Honourable companions,

1. On the Order.

On several occasions, I have been asked by others to start my own Druidic order. I admit that starting a new Order is something of a fantasy of mine. I've talked about it with friends, mostly to joke about what might be the purpose of such a society. However, I no longer believe that forming large orders is the way to accomplish a spiritual purpose.

First of all, I sincerely and honestly question why so many pagans feel compelled to join or to create organisations for themselves as pagans. I am not speaking here of the tuath or the coven, both common kinds of pagan organisation, which are small enough to retain real intimacy and communication. No, on the contrary, I speak of the attempts to built larger structures, to build what really are corporations, to deliberately use a word that has certain unpleasant connotations, with members scattered across whole nations or even the entire globe.

Why do pagans need to build these big corporate organizations? I suspect it is be related to a kind of unconscious insecurity about 'the faith'-- that somehow pagans feel more comfortable and more vindicated in their beliefs if the have recognition from some authority, be it a tax-exempt status with the state, or an initiation into a lineage-tradition, or something like that. Moreover, additionally, these enormous structures of organisation bear internal layers of complexity and bureaucracy. Most major Druid orders in the United States have a bureaucracy of councils, committees, sub-committees, secretaries, guilds, special interest groups, regional jurisdictions, and officers. So much time and effort is invested into the preservation and transmission of cultural knowledge and tradition, a praiseworthy effort on one hand but it has evolved into a pathological fanaticism, that presupposes that the religion of Celtic Paganism itself is nothing more than the preservation and propagation of cultural data, especially language‹an attitude which, incidentally, is not shared by people living in any Celtic country today. It was on such grounds, not so long ago, that I criticized paganism for being indistinguishable from a role play game, in an essay that no print journal anywhere has agreed to print because of its provocative nature.

Leadership in these big organizations is fenced in with thick taboos masquerading as Œinstruments of accountabilityı: as if we are all inherently corrupt, and so we cannot allow leaders to really lead with any endurance; they must, absolutely must, be accountable to a constituency on regular occasions and be vulnerable to impeachment at virtually any time. We have not shaken off the last vestige of Christianity, that life-negating nonsense called the doctrine of original sin. Of course, I know perfectly well why such democratic levers of power are set up: for one thing, it is believed that more absolute structures of authority have in the past abused and exploited people (which is true, certainly), and also because the political structure of social life in western civilization, of which paganism is a subculture, is set up that way. But why does it have to be the same way in paganism?

For these reasons, I sincerely question efforts to organize in large corporations. Paganism is inherently anti-corporate. I even question the effort to achieve for Pagans the same political rights enjoyed by mainstream religions. The effort, if successful, would lead Paganism on a road towards assimilation by the ruling paradigm, and thus away from what it is and what it was meant to be.

There is no reason why pagans must incorporate, except that it is what we have been bred to believe is the way to do things. This is nothing more than an artifact of "corporatist culture", in which people's worth and sense of purpose and identity is in large measure a matter of what group one belongs to. It is distinctly American, too, for it never happens that way in Europe nor in Canada to the elabourate extent that it happens in America. But more importantly, and more universally, it is indicative in an extraordinary lack of trust in one another, and also in ourselves.

The most ridiculous manifestation of this has been the "Blessed By Druids" stamp. So much is happening here that escapes ordinary attention! The very enterprise assumes far too much: that it is known what a Druid is; that blessing things is an activity that Druids do; that we know what blessing is; that we know what special quality is bestowed on a person, place, or thing that is blessed; that being blessed by Druids is different than being blessed by some other creature; that Druids want it known to the public that they have blessed something; and finally, importantly, that "blessed by Druids" will mean the same thing to the public as it means to Druids. Havenıt we had enough of these endless publicity stunts!

The entire difficulty is erased, and my complaint entirely nullified, if we start treating our spirituality as spirituality again, and go back to using our own eyes and ears, our own fingers and voices, our own reason and intuition. Let us re-discover the faculties of spirituality: the Sight, the Will, the Center. If we organize at all, let it be in small independent families of immediate tribe, clann, and coven, sharing in common with other such families nothing more than a group of customs and a literature. There is no need to complicate things further; and doing so will invariably turn out counter-productive.

Consider the wisdom of the Taoist sage Lao-Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching:
"A well shut door needs no bolts, and yet it cannot be opened".
A well shut door needs no additional aids and accessories to function.

Consider the wisdom of the Sufi poet Rumi:
"The rules of faithfulness
are just the door and the doorkeeper.
They keep the presence from being interrupted."
And,
"Stay out in the open like a date palm lifting its arms.
Donıt bore mouse holes In the ground,
arguing inside some doctrinal labyrinth."

