Interview with Jennifer Uzzell
Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. We are here on the first day of the conference of the British Association for the Study of Religions at Leeds Trinity University and I have here the pleasure of interviewing Jennifer Uzzell, a doctoral researcher at Rome University. She studies contemporary British Druidry and death rites. With Jennifer, we will talk about contemporary Druidry. So I have three questions that I’m going to ask her.
The first question is; what is Druidry and how does it manifest in Britain?
Jennifer Uzzell JU: That’s a very interesting question. I think if you were to ask three druids; what is Druidry? You would probably get about seven different answers. Yeah, that many. It’s very difficult, most druids in Britain would also define themselves as pagans but not all. I think there are two distinct bands of what you might call Druidry in the UK.
The first one goes back in a continuous line to around the end of the 1700s and it has its roots in the Celtic revivalist movement, in Welsh and Scottish nationalism, particularly Welsh and revival of the use of the Welsh language. And it’s more of a cultural than a religious movement. So you have people trying to reconstruct what they imagined were the noble qualities of the Iron Age Druids, about whom we know next to nothing, which means that they can be used and interpreted for almost any political or religious agenda.
And that train of Druidry is the one where you may have seen photographs of Winston Churchill or the Queen dressed in Druidic robes and that’s the strand of Druidry that they belong to and that they engaged with. It’s very much a cultural movement and the Ancient Druid Order that came out of that is still ongoing. It runs the Eisteddfod in Wales.
The other branch of Druidry, in Britain, is the one that I’m more interested in researching and that is Druidry as more of a pagan religious movement, specifically religious movement. And that really can be traced back to Ross Nichols who was a close friend of Gerald Gardner, who is known as being the founder of the Wicca, Gardnerian Wicca, in Britain. And those two were good friends and so a lot of the ritual that found its way into Druidry is actually very similar to Wiccan ritual because these two were talking a lot about what they did. So, for example, the wheel of the year, with the different Sabbatts and the different festivals that was used very much in Wicca was, we think, largely put together by Ross Nichols and so found its way into Druidry as well.
But Ross Nichols’ view of Druidry was, again, kind of monotheist He saw the wisdom of the Egyptians as having travelled across and through Europe, through the megalithic culture and it carrying a sort of a pure wisdom that had been lost in Christianity, which had become cluttered with other ideas. But he died, quite unexpectedly, and a young man, that had been an apprentice of his, called Philip Carr-Gomm, who was very young when he died. Slightly later, in 1986, I think, found a lot of his papers and reformed the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids which is currently the biggest and Druidic Order in Britain. But he founded …
AP: I think he lived in Italy.
JU: Yes.
AP: There is an order in Italy as well.
JU: Yes, and this was a very different organization. So self-consciously pagan, although Philip, who is still in charge of the order now is a psychotherapist, so a lot of his ideas about Druidry come out of using story and ritual as ways of engaging with your psyche and yourself. The other big Druid order in Britain, at the moment, is the British Druid Order, which was established in 1979 by Philip Shallcrass, who is also known as Greywolf. And whilst the two orders work closely together, the leaders are friends – they’ve worked together to lobby the government, for example, for access to Stonehenge. But the BDO’s vision of Druidry is more shamanic, it’s more animist and it sees itself as being the indigenous shamanic religion of Britain.
AP: Is it just these orders?
JU: There are lots and lots of orders.
AP: OK.
JU: So, there’s also the Druid Network, there’s the Anglesey Druid Order, and there are a lot of smaller ones as well. But in terms of numbers …
AP: No, but do all of them believe that they are the indigenous religion of Britain?
JU: Not necessarily no. They all take inspiration from it. So OBOD would see the ancient stories, particularly of the Mabinogi, as being connected to a mystery tradition and OBOD sees itself very much as a mystery school. So with both the BDO and OBOD, somebody would join as a Bard.
Now the splitting into Bards, Ovates, and Druids goes back to some of the ancient sources that mentioned these three grades but we don’t think, historically, that they were actually grades that you progressed through, we think there were three different descriptors for three different types of person. But in modern Druidry, you join as a Bard and then in both of these there’s a correspondence course that encourages you to explore ritual, to explore stories from ancient Britain, or at least from medieval Britain, and to progress through the grades through Ovate and up to Druid. So if you want to put them into a category I think they fit quite well into the idea of mystery schools.
AP: mmm this matter of indigenous, of considering themselves as an indigenous religion but would be, I guess, a topic on its own.
