Sublime

he eventually became an important figure in Irish mythology as the leader of the Tuatha de Danann.

LUGAID THE FIRE MAKER

Love of Peace Druids were traditionally peace-makers, and still are: each ceremony begins with Peace to the Quarters, there is a Druid’s Peace Prayer, and Druids plant peace groves.

Druidic methods of divination, including working with the sacred animals of the Celtic and Druid tradition and working with Ogham, which has come to be known as the sacred tree-alphabet of the Druids. It is claimed that the Druids used Ogham for divination.

From the mid-eighties they began to mine, articulate and popularize the treasure trove of spiritual wisdom found in the old Welsh and Irish manuscripts, which, until then, had only been studied by academics.

Despite these differences, however, certain themes were almost universally adopted: the reverence for nature, an avoidance of dogmatism or the development of a priesthood or spiritual hierarchy, and an absence of discrimination on the basis of gender, age, race or sexual orientation.

When I met the old Chief Druid, Nuinn, he spoke of a way that had never severed its connection with nature, and which conveyed a sense of the immanence of the divine in all things. In Druidry you communed with Deity in the ‘temple not made with hands’ – in the ‘eye of the sun’ – in the open air, in the environment made by the god/dess not by

Every spiritual tradition has a complex history, and the histories of minority movements such as modem paganism are more complex than most. Rather than defining Druidry in mythic terms as a primal tradition of the distant past – to be investigated purely by means of historical research, and thus distanced from the present – it makes more sense to

‘Many of the old Bardic tales speak of the union of God and Goddess, and one of them – the Tale of Taliesin – lies at the heart of the Druid tradition.