Celtic Druidism with Author Ellen Evert Hopman
This is Wendy Halley, and you're listening to Lucid Cafe. Hey. Welcome back. If you're a new listener, thanks for tuning in. Or rather, thanks for clicking.
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Wendy:Alright, so in today's episode my guest Ellen Everett Hopman shares what she's discovered about Celtic Druidism in her 30 years as a Celtic historian, teacher, and a practicing Druid. Her new book, Celtic Druidry: Rituals, Techniques, and Magical Practices is a handbook for becoming a modern Druid. In our conversation, she shares how our contemporary understanding of Druidism is not really complete. And you might be surprised to learn about the rather important roles Druids played in ancient society. So Ellen is the author of a number of books and has been a teacher of herbalism since 1983 and of Druidism since 1990.
Wendy:She's a professional member of the American Herbalists Guild and has presented on Druidism, herbal lore, tree lore, paganism, and magic at conferences, festivals, and events in Northern Ireland, in Ireland, Scotland, Canada, and in the United States. Please enjoy my conversation with Ellen Everett Hartman. Ellen, thank you so much for joining me.
Ellen:Well, thank you for inviting me.
Wendy:Of course. Yes. I was interested to talk to you because I don't know much about Druidry. That's that's a mouth that's a hard word to say, Druidry. Say it 10 times fast.
Wendy:So you just released a new book called Celtic Druidry, Rituals, Techniques, and Magical Practices.
Ellen:Mhmm.
Wendy:It is chock full historic information, which I think is great because I think the whole Druid world is probably very misunderstood and maybe not completely accurate, the information that we have. So I would love to start right there. I'd love to hear your definition of what a druid is and what that practice is all about.
Ellen:Oh, boy. Well, there are many different kinds of druids. There's druids, and there's druids, and there's druids. We like threes. The number 3 is very important.
Ellen:Okay. But there are people who literally say all you have to do is sit under a tree and hang out, and that makes you a druid.
Wendy:Oh, really? I'm sure it's that easy!
Ellen:Yeah. There are people who will tell you that. So how how do I become a druid? Well, just go sit outside and watch the clouds or something. And that's a druid.
Ellen:But I am what's called a Celtic reconstructionist druid. And what that means is that we look to the old teachings, the literature, the wisdom tales, the poetry. There's a lot of material out there. The other thing you'll hear people say is we don't know anything about druids. There's nothing out there so you can make up what you want, but that's because they haven't bothered to look.
Ellen:In the book, I tried very hard to give examples of ancient 2000 year old poetry and written by druids and and little herb spells that have been passed down. And, I mean, there's a lot out there. And I think one of the big problems is that people haven't really looked at the Irish material. People tend to look at the British material. There was a big British revival, English revival in the 1700, which was brought about by masons who were all men, of course.
Ellen:Of course. And there was also a French druid revival, which nobody talks about at least in America, which they were also masons. So it was very male, very masonic. So people think that that's what it is. But if you look at the Irish material, we're very fortunate because we have volumes of books.
Ellen:We have the laws of the poets, for example, the Euricak Narir, which I think every person who calls himself a druid needs to look at that book because it goes through the bardic training year by year, and it's only 8 years. We know that druids spent 20 years studying, but in the bardic training, it's 8 years, and it tells you what you need to know each year, how many stories you have to memorize, how many alphabets you have to know, and it goes on and on and on. And it's nothing about sitting under a tree. But what I say in the book is that being in nature is half of it. The other half is scholarship, and that's the half that most people don't wanna they just wanna look at their phone.
Wendy:That sounds like a lot of work. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. But I do provide a list of books, what I consider the basic books for people to read, and I just try to help people on the way if they really wanna learn this because it's a big subject. I've been at it for 40 years, and I'm still learning.
Wendy:I bet. Yeah. Because you're a druid scholar. Right? A practitioner.
Wendy:Druid. Yes.
Ellen:The druids were actually the intellectuals of the Quran.
Wendy:Yes. You did write about that. Yeah. I just wanna clarify that culturally, Druids were part of ancient Ireland. Is that correct?
Wendy:Or...
Ellen:No. Well, we had druids all over Britain in Scotland.
Wendy:Oh, okay. So the UK.
Ellen:Well, what was called the British Isles, which used to include Ireland, and then, of course, down into to Gaul, which is France and parts of Germany. I mean, Druids were a class within Celtic society. So they were the equivalent of Brahmins. You know, in India, you have the Brahmins, and they are a sacred class. And people were born into it's called Nemed, which means sacred in old Irish.
Ellen:You were born into the Nemed class. The kings and queens came from the warrior class, which is equivalent to the Kshatriya in Hinduism. And they had to be ritually elevated into the Nemed class. That's why you had to have a a big ritual. And we just saw that with king Charles.
Ellen:You had to have this ritual to sanctify him, to enable him to be elevated. Even though he was born into the nobility, he had to be elevated, right, and anointed and all that stuff. Well, it's the same thing. The king had to be ritually elevated by a druid, and we even have still some of that ritual. And I do talk about that in the book.
Ellen:It's called the Oidach Morin, which is the testament of Moran, and it it tells it's a druid telling a king, a young king, a new king, how to be a king, and that's part of the ritual. So the druid had druid parents usually or grandparents and was born into it and was trained by their parents, father and mother. There were female druids, which a lot of scholars have ignored, of course. But, but but, of course, yeah, I found plenty of evidence for that. And if anybody's interested, I have an essay.
