by vyvyan ogma wyverne
The Discourse:
In the discourse on Druidry which is being developed within Druidry the probing questions about Druids and about Druidry are being asked by Druids themselves. Druidry is a quest. It’s a call to the instincts, intelligence and communication skills of people who call themselves Druids. It’s a post-modern trend to be self-analytical, and post-modern propositions can be helpful in illuminating the mindscape – indeed, deconstructing current models, ‘unpacking’ key ideas, and analysing their implications and the various kinds of spin we put on them, conscious or not, is a major process in the discourse as it manifests on message boards, lists and chat and in talking stick groups around the world. Druidry is a part of the vast array of new possibilities that came to light during the blaring announcement of the New Age, and naturally, many popular New Age ideas cast exciting new lights on the question of Druidry. Druids are rational, yet new respect for the intuitive, the psychic, and the imaginative processes of the human personality gives the rational ‘realist’ in us all pause. Perhaps there is magic. Perhaps there are parallel universes, interactive archetypes, devas and gods. The traditions and traces of traditions, the texts, folk-lore and archaeological evidence, though problematical and their significance hotly debated by academics and Pagans alike, are not slight or irrelevant, and must be accounted for as well, in a traditional academic way as well as in a feeling, intuitive, New-Age way. This looks like an academic exercise, but it’s Druidry we’re doing, and we need to understand what sort of mentality answers the Druid call in order to understand and assess the legitimacy of the many positions we find within Druidry.
The motivation for all this exploration comes partly from a need to appease critics who are not Druids and may be hostile to the notion that anyone could be in these times, or a need to explain Druidry to non-Druids who are interested, or to satisfy our own qualms, which we bring to it from our various mainstream or other backgrounds. Often these qualms arise from the uncomfortable fact that most of us came to Druidry through seemingly unjustifiable lapses of ‘commonsense’, sometimes through mere infatuation with glamorous archetypes, or through fantasy, or just some ‘ego-trip’ we’ve all been taught to despise, yet we ‘know’ these things are irresistible to us for much deeper reasons than we ourselves could fathom. We need to find ways to justify it to ourselves as much as to others, even if we have no doubt that we are Druids. We need to appease others because it’s true that the Paganisms have come as a traumatic shock to many Europeans: those convinced that Jesus would conquer all and wipe out all ‘heresies’ world-wide so that we’d all be civilised in the same way; and those who thought that rationalism would defeat all superstition and we’d find new directions through science, technology and the humanisms, for example. The deeply entrenched chauvinism of the Bible-based church has, since Darwin, been yielding by slow degrees to reason, and is more and more whole-heartedly embracing multi-faith realities – at least here and there, though the Pope is still denouncing Paganism as the work of the Devil. Since the 1940s the rationalists have been looking at more extensive reasoning within more detailed paradigms, and they have often come to embrace propositions that they once thought superstitious – and occasionally at least some academics seem to be showing signs of readiness to acknowledge the limiting effects of their ethno-specific paradigms of ‘knowledge’, that still slam weighty, value-loaded, ethnocentric judgments onto all other knowledge systems built on databases and reality models other than their own – such as those of almost every other culture in the world.
To a limited extent our belief systems generate realities. The time is right for the building of bridges of sound, viable reasoning between our own and others’ paradigms. Because each unique human mind is a reality, we need ways to protect the diversity while evolving viable, effective bridges between the separate realities we generate in our own minds, individually as Druids, and collectively as contributors to Druidry; between individuals of different realities, between different groups, between individuals and groups, and between all and any of these and the natural matrical reality, not of human manufacture, within which we make it.
Most of us need to feel that the basis of our belief is firm, valid, and if not verifiable, at least justifiable, even if only on purely subjective grounds. We need to look at our ways of knowing, our ways of evaluating our knowledge and our ways of making use of that knowledge to respond optimally to the enchantment of the reality we’re in and to craft our own response to it and our own contribution to it, in order to optimise the blessing we ourselves bring to the world we live in.
