Tag Archives: paganism

What’s in a name?

We are all given name’s by our parents. Some of us like these names, others would really have preferred their parents had been a little more inspired, but these are the names we grow up with.

My given name is David Smith. You couldn’t get more ordinary than that. I was going to be called Philip Ian Smith, until my parents realised that every time I was asked to initial something I would be writing PIS. I’ve got to say I’m thankful for that forethought!

My middle name is Martyn. I really like that name and for a while thought of doing as many others have done and using my middle name as my first, becoming Martyn Smith, but I didn’t do that in the end. Middle names are often people our parents name us after. Sometimes one of the parents, or a Grandparent, or favourite actor/musician/footballer. I was named after Old Man Martyn, a plant nursery owner from the village we lived in in Devoran, Cornwall. He gave my Dad his first proper job, so my parents honoured him in me. I like that story.

I also like David. As a child you can be David, a teenager/youth/man Dave, then in older age back to David again. Smith, although I was called Smugger by some at school (which I hated), I’ve also learned to love, realising that there is a magical and respected ancestry within it. Were my ancestors Blacksmiths? Goldsmiths? Silversmiths? I don’t know, but somewhere in my past I had an ancestor named xxxxx the Smith, and I like that, a lot.

So we have our given names. Then we somehow obtain nicknames. I had a few at school but none stuck for long. Angus was one due to my obsession with AC/DC and I like that one, but it didn’t last long.

stag2

In Pagan circles many people take different names. Some public, others secret, only used in magical space. I found the name Damh quite easily. I was open to the idea of a Pagan name and one day I bought a copy of the Druid Animal Oracle by Philip and Stephanie Carr–Gomm. Now the image of the stag and Herne have always deeply moved me so when I found the stag card with it’s Gealic name, Damh (pronounced Darv) I realised I’d found my name. The thing is Darv/Damh is so close to ‘Dave’ as to be almost interchangeable. So I took the name of my Power Animal, the stag, yet kept the link with my given name too. Perfect.

Damh the Bard was born.

Over the years I have also had a few magical names that I have only ever used within the privacy of my Druid Grove. These names changed as my life-flow changed. For instance, when I needed to feel freedom the Seagull came to me, and for a very difficult period of my life I took one of the names of the Gull as my magical name, as the bird taught me to fly free, to survive. When I had learnt that lesson the animal left me, and I gave up the name. Similar things have happened at other times, when I needed the energy of a particular animal/God to walk very closely with me. Taking a magical name has a deep and real effect on our lives.

Some people scoff at some of the names people take within the Pagan community. I try not to. If somehow the Path has led a person to take the name Raven Morrighan (if a Raven Morrighan is reading this, I’m not referring to you by the way), so be it. Having lived with the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, consequences of taking a magical name I just always hope that they have done their homework and deeply considered the name, before taking it as a mantle.

Words and names are powerful things.

What’s in a name? If you take one, you will see.

Thinking about Elders and Teachers

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When I first came to the path the Elders and teachers were the people that were deeply involved in the foundation of the modern Pagan traditions. The Farrars, Maxine Sanders, Doreen Valiente, Philip Carr-Gomm, Vivianne Crowley, to name just a few. The internet was still making that horrendous modem noise on dialup. There were very few books available and even less teachers. It was obvious who the Elders were, and most often it was the people who had written books.

As time moves on and those Elders get, well, older, and in some cases begin to move on from this life, where are the Elders to take the flame? As I travel around the world with my music and I have the privilege to spend time in many communities I can see a varied attitude towards the new generation of Elders and teachers.

In the USA, for instance, the original Elders are again quite obvious but there is also a whole new wave of young teachers already sharing the flame lit by the likes of Margot Adler and Selena Fox, and I see these as regular speakers at Pagan festivals. Chistopher Penzak, T. Thorn Coyle, Teo Bishop, Jason Pitzl Waters and Jason Mankey are all inspiring speakers and teachers adding wonderful energy to that already given by those who came before.

This is where ‘Elder’ and ‘teacher’ reveal their differences to me. A teacher offers their experience, and age is not always a sign of experience. Some younger people have already had many years of study in traditions, and some older people are only just finding their paths.

So let’s talk about teachers for a while and maybe that will offer more insight as to what an Elder’s role is.

In the UK I’ve noticed a fair level of scepticism towards new teachers. Maybe it’s the same in the USA too, but I’ve noticed it less. When there are no rules or guidelines to what makes a Pagan teacher, or a Pagan for that matter, anyone can set themselves up as one. I know some even create fake initiatory lineages to add credibility to their claims.

So if anyone can set themselves up as a teacher it is down to the individual seeker to put those teachers to the test. Do they walk their talk? If they have written a book, do they actually practice the words they have written, or does it look like they just accumulated the ideas to get a book published to earn a living? How long have they been walking the path? What do others say about their work? Do you feel comfortable with them? Do you trust them?

