Can Druidry be deemed as an indigenous religious tradition? Yes. And here’s why. But most importantly how.

Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome to my symposium. I am a university lecturer and researcher and this is your online resource for the study of Magic and magic-practising religions and traditions. In this video, we will cover the matter of indigeneity in relation to religious traditions in Western countries and more specifically to Druidry. I’d recommend reading the book chapter “Druidry and the Definition of Indigenous Religion” authored by Suzanne Owen and part of James Cox’s book “Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions” as it will be the main scholarly influence, alongside my own PhD research, behind this video. Also, you might want to watch my interview with Suzanne Owen on indigenous religions if you are interested in the topic.

But now let’s move onto the topic, shall we?

In an attempt to delineate what might be the characteristics of an indigenous religion, James Cox identifies three main ones. The first thing is a focus on ancestors which is found in beliefs, social practices, and rituals. Consequently, kinship relations are of significant importance in such traditions. The second trait is the identification of one specific geographical area. This implies that their rituals and practices are not universally applicable but rather contingent on the place in which they were developed and have generated their own specific cosmology. Key also the means of transmission, for knowledge and practices in indigenous religions are passed on orally rather than via books, for example (Cox, 2007, 2016b).

Notably, for Cox indigenous religions are those practised by indigenous people but the assimilation between the two is not as clear-cut as the language may lead us to believe and it has been challenged by more recent scholarship (Owen, 2011, 2016) as well as by my own doctoral research. Linking indigenous religions to indigenous people presents a number of issues, only some of which will be addressed here.

First off, that of indigenous people is a political classification aimed at identifying and, hopefully, protecting and guaranteeing the rights of the people – now a minority- who inhabited a territory before its mass colonisation occurred. As Suzanne Owen reports, according to the International Labour Organization and the United Nations, Indigenous people are those who are original or first peoples of a place where they have been colonised (Owen, 2016, p. 82). This concept, however, seems to be particularly applicable to those countries where a massive wave of colonisation occurred in a short period of time and on a large scale – so to starkly remark a distinction between the before and after, the outsiders and the native people, the coloniser and the colonised.

However, colonising waves have happened throughout history and have affected all countries and people around the world, indigenous or not. Also, what about indigenous people who are original inhabitants but have not been colonised and how do we position those who are no longer colonised?

As these examples show, the category of indigenous people is an extremely useful one when it comes to politics and the need to uphold the rights of a minority living in a country where a massive wave of colonisation occurred in a relatively short period of time, restructuring completely the people’s face of said country. And yet, this category appears too limited when trying to understand indigeneity from an anthropological point of view especially when it comes to understanding, and what constitutes an indigenous religion or tradition. It is limited because it refers to specific geographic areas, to only one type of colonisation (there is also cultural and religious – colonisation) and to alleged stereotypes, such as “aboriginal” or “un-changing” – remarkably difficult categories to prove for any people or tradition, or other stereotypes such as “primaeval” and “exotic” which exclude a priori European countries or new indigenous religions from entering the debate.

Rather than static isolation between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures, what occurs can be described instead as a dynamic flow. Such a flow has been identified by Paul Johnson with the two categories of ‘indigenizing and ‘extending’. By indigenising, Johnson refers to the inclusion of outside elements to a local tradition in a way that the outer inclusion is reshaped and ingrained as part of the local tradition (Johnson, 2002, p. 313). An example could be importing Siberian Shamanism in Italy and having Italians practise it or importing Italian Witchcraft in the United States and having Americans reshape it and adapt it to local and their own folklore.

