‘In every grain of wheat there lies hidden the soul of a star.’
Druidry, as Nuinn conceived of it, was a phenomenon that transcended history and reached towards the future as much as it had manifested in a distant past. His perceptive observation has led me to some musing that may be of interest here. It is appropriate that we are gathered here at the ford of the Ox, in the middle of the Land of the White Bull, discussing the futures and pasts of druidry on this, the 40th Anniversary of the Founding of OBOD.
Let me try and illustrate some of the forces that led at least some of us to be assembled here today. My initial point of departure is a seemingly familiar story, one that many of you know quite well.
After two World Wars, the most recent one terminating with the first kindling of nuclear fires by the Modern Prometheus, most in the West breathed a collective sigh of relief. Plastics, television, the jet engine, transistor electronics, computers, insecticides (part and parcel of nerve gas research in Germany) Instant Film (Polaroid, another German war product), a mobile and mechanised society that only Hugo Gernsbach, inventor of the term and, arguably, genre of “science fiction” and the Director Fritz Lang (of “Metropolis” fame) had seen coming, and the promise of clean, safe nuclear energy that would make the benefits of electricity too cheap to meter and transform the world into an urban and suburban paradise.