Always ask your questions. If the answers given are direct and restrictive instead of helpful – encouraging you to discover the answers yourself – again my alarm bells would ring. This Journey is a personal one and even though your teacher might have been given an answer, the answer you get might well be different. Openness is the key.

I have found the best teachers are those that are a little reluctant to be teachers. If a person desperately wants to be a teacher, maybe they shouldn’t be just yet. Maybe the need to be the centre of attention is not for the benefit of the student, but more for the teacher’s needs. Now I’m not dissing egos. I think a strong ego, one that you understand, can be a good thing. And to stand up in front of people and speak takes guts and a strong sense of self. But that has to be tempered with the knowledge that you are doing it for the right reasons.

There are a new generation of teachers coming through in the UK, and it’s a very exciting time. To me some of the ones doing it right are Kristoffer Hughes, Penny Billington and Cat Treadwell. Each approach their path with confidence, but with a healthy level of humility and understanding that they don’t have all of the answers.

If you have a teacher, there should be a good teacher/student relationship. This to me is different from the role of the Elder. The Elder holds the flame of the tradition. We don’t always have to agree with everything they say, but by being there they act as guardians, as lore keepers, as people others offer their respect to, if not always their agreement.

As we now rarely have Rites of Passage that acknowledge when a boy becomes a man, or a girl becomes a woman, it is hard to know when someone becomes an Elder. Maybe this can never be a thing one appoints for oneself, but rather our community begins to view us as one.

Although anyone can appoint themselves as a teacher, maybe we don’t appoint ourselves as Elders, but when the moment is right we are acknowledged as one by our Tribes.

Maybe it is this reversal of energy, from tribe to individual, that designates the Elders from the teachers.

Story of the Song – Grimspound

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I find the moors of the West Country deeply inspiring. If ever I’m feeling any kind of disconnection from the Source of my inspiration, a visit to the moors will often reopen the floodgates for the Awen to flow once more. I was feeling that disconnection just before I wrote this song so I got into my car and headed west.

I knew where I was going – it’s a pilgrimage I take at least once a year, to Merrivale and Grimspound on Dartmoor.

Grimspound is a late Bronze Age settlement high on the moor. It’s surrounded by a large fallen stone wall, and inside you can still see the remains of the roundhouses. On a beautiful day it is incredibly peaceful, but on a typical Dartmoor day, with the wind and the rain, it must have been a harsh place to live.

I sat with my guitar inside the remains of one of the roundhouses and just began to play on the guitar – looking around, breathing in the history of the place, imagining it full of life. What kind of people lived there. A Raven called overhead, and I felt I could see torchlight on the Tors either side of me. Voices of the Ancestors singing. The Land singing. And the melody of the guitar began to take shape. A ghostly and reflective refrain.

“The wind and the rain, still whisper its name, and the name that they whisper, Grimspound.”

Deep in the Wild Land,

Placed by a cold hand,

A tribe of the Heartland,

A world far away…

At the time of the settlement much of Dartmoor would still have been forest.

The forest surrounds them,

And Spirit has found them,

They drink from the fountain,

On the noon of the day…

The water source is still there, running through the settlement.

The song came in waves. Voices telling their story. Me listening, writing.

It truly is a magical place. A year or so later on a clear night Cerri and I initiated two people as Druids. There is no light polution that reaches that far onto the moor. I had never seen to many stars.

The initiates waited in one of the roundhouses, and we brought each one, in turn, to the larger roundhouse and each one took that step onto the path of the modern Druid.

No sounds other than our voices, and the occasional breath of wind, and maybe the whispered blessing of the Ancestors.

Grimspound – The Hills they are Hollow

So what is Beltane anyway?

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Yes. What is it?

I’m having one of my pondering moments. This time about this wonderful Pagan festival called Beltane.

What is it exactly, to me?

I’ve been celebrating the Wheel of the Year for (cough) years now and to me Beltane is a celebration of the fertility of the land, its flora and fauna. Is it about sex? Of course it is. But not casual sex, it’s about the life-producing sex of the flower whose pollen is taken by the bee, the sex of the flowering tree, the birds nesting.

Weirdly enough it’s not about the sexual activity of that most iconic of Beltane animals, the deer. The Rut happens in Autumn, not Spring, and this offers another insight into the energies of Beltane. The Rut is in the Autumn (some deer species do mate as early as July but they are in the minority) because deer have a long and quite complicated gestation period, and it’s important that the fawn is born with the waxing light in early Spring, after the worse of the cold. The Rut is also the time when the stags have their full antlered crown. Right now at Beltane the stag’s antlers are still growing and covered in ‘velvet’.

Birds have short gestation periods, so they are nesting now.

