Sublime

Soon after the defeat of Veii, in 390 BCE a posse of marauding ‘Gauls’ sacked Rome. Exactly who these people were is now impossible to know; Roman writers were not good at distinguishing between those whom it was convenient to lump together as ‘barbarian tribes’ from the north, nor much interested in analysing their motives. But according to Livy,

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.

‘Beasts of England.’”

And then there is “The Greening of America.” Can there be a “revolution,” as Reich wrote, that starts with culture and the individual? Might it triumph without violence?

One Melisian king, who brought much order to the country, was Ollam Fodla, Doctor of Wisdom. He divided the country into Cantreds, appointing a chief, or Brugaid, over every territory, and a steward in every town. He established a school of learning and the Feis of Tara, which was a parliamentary gathering held once every three years and attended

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.

It draws on the heritage not only of the pre-Christian Celtic world, but also upon the inspirations of Pythagoreanism, the Egyptian and classical mystery cults, the worlds of alchemy and hermetic magic and the work of countless writers and scholars. But it does this in a non-dogmatic way that honours each individual’s unique needs and abilities.

The Romantics loved this, and the Druids came to represent an indigenous lineage of noble philosophers that had previously been thought to exist only on foreign soil – in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome.

DURING ITS LIKELY beginnings in Neolithic times, Druidry was probably at first animistic and shamanistic in nature, until gradually it evolved into its three separate streams of Bardic, Ovate and Druid practice described by the classical authors. This period of sophisticated, even complex, spiritual practice continued probably for at least a