Ellen:It's floating around on the on the Internet, and it's called female druids. So if you just look up Ellen Everett Hartman, female druids, it'll pop up, and you can read the evidence that I found, and it wasn't that hard.
Wendy:It wasn't that hard to find it?
Ellen:To find the evidence.
Wendy:Okay.
Ellen:Yeah. It wasn't. I mean, there's plenty of evidence out there.
Wendy:I was really intrigued by the comparison between Indian culture and Celtic culture.
Ellen:Mhmm.
Wendy:Is that just a coincidence, or is
Ellen:No. Is there a Okay. Yeah. I like to think of the old Celtic religion, Druidism is what I usually call it, as being the western end of Hinduism. Hinduism is the eastern end of Celtic religion.
Ellen:I mean, it's the same religion. It's part of the Indo European continuum. And so the class structure is exactly the same. The idea that cows are sacred, that you make offerings to fire, you make offerings to water. It's the same religion.
Ellen:And, well, I wrote a series of novels. If you look up my name and the Druid trilogy, it'll come
Wendy:You are prolific. You have written many, many books.
Ellen:Yeah. I'll keep A
Wendy:lot on herbalism and and some fiction too. Yeah.
Ellen:But in the novels, I talk about when the first missionary showed up, in the 2nd century, long before Patrick, and the confrontation between the indigenous druids and the missionaries. That's it's a 3 novels about that. 2nd to 5th century. But I do talk about that in there. And I think the essay, yeah, the essay female druids is actually in the back of one of those books.
Wendy:Okay. So it's like historical fiction.
Ellen:Yeah. Although, they made me, classify it as fantasy because if you have druids, you're supposed to make it fantasy. You're not allowed to make it history.
Wendy:That's right. Because of the misunderstanding Right.
Ellen:Of that. Because of Merlin.
Wendy:Druidism. Yeah.
Ellen:But, yeah, it's it's historical fiction. You could call it that. But it's based on when I was writing the books, I had been studying Celtic history for 30 years. I've now studied it for 40 years. So, yeah, so there's actual research that went into the books, all my books.
Wendy:Yeah. And so do you find that a lot of people are surprised to hear the true history of Druidism?
Ellen:Well, most people don't care about Druidism. Yeah. I just
Wendy:Well, I mean, the people who are interested.
Ellen:The people who do care? Yeah.
Wendy:Yeah. I mean Yeah. Okay. That's how
Ellen:you go. Yeah.
Wendy:I didn't mean, like, the whole world is like, no shit. Really? I had no idea.
Ellen:Yeah. No. I think well, I'm very used to hanging out in Celtic Reconstructionist circles, which I've been doing for 40 years. So the people that I associate with are not surprised. But what you typically get mostly with people who come to my talks or people online, you typically get people who will immediately say we know nothing about druids.
Ellen:So just make up what you want. That's what you hear all the time. And then I have to constantly go, wait a minute. You know? But
Wendy:So what got you interested originally in the history of it all?
Ellen:Well, I was born in Austria, and my mother was an artist. And she was very interested in archaeology, and there were a lot of digs going on, and there still are, of course. But they were digging up all these Celtic graveyards, and they were finding jewelry and metal work. And my mother was fascinated by that. So I grew up hearing about the Celts.
Ellen:And what I remember most, and mothers are very powerful when I look back on it because I didn't think anything of it. But what happened was she would talk about the Celts, but she would talk about them with such respect. That's what I really got as a kid was this respect, this profound respect, and that's what really came through. And I never thought anything about it, and I promptly forgot about it, and it wasn't until my thirties when I heard Celtic music for the first time, and I heard somebody on the radio say this is Celtic music, and I went, Celtic, wait a minute. And I loved I just loved the music.
Ellen:I adore I still do. It's my favorite music. But
Wendy:So that seed that your mom had planted Yeah. Began to sprout.
Ellen:Yeah. And and I literally hadn't thought about it. I'd never heard the words spoken out loud. Nothing. And then I I went to, Findhorn in Scotland, and I actually lived at Findhorn for a summer.
Ellen:That was the Finhorn is the first new age community in the world, and it's in the Moray Firth of of Scotland, and I was there for a whole summer. And for one week of that summer, I got to go to Iona, the island of Iona, and that was the first time I heard the word druids spoken out loud because there were stories about the druids. And, again, as soon as I heard that, some part of me just immediately resonated. You know? I knew it was something.
Wendy:How do you make sense of that kind of I mean, I know your mom planted the seed, and she had a lot of reverence for Celtic culture, but you seem to have a very strong passionate connection. Do you have any kind of theories as to why it feels so powerfully strong and why you've dedicated so much of your life to understanding the culture and the practices and what it really means to be a Druid.
Ellen:Well, I have theories.
Wendy:I love theories.
Ellen:Okay. Well, I've I mean, I've done past haven't we all done past life regressions? You know? And I remember a 7th century lifetime as a druid. And, also, for me, druidism, I haven't really connected with witchcraft the way a lot of people connect to witchcraft, mainly because the witchcraft that I've been exposed to has been modern.
Ellen:It's been wicca, which was invented in the 19 thirties, and somehow I'm not built that way. I'm more interested in the old stuff. So if somebody came up with a witch tradition that was 2000 years old, I'd probably be interested. This is our indigenous history. This is who we are.
Ellen:And what happened was, first, the Romans came, and they did unspeakable things. And,
Wendy:Really? I think I heard something about that. Yeah.
