Angela Puca AP: If you’re interested in Druidry and how it articulates and manifests across the globe, stay tuned because you’re just about to find out.
Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a Ph.D. and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magick, Paganism, Druidry, and all things esoteric.
Today I have here with me Dr Larisa White. Dr Larisa White is an independent scholar with a background in science and a Ph.D. in engineering. She employs mixed methods in her sociological research and conducted the world Druidry survey of 2018 and 2020 which was the first scale international sociological study of contemporary world Druidry. The complete findings of that study are presented in her new book “World Druidry: a Globalizing Path of Nature Spirituality”, which we will discuss today. She is currently working on a shorter, interfaith, pocket guide toward Druidry, also based on the results of that study – which is expected to come out later this year.
So please help me in welcoming Dr White. Hello Larisa how are you today?
Larisa A. White LW: I’m very well. Thank you for having me.
AP: Thank you for coming I have here your fantastic book and that, we will be discussing today so the first question that I’d like to ask you, Larisa, is: what is Druidry and what do Druids believe? And I did notice that, in your book, you tend to talk more about what Druids do as opposed to what Druidry is? And so, I’m being very evil here and trying to get what Druidry is out of you.
LW: Not at all. Druidry, I would classify it as a religious tradition. Of course, that will annoy some people. There are many Druids that do not like the word religion at all. Primarily because that’s often associated with the idea of, ‘mandated from above’, sets of ritual forms and beliefs that you must follow exactly as like…
AP: Dogmatism.
LW: Yeah, yeah. However, the word religion has been defined in different ways through the course of history and that dogmatic version of religion is relatively modern. Earlier versions – we talk about a religious tradition which was more of a cultural way of identifying, a cultural way of finding role models, and in that sense, Druidry fits very well as a religious tradition. It is less of a magical tradition than some of the paganisms because it focuses more on building relationships with nature, relationships with nature spirits, spirits of place, and so on, relationships with deities for those who are polytheists or monotheists. The range of theological beliefs is quite varied but the ways in which Druids will interact with the spirits, with the deities that they work with, is common across almost all Druids. That’s, to me, surprising – that with such different belief systems you can have such similarity in the practical aspects and that’s why I focus, in the book, so much on what they do because that’s where the similarity ties them together.
AP: So it’s like you’re allowing the reader to tell what Druidry is after reading what Druids do.
LW: Yeah so Druidry, if I were to define it, would be a spiritual path that focuses on building honourable, reciprocal, relationships with nature and not just with the idealization or some mythical version of nature but concrete. Something like 89, 90 percent of Druids spend time with their hands in the dirt. They work physically with the ecology where they live. They do all manner of ecological restoration works and forestry works and they work with animals and so it’s a very physically real relationship with nature. In addition to making the spiritual relationship with sort of animistic aspects of the natural world, spirits of trees and of rivers and so forth. But it’s about the building of a relationship that I think ties it all together. I don’t know if that answers it enough. Gee, it’s easier to get into the specifics of what is done than to define it as one thing because there is such diversity. But that is, really, the common core. That ties…
AP: Yeah I think it’s a good definition and I think with religious practices, such as Druidry or even other forms of Paganism it’s difficult to be too specific when you have to define the term but then when you get into the specifics of what people do then it’s easy and it becomes easier to narrow down to what is actually happening in those traditions.
LW: Generalizations tend to be vague. That’s the only way you can make a generalization without irritating too many people.
AP: Yeah, I understand that, although I think then, as scholars, it’s also up to us to identify certain patterns and not be, necessarily, satisfied or having to be satisfactory to every single practitioner of that specific… otherwise, especially with these kinds of traditions, you would just go absolutely mad I think. But as you said with the concept of religion, for instance, I would agree that Druidry is a religious path and I also think that paganism is a religion but when people have to define what religion is they don’t come from, especially when they are practitioners within these traditions, and they don’t come from a scholarly background. They may have certain ideas what religion is, which may be more linked to the culture and certain bias from family or the culture they grew up in, so I think that, in this sense, it’s also useful for a scholar to see things from kind of an outside perspective.
LW: Yes, yes and I think the analogy is not necessarily to the reality of what it is, so much, as to the word and some cultural baggage associated with the word religion.
AP: Yeah, and also we know that using religion, as you know, to define their practice could also have certain benefits so that people, perhaps, who are more concerned about their own practice may not necessarily see. But what is it that Druids do then? What are the core things that define what they do?
LW: So I would say that the core things that all Druids, or almost all Druids, across the world do are a specific set, and I pulled this out of the data on two criteria; one is that 90 percent, or more, of world Druids, reported doing these things and there were no statistically significant variations among any group – if you cut by age or by years of experience or by geographic location. You know, slice and dice the data any way you like, there are no variations and that left me with five main practices.
The first of which is 96 percent of all Druids maintain a regular meditation practice of some kind. The variations in the kind of meditation, there are some variations but that is nearly universal.
Almost all Druids, and about 94 percent, have a regular practice of either prayer or conversation with nature spirits or spirits of place or deities, and I can get into the types of deities for the polytheists a little bit later, but they maintain a regular practice of sort of conversation and interactions with those spiritual beings.