What about humans? Babies conceived at Beltane will also be born in February. So maybe the Horned God we see and revere so much around Beltane is that link between human and deer, with both species trying to time their mating seasons with the ideal month of birth? So the image of the human male with antlered crown makes a lot of sense as according to our gestation time, May is our ‘Rut’.

So to me Beltane isn’t just about the human sexual world, it is about the land, its flora and fauna, of which we are just one small part, and the way the land bursts forth with that fertility.

But there’s more…

Where does this leave people who don’t want/can’t have children at Beltane? To me the fertility of the land is also mirrored with the fertility of the mind, and not just about one process of the body. So the fresh unfurling leaf, the cracking open egg, the brightly coloured enticing flower, is also the creative and fertile way we live our lives. This fresh flood of fertility, each year, is important to acknowledge as the fresh flood of creativity for those parts of our lives where we are at our most productive, be that work, cooking, our hobbies, our relationship with our loved ones, the list is endless.

As the Sun warms and I see that fresh green and flower-dappled countryside, I can’t help but feel my creative juices flowing more freely.

So I celebrate the fertility of the land and all of its creatures, and I celebrate the creativity of our lives.

Thing is…

I look to the Hawthorn as my signal that Beltane has truly arrived, and although the Blackthorn is in flower, and although social network sites are awash with ‘Happy Beltane’ messages, to me it won’t really be Beltane until the May flowers coat our hedgerows and May trees.

Then I will see the Goddess and the Green Man in full splendour, strength and beauty.

Not long now.

Update on the Royal Albert Hall Pagan Music concert

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I’ve been asked a number of times recently how the plans are going for the Pagan music concert at the Royal Albert Hall idea I had last year. The simple answer is that it’s still ongoing but I’ve encountered a couple of issues that have made things a little more complicated.

The most recent is that, on contract, every event held at the hall must have the possibility of selling it out. Now I know we can get enough people to pay for the event – at £30 per ticket that only needs 1000 people and that is very much achievable. But to sell it out would be 3900. That’s a lot to ask.

So I’m thinking about how we can get closer to that figure using the Kickstarter campaign concept to raise the finance to pay for the hall. It would mean that instead of making the target 1000 donation/payments of £30 (each £30 gets a ticket to the concert), we would probably have to get closer to the sell out point, in advance, with no fixed date for the event.

I’m beginning to wonder if that might be just a little too much to ask of the community at this time.

So the idea and willingness are very much still there, and I’m still in negotiation/discussions with the hall. It just needs to be an achievable goal when and if things come together to make it happen.

DruidCast – A Druid Podcast Episode 73

The Wheel of the Year – Valid or Not?

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I sometimes watch with confusion the conversations that develop on social sites like Facebook and Twitter over some of the things we do as modern Pagans. One of the topics that seems to get regularly dissected is the Wheel of the Year and the way it is celebrated. There are those who love it, there are those who say that it is a modern invention so therefore we shouldn’t be following its pattern, there are those who see its value in the regular connection with the natural world, there are also those who express a form of superiority by turning their back on it in order to practice something more ‘authentic’.

I must be a little weird because in these situations I just think if you don’t like it, don’t work with it, simples.

Why is there the need to place one practice in a better light by denigrating the practice you don’t do? Why not live and let live and just do what is right for you? These are the things that occur to me when I see people laying into the Wheel of the Year.

But I also don’t mind being challenged to take a fresh look at why I do what I do. Sometimes this is a very valuable exercise, to challenge something I hold as sacred every now and then – to make sure that I’m not just blindly following something, but that it is still a practice that I find valuable and of importance. So I took the time to take another look at the Wheel of the Year, to see where I stood in relation to it as a practice.

I took three of the most common accusations I’ve read over the years against the practice of the Wheel, and then wrote my thoughts on each one in turn.

So here goes.

1. “The Wheel of the Year is not an authentic ancient Pagan practice.”

No, that’s right it isn’t. Although we know that Pagans have been marking each of the 8 festivals individually, the placing of them into the 8-fold Wheel of the Year was probably created by two men, Gerald Gardner (the father of modern Wicca) and Ross Nichols (the founder of the OBOD), sometime back in the 50s/60s. So as the pattern of a cycle of festivals this practice probably goes back 60 or so years. Does that matter? Not to me. I’m not seeking complete ‘authenticity’ of practice, I’m seeking meaningful ‘validity’ and connection.

See I think those two men tuned into something very powerful. We know that the ancients marked the Solstices and Equinoxes, and we know that our farming ancestors marked the agricultural festivals. When I stand in circle to mark the Winter Solstice I know that this is a moment that connects me not only with the turning of the planet, and its relationship with the Sun, but it also connects me with my ancestors who also marked this time at passage grave and stone circle. The same is true for each of the festivals. The pattern is the glue that brings each festival in relationship to the other, and it does it beautifully. If we were living during the time of Taliesin, and he had seen the connection between these festivals, I think we would have honoured that insight of Awen with respect. I honour the inspiration that has given us this mandala. I have no need for that aspect to be ancient. It works.