Ellen:So we had first, we had the Roman armies who came in, and we had to try to get repel that. And then when we finally kicked them out, then along came the Roman Catholic church. So it's been 2000 years of misery, you know, on that level, and trying to impose an authoritarian patriarchal structure on top of a forest based, not 100% egalitarian, but very pro female compared to the Romans and compared to modern day, you know, like women were actually honored.
Wendy:Wow. That's a novel idea.
Ellen:Yeah. What an idea. But, I mean, that's who we were. We were a forest culture. There was unbroken oak forest from the west coast of France all the way to the Black Sea, and probably in Russia too, but I've never been to Russia.
Ellen:But it was unbroken oak forest, And that's our indigenous state. That's who we are. Even Ireland if you go to Ireland now, they only have 1% of their forest left. And there's a terrible history there too. The English came in and cut down all the trees.
Ellen:And and it now you have these corporations who are planting Sitka spruce plantations, which don't belong there. That's an Alaskan tree. And Oh, no kidding. And it kills everything underneath. So all the the bushes and the berries and the flowers, herbs, it should be that's all killed off.
Wendy:Nice try, I guess. I mean
Ellen:Well, it's
Wendy:If they didn't do a lot of, research on indigenous Oh, they don't care. Trees.
Ellen:No. They just don't care. It's all about profit. They think of trees as farming. You know, you're farming trees, so you grow them for a certain number of years and then you clear cut.
Ellen:That's the way they think.
Wendy:I see. Okay.
Ellen:Just for money. That's all they think about.
Wendy:Oh, I thought it was the illusion of, see, we're helping the planet by planting trees.
Ellen:Oh, no. It's a business.
Wendy:Okay. I I guess that was my my wishful thinking.
Ellen:I mean, there are people in Ireland and in Scotland and in England and all over the place who were trying to plant the indigenous trees back. But it's just little groups of people working really hard against the these giant corporate interests when the government keeps giving the corporations the go ahead to rape the land, basically. But that's a whole
Wendy:That's a whole other conversation.
Ellen:Another con but, anyway, yeah. So we're still the way I look at it is we're still trying to get out from under the mentality, what came in 2000 years ago. And, yeah, it's been bad news ever since kind of.
Wendy:Okay. Let's get back to the role that druids played in society. How would you describe the various roles? Because it wasn't just one role. Right?
Wendy:It was Right. You already talked about of them being intellectuals Right. Scholars.
Ellen:Right. And They were scholars. They were called the people of arts. In our culture, we have something called a master of arts. It's a degree.
Ellen:Right? Well, that's what they were. They were the people of arts. They were the masters of the arts. And so some of them were ritualists.
Ellen:They supervised the sacrifices and rituals. Some of them were sacred singers. Some of them were sacred poets. Some of them were genealogists. Some of them were historians.
Ellen:Some of them were herbalists, what we would call doctors, which was a combination of herbalism and magic. But some of them were judges, some of them were lawyers, all the educated people. And then they were the teachers of the children of the nobility. Obviously, they weren't teaching the lower classes. You know?
Ellen:But yeah.
Wendy:I'm probably gonna be asking you a lot of ignorant questions, so forgive me in advance. But the way you're describing it is clearly very different than my understanding, my maybe more Hollywood understanding of the druid Mhmm. Or the fictionalized version of the druid that shows up in, in fantasy books and such. So ritual's obviously super important, and I think it's been important in every culture throughout history. How do you see the importance of ritual playing out with the druids?
Wendy:Like, in your own life, do you use a lot of ritual?
Ellen:Yeah. Ritual today has the same place as it did in the past in the sense that it's a way to bring the whole community together. And, well, a druid would be working for 1 king and a tribe. And that's one of the big differences between druids and witches, for example, or cunning folk. The witch is an independent agent and you don't know who they're working for and therefore they're scary.
Ellen:Whereas the druid is always working for the tribe and they're working for the king and you know what side they're on. But the rituals, I mean, they had lots of different rituals, but, obviously, you had things like marriages, marriage contracts, the usual stuff, what we call baptism, baby blessings, that kind of thing, or blessing the soldiers before they go off to war and all that, but also the big seasonal festivals. And in fact, we just celebrated Beltane, which is May Day.
Wendy:Right.
Ellen:And for the Celts, there were really only 2 seasons of the year. There was a dark half and a light half. So there's 2 New Years. Right now, there are people arguing about when is the Celtic New Year. And one faction says, oh, Celtic New Year is at Samhain, which is Halloween.
Ellen:And the other faction says, no. Celtic New Year is Beltane, which is May Day, but they're both right.
Wendy:They're both. Yes. Okay. Gotcha.
Ellen:And so those are the 2 big spirit nights of the year, and you have all kinds of rituals that go on. So for example, for the May Day or or Beltane that we just had actually, okay. I'm gonna backtrack. It's not Beltane yet. I call Beltane or May Day, the way most people celebrate it.
Ellen:I call that the secular Beltane because the real Beltane is at the full moon, and it's when the hawthorns bloom.
Wendy:Ah, okay.
Ellen:And I've been I've been keeping a careful eye on the hawthorns behind the house, and I recently spoke to somebody in Ireland and I asked them. I said, are your hawthorns blooming yet? And they said, no. Not yet. There's just buds.
Ellen:And it's not it's not Beltane until the Hawthorne blooms. And the reason is that once the Hawthorne blooms, that's the signal that it's warm enough to send the cows up to the hills because the tree knows. So that's what the druid has to keep their eye on the hawthorns and then has to tell the tribe, hey, the hawthorns are blooming. It's time. It's time.
