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Bards
The Bards were the keepers of tradition,
of the memory of the tribe - they were the custodians of the sacredness of the Word. Although they represented the first level
of training for an apprentice Druid, we should not make the mistake of thinking that a Bard was somehow in a lowly or inferior
position. There were many levels of accomplishment, but the most skilled of Bards were held in high esteem and partook of
many of the functions of both the Ovate and the Druid.
The training of a Bard was intense and lasted for many years. There
were variations in the curricula between Scotland, Ireland and Wales. In Ireland it is recorded that the training lasted twelve
years, with students undergoing the following rigorous curriculum:
In the first year, the student progressed from Principle
Beginner [Ollaire] to Poet's Attendant [Tamhan] to Apprentice Satirisist [Drisac]. During this time they had to learn the
basics of the bardic arts: grammar, twenty stories and the Ogham tree-alphabet .
Over the next four years, they learnt
a further ten stories each year, a hundred ogham combinations, a dozen philosophy lessons, and an unspecified number of poems.
They also studied dipthongal combinations, the Law of Privileges and the uses of grammar.
By his sixth year the student,
if he had stayed the course, was called a Pillar [Cli] and would study a further forty-eight poems and twenty more stories.
Over
the following three years, he was termed a Noble Stream [Anruth] because 'a stream of pleasing praise issues from him, and
a stream of wealth to him'1. During this time he learnt a further 95 tales, bringing his repertoire up to 175 stories. He
studied prosody, glosses, prophetic invocation, the styles of poetic composition, specific poetic forms, and the place-name
stories of Ireland.
The final three years of his training entitled him to become an Ollamh, or Doctor of Poetry, passing
through the grades of Man of Learning [Eces] and Poet [Fili]. In his tenth year the student had studied further poetic forms
and composition, in his eleventh year 100 poems, and in his twelfth year 120 orations and the four arts of poetry. He or she
was now the Master or Mistress of 350 stories in all.
As Ollamh, Doctor of Poetry, he was entitled to receive a gold branch.
As Anruth, Noble Stream, he had carried a silver branch, and before that - throughout his training - he had carried a bronze
branch. These branches had bells attached to them, so that as the poet strode into the hall to recite a poem or tell a tale,
he would be accompanied by the sound of bells - warning the audience to become silent, and summoning the help of the inner
realms to ensoul his poem or story.
In Wales and Scotland the training of a bard was similarly rigorous, although with
different grades and a different curriculum.
O Hear the voice of the Bard
Who present,
past and future sees
Whose ears have heard the holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees...
-William Blake,
first Song of Experience
Knowing something of what the Bards did and how they were trained, we can ask ourselves what
relevance the Bardic work might have for us today.
It is no coincidence that we begin our study in Druidry within the
Bardic Grade. Its importance as a foundation for our lives and character and spiritual development is no less significant
than it was thousands of years ago, and it could be argued that it is even more essential today than it was then. The clue
to understanding why this should be so lies in the realisation that the historical Bards worked with Record and with Inspiration.
One of the prime reasons for modern man's sense of alienation lies in the fact that he has cut himself adrift from both the
natural world and from the roots of his past. Practising Druidry is about healing this alienation - reconnecting to our past
and to the world of nature. In the Bardic grade we open ourselves to the restorative power of the Druid understanding of Nature
- we allow the Mandala of the Eightfold Seasonal Cycle, explained in the next chapter, to be grounded in our beings. Working
with Record means working with heritage, lineage, and the mythology and stories of the tribe. Working with Inspiration means
opening ourselves to our inner creativity.
The Bardic stream is not simply a body of knowledge we once possessed and which
we attempt to regain - it is a spiritualised mode of artistic creative consciousness which is dynamic and living - the future
holds as much, if not greater promise than the past.
In the Bardic Grade we open to what it means to be living on the
earth with the ability to be creative. Although this is the first stage of Druid training, its purpose reaches to the very
heart of Druidry - which is the development of a mastery of the powers of generation - at the Bardic level this involves the
generation of creative works - of music, song, poetry and art in all its forms. In the Ovate and Druid work we relate to this
power in the same way but we also become concerned with generating healing and love, ideas and light. The Bard's knowledge
of and skill with the power of the Word becomes magical with the Druid: understanding the creative force of sound, the Word
is used to generate seeds of light that echo through creation.
Ovates
"To you alone it is given to know
the truth about the gods and
deities of the sky.....The innermost groves of far-off forests are
your abodes. And it
is you who say that the shades of the dead
seek not the silent land of Erebus and the pale halls of Pluto;
rather,
you tell us that the same spirit has a body again elsewhere,
and that death, if what you sing is true,
is but the
mid-point of long life."
Lucan Pharsalia c.60AD
Lucan, in the above quotation, is addressing Druids
generally, but it is an appropriate quotation to open our study of the Ovate Grade, for it was the Ovates who, to the greatest
degree, were responsible for understanding the mysteries of death and rebirth, for transcending time - for divining the future,
for conversing with the Ancestors - travelling beyond the grave to bring augury and counsel to those still living on earth.
If
the Bards were shamans in Michael Harner's understanding of the term because they opened doors with the power of the Word,
then the Ovates deserve the term shaman even more so - for they open the doors of Time.
A general categorisation of the
three different grades accords the arts to the bards, the skills of prophecy and divination to the Ovates and philosophical,
teaching, counselling and judicial tasks to the Druid.
