt-like structures, with a sod fire at the center directly under a hole to allow the smoke to escape. Nowadays, the hearth is usually in a wall; but it is still the center of the spiritual home. The hearth should be a place where pictures of family are placed, where stories are told and cares are forgotten.

MacEowen relates a story from his youth, in which he awakened suddenly in the middle of the night and wandered into the living room, where the fireplace was. There sat his grandmother, also unaccountably awake, sitting by the long-dead fire. She was watching the ghost of a girl standing at the hearth. Almost as soon as MacEowen came in, the ghost disappeared.

“You saw it?” asked his grandmother. MacEowen nodded, and she nodded in turn. They never spoke of it again; in a Christian family such as MacEowen’s, seeing ghosts was not encouraged. We’ll come back to that a little later. But the important thing was that the ghostly child had appeared by the hearth — a place her heart was evidently drawn to.

Heart.

For MacEowen, “heart” is compassion, courtesy, and hospitality. He tells stories of times in his childhood when the Mississippi flooded, and his father went out into the rising waters to help save lives and property, while his mother stayed home and opened her house to those whose homes were gone. The Celtic peoples have always been famous for their hospitality to strangers: tales are told of Irish families during the Famine who would take in any visitor and offer them a portion of what little they had, and a place by the meagre fire. Compassion, at its root, is the recognition of the kinship of all humanity, and is at the root of all the greatest spiritual paths.

Earth.

You can’t get away from nature if you’re going to call yourself a Druid. For MacEowen, nature is the greatest spirit guide there is. When he wants guidance in a decision, contact with his soul or the souls of his ancestors, or solace in suffering, he wanders the hills and forests, finding inspiration in the patterns of tree bark, the arrangement of stones in a river, and drifting mist. For him, it is a meditation with the living earth.

The Celts and Christianity

These three characteristics of Celtic spirituality made for an interesting brew when it was mixed with Christianity. The oldest, original Christianity — the Christianity you get if you actually read the gospels — is based on compassion and divine inspiration. Jesus, in common with other spiritual teachers of Asia, emphasized the relationship between the individual and divinity. Each of us should seek out God in our hearts, and make peace with Him there. He also, of course, taught compassion for all — to love your neighbor.

This is not the form of Christianity that reached the British Isles. By that time, Christianity had been transformed by its incorporation into the power structure of the Roman Empire. Christianity was patriarchal, hierarchical, and a creature of institution. But the Celts recognized the roots of Christianity, revived them, and lay them over their home-grown spirituality. Celtic Christianity was marked by extraordinary good works (heart), by the ordination of women and allowing priests to marry (hearth), and the remarkable ability of practitioners to find God in nature (earth). Reams of religious poetry written by Celtic Christian monks in the middle ages testify to the great love they had for small creatures, rocks and rivers, and trees. And of course, the most beloved pagan gods and holy sites were converted into saints and churches.

As the power of the Roman Church grew, they cracked down on the irregular practices of the Celtic Church, especially regarding the status of women. Some of the most insightful of the Celtic religious thinkers were labeled heretics (see, for example, Eriugena). With intimidation, politics, money, and blood, the Roman Church overpowered the Celts. But the core of Celtic spirituality always remained among the people, even if the church itself was bound to the patriarchy in Rome.

Silent Paths Crossing in the Woods

Celtic spirituality has had good times and bad times with Christianity. The Celtic path meshed well with the original spirit of Christianity — possibly because of the similarities they both share with the mysticism of Asia. But it didn’t play nice with Roman Christianity.

MacEowen himself has had trouble fitting his brand of Celtic shamanistic mysticism into the mold of modern Protestantism, despite the fact that his father was a pastor. (Note that, in MacEowen’s case at least, it really was despite the fact, not because of the fact.) Modern Christians sometimes have trouble with spirit flights, talking directly with ancestors, and finding God out in the woods rather than confined safely to His house.

But as MacEowen found, just because two paths are pagan doesn’t mean they’re compatible. He tried to adopt the First Nations path, but found himself led back to the paganism of his ancestors. There are many similarities between European paganism and the religion of the First Nations — the focus on nature, the animism, the shamanistic elements, the reverence for ancestors. But it was that last point that was the real problem. If you revere your ancestors, and receive guidance from them, your path cannot deviate too far from theirs. A First Nations shaman must revere First Nations ancestors, and a European shaman must revere European ancestors.

Interpreting the Dream

Now we return to the dream of the chief and his wife I described above. For weeks I could make no sense at all of it. But after some more meditation and asking friends for help, I came up with this:

The chief’s wife represents the First Nations spiritual paths. The chief, representing the surviving First Nations peoples, love her; and I do too, even though I am not married to her and never can be.

For all my life, I have been drawn to First Nations spirituality, but I am not a member of the First Nations. I may have some blood from them on my father’s side (there is a tradition that Pocahontas was among our ancestors, and certainly the Lillys were in southern Virginia at the right time) but not much. In the dream, I loved the chief’s wife, but could never consummate that love; in reality, I love the First Nations paths, but cannot walk them.

In the dream, the chief’s wife was shot and killed. In a similar way, First Nations spirituality has suffered terribly from the European occupation. But the wife was revived via the love that I and the chief shared for her. The interpretation of the dream is now clear: the spiritual paths of the First Nations can be revived if both First Nations peoples and Europeans love it enough. The love of just one or the other is not sufficient.

But even when she was reborn, she was still the chief’s wife, not mine. In the same way, if the traditions of the First Nations comes back into full flower, it will still be the path of the First Nations, not of the Europeans. But that doesn’t mean that the love is worthless or misguided. On the contrary — as long as the love is pure and not mixed with envy, it’s healthy, and necessary for the survival of those traditions.

And recalling the discussion above, it’s easy to see why. The First Nations paths are marked by reverence for ancestors, and Europeans simply do not have First Nations ancestors. It’s as simple as that. I have read more than once that this advice is frequently given by First Nations peoples to European-descended Americans who want to learn their ways: go back and learn about your own ancestors, learn your own old ways, and then we can talk. Even though it might seem easier to link in with the First Nations traditions, as weak as they are, than to try to go all the way back to a healthy pagan European religion — you just can’t do it.

Paths for Europeans

Many people in the Western world have lost contact with their ancestry — especially in the former colonies. We people of European descent live on stolen bloodstained holy land, far away from the ground our own ancestors hallowed.

If we seek guidance from our ancestors, how do we reach them across the cold battlefields and empty oceans? And which ancestors do we choose? Will they all get into a huge, bloody, continent-spanning war, as Europeans were once wont to do? Do we have to try to synthesize their beliefs, as our genes are synthesized from theirs? Do we have to bring all their paths together into a broad highway, a One Great Truth?

No. But we must lift our heads, peer into the mist, and simply move, trusting that our steps will be guided. The holy ground we walk on is defiled with blood and treachery, but it is still holy ground. The ancestors buried under us are not calling us to paganism or Christianity or some hybrid Frankenstein-faith, but simply to hearken to their whispers of hearth, heart, and earth.

Jeff Lilly is a druid, linguist, father, and author of the blog Druid Journal, where he writes about meditation, relationship with Spirit, soulful fulfillment in scholarship and art, reconnecting the ancient with the modern, creating beauty, and healing the world. He lives in Pittsburgh with his partner Ali.

Rituals of Peace

Over the years I’ve been to a few rituals where peace has been a significant focus, and heard about others. With Peace One Day falling on the 21st of September, it makes a lot of sense to incorporate peace elements into autumn equinox rituals.