Ellen:Yeah. So then you have this big ritual which involves 3 fires, we like the number 3, and it's one big fire which was probably dedicated to a a male deity, one another big fire for a female deity, and then a third smaller fire. So first, you have to ritually light the small fire, and that means, like, holding a crystal to the sun or gathering wildfire from a lightning strike or some from nature, some natural or using well, they didn't have matches. But Right. Right.
Ellen:Using some natural fire, you have your little fire. And, from that little fire, then you light the 2 big fires and then you have to pass all the cows through in between the two fires. And the two fires have to be close enough that a white cow passing through will have her fur singed brown.
Wendy:Wow. That's intense.
Ellen:Okay. Close. Yeah. And every cow has to go through those two fires. And this ties in to Hinduism again because the reason for this is that the cow is a lunar animal.
Ellen:It's an animal of water because it carries liquid, otherwise known as milk or soma. Mhmm. And the fire is the opposite. Right? Just like dark half of the year, light half of the year.
Ellen:Fire and water. Yeah. Fire and water. So milk is liquid. You got the fires.
Ellen:So you pass this lunar watery animal between 2 ritual fires, and fire and water come together. And I talk about this in my novels a lot. But where fire and water come together, you have the greatest potential for magic and transformation. The whole world is made of fire and water in Celtic thinking. In in its interest in Scandinavian thinking, they say fire and ice.
Wendy:Makes sense.
Ellen:And they had 2 seasons, a fiery season and an icy season. So at Lunasa, which is Lammas, they call it Lammas, which is actually Anglo Saxon, comes from Loof, Mass, but the word is lunasa. You have fiery animals, which are horses. Those are creatures of fire. And if you read the Rigveda, there are hymns to horses, and guess what?
Ellen:They're fire animals. So you take these fire animals, horses, and you pass them through water. So you drive them across a river or through a pond or something because you have to bring fire and water together again.
Wendy:That's to symbolize that time of year. Is that
Ellen:Well, it's it's magic. Like, at Lunasa, which is around August 1st, last week of July, 1st 2 weeks of August, The crops are not yet in. You're waiting for the wheat harvest or the oats. They're sitting out in the field. They haven't been harvested yet, and they're not quite ripe yet.
Ellen:So you still need magic. You still need good weather. You still need rain. You still need good luck, the luck of the harvest. So you do this ritual act to bring fire and water together to empower whatever it is that you're trying to manifest.
Wendy:Okay. So is all magic ritual based then?
Ellen:No. Okay. Well, can you
Wendy:tell me a little bit about how magic works
Ellen:with the druid tradition? There's many different kinds of magic. I mean, it could be a solitary practitioner sitting in your house doing magic. In the book, I have herb magic, for example.
Wendy:Right.
Ellen:I even quote some old Scottish writings about that. There are certain herbs that you twine together and you put under your milk pail so that the fairies and the witches won't steal the milk. You know, or you can hang a wreath on the house to protect the house so the fairies won't come in. So, I mean, that's just one type of magic.
Wendy:So let me ask this question then.
Ellen:Yeah.
Wendy:If you perform some magic
Ellen:Mhmm.
Wendy:And things didn't go the way you hoped it would go Mhmm. How would druids explain that?
Ellen:Okay. So you do a ritual. You set it all up. You make your offerings. We're more into giving praise to the gods and goddesses.
Ellen:That's that's what we do more. Working magic for a specific intention is rare.
Wendy:But Okay.
Ellen:Usually, we're praising the deities. So we do our big whatever it is, and then there's always a place in the ritual where you do a divination to see if it was accepted. Now back in the day, they would have taken a liver, a nice liver, and they would have cut it open to see what was going on in there. But, what we modern druids will use cards or bones or, you know, something like that. And we we look to see if it was accepted.
Ellen:If the if the omens are good, then we go, okay. We did our job. That's fine, and then we go eat. You know? But if but if the Romans are bad, that means that we either have to start all over again or there's something that the gods are asking of us.
Ellen:Something that we And you
Wendy:just have to figure out what that is.
Ellen:Out what it is exactly.
Wendy:Got you. And so is there direct communion with the gods and the goddesses?
Ellen:We hope so.
Wendy:One of the questions I wanted to ask was any parallels to shamanic practice?
Ellen:Yes. The druids were also shamans. That was a big part of it. In fact, see, there's modern druids, and you see this in Britain that wear white robes and nice clean white robes and all that. That's actually Egyptian.
Wendy:Oh, really?
Ellen:Yes. Because the accounts that we have of the ancient druids, they wore plaid.
Wendy:I love plaid.
Ellen:Yeah. Well
Wendy:I do. I I never would have alright. So they were plaid. That's amazing. Alright.
Ellen:By the different numbers of colors in your plaid, you could tell what status somebody had.
Wendy:Right.
Ellen:Okay. So the king could wear 7 colors, the druid could wear 6, and then it kinda went down from there. So that was your calling card. You didn't have a a label or a card, but you wore your plaid and people knew just looking at you, they knew exactly who you were. The slaves could only wear one color, and farmers might wear 2.
Ellen:The young lords who didn't have terribly much property but might be a good warrior, they would get 3 colors. And it just kinda went up from there. But we also have writings that talk about the druids wearing a cape of feathers. Okay? Now isn't that a typical shamanic costume?
Wendy:It certainly could be. Yeah. Absolutely.