2. “People who practice the Wheel of the Year are not farmers anymore so it is no longer relevant.”

No, that’s right, many of us are not farmers. And that is an even more important reason for us in this modern time to make that regular connection with the turning seasons and with nature. Many of us are so busy, running from job to home, to kids, to work, to home, that we can be swept along by the demands of modern life. But every 6 weeks or so we consciously make the time to turn away from that and go outside so a place that has some kind of significance for us. To look around, to see the changes that have taken place in the landscape, to smell the difference in the air, to notice the touch of the air upon the nerve endings of our skin. To mark our place in time.

At the Anderida Gorsedd we have just entered our 14th year of continuous open ritual celebrations at the Long Man of Wilmington. 13 times through the Wheel of the Year with 104 rituals, rain, shine, or snow. The regular marking of the Wheel gives a connection to the seasons that is tangible, with memories of 13 Imbolc rituals going back to 2001 you get to know and understand where the cycle is and what to expect of each time of year. The wheel goes way beyond farming practice, and for us with our disconnected lives, where we sometimes get to spend little time with our eyes well and truly open to see the changes of the seasons, the festivals that make up the Wheel are probably more important now than they ever have been in the past.

3. “Celebrating Spring when there is still snow on the ground is stupid. Winter is still here.”

This is one for 2013′s Spring Equinox. We had our Spring Equinox ceremony at the Long Man and it was ice cold. It didn’t feel like Spring at all, that’s true. But I have two reasons to still mark that time. The first is that the Equinox is a celestial event – it’s happening regardless of the weather. It is the time of equal day and night and is the relationship between the sun and the earth’s axis, and regardless of the weather it is the bringer of Spring. It’s here and ready to burst. It just needs the wind direction to change and those leaves will explode. The other reason is hope, particularly this year. We know it’s cold. But we also know that the Green is ready, and some plants and trees are already opening their leaves.

So for me the Wheel is still very much a part of my regular Pagan practice, and I can’t see that changing. It might not be for everyone, and that’s ok. But for those of us who do mark the turning seasons in this way, if you don’t, try not to make the judgement that it is meaningless. There is deep meaning here, laid out in the movements of the sun, the moon and stars, the changes of the landscape, and the honouring of the ancestors.

Free Meditation Music – Willow Dream – Damh the Bard

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This is a piece of meditation music I created for Sacred Nature – Meditations For Health & Healing With The Golden Mean by Philip Carr-Gomm. It was a very different experience recording this piece, and I have to say it was hard to focus as I kept finding myself drifting off into some other place. It’s how I knew the music would work for its intended purpose. So I recommend you listen through headphones, in a peaceful place, close your eyes, and dream into the Willow. Enjoy!!

Yearning for the Green to Return

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I’ve heard it said that the ancients held their ceremonies, in part, to ensure the return of Spring and Summer. We now know that the seasons are an interplay between the Sun, the turning Earth and its axis, but standing on the Gorsedd mound at the Long Man of Wilmington yesterday as the Anderida Gorsedd held their Spring Equinox ritual I found myself feeling very much like our ancient ancestors.

We were there to celebrate the return of Spring but as we stood in minus degree icey winds that literally took the breath away my thoughts turned, as they ofter do at the Long Man, to the Barrows on the top of the hill. Those people held their rituals to ensure the warmth’s return, the ensure a good harvest. Last year’s Summer was almost non-existent and it’s felt like an age since I felt Bel’s warmth on my skin. Like many people I’m sure my vitamin D is pretty low right now, the SAD is threatening to kick in, and I can feel my heart yearning to stand in the sunshine and feel that warmth once more.

It’s still cold today and I’m reading peoples’ status updates on Facebook and Twitter saying more snow is falling in parts of Albion. I do know the Spring will come. I do know the Summer will warm my bones. I do.

There was a sheen of green on the brow of the corn field below the Long Man. Snowdrops have come and gone, daffodils and crocuses are in flower. The eyes of the Young God are turning to the Land as the Goddess catches his eye.

And I know they will lay together with the flowering of the May.

I feel like this every year around this time. I’m a child of Summer. I don’t want to wish my life away, but I, for one, cannot wait for Beltane!

Bring…it…on!

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Tag Archives: paganism

What’s in a name?

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Thinking about Elders and Teachers

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Story of the Song – Grimspound

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So what is Beltane anyway?

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Update on the Royal Albert Hall Pagan Music concert

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DruidCast – A Druid Podcast Episode 73

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The Wheel of the Year – Valid or Not?

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Free Meditation Music – Willow Dream – Damh the Bard

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Yearning for the Green to Return

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Help Tuatha Dea with their community Pagan music album

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