Sublime

Once Maughan became chief, a number of fellow Druids decided to form a new group and in 1964 the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids was founded, led by Ross Nichols – a man who was to become one of the most influential figures in the modern Druid movement.

While the Druid Revival began in the seventeenth century, with interest in the megalithic monuments of Britain and the rediscovered classical texts, it gained momentum in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and resulted in the development of three separate, though related, manifestations of Druidism.

The Gods have returned to Eri and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country. They have been seen by several in vision. They will awaken the magical instinct everywhere and the universal heart of the people will turn to the old Druidic beliefs. George Russell (‘AE’), in a letter to W. B. Yeats, 1896

Only here do we see an attempt to make Druidry a spiritual path in its own right. Early in the 1900s, if not before, the Order began holding summer solstice rites at Stonehenge – initiating a struggle with the owners of the land to gain access for worship that has continued on and off for about a hundred

England a different kind of Druidism developed through the organisation of the Ancient Order of Druids, founded by Henry Hurle in a tavern in London’s Poland Street in 1781.

Then, in the 1690s, the Druid Revival began in earnest when John Aubrey, the writer and antiquarian, turned his attention to the stone monuments of Wiltshire.

For another thousand years the ideas and practices of Druidry become enshrined in popular culture through the recording of the old tales by Christian clerics, and through Christianity’s adoption of pagan customs, until – through the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – a revival of interest in Druidry occurs which results in the foundi

THE REBIRTH OF Druidry in the modern world can be traced to the time of the Renaissance, when the forgotten classical texts of Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Diogenes Laertius and others dealing with the Druids were rediscovered and eventually printed.