Nice Witchfest, shame about the Druid

Witchfest Scotland was on Saturday — this is one of the Children of Artemis’s regional conferences — at Langside Halls. I can’t say the CoA are an organisation which particularly appeals to me (well, I’m hardly a Wiccan, am I?), but the local organisers are friends, and they did a good job of putting together a conference which doesn’t just appeal to Wiccans. Also, the venue is practically round the corner, so it would be perverse not to go. As if I had a choice…

Don’t know if I have mentioned that my gods are ones who tend to bugger around in one’s life, but they certainly are, and one particularly sharp bit of buggering about was suckering me into speaking on Saturday. Only a wee thing, in one of the side rooms (well, actually, in a windowless subterranean room with brown 70s decor), don’t want you to think I was doing anything major in the main hall. Mind you, it seemed to me (from what others said as well as my own experience) that the most interesting stuff was mostly going on in the peripheral rooms. At the same time as I was talking, there was a good incense and herbs talk upstairs (and I do mean upstairs; you practically needed an oxygen tank to make it up there); it got very approving comments from those who were at it and have no problem believing them; I have heard Kenneth before myself.

My talk was followed by a woman speaking on Irish Witchcraft. She attended my talk, which was fortunate, because I do tend to avoid any pagan talks involving the word “Irish” like the plague — there is such unmitigated rubbish talked about “Irish” paganism; I also suspect I would have been inclined to make for the green room to chill for a bit. However, from her contribution during my talk it was clear she had her head well screwed-on and would be worth listening to. My impression (although it’s obviously hard to tell as I couldn’t attend everything) is that she was much the most interesting speaker there, talking good sense about relating to the gods, the land and the guardians of the land. She has a book coming out in October; I might actually buy it.

Fred Lamond’s talk seemed to be well-received, as far as I could tell from comments, but I had opted to relax with a reflexology foot massage. Excellent, just what I needed at that point of the day. A couple of the talks, though, were apparently very poor. Someone made such a mishmash of history, myth and personal opinion in one talk that several people walked out. The talk by the Big Name speaker, Emma Restall Orr (former joint chief of the BDO), I attended, because I have hung around with Druids and there are certain aspects of Druidry (at least, as it is practised by some local Druids; Druidry in general is something else, if in fact there is such a definable thing) which I can relate to. Now, I have heard ERO speak in the past, and heard her speak when she both made sense and was, to some extent at least, inspiring (although recently she has said some odd things on radio programmes); but her Witchfest talk was downright bizarre.

The title of her talk was “Living Druidry”, which by no coincidence at all is the title of her latest book, and plugging it was the first thing she did. It’s fair enough she should mention that it is a new book since her old publisher, HarperCollins (part of the demonic Murdoch empire — pretty much her description), reissued without consultation with her (she says) her books under different titles. Many people bought or came very close to buying, for example, Druid Priestess before discovering it was just her Spirits of the Sacred Grove with a new cover. Yes, fair enough to reassure people that this is in fact a new book. However, she spent ten minutes on this, and on reading two excerpts from the book which she gave without explanation or context. The first was the sort of thing I am sure is meant to be inspiring writing, but that doesn’t really work if you just launch into it after an anti-Murdoch diatribe and a you-can-buy-my-new-book spiel. I cannot recall a single thing about the second reading.

Having got the advertising out of the way, she got stuck into one of the main themes of her talk: self-justification. Aggressive self-justification. She has certainly come in for some criticism in the recent past, mainly because she has made statements presenting herself as the representative of all pagans in relation to Stonehenge, and as this has naturally stirred up some ill-feeling. That was not what was she was talking about on Saturday, though.

It seems that there are those who have taken her to task for calling herself a Druid. This is not unreasonable: she clearly is following a genuine spiritual path of some sort, but it is difficult to see what it has to do with anything the ancient Druids might have practiced. It is my own opinion that those of us who claim to be in any way following in the footsteps of the ancient pagan religions of Europe should be prepared to defend our beliefs and practices, but ERO takes a different approach. She said, pretty much in so many words, that what she does is Druidry because she is a Druid. OK…

She went on to state that Druidry was an individual thing, that one person’s Druidry not only need not be but could not be the same as anyone else’s; that the very glory of Druidry was that it could encompass all sorts of approaches to spirituality and mysticism, including both pagan and even Christian Druids. Well, OK, although it seems to me the necessary conclusion to be drawn from that is that there is no such thing as Druidry, only Druids (which incidentally seems also to be the inescapable point of the chapter on Druids in Ronald Hutton’s Witches, Druids and King Arthur). Except… well, we will come on to the except in a while.