Ellen:And you don't see that in Hollywood, usually.
Wendy:Oh, you don't. You don't. No. Does that mean they would do things to alter their consciousness and travel to the dreaming realm?
Ellen:Absolutely. And in fact, in the book, I talk about different trance techniques, which you can do at home. Yeah. There's there's a famous poetic technique called the stone on the belly, where you literally go into a dark room, complete silence, complete darkness, wrap some a plaid around your head maybe so there no light comes in, and you you don't eat anything. You fast, and you put a huge rock on your belly, and you lie there and you incubate a poem.
Ellen:Now if you think about this, and I've thought about it, you're lying there with a big rock on your belly. What does that represent? What does that resemble?
Wendy:Well, pregnancy. Exactly.
Ellen:A lot of the techniques are about going back to the womb or being pregnant. No kidding. Okay. And even with the harp, the harp was the druidic instrument. If you were a harper, you were automatically given land because you were automatically noble, and you had to have land.
Ellen:But there's a there's a ritual called the raising of the belly, the belly of the harp. So the sound box of the harp, a new harp that's just been made, you put the strings on when it takes months, and you you keep tightening, tightening, tightening, and the belly of the harp rises.
Wendy:Okay.
Ellen:Yeah. The sound box is a belly, and it there's a lot of that.
Wendy:You think it has to do with just creating, whether it's creating magic, creating connection, creating art?
Ellen:I think it's very feminine. I think it's very female. I mean, at Imbolc, there's an old tradition of making a bride doll, an image of Bridget, and putting her on a bed by the hearth. Okay. So the bed it's a bed of straw.
Ellen:And a lot of people think, oh, it's a doll. It's it's a baby Bridget. You know? Isn't that cute? And it's gonna attract Bridget, and she's gonna come down the chimney and leave her footprint in the ashes, and then we'll be blessed.
Ellen:But when I looked into it, it turns out that back in the day, when a woman gave birth, they would put straw on the floor, and she would lie on the straw. She would give birth on the straw, and you can imagine the afterbirth and the blood and all that. And then they would, this is all very sanitary. They would pick up the straw and take it outside and burn it.
Wendy:That makes sense. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. So this Bridget doll, it's actually an image of Bridget ready to give birth. She's giving birth to spring, to the new year at Imbolc. I don't know if I put that in the book or not, but but I but I did talk about some of the other rituals, and they're very feminine. Yeah.
Ellen:It's about being pregnant.
Wendy:Yeah. That's the impression I got when I was reading your book. Yeah. It did feel very feminine.
Ellen:Mhmm.
Wendy:A lot of the the practices and the poetry and the one of the things that really strikes me, which is not surprising at all, is the relationship that Druids have with the natural world and that they're constantly, it seems, attending to, paying attention to what's happening in the natural world. Yeah. In relationship with the tree spirits and all of the the nature spirits, it seems like.
Ellen:Mhmm. Well, that's what we lost when the Roman Christian religion came in. That's what was lost. Initially, it wasn't lost so much. There was a a Christian tradition called the Caldi who were Celtic Christians.
Ellen:But then there was a Synod of Whitby, and the big Christians got together and had the Synod, and they decided that, no. We can't have that. And they threw out the Celtic church, and they forced everybody to become Roman Christians.
Wendy:And Really? That's shocking too. Well It's not. It's not. It happened everywhere.
Ellen:Yeah. But but it initially, you had the pagan nature religion, which honored the seasons, which honored the trees and the herbs, and the fire was sacred, and the water was sacred. And the animals were sacred and the people were sacred. You had all that. And gradually, they melded with the missionaries who showed up, And it was kinda peaceful in Ireland.
Ellen:It was not peaceful at all in Gaul, in France, and Germany. It was terrible. There's a lot of violence that went on, forcing people to convert. Right. And cutting down sacred trees, destroying temples, the whole thing.
Ellen:It was terrible. So that went on. And it initially, there was kind of a melding, and it it wasn't so bad because the the clergy that was coming in, the missionaries were intellectuals, and the druids were intellectuals.
Wendy:So They had a meeting of the minds.
Ellen:Yeah. They were talking to each other. They were sharing stories. They were learned people, and that was okay. But then they were forced to become this patriarchal mindset, which came directly from Roman culture.
Ellen:Roman culture was very patriarchal. And it it actually goes against who we were for 1000 and 1000 of years. And I think we're still struggling to regain what was lost.
Wendy:Yeah. No. It's very sad.
Ellen:Yeah.
Wendy:But then there's people like you who are who are digging deep and sharing this information, which is great.
Ellen:Well, yeah, that's what I've been doing for the last 40 years. All my books Yeah. The different Druid orders that I've created or cocreated or been a part of, I've just been plotting along.
Wendy:Well, what made you write this particular book now? I would have thought this would be a more foundational book that maybe you would have written earlier in your time practicing as a druid.
Ellen:Yeah. That's not the way I see it at all. No? This book, Celtic Druidry, is an overview of what I did for for 40 years. I mean, what I believe to be the essence of Druidism.
Ellen:Somebody who's a new practitioner, they don't know. But, I mean, I've talked to thousands of Druids literally. I've read 100, if not thousands of books and articles and helped to create Druid orders. And so what I did was I just took all of that and distilled it into an overview of what I consider to be important if you're gonna be a druid. And I I don't think I could have written that book 30 years ago.
Ellen:There's no way.