Almost all Druids, over 90 percent, have some regular practice of what I would call an extra-sensory form of wisdom gathering from the world of spirits. So some may practice divination or they may do Shamanic journeying or like there are a variety of specific methods and not do all of them but almost all Druids have at least one that they will regularly practice.
The fourth one is that almost all Druids will use a kind of nature-based energetic framework when they’re developing their ritual’s forms or preparing their ceremonies if they do ceremonies, and that will either be the sort of the Druid version of the four elements, right, which we see that in paganism with, I think, relatively similar symbolism where you have each of the cardinal directions associated with certain thematic elements or animals or right meanings and that would be the air and the fire and the water and the earth right so those four elements and or sometimes they’ll use the three realms which is the land, sea and sky framework and Druids will usually have one or the other that help them organize their ideas and their rituals and their meditations.
And the last one that is common is that 89 percent of world Druids do a regular practice of a nature-connection and environmental stewardship in some form. So that will be both sort of interacting with nature in a spiritual manner trying to form an energetic or spiritual-bond relationship and some of that will be actually physical some of it will be activism work to protect the environment. Some of it will be organic farming, some of it will be ecosystem restoration work. A whole variety of different specific activities but all of which are active in environmental stewardship of some kind and those are the really, the core practices that are universal.
And then there’s another level down from that which is, I would say, most Druids, usually over 80 percent of Druids will do but there might be some variations between groups. And some of those would be maintaining an altar or shrine or sometimes more than one altar or shrine. Making offerings to deities or nature spirits, things like they’ll give wine or mead or milk or water or sometimes birdseed but sort of little leaving offerings to nature’s spirits, wheat sometimes. There’s a common habit of using chanting, music, or song, in some ways, within ritual often [an] offering that’s seen as an offering, in some fashion, of the voice. There’s a common habit of declaring peace. So one of the things that are interesting about the beginnings of many Druid rituals is they will go to the four directions and declare peace to the four directions and or to the world in general and do visualizations of sending a peaceful energy out into the web of life.
Seeking the company of trees. This is the one stereotypical image that you see everywhere that actually plays out in the data. That Druids, where they can get to trees, like to be with trees. That’s not always possible for those in the desert or you know some of the other ecological systems but that’s common.
Engaging in creative and artistic activities is another big one that’s very common. More than 80 percent of Druids use that as part of their spiritual work creating objects of beauty and it may be poems, it may be telling stories, it might be creating music but also doing crafts, various kinds of arts and crafts that convey their love and their connection for nature.
And the last one that I would consider sort of a big common one would be ongoing studies in spiritual philosophy of various kinds. So Druids are great readers and I think this may be common across other paganisms, I suspect, but they don’t read just Druid literature in seeking wisdom, they read a wide variety of religious literature and science literature about ecology and global climate change and all these kinds of things. They’ll read Celtic spiritual things they read very broadly, academic works are commonly read. So they’re constantly reading and learning and trying to develop their understanding. And as that they’re often also changing, so in when we talk about the theology and the sort of the sense of what the cosmology is about. Many Druids report being in a state of constant evolution in their ideas. Not that they’re confused or think that they’re not there yet but they sense that as long as I’m alive I’m growing, right. My understanding of the universe is going to be growing and evolving because I’m just human, right and I’m not yet a deity therefore, you know, I have a lot of room to grow. And they’re constantly evolving and developing their sense of understanding of the universe.
And I guess that kind of covers the main common things. It’s probably too much but there are so many little things, right and…
AP: Yeah I’ve got to pick up on the “not yet a deity”.
LW: It’s like, you know, some life in the future maybe. I’ll get there but no not this one. So…
AP: Do you think that there’s an influence from Buddhism because this idea of reincarnation is very Buddhist?
LW: It’s possible. There are… what is the percentage now? Here, let me see if I can find my percentages but there’s a lot. Nearly half, about 46 percent, of world Druids, talk about having concurrently practising different spiritual paths. So Druidry is something that they practice but about 46 percent will practice another spiritual or religious tradition at the same time and sometimes they blend and sometimes they keep them separate and parallel. But Buddhism was very high on that list. I think it’s, let’s see if I can find my… I don’t have that data right in my hand but I think it’s second only to Christianity. I’m just taking a peek. I can find it really quickly. No, I am incorrect, Buddhism 24 percent of Druids concurrently practice Buddhism with their Druidry. 20 percent practice Christianity concurrently. So yes, I would imagine so. I don’t have a direct causal link that I can draw to but that parallel.
AP: It’s possible, yeah.
LW: Yeah, it’s very possible. It’s a good question though.
AP: And what about the meaning of life? Do they usually talk about that? How does their practice of Druidry links to what they believe is the meaning of their lives?
LW: This I can’t speak to. This is not something…
AP: Yeah, I guess that was a bit too metaphysical.
LW: I would imagine that varies a lot, depending on the Druid that you ask.
AP: Yeah and yeah, it’s also interesting because I’ve been with Suzanne [Owen]. We went to a Druid gathering and even on that occasion, they said that you can be a Druid and be something else. So that kind of confirms, even from my anecdotal experience with Druids that that is quite common. So it’s interesting in a way, especially since you mentioned that Christianity is the most popular one among the concurrent religions that raised the…
LW: Second most.
