If I had to summarize what a Druid is in one sentence, the sentence might be:
"A Druid is a professional invigilator of living spiritual mysteries
as expressed by Celtic cultural forms".
This is the most precise and yet fully encompassing definition that I can concieve of at this time. It doesn't employ vague metaphor, but uses analysable language, and it doesn't harken back to a claim about history which means that this definition may serve contemporary people. But even so, perhaps it deserves further elabouration.
"professional"
because being a Druid is a responsibility for
one's tribe, not only for one's own self. Being a professional means
having a skilled capacity that not everyone has yet everyone needs; it is
the investment in you by one's tribe so that you could aquire that skilled
capacity, that grounds you in responsibility to that tribe. Being a Druid
requires one to be accessible and available to people whose scope of
spiritual vision is not as wide as yours. Among one's responsibilities to
such people is to aid them to widen their scope of vision. Being a Druid
is even a responsibility to the world itself, for as the ancient Druids
said, "we created the world", and without Druids to bring about the
renewal of the seasons with their rituals, the world might end. So goes
the myths. But even contemporary Druids have responsibilities to the
world for our Earth is dying. She is being poisoned by the excrement of
human industry.
"invigilator"
a word encompassing a
range of ideas, including steward, investigator, watcher, even 'knower',
but also operator and user. An invigilator is a person who keeps a vigil,
which means watchful and mindful and attentive over something. And so to
say that a Druid is an invigilator is to say that a Druid is watchful and
mindful of something.
"living"
to emphasise that the
spiritual mysteries are real and accessible, and not locked in an
unknowable, unreachable heavan but manifest and realised in our embodied
world. (but this is connected to my idea that the Celtic "otherworld" is
not really a mythic place but actually a certain state of consciousness.)
"spiritual mysteries"
Universal principles of animation
that emerge from all environmental life. (see my essay,
"Ex Nemeton 1: On
Mysteries and Spirit") Spiritual mysteries exist everywhere and always,
and are knowable by everyone. They are the life-experiences and
world-forces that give shape to reality and
meaning to our existance. Yet there needs to be
something more saying that there is a particularly Druidic way of knowing
them. Hence the last part of the definition, which reads:
"as expressed by Celtic cultural forms"
being the culturally specific content of my definition, so to include
poetry, art, archaeology, architecture, literature, mythology, language,
and folklore, and so to require Druids to have comprehensive knowledge of
most of these features of Celtic culture. This is also a
strictly epistemic issue, for it touches on ways of knowing about
things, which is different from the issue of what things essentially *are*
(that's metaphysics).
Postscript: The reporter gently suggested that the definition I gave him was not simple enough for the general public, and so I produced this:
Druidism is the revival of the ancient Celtic religion which holds the Earth and the environment as sacred, and promotes a morality based on truth, honour, strength, and justice.
I believe this is simple enough to be understood by all, and is fairly representative of both ancient Druidism and modern revival Druidism. But it too deserves further elabouration-- what is meant by Truth here, for example. But this is work for another day.