JU: Oh easily, yes, I would think so. I mean Philip, for example, quite often goes over to America and he’s part of the drumming circle with a Native American tribe and he talks a lot about both of those traditions trying to reclaim their own heritage and he says that for the British there’s a huge gap in time and for the American not so long – but there’s still a disconnect because of the British colonialism and because of what it did to the indigenous American tradition. They’ve lost a lot of their stories they’ve lost a lot of their songlines. So he’s not saying that we should appropriate ideas or rituals from the Native Americans but he’s saying that we can work together and help each other to re-establish lines and connections. So he drums with them in their ritual and he is also very certain that there’s a tradition, in Britain, of sweat lodges – based on some archaeological evidence and that is certainly one good interpretation of it. So that there are those connections there.
AP: Is there evidence that that might be true?
JU: There is, particularly In Orkney, where there’s a building quite close to the Tomb of the Eagles, which I’ve actually seen in Orkney, and the interpretation site there, the sort of information that they give you, talks about it as a brewery, perhaps, or as a bathhouse and looking at it, to me, when I saw it, it looked pretty obviously like a sweat house of some sort. But I’m not an archaeologist but it certainly looks like a valid interpretation.
AP: Moving on to the second question. I’d like to ask Jennifer how is Druidry portrayed and perceived and how accurate this portrayal is – of course in Britain?
JU: Yes. Well, the first thing is that most people in their minds, make an association between Druids and Stonehenge and stone circles and if you think about druids you probably think mostly about men and mostly wearing long white robes and probably mostly with beards and interestingly if you look at the – there’s quite a famous photograph of Churchill in a Druidic ritual when he’s in his twenties and he doesn’t have a beard but if you look at all the people around him in that photograph they all have the long white robes and they all have long white beards that are quite obviously false. And so they’re sort of living up to this idea of the white robes which looks like it might derive from a misinterpretation of, I think it’s a Roman picture, that is actually depicting philosophers, not Druids. Then there’s various little snippets of evidence about what Druids actually wore but the white robe and certainly, if you see some of the early pictures of Ross Nichols, at Stonehenge, the sort of Egyptian style headdress, as well comes in there.
The association between druids and stone circles and chamber tombs, long barrows that really goes back to William Stukeley who was doing a lot of investigation in the 1700s, particularly around Avebury, and he believed that the Druids had built it and he saw it as very much as a Druidic temple and this, of course, isn’t true. The Neolithic tombs are much, much older than the Druids. The earliest definite evidence we have for Druids in the writings of Strabo and that sort of historical source is from about 300 BCE. Whereas, the chambered tombs are from about 5000 years ago. So there’s a huge time difference but I always think that Stukeley gets a very bad press for that because, whilst he’s way off the mark, people forget that at the time that he was writing the consensus, that everybody shared, was that the earth was about four thousand years old and he was the first person to accurately say the Avebury and the tombs, like West Kennet, were older than the Romans and he was right about that. And in the context that he was working in, older than the Romans, could only mean the Druids. There wasn’t anything else, there was no before the Druids so to that extent, as far as he could be, he was right. And yet a lot of archaeologists, since then, have made a mockery of this connection between the Druids and the stone circles.
But it still very much stays in the public imagination that people associate stone circles. I mean, you may have seen on Facebook, round about when the clocks come back or when the clocks go forward there’s always cartoons about Druids moving stones at Stonehenge. So it’s a very deeply ingrained idea and of course, modern druids do use ancient sites like that for rituals. So …
AP: Like Stonehenge.
JU: Like Stonehenge, you will still find Druids there at the solstices by arrangement with English Heritage. So it is an ongoing, although there’s no true historical connection, there is still that association ongoing.
The other thing is that, every so often, Druids pop up on, usually on detective mysteries, so I’m thinking of – there was an episode Midsomer Murders where Druids featured quite heavily and I think they made a brief appearance in New Tricks as well. And they tend always to be portrayed, whereas if you see witches or Wicca portrayed, in that sort of thing, it’s seen as something very dangerous, it seems very often as associated with black magic, as something to be feared, whereas, where Druids are portrayed, they’re usually seen as harmless eccentrics, sometimes people with their heads in books all the time, people usually, quite often women. I think there is still a preponderance of men in the way Druids are portrayed, although in actual fact, I would say, it’s about 50/50. And there is going to be a new, chosen Chief of OBOD, in 2021, who is a woman. So this is quite a new thing.
AP: Even in video games. I mean Druids tends to be portrayed in a positive light, as opposed to witches.
