This article first appeared in Touchstone Magazine, July 2009
How often does an OBOD ceremony start with a resounding cheer for the brownies? Well, it happened this spring.
Community druidry happens in many ways, often with people’s druidic connections cloaked in invisibility; but the invitation to contribute to local celebration by providing a full blown ritual is a rare privilege.
The invitation this year from an interfaith priest to join in the newly-established well dressing celebrations at Malvern Spa was a thrill, and posed a number of problems.
- 1. We weren’t exactly ‘local’ - and the essence of druidry is working for your own community. As the estate agents say, ‘locality, locality, locality’.
- 2.Knowing the area is very important if a celebration is to be relevant.
- 3. The decorators of our well were a Christian organisation - the Girl Guides - whose members are largely minors. How would their leaders feel about druids?
The issue of local druids I addressed by contacting the local grove - four members of which eventually participated in the ceremony - and was helped by a posting on the OBOD camp website, which drew in two other OBOD members. Personal contact swelled numbers to nine druids, an auspicious number which dictated in part the type of ceremony that was possible.
Visiting the well was a wonderful experience: from a semicircular stone wall built into the hillside, a double spout poured spring water into a trough and a grate took the overflow. Above, to the East, the hillside supported oak and birch. The spring was set back slightly from the road: facing it, to the West, was a panoramic view. It was an enchanted landscape.
I had lived for years near the source of the most ancient well dressing celebrations in the country, Derbyshire; and had moved to Wells, a magical source of underground water, which flows past our front door. I felt in tune with water, the deep, secret silver veins of the springs under the earth.
I began that druidic process of study and ‘moodling’ which allows ideas to flow and strands of thought to coalesce to form coherent themes and ideas for ceremony, and made contact with the local Guides. Through email I told them a bit about druidry, how accessible our ceremonies were and, most importantly, how attendance would not compromise the integrity of anyone’s personal beliefs. Their questions were intelligent and friendly, exactly as expected, and my contact assured me that several guiders and girls would be at the ceremony.
‘Sacred wells’ is a huge field of study, and fascinating. The traditional role of maidens as guardians of wells intrigued me, given that the well would be decorated by a veritable phalanx of modern maidens. Could they be incorporated into the ceremony? I kept this idea on the back burner as I got down to planning in earnest.
|
Goddess bless the OBOD ceremony! For my druids, I knew that a standard opening and closing would be as familiar as donning an old pair of magical boots. I have a real concern with public rituals involving flapping scripts: they look dreadful, and reading a ceremony is not the same as engaging actively and ‘doing it’. Most of us in these lax days can’t memorise vast swathes of text, but by using experienced druids I knew that just the middle of the ceremony could be jotted on a small card for each person, to be referred to discreetly if necessary. And the herald role would keep things moving along. So what about the meat of the ceremony?
Community... continuity... settlement... reliance on water... purity... sacredness... guardianship... all had to be incorporated, which we did by having Speakers for the area, the Malverns: a Mother and a Landworker represented the continuity of life from the first settlements onwards: an Incomer, an industrialist, spoke for the economic life of the region, uniquely dependent on the water; and a Speaker represented the natural world. After them, a ‘Guardian of the Well’ stepped forward, plunging her hand into the trough to produce a sparkling full glass chalice which was passed round, with a simple chant, and we resolved actively to maintain the purity of our waters. Then the four Speakers each placed a votive offering - flint, bronze, brass and silver - into the chalice; the well was blessed and the water and offerings poured down into the overflow, to rejoin the underground spring.
And then it was ‘the time of recall’, the conclusion, with the overcast skies having been kind, though there were a few umbrellas in evidence. And what about the Guides’ participation? Well, I’d left that up to fate: if we’d had single figures attending, it would have been possible to cut a couple of maidens out from the herd and involve them with the Guardian in passing the water. As it was, when we convened to find the well transformed by their labours into ‘Darwin’s journeys around the earth’ there were fifty to sixty people gradually arriving well before time. With such a melee, the idea of maiden-input had to be shelved, with a brief cheer for the Guides’ , Guiders’, Rangers’ and Brownies’ well deserved old award and an explanation of the ‘Awen’, we proceeded. And it was a wonderful experience.
The Guides’ notion of hospitality was Celtic in its generosity- huge slabs of cake and glasses of elderflower water as we all chatted afterwards, And, in the middle of the hubbub, there was a still time to consider that our celebration might have reflected, in some way, a ceremony from the distant past at that very spot. Probably without robes, guides and cake, but still a commemoration of the precious gift that still pours ceaselessly from the side of the hill, to sustain life.
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.
The blessings of pure water on us all.
|