AP: Oh, the second. Okay so Buddhism was the first one.
LW: Yes, yes when I looked at the notes I was like, oh no Buddhism is first, and then Christianity. Among those who … just under half have some concurrent practice, right, so of those halves, that have concurrent practice, Buddhism is the primary other – the other one and Christianity is the second most. So what’s interesting about Druidry is that it’s really defined, not by what you believe about the nature of the cosmos, but the way in which you interact with it, right. So, you know, we don’t care what you believe or what picture you have in your head but you got to treat it properly and that’s where the unifying principles come out of this is that’s it’s the how you interact and how you build the relationship that ties it all together.
AP: I love this explanation and you also just answered my question. The question about the meaning of life because in a way it’s like saying, you know, the belief in what is less important when considered the relationships that you build. If I’m understanding correctly.
LW: Yes, yes.
AP: Yeah and this also perhaps links to the next question that I was about to ask; which is how come Druids can also practice Christianity, concurrently, with Druidry? Is it not considered to be two belief systems that might conflict with each other?
LW: I think what I’ve been reading and of the Christian Druids who responded in some depth, I mean some were concerned that their local churches might not approve of them as much as they think but within their own understanding, the beliefs that they expressed were often trinitarian but not always. Some were very much really focused on a relationship with Jesus, But they also saw the landscape as being sacred and for some, there was an element of animistic perception of the landscape, in addition to their belief in the deity.
I’m really at the edge of my understanding here but my understanding is that Saint Francis was considered a heretic, at one time, because he had these relationships with animals and that wasn’t quite considered appropriate, early on. But I think there’s something at that edge where, either they’re seeing the landscape is somewhat in spirited or seeing is that as being holy because it was created by God and if you really believe in God and you really believe that the Christian God created our existence then why would not this creation be holy? It’s a work of the creator God, right. This is a sacred thing, not just us sacred but all of what was made is made by the same artist, right. So it should be respected similarly. So there may be elements of that on one side. Many of the Christian/Jewish who wrote detail about their theological beliefs, though, described elements of archangels being part of it – they sounded like they almost had a little bit of an animistic part or a pantheistic flavour to their Christianity. And many of them discussed trinitarianism, which if you start pulling that apart and questioning exactly how that’s being interpreted, can lead you into a place that’s close to a soft polytheism, right. It’s not really belief in separate deities but the idea that there could be different facets viewed from different ways.
So I think that there’s a more of a spectrum of belief there, rather than you’re just a straight Christian and you don’t believe any of that nonsense or you’re a wacko, magic-using hoki person who can’t be trusted to have sense, right. There’s a lot of space between those two and I think I saw evidence of a wide variety of beliefs that kind of integrated the two and I’m blathering on but I’ll stop now and you can ask more questions so I don’t go too far.
AP: Yeah, I guess that I was trying to understand whether they perceive the conflict between Christian theology and Druidry but I think that from your answer I gather that, once again, it’s not really. Their approach appears to be not as dogmatic and not as linked to the institution and so it is more about, even when practising Christianity, it is their interpretation of Christianity that tends to focus on the same aspects that they focus on when they practice Druidry which is a focus on the creation, which is nature and a focus on the relationships, which may be with spirits, deities, and Jesus. Just so it’s like including Jesus in the pantheon in a way.
LW Exactly but I don’t think they would term it a pantheon, right. So, again the words are very important, right. They bring different ideas with them.
AP: Yeah, you’re correct in highlighting that. I’m using a more Pagan term perhaps than that is used often by Pagans, I mean.
LW: Correct, correct but I think you’re right they’re talking about the holiness of the creation and the importance of the relationship that’s being built and so that’s what is shared with Druidry, right. So even if their belief system, I mean, if you look at belief systems overall, among Druids, the vast majority are animist in their belief, actually, about 64 percent reported animism being the main theological perspective. About 49 percent described some elements of what I would call soft polytheism where they will revere certain gods, right. Pick your pantheon but certain gods, but they perceive them more as an archetype or a role model or not so much a deity to be worshipped but more of a symbol rather than an actual separately existing deity.
AP: Whereas a hard polytheism is when practitioners believe that the deities are actually real – existing on a different plane of reality – just separate…
LW: And not interchangeable, right. So a soft polytheist might talk about interchangeable gods of thunder or interchangeable gods of rivers, right. And you could pick and choose from different cultures and it would be fine because they sort of represent the same thing. Where a hard polytheist is like, no those are separate individual gods and they would be really angry if you started calling them by the different names and it’s very important to have the understanding that they are very real distinct beings.
But hard polytheist, interestingly, was only 15 percent, only 15 percent of Druids considered themselves hard polytheists and they were adamant that they should not be confused with the soft polytheists. So it’s very much distinct groups. But pantheists even outnumbered them, 37 percent reported pantheism as being their primary theological view. And then seven percent were monotheists. So that’s a small number but it’s significant to think, right. And when we think in terms of Druidry, it is often put, as a subcategory of paganism, in, if you look at some of the books. But if you consider the range of what the beliefs are and that you know 7 percent are really monotheists it doesn’t necessarily sound like, it’s more like a Venn diagram, right, where there are paganisms and then there’s Druidry and there’s some overlap but it’s not necessarily one as a subcategory of the other.