JU: Yes, I think positive would be stretching it a little bit and they usually under suspicion at some point in the plot but they usually come out being harmless eccentrics. The object of a bit of sort of finger-pointing and fun but not dangerous and not evil. What is interesting, if you compare the portrayal of Wicca and Druidry, is that Druidry, I think, as a religious movement, I’m using the word religious very loosely there, not all druids would associate themselves with being religious.
AP: Yeah, I know. When religious studies scholars use the term religion everybody attacks us.
JU: I don’t necessarily mean what most people mean by it but tend to be very outward-looking. So Druidry is often to be found where there’s interaction with the public world. So interfaith forums, anti-fracking demonstrations. There’s a big engagement …
AP: So there’s an association with environmentalism?
JU: Yes, yes, there’s very much as an association with environmentalism and I think, if I had to say what makes Druids stand out from other forms of contemporary paganism, is this association. I think three things; there’s an association with the landscape, so very much the ecology, yes, and also a relationship with the landscape that they’re in. And this fits into my own research with newer barrows that are being built for cremated remains and the way that those landscapes are fitting into stories and stories would be the next thing.
So there’s a self-conscious engagement with, I suppose, what Druids would call the bardic arts; so storytelling, music, ways of using artistry, and creativity as a form of spirituality in itself.
And the third would be the connection to ancestry. And ancestry in Druidry is very widely interpreted. So it means your blood ancestors, of course, it does. It also means ancestors of place, so the things that have been in the place that you find yourself before you. So, for example, if you were to move to a country then your ancestors of blood would be, in your case, Italian still but in Britain, you would also have ancestors of place, in the place that you settled in Britain and they would be just as much your ancestors.
AP: Oh, that’s lovely.
JU: And then thirdly, ancestors of tradition. So for a Druid, that might be people like Ross Nichols or Philip Carr-Gomm, in the future, or just the people – basically anything, be it human or animal that has allowed you to be the thing you are in the time and space that you are is understood as an ancestor and there is a real engagement with that idea.
AP: So, is it like in allied spirits? The way allied spirits are seen in shamanism?
JU: To a large extent, yes, and I did an online survey, a while ago, asking about how people engage with ancestors and 83% of the people that replied and it was a big survey, I got over a thousand responses [garbled]. 83% said that they did some sort of ritual practice that involve their ancestors. But for a lot of Druids, not all Druids, believe in anything supernatural at all; this is why I say, who has three druids you’ll get seven answers. A lot of druids also involve in their practices, spirits of land, things that you might call land-spirits, wights, for the genius loci. This is also a big thing and Druids might try to work with them to get to know a place or to heal a particular environment.
AP: That’s very fascinating. So is there anything true about the people, the average person perceives through Druidry or Druids?
JU: There is. In as much as there are Druids who wear white robes, not all of them. Philip Shallcrass, for example, based on a different piece of historical evidence – he tends to wear red. And there are different colours associated with the different grades. But you will find, if you go up to Glastonbury at midsummer, it’s the week before midsummer I think, you will find people in white robes. And a lot of Druids do still do ritual at places like Stonehenge, Avebury – there’s a very active Druid Grove around Avebury. So, yes that is true but there’s a lot more women involved these days. I had a photograph actually taken at the summer gathering the year before last and I counted and, I think, there is exactly the same number of men as there are women in the photographs. Not everybody wears robes, not even for ritual.
What might surprise people is the connection, maybe, with creativity, the connection with activism, particularly with ecological movements. And a lot of the time, druids are involved in professions that are caring or helping, or creative.
AP: Another question that I’d like to ask Jennifer is what role does magic play in Druidry, in contemporary Druidry?
JU: Okay, I would say again, it very much depends on the Druid.
AP: So even in this case we will get, Jennifer “in this case”.
JU: Even in this case you will get seven answers, yes. There are a lot of Druids for whom it probably doesn’t play any particular role at all. And it probably is less obvious, it’s less of a big thing than it might be in, for example, in Wicca. A lot of Druidry is about relationships. It is about building relationships with the natural world around you and for some Druids, it’s about building relationships with ancestors, with land spirits, and maybe with Gods. And Druids understand God, Gods, and deity in a lot of different ways.
Where it does play a role, the rituals often look very similar to Wicca. As I say, that’s because there are very close connections. If you go back to the beginnings of contemporary Druidry and the beginnings of contemporary Wicca there are a lot of people that are connected there and the friendship between Ross Nichols and Gerald Gardner is obviously a big factor in that. So, for example, Druids, a lot of druids, not all of them, would do ritual in a circle they call the quarters. Not necessarily in quite the same way as Wiccans would and I …
AP: How would they differ?