On the other hand, extending suggests an openness on the part of the locals to export their local traditions and make them available to outsiders. Johnson here offers the example of priests of Candomblè who appear on Brazilian national television advising how anyone regardless of African descent, can practise the religion of the African gods (orixas) in the privacy of their own home, with or without initiation and a community of practice (Johnson, 2002, p. 313). This dynamic is not only present outside of the Western world but in Europe as well. Based on Johnson’s category, Graham Harvey edited a book and a special issue – both including my own contribution – where a few of such occurrences are uncovered in the European continent (Puca, 2020). So, when ‘indigenous’ is interpreted and analysed in a dynamic sense, devoid of misleading primitivist claims of pureness and immutability, it becomes clear how such manifestations of indigeneity and ‘indigenizing do very well occur in the Western world as well.

Thus, going back to the traits of an indigenous religion mentioned earlier, we have 1 connection to the land, 2 being kinship-based – which can include ‘other-than-human-persons,’ (Harvey, 2000; Hallowell, 1960)– and 3 an oral transmission of knowledge, which can be seen as a non-standardised non-universalised transmission but rather as a person-to-person transmission of knowledge embedded within and belonging to a specific, local-based community, its past ancestry and contemporary inheritance.

In line with this description, Suzanne Owen proposes a definition of indigenous religion as ‘that which relates to the land, the people and that which has gone before’ and argues that Druidry can, in fact, be seen as an indigenous religion in this sense(Owen, 2016, pp. 91–92). With specific reference to the British Druid Order, which gained charitable status in September 2010 for furthering religion, Owen highlights that those who follow this path describe it as a ‘living native spirituality for the 21st Century.’ The matter of self-identification as being part of an indigenous tradition is accompanied by the aforementioned traits suggesting what an indigenous religion may be. Druidry, as well explained by Jennifer Uzzell in a previous video, is strongly connected to the land, to the point of fostering a high sensitivity to environmental issues. In addition, in Druidry, we also see a prominence of kinship relations – including spirits – and ancestry, which can be ancestors of blood, ancestors of place and ancestors of tradition. An ancestor can hence be everything human or other-than-human which allowed you to be the person you are in the time and place you currently inhabit, which I believe makes it plain how pivotal ancestry is here.

The Druidic tradition is also portrayed by practitioners as an orally transmitted tradition and, even though nowadays this orality can translate into podcasts and online guidance, the knowledge passed on can still be seen as community-based and also locally-based and in a constant dialogue with its heritage, history and re-interpretations thereof.

So, provided we agree upon the definition of indigenous religion as offered in the referenced scholarship and in my research, Druidry ticks all the boxes and can indeed be viewed as an indigenous tradition.

This is it for today’s video. Hope you liked it. Let me know what you think in the comments. I am really curious and I know that this might be a controversial topic. But we like controversy here. If it is well-argumented, well-referenced, and well-researched, don’t we?

Also if you liked this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so you will never miss when I upload a new video and as always, stay tuned for all the Academic fun.

Bye for now.

ERRATUM: It was the Druid Network that was recognised as a charity, not the British Druid Order. Apologies for the mistake.

REFERENCES

Hallowell, A. I. (1960) Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View, Columbia University Press.

Harvey, G. (ed.) (2000) Indigenous Religions: A Companion, 1 edition., London ; New York, Continuum.

Johnson, P. C. (2002) ‘Migrating Bodies, Circulating Signs: Brazilian Candomblé, the Garifuna of the Caribbean, and the Category of Indigenous Religions’, History of Religions, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 301–327.

Owen, S. (2011) The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, London, New York, Bloomsbury Academic.

Owen, S. (2016) ‘Druidry and the Definition of Indigenous Religion’, in Cox, J. L. (ed), Critical Reflections on Indigenous Religions, London, New York, Routledge, pp. 81–92.

Puca, A. (2018). ‘Witch’ and ‘shaman’: discourse analysis of the use of indigenizing terms in Italy. International Journal for the Study of New Religions, 9(2), pp. 271-284

Puca, A. (2020) ‘‘Witch and ‘shaman’: discourse analysis of the use of indigenizing terms in Italy’, in Harvey, G. (ed), Indigenizing Movements in Europe, Sheffield, London, Equinox Publishing, pp. 107–120 .

First uploaded 14 Sep 2019