The Ovate as master or mistress of prophecy and divination needed,
and still needs today, a reorientation in relation to Time. To travel within time - to read the Akashic Records as some would
term it, requires a conception of its nature and dynamics that is radically different to post-Enlightenment thinking, and
more akin to the understanding now being offered by the New Physics.
The belief in the cyclicity of life, as we shall see
in the next chapter, was fundamental. In common with the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Christians before the Council of Trent
in .................. the Druids believed in reincarnation. Of this item of Druid belief there is no doubt, for it is confirmed
many times in the classsical sources. Caesar, in De Bello Gallico says "The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is
that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside,
they hold to be the greatest invective to valour." Diodorus quotes Posidonius when he says that the Druids held that "the
souls of men are immortal, and that after a definite number of years they live a second life when the soul passes to another
body."
Now we can understand how the Ovates were able to conceive of time-travel. The Realm of the Ancestors was not the
realm of people dead-and-gone - it was the repository of tribal wisdom - the realm in which the Ancestors lived whilst awaiting
reincarnation and to which the Ovate could turn for guidance and inspiration on behalf of the tribe.
What does this tell
us of the Ovate work?
Firstly that the realm of the Ancestors does exist, and that it can provide succour and guidance.
Secondly that a realm exists in which time is transcended, or fundamentally changed. It is to these realms that the shaman
travels, to bring back guidance from Past Souls and insights into the future.
It is the Ovates particular connection with
the Other World, with death, which makes him the officiant in the rite of Samhuinn - the feast for the departed on 31st October.
But it is only in the naive imagination that this concern with death is viewed as morbid, for in reality the Ovate is concerned
with new life, with regeneration. She knows that to be born she has to die - whether that means in the literal sense or in
the figurative sense which all psychotherapists understand as the essential pre-requisite to change and healthy development
of the psyche.
In working with the processes of death and regeneration, the Ovates particular study is - fittingly - tree-lore,
herbalism and healing. The plant world is a great teacher of the laws of death and rebirth, of sacrifice and transmutation,
and the tree is the supreme teacher of the mysteries of time, with its roots for the most part invisible in the past and the
subconscious, and its fruit and leaves likewise mostly hidden from us in the heights of the superconscious - holding the potential
of the future in the seeds that will in due time fall.
The art of healing concerns the application of natural law to the
human body and psyche. If the heart, mind or body is out of tune with nature we suffer. The application of natural remedies
- with plants, with the four elements, with solar, lunar and stellar power are studied by the Ovate. Knowing that it is only
through death to one state that we achieve a wider life, the Ovate is in this sense also a psychotherapist. The Ovate learns
and teaches that it is only by letting go, rather than holding on, that we truly find what we have been seeking.
Druids
The reason we tend to visualise the Druid as an old man in
our imagination is partly due, perhaps, to a realisation that by the time one has undertaken the training of Bard and Ovate
one is bound to be ancient! If it took a dozen years to be a Bard, how much longer must it have taken to learn the skills
of Ovate and Druid? We cannot be sure of the exact time it took, but Caesar mentions that it took twenty years to train as
a Druid, although Stuart Piggott rightly points out that this could have been a figure of speech to denote a long duration
of time, or that it might have actually been 19 years, since the Druids almost certainly used the Meton Cycle, a method of
reckoning based on the nineteen year lunar cycle. It seems that whatever the period was, it included the earlier stages of
Bardic and Ovate training.
If the Bard was the poet and musician, the preserver of lore, the inspirer and entertainer,
and the Ovate was the doctor, detective, diviner and seer, what was the Druid? His functions, simply stated, were to act as
advisor to kings and rulers, as judge, as teacher, and as an authority in matters of worship and ceremony. The picture this
paints is of mature wisdom, of official position and privilege, and of roles which involved decision-making, direction and
the imparting of knowledge.
We tend to think of the Druid as a sort of priest - but this is not borne out by the evidence.
The classical texts never refer to them as priests, but as philosophers. At first this appears confusing since we know they
presided at ceremonies, but if we understand that Druidry was a natural, earth or solar religion as opposed to a revealed
religion, such as Christianity or Islam, we can see that they acted not as mediators between God and man, but as directors
of ritual, as shamans guiding and containing the rites.
Druids as Philosophers
"Some say that the study of philosophy was of
barbarian origin. For the Persians had their Magi, the Babylonians or the Assyrians the Chaldeans, the Indians their Gymnosophists,
while the Kelts and the Galatae had seers called Druids and Semnotheoi."
Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers c.250AD
In examining the roles of the Druid as teacher and
judge, king and advisor to kings, scientist and inventor, we must remember that behind each of these functions the Druid was
at heart a philosopher. His or her concern was with the meaning and purpose of life on earth, and it was for this reason that
Strabo wrote "...the Druids, in addition to natural philosophy, study also moral philosophy".
To divide their roles in
the way we have done here, is for the sake of convenience only, for in reality the roles merged and combined, as we can see
when Caesar tells us " They have many discussions as touching the stars and their movement, the size of the universe
and of the earth, the order of nature, the strength and the powers of the immortal gods, and hand down their lore to
the young men." Here we see them as scientists - as astronomers and mathematicians, as philosophers discussing the powers
of the gods, and as teachers passing on their wisdom.
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