Wendy:As you're talking about it, I yeah. That seems very clear. You needed to have all this experience
Ellen:Right.
Wendy:First.
Ellen:Plus the ancient literature that I mentioned, it it I didn't learn that immediately. That's something that I had to learn over time.
Wendy:So what do you hope this book will do for folks who are interested?
Ellen:Well, it's it's set up so that you can be a solitary practitioner, most people are. To really be a druid is to serve a tribe. So if you're really gonna be a druid, you're really supposed to be serving a tribe. So you have to identify who is your tribe and how are you gonna serve them. You
Wendy:know? Okay.
Ellen:It's it's not a solitary function. Although these days, most pagans, most witches, most druids are solitary, which is kind of because we've lost our tribes. We always had tribes.
Wendy:Right. Yeah.
Ellen:So my hope is that somebody could pick up the book and be a practicing druid, whether they do it by themselves or they identify their tribe and who they serve.
Wendy:Are there druid schools out there that you feel are doing the practice justice?
Ellen:Well, yes, as a matter of fact.
Wendy:Yeah?
Ellen:Well, I founded a group, and I was archdruid from 2014 until just a few months ago. And we now have a new archdruid, which is fantastic because I was able to hand it off to somebody else, which is to me, that means I was successful. You know? Yeah. But it's called tribe of the oak, and you can find us at tribeoftheoak.org.org.org.
Ellen:And we have a training program. So we have a website, tribeoftheoak.org. We also have a public page on Facebook. It's a tribe of the oak druids public forum. We do online rituals for people because we have members all over the world.
Ellen:So people in Ireland, Canada, all across the US, Australia. We've had people in Mexico, Japan.
Wendy:Alright.
Ellen:Yeah. So I'm trying to think where else. Anyway, we're all over the place. So the only way we can have a ceremony together is to do it online. So we're also cyber druids.
Ellen:But our train our training program is very thorough. It takes years to finish. You can't just go sit under a tree. You know what I mean? But I think the quickest well, I did have 1 PhD student who did it in 1 year, which was astounding.
Ellen:But most people take, I would say, at least 3 to 5 years to do the we have a very large reading list, and on our website you can find all the books. So the first thing you do is you have to read all the books. And then you can start your, what we call, fostership, which is 1 on 1 mentoring. So it's a process.
Wendy:Yeah. So you have to really, really want to because it sounds like you're dedicating yourself to a lifestyle.
Ellen:Yeah. It's a lifelong pursuit. Definitely. And we recently had a scholar in Ireland look at our mailing list excuse me, our book list, not our mailing list. We don't have a mailing list, but they'll look at our book list and update it.
Ellen:So the scholarship has been recently updated if you go to the website.
Wendy:So it sounds like this particular group prides itself on authenticity, honoring the past in a way that maybe
Ellen:Well, no. But always been Yeah. The the druids didn't write down their rituals. They didn't
Wendy:Oral tradition. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. It was an oral tradition. So we're piecing all we're doing it that's why it's called Celtic Reconstructionism. We're trying to piece it back together. And then there's certain parts of it that absolutely we will not do.
Ellen:We don't encourage people to take heads.
Wendy:That's probably a good idea.
Ellen:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don't go in for that. We don't have slaves.
Wendy:Another good idea. Yep.
Ellen:Back then, everybody To
Wendy:not have them, I mean.
Ellen:Everybody had slaves back then.
Wendy:No. I mean, now. Not to have them now. It's a good idea
Ellen:not to have them now. Still have them Yeah. Now.
Wendy:I know.
Ellen:We we discourage that. You know, so there's certain things we don't do, obviously, and we are not advisors to kings. But if you're a druid, it's perfectly legitimate to have strong political leanings and fire off letters to political leaders because that's that's a final Druid tradition. You could even say to them, I'm your druid, and this is what I think. You know?
Ellen:But,
Wendy:Yeah. I'm I'm trying to imagine how that might go over. Yeah.
Ellen:Not too
Wendy:well. Is there kind of in the same vein, are there strong ethical guidelines that anyone in the practice adheres to or agrees to adhere to?
Ellen:Yes. We have the laws, the old tribal laws. They're called the Brehon laws. Thankfully, we we have that. It's about the equivalent of 25 law books, which in the old days, the druids would have memorized the laws, and they would have recited the precedents.
Ellen:But the nice thing about the laws is they're all about restorative justice. And that's something that modern lawyers and judges and town councils and whatever. Some people are starting to look at that. In Vermont, I think there was even a restorative justice project.
Wendy:I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds familiar. Mhmm.
Wendy:Yeah. I can't I can't remember the details. But
Ellen:What if they wanna see how it was done 2000 years ago because they had century after century to figure it out. You know? Right. And that's what it's all about. It's about the basis of the law is restorative justice.
Ellen:So if anybody's a lawyer out there, look at the Brehon laws, brehon. And those are the old tribal laws, and I think you will find them very interesting.
Wendy:Hint. Hint. Hint. So do you find that a lot of people are drawn to these practices despite the amount of dedication it requires? Or do do people find out what it really entails to do it authentically?
Ellen:When they find out that druids were scholars, they usually run away screaming.
Wendy:Yeah. That's kinda what I was wondering.
Ellen:Because they don't wanna read books. And I've watched this change. I mean, I've been doing this for 40 years. So when I started out, there was no Internet. Finding information, the only thing you could do was go to the library.