AP: I’m not sure I would agree on that. I understand what you mean. Yeah, I guess it all depends on the definition that we give of paganism. I mean is paganism necessarily hard or soft polytheist?
LW: And I don’t have an answer to that. One of the things that I did ask, specifically, was whether or not people identify with pagan as being a descriptor of their path and it was only about half, only about half identified with paganism about half said, no, I’m not a pagan – no way.
AP: Why did they say that?
LW: They didn’t necessarily give reasons for that was just check which or what applied – describe your path. So that’s interesting and I wonder if there are cultural baggage associated with the word paganism or pagan that, similar to the word religion, right, that some people might have an allergic reaction to.
AP: Yeah, I think that that needs to be actually… you know Suzanne [Owen] and I might investigate it further for our book because I think it’s a very interesting topic to see whether Druidry can be seen as part of paganism or something that is just tangent, that only has overlaps but it’s not quite part of the umbrella of paganism.
LW: What’s interesting is, and I haven’t checked yet to see if it’s the same number, the same percentage of Druids identified as pagan, as described concurrently following another religious path at the same time as Druidry and I don’t know to the extent that those groups overlapped. So that was interesting that was this similar number said, I agree pagan – and I do other things as well. So is the paganism part of the Druidry? or is that – I am pagan and I am Druid. That I can’t really answer right now.
But I’m curious, how you would define pagan? Because I’m curious to see how they’re similar and how they would be different?
AP: well that’s a very big question. I don’t have a precise definition of paganism but I guess that a good way to represent what paganism is; is a nature-worshipping religion or rather an umbrella term to define a set of traditions which are of nature-worshipping nature. I think one of the three elements that I once found as defining paganism, by the Pagan Federation International, is the idea, well first off, of course, the concept of nature-worshipping, a form of connection or worship of nature. Then you have the idea of seeing the deity or the divine as encompassing both the masculine and the feminine and then the idea of a personal ethic based on individual responsibility. Which means that you don’t really have somebody telling you what you should do. It is more based on your personal responsibility and your connection to the community. So these are the three principles that the Pagan Federation International used to list as three elements, three core elements of paganism and I would think that these are also found in Druidry, would you agree on that?
LW: I would say definitely the nature connection, nature worship or nature reverence. Definitely the relationship, the aspect of relationship. The deity aspect, actually, is true of some Druids, but not all, right. So there are many that have an animistic or a pantheistic view and they’re not really looking at male and female elements of nature. They don’t really anthropomorphise. There’s their sense of the divine and so that is not necessarily a part of their system of beliefs and then you also have the monotheists among Druids for whom it’s very much not. Although many of those, who are monotheists, will say that they see the Holy Spirit as being feminine, right. So that there may be some element of that. But I think, if you were talking about the polytheists, soft or hard polytheists, among Druids, that’s probably true. But then for many, it’s not true. So I guess I come back around to – some Druids are probably fitting in that umbrella as just as described by the Pagan Federation and the other half are not. And yet they’re united through some of their practices which are, in addition to what’s described in the Pagan Federation. So, I think it’s not necessarily completely separate, but maybe an overlapping group and you’d have to ask each individual Druid whether or not they belong in both places or just in the one. So that, I think, that argues for more of an overlapping of similar traditions rather than one being a subcategory of the other.
AP: I see.
LW: Is the use of magic considered something that’s a critical component of paganism?
AP: It’s not. I wouldn’t say that it’s considered a critical component in that not all pagans would practice magic but, considering their worldview, I would say that most, if not the large majority of pagans, believe that magic exists – so it is part of the belief system but whether they actually practice or not, that is a different matter and I’d say that not all pagans practice magic but most pagans believe that it exists. I can never say all pagans for anything, really, because – but I think, in the past, I used to think that that was a characteristic of these kinds of new religious movements but actually I realized that that is also true for the institutionalized monotheistic religions like you do have a central dogmatic understanding of the religion but then when you ask people – so it’s like when people have to understand Catholicism, for instance, they don’t go and ask people, usually, I don’t know, actually, because I’m not a catholic scholar but when people think of Catholicism they tend to have the idea what the church says. Whereas with paganism, or other new religious movements, you tend to think more of what people say and how people describe their practice because you don’t have a centralized dogma or an institution that could answer those kinds of questions. But if you were to apply the same methodology to Catholics, I would argue, from my experience as an Italian among many, many Catholics that they also have a very different idea of what Catholicism is for them. And they would strongly argue that they are Catholics but they believe in a goddess figure or they just despise the idea of confession or all sorts of things that would be considered, you know, heretical. But they don’t see they don’t say that way so.
LW: Right I suppose it depends on how you define magic because like pagan, like religion the word magic has so much cultural baggage that you will often have people who practice, what would look like magic to a scholar, adamantly deny that they practice any form of magic.
AP: Yeah and even in that case you can see how certain – the cultural baggage and the history plays a massive role there because some people may say that they don’t practice magic just because they are afraid of repercussions or the stigma from that community or other such things.