More determined self-justification followed. One of the striking features of Spirits of the Sacred Grove is the way in which she casually makes references to seeing spirits — of dead people, trees, and so on. Clearly, as someone who has had some contact with spiritual beings myself, I don’t have a problem with her seeing spirits. The way she writes about it, though, is confusing, making no allowences for the presuppositions of those brought up in a secular society. As a result, many people assume she is speaking metaphorically, and in fact it took me some time to decide whether she was speaking literally or using vivid metaphor to make a point. She is not speaking metaphorically, and seems irritated, annoyed even, at those who assume she is. I can’t help thinking that clearer writing would help there.

This led on to the oddest part of this rambling talk. It would seem that someone has accused her — some pagan has accused her — of having a psychosis. If I heard her right, she claimed that someone she knew had been told this, but the length of time she spent on it, the number of times she stated something she experienced and asked, “Is that psychosis?” made it seem extremely likely that she was talking personally. I was and am baffled as to why she should bang on about this at a conference where it is unlikely anyone would be aware that such a suggestion had been made and where there are certain to be scores of people who do not have the slightest problem with the notion of seeing and communicating with spirits. Perhaps she did not consider that there would be other people there who do this, since she presented herself as one of a special group of people, an “eleventh percenter”; she has heard the waffle about people only using 10% of their brains, so she says she and those like her use the eleventh percent (though not necessarily all of the first ten!), and this lets her see spirits.

There was a strange diversion about drugs. Well, I say diversion, but really there was no coherent theme to the talk beyond “I am me and I am right.” So she rambled into the area of drugs, and listed some. She mentioned marijuana and Prozac, for example, which are unquestionably drugs, but she also said — stated baldly, as if indubitable fact — that white sugar and animal fat are drugs, too. There didn’t seem to be any point to this. Following that mind-boggler, she told a story about a time she had tried to get stoned to the point of losing control, and she took dope until she was really relaxed and couldn’t be bothered carrying on; this, she said, was the point at which she had lost control. End of the story, and no point in sight; well, none more complex than, “Drugs are bad, m’kay?”

On her flight up from Birmingham, she told us, she had realised that the clouds were alive, and so she danced and sang with them in her seat. She made some comment on the reaction of the guy in the seat next to her, but I couldn’t help thinking that this was staggeringly inconsiderate and I’d loathe being sat next to her on an aeroplane, even if only for an hour. Odd, I thought, that someone who is explicitly concerned about the planet and the environment should fly up from Birmingham rather than use the train. She said that she felt it would have been worth it if she spoke and her words “touched six people.” Interesting balance of costs and benefits there.

She doesn’t worship gods, she told us firmly, stating that she was not under any god’s thumb. A bit tactless given the number of us there who have a rich (if at times taxing) relationship with our gods and who do worship them, in the sense of giving them their worth; forceful as Oðinn, Thor and the rest can be, I ain’t under their thumbs. That was just dropped in, with no real connection to what went before or what came after. So was her comment that she is mystified that psychologists can be pagan, she does not see how it is possible for a psychologist to be pagan. Given that many well-known Wiccans are psychologists or trained in psychology, and I’m pretty sure one of the chiefs of one of the Druid orders is a psychologist, that was an extremely peculiar thing to say, yet one which she simply stated as though her reasons would be obvious to all. A number of us were left with the impression that a pagan psychologist had told her she had a psychosis…

Now we come to the “except”. Towards the end of her talk, ERO started saying that Druidry was about this, it was about that — “honour” was one of the things she claimed Druidry was about. Now, it seems to me that you can hold that Druidry is a completely individualistic thing which will be different, mean different things, and be practised differently by each individual Druid, or you can hold that Druidry is to some extent a defined and coherent body of belief, practise, morals, and so on, but you cannot do both. Yet, having said that Druidry was a completely individual thing she spent the last part of her talk giving ex cathedra statements about what it was.

And she overran, so no one had the chance to ask questions.

Still, that very odd talk aside, it was a pleasant day, and there is a bit more to tell about it; but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

By the way, I can heartily recommend Buongiorno, the Italian restaurant in Pollokshaws Road where six of us ate in the evening. The garlic doughballs are delicious.