Ellen:And then eventually, if you got really lucky, you discovered that there were pagan gatherings. And so you would travel 10 hours to go sit sit with somebody and listen to them talk, and and you would have these big discussions around the fire. And gradually, we we learned about books. There were certain books out there, and everybody was hungry for it. But then the Internet came along and smartphones and TikTok and things like that, and then people didn't wanna read books anymore.
Ellen:So now
Wendy:That's a thing. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. It's like pulling teeth to get people to read books. And they think they that that all they have to do is go on TikTok and find a druid or Google something
Wendy:and they'll Druidry in, 40 seconds or less.
Ellen:Yeah. Yeah. And anything more than that, you know, I've I've had people actually tell me. They say, I wanna be a druid. I want you know, I wanna study with you.
Ellen:And I'm like, okay. Well, here's the first thing you have to do. You have to read the books. I don't wanna read books.
Wendy:And then
Ellen:I then I had somebody tell actually, 2 people now have told me, what you should do is you should take all the books and book by book, you should make videos of each book, and then we can watch the videos. That's what you should
Wendy:Yeah. Look. Thank you for that suggestion. Yep. Yes.
Wendy:Put that in that suggestion box.
Ellen:In my spare time, I'll send
Wendy:you That that'll be hours to make your life easier. Yeah.
Ellen:Yes. So you don't have to read a book.
Wendy:Yeah.
Ellen:But I literally, people have literally said that to me.
Wendy:Well, yeah, it's unfortunate because, I mean, any practice, it requires discipline, especially a a practice like this because it's I think maybe people just get eager to jump to the good stuff.
Ellen:Well, they want the title. They just want the title.
Wendy:The title. They okay. I thought maybe they wanted to get right to the ritual and the magic and healing and No. No. They just want the title?
Wendy:I'm a druid. Well, you can call yourself a druid. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. But anybody can call themselves a druid.
Wendy:What I mean. Yeah.
Ellen:But yeah. But when they do when someone says, I'm a druid, you say, okay. Who did you study with? How long?
Wendy:Right. Right. Yeah.
Ellen:What have you read? What have you studied? Where have you traveled? Who have you met? Ask a few questions.
Wendy:Yeah. I think that's true. I have a, shamanic practice, and I think that's true of shamanism as like, the general shamanism.
Ellen:Mhmm. Well, in the in the book, there's a section. I don't know exactly where it is, but I talk about their their shamanic techniques. Some specific druidic magical techniques, crane magic, where I talk about standing in the posture of a crane on one leg with one arm extension.
Wendy:I was looking at that. Yeah.
Ellen:Yeah. And then there's seeing, how to do a seeing. The most important part, by the 8th year of bardic training, a seer was expected to have mastered three skills. Or illumination between the palms. And is a spontaneous uttering of poetic prophecy using the tips of the fingers as a mnemonic device composing and reciting at the same time.
Ellen:Is an altered state brought on by repetitive chanting or singing, kind of like, kirtan where the mind and the body becomes synchronized to an external rhythm. Yeah. It's just like, Indian kirtan.
Wendy:Yeah. Yeah. No. That makes sense. Yeah.
Wendy:So this book is an invitation to start having a personal practice. Right. But, really, if you would encourage people who are really interested to do training of some sort, like with is it the the white oak white oak?
Ellen:Tribe of the
Wendy:oak. Tribe of the oak. Where did I get White Crow?
Ellen:White Oak White Oak no longer exists. The order of White Oak went defunct, which is why I started tribe of the oak. Oh, okay. Yeah. White Oak went from 1996 to 2014.
Ellen:And then in when it collapsed, I said, I'm not gonna let this go. You know? In in 2014, I started
Wendy:I don't know why White Oak came came out of my head. But
Ellen:Because it's in the book.
Wendy:Oh, maybe that's why. Yeah.
Ellen:Alright. Talk about that. I mean, the a lot of the the the lessons and so on were created by White Oak Druids, but the order of White Oak no longer exists. And but a lot of the people that were in White Oak migrated to tribe of the oak, and tribe of the oak is alive and well.
Wendy:Okay. So, how would you say that being a druid has enriched your life?
Ellen:Well, for 40 years, it's been my life. I mean, it's hard to I mean, it's my spiritual practice. I mean, as I go through the year, the season of the year, I'm I'm observing the Celtic Festivals. I've been working with Bridget. She the goddess Bridget.
Ellen:She's been working with me for 40 years now. I've been a devotee of Bridget. So it's it's part of me. It's who I am.
Wendy:Understood. I was just trying to get a kind of a picture of how this life as a druid is different from a life not as a druid.
Ellen:Well, I I've been a druid for so long. You don't know the I don't remember what it was like. To not be a druid, but, but I imagine that to be a pagan in general, if you're really doing it, is to be very close to nature. And to be a druid is to be very close to nature. So I never feel alone if I step outside.
Ellen:Like during COVID, I had no problems. I had no you know, I kept hearing people saying that they were having all this terrible time. They were alone and they were isolated. Blah blah. I never felt that way because I would look out the window and I would see crows or turkeys.
Ellen:I would go outside and there the trees were there. You know?
Wendy:And Oh, your nature spirit friends.
Ellen:Yeah. I was surrounded by when I'm in the city is when I feel alone. When I'm walled off with cement and
Wendy:I'll drink to that. Yeah. Yeah.
Ellen:But when I'm in nature, I never feel alone. So Yeah. And I'm very fortunate because I live in in the woods, in an oak forest, which is the ideal place for a druid to be. Absolutely. Yeah.