LW: Or they believe magic is a process of selling your soul to a demon so that you can get power. But if you think of magic, one of the things that I noticed early on when I was attending ceremonies of many different religions, as I was trying to understand the variety of religions and I sat in on some Catholic masses and some Anglican masses and I noticed that, if you think of the magical tradition in witchcraft where you form a circle and people work to build up energy among the community and focus on some change that’s intended and then releasing that energy to try to manifest the change. And if you consider that structure of intention being the element of magic, rather than the specific you know candles and whatever implements, wands, whatever are used, but that intention. When I sat in the masses I noticed that they didn’t make a circle, they came down in a line and created lines, but then there was a procession, and then they used song and chanting to build energy, and then the priest would say a prayer, in which they specifically just stated an intention for the way the world should change, for the better, right and then everyone shouts amen, right, and releases that energy of their prayer out for the change of the world. In my mind, that seemed very close to the sort of the energetic intention of magic within pagan traditions.
And that probably will get me in all sorts of trouble but there’s a similarity, I think, in the ritual structures there that are all focusing intention and trying to build energy of intention in order to manifest a desirable change in the world and, if you think of magic in those terms, there is substantial magic within Druidry. Although, again only 63 percent of Druids say they ever practice any form of magic, right.
AP: 63?
LW: 63 percent.
AP: So, well, that’s a considerable percentage, right.
LW: So, it’s not core for everyone but it’s a substantial number. But then there’s the 47(37) percent who say, no we never do magic, and yet they will talk about meditations where they’re drawing in different energies to heal themselves and they’ll talk about doing land healings and some consider it magic and some don’t. So I think it’s a difficult question about whether that’s like with pain, isn’t like it’s within the world view it might exist but maybe it’s not always practised.
AP: Yeah and one other question that I had is: why did you choose world Druidry? Is it because you were trying to investigate whether there are changes depending on the geographical context or just you wanted a large-scale global survey?
LW: The reason that I chose to study world Druidry was mostly that there are these questions that in the online forums, over all these different orders, all over the world. Every few months there are newcomers who come in and ask the same questions; well what really is a Druid? How do I know if I’m a Druid and not? How do I know if Druidry is right or not some other pagan path? What is it that Druids actually do? And then the answers always come back, some form of; well Druidry is about what you do, not what you believe. You should read a lot we really can’t tell you what to believe or do because it’s so diverse. Ask three Druids get seven answers, right. There are these standard responses that were so vague that I started wondering whether there really was any such thing as Druidry as a coherent religious tradition or is this just a word that a lot of people fancy using to describe themselves but was there actually something religiously or spiritually or practically in common across the world.
And a part of that was probably due to the fact that while Druidry, the modern Druidry started in Britain, it has since travelled to so many countries and cultures and so many environments of the world and, for example, one element of Druidry is the celebration of the wheel of the year, of this the cycle of seasonal festivals but, as taught in all the curricula, that those seasonal festivals are based on the agricultural cycle of Britain. And if you’re talking about the Brazilian rain forest and there are a large number of Druids in the Brazilian rain forest, right. Or if you’re talking about the desert southwest of the United States, where it’s a monsoon-driven environment, that has nothing to do with hot, cold, light, dark but only about when the water comes or in very, very different ecologies. I wanted to know well, how does that really work, how do you celebrate the agricultural cycle of a land that has nothing to do with where you are. Do you just read a book and stay inside or does that change what you do in some way and so there were no resources, there was no data anywhere to be read. There were anecdotal evidence by people who had leadership roles in different orders and had a specific curriculum, that they were teaching and they could report that the people that they met in the gatherings near where they lived and were teaching, did things the way they said in their curriculum which makes a lot of sense, right. If you go to Stonehenge it makes sense that you’ll see people following the curriculum developed in Britain, related to Britain. But what about in New Zealand, right. Do they really do it the same there? And how does that work? So I went out expecting to find that there’s really no commonality, that it either changed a lot, right. And it turns out that it didn’t, right. So it was very interesting what came out of the research but I wanted to have some data that would provide a definitive answer. What does it actually mean to be a Druid? What do they have in common, if anything?
And then, when I started the project, it started out smaller. I expected to write a paper and then I was talking to the leaders of the different Druidry groups, to the OBOD and the British Druid Order and the Druid Network and then some American groups there’s the Ancient Order of Druids in America and there’s ADF and so I said well let me ask those people because my experience of Druidry is, of course, narrow. It’s my experience and I’ll probably ask things that are offensive or forget to ask things that people would be offended that I didn’t ask. And so I got started asking for input of, as I’m developing this survey instrument, am I asking all of the necessary things and or have I phrased something in a way that would exclude certain people, right. I wanted to make sure it was really open and inviting to all Druids of all kinds so otherwise, you don’t have a useful database. And as they were giving me feedback on what I had started. They’re like, oh well you know this would be an interesting question to ask. Oh, and we should find out about this because no one really knows and so it ballooned into this giant study.