JU: So in Wicca, you tend to have sets of phrases like calling on the guardians of the watchtowers of the east, of the west. In Druidry, very often, there’s an animal that’s connected with each of the quarters. So, for example, the East is connected with a hawk, the South is connected with a stag, the north is connected with a bear, and the West is connected with a salmon. And these are images that come out of, again mostly, the Mabinogi and are associated with, what the characteristics of, what those directions are thought to be, although the actual associations are pretty much the same as you’d find in Wicca for most Druids. Not everybody does it the same. There are some Druids, for example, who rather than working with four directions and four elements like Wicca tends to do, instead, and this comes out of Irish sources, Irish medieval sources, and Mabinogi sources instead, they work with land, sea, and sky and so they’d have this three instead of the four. And they would call on those things to help them or to witness what they were doing. A lot of what looks like magic, to Druids, is to do with trying to build relationships with spirits, particularly spirits of place, and it’s usually then connected with trying to heal energies in that space.
You will find a lot of Druid ritual going on in anti-fracking demonstrations, the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations that were in London recently, there were quite a few OBOD Druids there doing ritual and I suppose you could, definitely, in that case, you could define that as magic because what they’re trying to do is to summon spirit allies or help or to align the purposes of the earth or the place with their purposes in order to change the political situation. So that sort of magic you do see going on in Druidry.
A lot of druids also work with divination so the Ogham, which is usually a set of staves with, effectively, letters carved on them but those letters are associated with particular trees, so that’s used in divination. A lot of Druids use oracle cards or tarot or that sort of thing. So those sorts of magical practices are quite common in Druidry.
AP: So, basically, magic has an importance that depends on the single Druid. But at the same time, overall, they use magic in order to connect with the spirits of places and to help the political situation when it comes to environmental issues.
JU: Yeah, I would say that’s broadly the case and if you can trust that, maybe with Hermetic magic or with some of the ceremonial magic where the idea is more about control and about getting various sorts of powers to do your will – that’s pretty much not a thing in Druidry. So it’s working with, rather than working on. I would say if you wanted to categorize it like that.
AP: Yeah, I’m trying to think about it. Even if you’re working with – your still working on something, in order to change it. It is still a form of control, isn’t it?
JU: it’s only to the extent would you say that you were controlling me by getting me to do this interview?
AP: No.
JU: It’s that sort of thing. It’s not. Druids don’t tend to summon spirits they invite spirits.
AP: Ah, okay.
JU: So there’s that sort of, not to say that all Wiccans or all ceremonial magicians would summon spirits, but there is that emphasis in Druidry that you …
AP: so it is more an invitation rather than a summoning?
JU: Yes yes.
AP: Okay, that makes sense.
AP: So that is it for today’s video on British Druidry in the contemporary world. I really thank Jennifer for doing this interview with me and I hope you really liked it.
So if you like this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, and stay tuned for all the academic fun.
JU: Oh there was a thread on a Facebook group, a while ago, and somebody had asked; they said when Wicca or witches meet each other they say, “blessed be”, is there a Druid equivalent? And this thread went on for two or three hundred posts and the final conclusion was, that the Druid equivalent of blessed be, was, “Hello, would you like some mead?”. So there’s something else, that’s fairly definitive of druids is mead.
AP: So, I guess we will end this conversation saying …
JU: Would you like some mead?
Jennifer Uzzell’s contact details:
email: j.s.uzzell@durham.ac.uk
twitter at @jenny_uzzell
blog: https://theforesthouse.wordpress.com/…
REFERENCES
Hutton, R. (2009) Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain, New Haven, Yale University Press.
Owen, S. (2013) ‘Druidry and the Definition of Indigenous Religion,’ in J.L. Cox (ed.) Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions (Farnham: Ashgate), pp. 81-92
Uzzell, J. (2018) ‘And Raise Me Up a Golden Barrow. Narratives of Ancestry and Continuity in Contemporary British Druidry and Beyond.’, Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion (JBASR), vol. 20, pp. 67–82 [Online]. DOI: 10.18792/jbasr.v20i0.28.
Uzzell, J. S. (2018) ‘Gods, wights and ancestors: the varieties of pagan religious experience at ancient sacred sites.’, Journal for the study of religious experience., vol. 4, pp. 64–80.