Presenting the Most Amusing and Entertaining Comedy of The Prarie Druid

A Jest in One Act and Six Months

When I was about sixteen years old I met "The Prarie Druid". He was a youngish man of about twenty-five years or so, who had this story: in the period following saint Padraig's mission to Ireland, (circa 432CE) a conclave of Druids did some divinations and found that the country would eventually be christianized. So they got into a couple of curraughs and sailed out West, hoping to find the otherworldly islands that are reputed to be out there. Instead they found Canada's maritimes. There they founded an insulated Celtic community dedicated to the preservation of the Old Ways. The community kept moving west, trying to stay ahead of European colonists. The decendants of the original settlers live a subsistiance existance in isolation, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.

Today it is a village of close to a thousand people, mostly farmers, but with a group of traditional Druids doing all the civic, judicial, and medical things that need to be done. Families tend to be small but fosterage is still practiced so a particular farmer can usually count on having enough labour to work the land and tend the animals. Polyandry is also practiced: women take more than one husband, and the responsible father for children of unknown paternity is selected by the mother from among her husbands. Apparently it works because a woman who desired polygamy would have one husband who worked as a trapper (gone all winter, home in summer) and another who was a hunter (gone all summer, home in winter).

Premarital sex was, as you can guess, perfectly legal and acceptable; the idea was if the girl became pregnant, they would be married, but if she did not become pregnant after a few months then the boy could go back to his tribe with no loss of honour. If, however, she became pregnant and the suitor left her, he would be banished from his tribe, and anyone from the village would be free to work any injury or death upon him without fear of being punished. I was never told what was the fate of barren women.

Though in this town men could not have more than one wife, only men could be Druids, meaning only men could hold positions of authority in the village. Also, in the fifteen hundred years since the original immigrants made it to the St. Lawrence, the people divided into three tribes, and teenagers were expected to seek a spouce from some tribe other than their own, and children would be a part of the mother's tribe.

The man I met said he found this village accidentally, while on a canoe trip somewhere. He joined one of the tribes because the earth-centered lifestyle appealed to him, and trained under them until achieving the rank of 3rd Ring. Then he and some of the other "outsider" druids (that is, people who were not born in the village) who know how to live in the modern world, went back to civilisation to spread the teachings.

It's all bullshit, of course, but I didn't know that at the time. I ate it up completely.

This is how I penetrated the illusion:

In the space of six months I was initiated up to the rank of 2nd Ring, in "Prarie Tradition Druidism", in a rank advancement order that proceeds from Neophyte to 3rd Ring. (Sound familliar? This is exactly the same rank advancement procedure used by the Wiccan Church of Canada ) The location of the secret village was a 3rd Ring secret, apparently.

The way he described the Irish myths did not coincide with the way my Dad described them, and I'm more inclined to believe my dad because he was born in Ireland, and had access to the Irish folklore until he moved to Canada, when he started teaching it to my sisters and I. I can understand that oral legends change over time, but both the early christians and this alleged splinter group of Druids were writing things down around the time they departed Ireland. The man said he saw their sacred books, which were copied by hand on sheep skin with natural dyes for ink, and new ones were made every few hundred years so that they would not have to rely on fragile or rotting books.

He never told us what his legal name was. He was "The Prarie Druid".

He began to ask for money from his male students and sexual favours from his female students, in return for telling us a few of the traditional secrets of Druidism that he was always promising.

He said the Druids from the village were in contact with a half-dozen or so other secret villages of escaped Druids around the world. So how does a secret, isolated, agrarian economy village make that contact, without becoming involved with the rest of the world? (He said there were two more in the USA, one in Ireland's Wicklow Mountians, one in Scotland's Hebrides on an "uncharted island", as if such a thing can exist in the age of sattelite cartography, and he hinted at more.)

He didn't speak gaelic. A village with the history he described would not have learned The Queen's English.

Actually, the coven he formed (and that I was a part of) broke up when our high priestess handfasted someone from outside the coven, and moved to Chicago. The rest of us parted ways a few days later. I guess she was the sensible one, the moderating influence, and without her to prevent the Man from screwing us (in more ways than one) it was only a matter of time before it fell apart. When she left, the rest of us thought she was on to something, and then we started asking the questions that left the Druid squirming.

That I posess the rank of 2nd Ring in his tradition is meaningless to me, since most of what he taught was either the sort of Wicca that Llewelyn Publications might produce, or else pure bullshit.

Although I must point out that I still do one of our rituals: I will take the solo camping trip every winter as we once did. We also used to use Oriental weapons like sai and katana swords, instead of iron-age Celtic implements, but that was just because we all thought they looked cool.

I find it more productive to build a style of Druidism that is brighter, rather than trash someone else's tradition. This page is not about debunking family traditions, or "fam-trads". It is about showing how one's expectations and needs for a spiritual leader can be manipulated by the unscrupulous. This goes for popular books as well as for teachers, for many authors will write about anything from wicca to angels to faeries, and even take a fantasy name to appear more committed and credible, just to make money and gain popularity.

But for the moment, I will leave speculation about contact between Celts and Aboriginal people of north america to more informed minds.