There was a 20-page survey form that had like 189 separate questions and 18 of them were essay questions. And people wrote thousands and thousands of pages. They just wrote like, when I spun out all of the narrative data only, there were 1 500 pages of single-spaced text that came back. So they just poured out their hearts from all over the world, which was amazing. And then I started digging through to try to find out what the answers were to these things. And that’s what the book was about. Now there’s a place, when people start asking those questions, that keep getting asked every year. What theology do you need to have? Well, now we actually know the range of what people believe and what are the things that you have to do or what are the things that everyone does. Well, you don’t have to do anything but if you want to know what most Druids actually do, now there’s a place where you can find out. And what are the differences and what are the regional differences?
AP: So how many respondents did you have in total?
LW: There were just over a thousand people who began the survey. I had 725 completed it with the essay questions and all that. I’m glad there were no more because I couldn’t have handled the data set if I had more. But it was enough and it was diverse enough that you could really do this mixed-method research where you sort of code answers and then you could do statistical analyses and compare the types of responses based on all the different demographics. You know where people were and whether or not they had a Celtic genetic background in their family heritage. How long they’ve been practising. How old they were, so you could tease out generational changes and changes over time and differences between the young and the old and differences between different Druidry groups. So one of the things I could do is; any Druidry groups you’re affiliated with so you could find out whether there were differences between the major groups and so on and then you could do all the slicing and dicing and see where the patterns were.
AP: Yeah and can you expand a bit more on your research method with regards to this survey and how did you gather the data and then analyse the data?
LW: Sure. So it was done by a long-form questionnaire, mostly because there weren’t many earlier studies that really did broad sociological research but they were always done with small sample sets that were very local so they would have a strong self-selection bias and I wanted to make sure it really had a global reach that was not emphasizing any particular group based on ease of access and it wasn’t emphasizing a particular cultural background necessarily based on the location and so, once I generated the questionnaire and had it checked and suggestions made and revised to be really inclusive conceptually, then the next thing that I did ask was to figure out where people believed there were Druids, possibly, in the world. And I looked at the databases, from the major Druid orders were able to generate for me, lists of countries that had, at least at one point, had Druids, modern Druids living there and then I gathered a group, a wonderful group of translators who translated the questionnaire into five other languages.
So we had versions in Portuguese and in Spanish and in German and in Dutch or Flemish and, what’s the other one, French and I tried Italian but I couldn’t find enough Druids and no one would translate for me, so we didn’t have an Italian version, sadly. But so we translated it into all of these different languages and then we made a Survey Monkey, and I say we, because a couple of the translators also helped me troubleshoot the different distribution methods. So we had a Survey Monkey form available in all the languages and we had a PDF form that people could download and email back if they wanted and I had printed out forms that people could send to a postal box, if people wanted to do anonymous responses and were worried, they could do it that way. Also, I wanted to make sure that you didn’t have generational differences in computer tech access or income access to technology to be a barrier. So we worked, that was like the first six months was working on developing all of the different forms and formats so that it could really have a global reach. And then we did then I started an advertising campaign where I did searches in the historical books about Druidry for the names of any organizations having to do with religious rather than cultural Druidry. So I was very focused on just the spiritual-religious forms of Druids because there are also cultural heritage Druids, who are focused more on reviving some of the cultural heritage of Wales and so on, right. And they’re not necessarily religious sense Druids and so there’s some overlap, but I wanted to make sure that it was focused on just the sort of the religious tradition of Druidry. My head is spinning – there are so many bits and pieces.
So then we started in every country where we thought there were Druids. I had an announcement in English and translated into the local language that were sent to the contact people for every organization that we could find that was still active, apparently active, in the world and invited them to participate and to share information about the survey with their memberships. And there were a number of them that sent back emails and said, well we disbanded 20 years ago, we’re no longer active, that the website is just for historical purposes. So but then I got the contacts of the former, localized seed groups that had spun out of those major organizations and contacted them in case there were still Druids that could be reached through that network, even if the central organization wasn’t there. So we did a lot of, and I had friends who, hunting around and trying to find sources and sending me contacts so that we tried to really make the reach as broad as possible. And then waiting for six months while all of the data came in and then, when I finally had that data, and sort of cleaned it up and got rid of the blank the ones that started and filled in two demographic questions but didn’t finish you know you sort of clean out the incompletes and the duplicates.
I had 725 respondents who had completed the whole thing but all of the software that’s designed for mixed methods is designed to handle about 10 percent of the amount of data that I had in hand and so you couldn’t use any of the standard software packages to do the analysis. So then I had to do a – my husband is actually a software engineer – so I had his advice and we had to program a way of working with spreadsheets, nest-layered spreadsheets to try to manipulate the data set and do the analysis and then we split out the quantitative data from the qualitative, the narrative stories that people told and they wrote paragraphs or essays about their theological beliefs, about other religious traditions they had followed before Druidry or that they practised concurrently with Druidry. They talked about their local ecology, about the way they celebrated the wheel of the year, about the ways in which they felt their local ecology influenced their rituals or their wheel of the year celebrations. So there’s a number of questions of this type and so I went through them and I did something called a content-coding where you read through for the kinds of information that are in each so, for example, the theological discussions would be coded according to categories of theological belief; animist or pantheist or monotheist, right, and so then you can sort through and figure out how those relate to the qualitative data.