Ellen:So
Wendy:Yeah. And I think what you're just reflecting on is how disconnected we all are. I won't get on my my soapbox about our disconnection from the natural world, but Mhmm. But it's it's a sad thing.
Ellen:Well, that that again is part of what we lost 2000 years ago when the Roman church came in and said that god is something unknowable. It's a man with a beard who's hanging out up in the sky.
Wendy:Planet. Yeah. So it takes our attention away from the planet.
Ellen:Exactly. Exactly.
Wendy:And then a lot of other things ensued. Right? Right. Colonialism and ownership of the earth.
Ellen:Yeah. And the water wasn't sacred anymore. The fire, we feel happy polluting water. We feel happy polluting the fire. We feel happy clear cutting forests.
Ellen:It all comes from that from that mentality.
Wendy:I know. It's it's a thing. It's a whole cultural worldview that's unfortunate, and it's Yeah. It's done a lot of harm, I think. Alright.
Wendy:So I got on the soapbox a little bit. Alright. So where do folks find your book or any of your books? Right?
Ellen:Yeah. I have an author page on Amazon. You can see all my books there. I'm on Barnes and Noble. I'm distributed by Simon and Schuster.
Ellen:You can go to inner traditions, Baer and Company. A lot of my books are there. The novels are not. The novels are only on what happened was I had a the novels were originally with a publisher, but they went out of print, and libraries and bookstores won't buy books that are self published. So I ended up I I had never self published before, but once those novels went out of print, I said I'm not gonna let them print and I self published for the first time.
Ellen:So they're on Amazon.
Wendy:Okay. Alright. And you also have a website?
Ellen:I have a website, Ellen Everett hotman.com. You can also get the novels there.
Wendy:Right.
Ellen:But the rest of the books can be found anywhere. Alright. If you just Google my name, they'll come up. Or go to Ellen Everett hottman.com, they'll come up. Or go to Amazon, they'll come up.
Ellen:Or Barnes and Noble or Simon and Schuster. Yeah.
Wendy:Okay. Is there anything that you would like to add that we haven't talked about that you think is important?
Ellen:Well, one of the things that I always think about is druids and trees. Sometimes people who know nothing about druids, they either think that they are old men with beards or they worship trees. That's what they'll tell you. We don't worship trees. What we see the sacred in trees just like we see the sacred in every herb, every animal, every element.
Ellen:But I have an expression that that I came up with, which is every tree is a church for a druid. And this is where sitting under a tree is actually very valid because a tree spans the 3 worlds. The roots go down to the underworld of the ancestors and the fairies. The branches go up to the sky world of the gods and goddesses. The trunk is in the middle world, which is where we are.
Ellen:Mhmm. So and this is where shamanism comes in. Absolutely. If you wanna travel, oak trees are incredibly useful for this. Find an old oak, and you can go in about 3 feet up.
Ellen:There's usually like a almost like a chakra. I think of it well, a tree is like a straw. It's a green very thin green straw held up by cellulose. The outer layer is dead. You know, the bark is dead.
Ellen:In the center of the tree is cellulose, which is dead, and and it's all there to hold up this very thin green straw. So I think of it as an elevator. So you go into the tree, and you can go ride up the elevator into the branches and then out the branches, and you can fly Mhmm. To wherever it is you gotta go. So if I wanna go to Ireland, for example, I go up and then I go out the branches and I fly across the Atlantic and I land, the shore of Dingle usually.
Wendy:Why not?
Ellen:Yes. Or you can go in and then go down through the roots and you'll find yourself tunneling through the earth, and that's where the fairies are and the ancestors. So if you wanna communicate with them, you go down. And that's why when you make offerings for ancestors or fairies, you put them on the land. So liquid offerings that go down, or you make offerings to water, which takes it down, or you leave offerings on the land.
Ellen:But if you wanna make offerings to the gods, you put it in fire, which takes it up to the sky world. Okay. So depending on who you're communicating with. So all you have to do is have a tree, any kind of tree. Oak is ideal, but any tree, even a little tiny tree.
Ellen:I like to think that if we're on Mars, you know, people ask me, what happens if there's will there be druids on Mars? I've been asked that. Absolutely.
Wendy:People ask that question.
Ellen:Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Wendy:That's that's a that's a weird question.
Ellen:Right. But but okay. So so what they're asking is is this only connected to the earth? No. It's the 3 worlds.
Ellen:It's three directions.
Wendy:And you can access them from any planet.
Ellen:Exactly. So you could be in Mars sitting there Hanging
Wendy:out with Elon Musk. Yep.
Ellen:Yeah. And there's this little tiny 6 inch tree, maybe in a pot even. Mhmm. And you sit in front of it, and you're in church.
Wendy:Okay. Well, I'm glad that you solved that for the folks who are concerned about Druidry practice on Mars. That's good. Nice work. Alright.
Wendy:Well, Ellen, thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me.
Ellen:Thank you very much for inviting me. This was fun.
Wendy:Alright. So now you know that becoming a Druid is a little more involved than sitting by a tree. If you'd like to learn more about Ellen's work and her books, there's a link to her site in the show notes as well as a link to learn more about the Tribe of the Oak. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for your lovely reviews and feedback and donations to the podcast.
Wendy:I am truly The next and final episode of season 6 will feature my old friend and two time podcast guest, Linda River Valente, who will share with us her astrological take on the upcoming year. Unsurprisingly, it's gonna be a wild ride. Well, I hope the rest of your day is a really good one. Until next time.