What can be said of tradition, at the last? Tradition is a means of connexion with others, which is what makes tradition so valuable. Paolo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed says that "no one liberates himself, nor does anyone liberate anyone else. Rather, people liberate each other." Certainly, one advantage that the lineage-traditions have over eclecticism is that a person receiving an initiation in a lineage-tradition gains a kind of confidence from knowing that the knowledge she receives has been formulated, refined, used, practiced, and accepted by numerous 'generations' of predecessors along the lineage. And moreover, your spiritual being cannot be fulfilled except in communication and inter-connexion with other beings in the world. But as soon as that communication and inter-connexion is codified into a doctrine and enforced by a corporate order, all is lost.

Religion itself begins in private solitary experience, and it might be the case that a more spiritually mature person doesn't need her spirituality reinforced by constant contact with others. Alfred North Whitehead talks about religion as "solitariness". All the major spiritual inspirations, insights and ideas, he observed, occurred to the founders during times of extended solitude. Jesus has his forty days in the desert-- this I think is the more important moment in his life than the nativity and the resurrection. The Buddha meditates in the jungle, under the Bodhi tree. Moses goes up the mountain. So does Mohammed. They had to go out of the realm of the everyday and the common, to another place. And then they had to come back, and tell us all about it.

2. On The Teacher

For the overwhelming majority of us, through our experience in state-run schools or in parochial schools, the relationship of student to teacher is a contradictory one, characterised by the following rules (as articulated by Paolo Freire):

"the teacher teaches and the students are taught,
the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing,
the teacher thinks and the students are thought about,
the teacher talks and the student listens‹meekly,
the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined,
the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply,
the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher,
the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it,
the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students, the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects."

There are ways to overcome this contradiction, but I cannot see how it can be possible except in a face to face and direct encounter with the world and with other people, everyone teaching each other, everyone learning from each other. Apprenticeship and fosterage are contrivances of this process which have their usefulness only in limited contexts.

One can be far more effective by going on one's own, just talking to people, sharing knowledge, sharing experience, sharing life. Just talk to people: and forget about being a teacher or a student. Let everyone you meet be your teacher and your student. Teach without teaching. Lead without leading. There are numerous advantages to this. One does not encounter the problem of presenting oneself with the pomposity and overbearing pretentiousness of a title, as in the case of those whose claim to public prominence in the community is their status some pagan organisation.

Put your own name on yourself. Donıt go looking for someone elseıs name, the name of some corporation, to put on yourself. I have found that if one doesn't put one's own name on what one does, then someone else will. So what I generally do is pick a term that people are going to understand. In certain communities, I'm known as a Druid. If I'm among academics, I'm a philosopher. at Wiccanfest, I'm that long-hair Celt who plays guitar. Put your own name on yourself, and with your community, earn it.

I don't need to identify myself by way of having certain affiliations or connexions. Indeed, I have found that by deliberately not identifying any affiliations, people get a little confused and lost, and this is an opportunity for teaching, although what usually happens is that people seem to act as if whatever opinion you might be stating has reduced legitimacy. There are problems there that I'm sure are obvious to everyone. But one advantage is that no one makes assumptions about what you believe or what you do. You can be yourself. So, who are you?

3. On the Seeker

The first basic teaching of any [mature] mystery tradition is Know Yourself. The phrase was written over the entrance to the Oracle of Delphi. Schopenhauer said It forms the basis and beginning-place of all knowledge of anything. It is the most immediately knowable object of knowledge. It cannot be under-emphasized what a curious and wonderful phenomena the Self actually is. To inquire into it is the "First Question", for of all philosophical questions, the first one that is formulated by children and posed to their parents is, "What am I?"

The large majority of people in the western world do not know who they are. The believe they are who they have been told they are, and who they have been required to be, by various authorities: school, parents, church, big business, media and advertising, and other sources of noise. It is much harder to overcome than it appears. The process of self introspection is not as straightforward as one might like either, although the answers that emerge from it are often remarkably simple. People who are interested in spirituality tend to be more willing and able to do the kind of introspection that is necessary to uproot one's programming, but frequently enough such people have merely substituted one chimera for another. Other forces control our thinking much more than we are aware, and much more than we are ready to admit.

Of someone who knows herself, this is said: "She has no need for a label. She's just who she is, doing her thing, playing the music that takes her to the other side. She has no doctrine, no thick intellectual interpretations. She has a word to speak, but it is spoken for herself. And the world responds to it. She makes her music, and there isn't a concern for what is experienced; it's important only that the experience is happening".

"The presence" always arrives whenever religion turns its attention away from the world, from reality, from life, from all these things in terms of the particularities and minutia of their disconnected details, from whatever power and authority its magisterium might control there, away from doctrine and interpretation, even away from God: and focuses its attention on the Seeker. For whatever truths are "out there" to be discovered, it is yourself, your mind, that searches for them and finds them, and so it may be that they were never "out there" at all. And then, in her meditative silence, or in her ecstacy as induced by music, dance, art, love, the seeker appears to have withdrawn from the world. But we find that actually she has pierced the Mist, and is abiding in the worldıs fully unified totality.

Cathbad
From the Grove,
And in the season of Samhain, 2001.