And then there were a lot of statistics. Once you had those coded and I’m sorry – I asked if there are more questions so but that’s the general process and then so when I report, I report the statistical analysis and then I, in the book, use many, many quotations pulled from the data set to illustrate what is meant by the codes that I described. This way, you know, my coding was checked by two other people for whether it sounded like the codes were properly related to the quotes. But then you still want the reader to be able to read through examples to see what I was reading when I used this description.
AP: Yeah, I noticed that while reading your book that there are lots of examples of how people describe their practices and explain things themselves. So I find it to be quite interesting how you gathered both quantitative and qualitative data and put it all together to give a sample of how Druidry manifests around the globe.
LW: What I love about all of the quotes – actually, it was the hardest part, really, of writing the book was the quotes that I had to leave out. I mean I had 725 to choose from and I could pick, for a really important theme that was everywhere, I could pick maybe nine quotes to put in and it was so hard. Some that I had to leave on the cutting room floor because the subtle differences in the way. So the themes would be clearly represented, but then there were shadings and ways of describing things that were so beautiful that it was really hard, sometimes, to pick one and not the other. And this is the fun part of doing the research, is getting to actually read all the words and hear the different perspectives as people present them.
AP: Yeah, sounds like a lot of work. Must have taken you ages.
LW: It did, well it was a three-year project so probably 50 percent time for three years and that was and that was a stretch. I think the last time I did a project of this scale I had 12 grad students working for me so it was a lot easier to manage that way than this. But then I didn’t get the delight. In the old days, the graduate students got to do the reading of all the beautiful quotes and I just got to spot check their work, right. So now I got to actually enjoy, enjoy all of the wonderful stories.
AP: Yeah, so as a last question I have one from one of my patrons, Andrew, and he says; I often see in social media hashtags for Druidry alongside ones for witchcraft and other pagan paths. Are study and initiation still important to being involved in the religion or are those aspects being eroded through internet-mediated eclecticism?
LW: I think that study is still very important among Druids. There was a whole section analysing the kinds of books that are read and studied by and are influential in forming the spiritual path of individual Druids and it’s an enormous list. There were thousands of books that were cited as being, not just purchased, but actually influential in shaping the individual paths. So I think that studying widely is still very much important. Many Druids will read and study-specific Druidry curricula but it’s not necessarily the most influential in terms of their final path. So really, books about all manner of spiritual and religious topics are considered much more influential on the final results, although the curriculum is often where people begin. Initiation, there was only one person in 725 who mentioned anything about the importance of initiation or initiatory traditions, so that does not seem to be as much important among Druids now. It might have been earlier more so but I think the study is more important for sure.
I actually have a question for you if I may.
AP: Of course.
LW: Okay. Because I know that you’ve been working with Suzanne Owen and the concept of indigeneity in religions and I’m curious about that. I haven’t gotten to see Suzanne’s book yet because I know it’s still coming and not yet here. I have some information from my book that talks about how indigeneity of Druidry is affected as it travels around the world and I’m curious if you have any information on that perspective to add. I’ll give you mine if you give me yours.
AP: Yeah I describe the whole issue in detail in a video on indigenous religions versus indigenous people and there’s also one video, on the channel, on whether Druidry can be considered indigenous, where I tackle these topics. But that also was important for my own Ph.D. because in my Ph.D. I study Italian vernacular, the Italian vernacular healing tradition and I argue that it is the indigenous Shamanism of Italy. So, obviously, the matter of indigeneity was also important in my case. So the thing I think that, when it comes to defining indigeneity, the first thing that we need to do, and this is something that I’m publishing as a chapter in an edited volume, which you will also find on my YouTube channel as a video because everything that I research, I will turn into a video.
But yeah the first thing, the first step is to disentangle the idea of indigenous people from that of indigenous religions – because an indigenous religion may not necessarily be one practice by indigenous people, and not every tradition that is practised by indigenous people is necessarily an indigenous religion. So what about indigenous people that are Christians. That doesn’t make Christianity an indigenous religion. Also the concept of indigenous people, it’s a political identifier which is related to specific countries, the law of specific countries, so it is not really a concept that… I think that it would be detrimental to a religious studies’ understanding of indigenous religions to keep the two entangled and attached because it is sort of impeding a full understanding of what indigenous religions are. And also, it is hindering the understanding of what indigenous people do.
So, I think that it is limiting in both ways and so, when you disentangle the idea that indigenous religion isn’t necessarily one practised by indigenous people, how do you define indigenous religion then? And then, from the literature and also from Suzanne’s research, and my research – I employed the definition of James Cox, saying that there are a few elements that are characteristics of an indigenous religion and that is; kinship relations, the connection with the land. Yeah, there are three main components to what constitutes an indigenous religion and none of them is necessarily linked to it being practised by indigenous people. So when you analyse the tradition itself and you look at whether it is connected to the land or there was the oral transmission – that was the third, the third element – the idea of oral transmission which could also be seen as a non-standardized transmission. The idea of oral transmission is usually connected and linked to the idea that knowledge is passed down not based on a standardized understanding of the practice, because when I’m trying to teach to you orally and not by a book, I’m going to tailor what I’m saying onto you. So it is all based on our personal conversation, what are the things that our conversation will allow to emerge from my baggage of knowledge. And also, there are things that I might be more inclined towards sharing and other things that I might not or, perhaps, at least to me it happens that different people ask me the same question and I may come up with a different answer or answering from a different angle just because of the situation and the person and the relationship and how open I feel at that specific moment and these are all things that play a part in a transmission of knowledge which is not standardized.
So I’d say that, rather than being …I don’t think that it is the oral transmission that is key but the one-to-one transmission that is not standardized through workshops or books or a specific course that you have to undertake, which is the same for everybody. And so yeah, when you have these three aspects, the connection to the land and a tradition that is somewhat connected to the land, like for the use of specific herbs, for instance, or it might be necessary for you to practice it within that specific context. And also the idea of transmitting the knowledge on a one-to-one basis rather than in a standardized way. And the idea of kinship relations being important, which can include people from your bloodline but also spirits and the connection with the spirit world, which is also something that you find in with Shamanism, for instance.
When it comes to Druidry, was your question like can Druidry be indigenous even outside of Britain or can Druidry be indigenous generally?
LW : It was more that I’m curious how you define the indigeneity of religion, now, because I would argue that Druidry is definitely indigenous religion but it is not only indigenous to Britain. It has become indigenous to other landscapes and the arguments that I would make for that based on sort of your defining terms is that well first it is definitely based upon connection to the land. It is definitely based on a personal, one-to-one communication, both in terms of Druids talking to other Druids saying, well I can’t tell you what to do, you need to look at, where you are right, and figure out how to connect there. And, for example, the rituals and celebrations of the wheel of the year, turns out that, within Britain, stay very close to the curriculum but not always exactly so. Sometimes the dates are shifted because the snow hasn’t yet melted and so the first flowers haven’t arrived yet, so Imbolc, at the calendar date, makes no sense, right. But sometimes it’s entirely reinterpreted based on the details of the landscape in which a Druid lives. So almost all Druids talk about the wheel of the year.
What’s interesting, and there’s a lot of lovely examples within the book, is when Druids live in very different landscapes to Britain not only do dates shift but it’s not even the same cycle, right. This agricultural cycle and the theological symbolism of the birth and the growing and then the peak light and heat and then the gradual harvest and then the decline and then the rest by death or rest period and going around that circle doesn’t play out in some other landscapes. And you’ll find Druids in places like Brazil, where the light and dark doesn’t change that much and the temperature doesn’t change that much but you have a wet and you have a dry and you have celebrations that revere elements of the landscape changing. And the, so I guess, the spiritual symbolism that represents whether it’s a turning inward or returning outward or a birthing or a decay, and they can happen in different cycles.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining that very well let me try to give an example. From where I live, we have a rebirth that happens as the sun is going to bed because our first rains come and while in Britain things at Samhain time are dying back and going into dormancy our rains come and everything comes to life and it starts greening through midwinter and our explosion of flowers happens in the beginning of February but then we have a little dormancy that happens because we get a sudden icy fog and everything stops growing and things die down. But then it gets warm again a little bit later and they start growing but then fire season kills them off and so we have a very different cycle. And so people in California, Druids in California talk about the fire season, they talk about the fog, if they’re in a place that gets the fog. They talk about different symbolisms of when you’re turning inward or when you’re growing outward.
In Brazil, they spoke about different things. In New Zealand, they connect very much to some of the Māori myths. Māori?, mary? I’m probably pronouncing that incorrectly. Where they talk about the cycle of the sweet potato, which is like their wheat, but it’s a little bit different, right. So I’m seeing that the Druids are having conversations with the spirits of their landscape, one-on-one for what is the spiritual lesson of that moment, in the wheel of the year and it doesn’t always match to the British one. And so it’s being grounded more in the landscape as it goes around and I don’t know if that’s also done in other pagan traditions but in Druidry it’s that’s very, very common.
AP: Yeah that’s I guess. Have you read the book “Indigenising Movements in Europe” which both Suzanne [Owen] and I have contributed to? I think that you might also be interested in the categories that we use in that book, which are the categories by Paul Johnson, which are indigenising and extending, so the idea that when something is imported, from the outside, it can be indigenised into a different territory. So I wonder whether in your case it may be indigeneity or indigenising.
LW: Well possibly, I don’t have those terms yet so, very good, but you’ll put the link down there so we can find it?
AP: Yes.
LW: Very good. Thank you so much for a wonderful conversation.
AP: Thank you for coming here. I will leave Larisa’s contact details down below, so do check out the infobox because you will find a link to the book and to her contact details.
So this is it for today’s video. Hope you liked it and if you did don’t forget to SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new upload from me and, as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
Get ‘World Druidry. A globalizing Path of Nature Spirituality’
US https://amzn.to/2WhhyPb
UK https://amzn.to/3y44HOi
Canada https://amzn.to/3eLpuhF
Dr Larisa A. White Contact details:
https://larisa-a-white.com
https://www.facebook.com/Larisa-A-White-105265458509535
https://twitter.com/LarisaAWhite