Like lambs to the bleat of a ewe
In the late 1960s the age of Aquarius dawned. As if by a series of trumpet blasts the hippies, the western ‘bourgeois’ Buddhists, Divine Light Mission and Hare Krsna people, the peace movement, self-suffers, vegans, and the greenies – baby-boomers for the most part – came forth. We knew who we were. Millions did not respond to the call. We didn’t hesitate to answer it. NOBODy questioned our authenticity. In the 70s came the consciously New-Age people with their new ways of reasoning, new ways of listening, new ways of healing and feeling and knowing and new senses to know with. They responded to their call, flocked to the workshops, collected their qualifications, showed us all how to network – and are still doing it. Then in the 80s many notable indigenous teachers came forth and spoke – native American, Peruvian, Maori, Australian aborigine, African, Japanese, Chinese and Russian. They called forth their own and we knew when we were called and didn’t hesitate to answer. But those are fraught interfaces, and the bridges few and uncertain, so we often drew hostile criticism and unjust accusations of appropriation and ego-tripping from all directions – and still do: but then most of those paths have endurance-building programmes built in, so we persevere. And then the Pagan trumpet blast, fitful till now, came loud and clear in the 90s and is still calling forth the ones who want to rediscover the old religions; and the ones who are answering that call are certainly Pagans.
And when the individual horns of the various Paganisms began to be heard, those of us who turned at once towards the sound of the Druid’s dord, steering our course to where Bards and Ovates also meet under Druidry’s umbrella, we must then surely be Druids – Bardic, Ovatic Druids, or Bardic, Druidic Ovates, or Druidic, Ovatic Bards, or some variation on the theme. That’s probably one of the easiest ways to tell if someone is really a Druid, although there’ll always be some by-catch. But when you ask what motivates each one who answers the call to Druidry, you find that not only are most Druids inarticulate about it, or defensive or evasive, or all three, but that when they begin to seek their reasons and to discuss them, however well they know what they mean, you, the listener, may be at a loss to understand. Our realities are so diverse that we almost speak different languages, or more confusingly, use the same language in completely alien ways. This is because the mass media and especially the internet has called us together from such diverse geographical, ethnic, cultural, social, ecological, environmental, educational, spiritual, and political backgrounds. That’s why we need the Bard, the wise poet, the magical artist, to wrestle our rafts of reasoning into poetry, performance and art, to help us to express the heretofore inexpressible, and to understand the heretofore incomprehensible, so that we can bridge the heretofore unbridgeable with style and grace! Awen!
Right (intelligent) vs. wrong (unintelligent) reasons for responding to the call
Druidry turns the attention of the fledgling Druid to the simple folk- and traditional afterlife and fairy beliefs that rationalism had all but suppressed by the end of the 19th century. No Druid is required to believe in any of it, but certainly the OBOD gwersi ask us all to engage with it in some way, if only to dismiss it, and most of us take at least some of it on board. So some kind of engagement with this folk heritage is a feature of Druidry; the Bardic circle magic accommodates it quite simply and naturally, and Ovates are supposed to be deeply engaged with it in one way or another. Although it’s not obligatory, many Druids do believe in at least some form of supernatural reality. Many of us claim to perceive something at least that convinces us that we’re breaking through some sort of thinning veil between our world and one or a number of other worlds, the realms perhaps of fairies, gnomes and elves, or of angels and saints, or of ancient sages and wizards, and the so-called inner plane and the transcendental sacred grove. Among these is a growing number of perceivers who focus not so much on the perceived, which they can’t verify the existence of, but on the perception itself, arguing that whether the object exists or not, the effect of perceiving it is the same so it’s the effect that counts. But this of course does not detract from the value of the perception, or the potency of its content. It is this part of our ‘inner’ experience which is often accused of being irrational. Some believers in the validity of it have responded with a vindication, calling it ‘transrational’ belief, which takes its leaps of faith for defensible reasons. Instinct, the deep stirrings of ancient race memory, intuition: though unprovable, these are almost universally experienced and may be deemed worthy of respect and due honour. Thus one can accommodate disparate realities, and so justify choosing to align oneself to a model of reality that embraces one’s most persistent transrational preoccupations. Some see every idea or complex of ideas as having its own reality, whether natural or artificial, whether genuinely perceived or ‘only’ imagined, and have broken fresh ground in their exploration of the concept of reality in doing so. the same realities look very different from different perspectives, and perception itself is a complex process, which may be hi-jacked by fantasy or denial, or loaded with all kinds of spin, corrective, distortive or creative, good or bad.
More than that, perception is always limited and highly selective – in European culture and its daughter cultures we normally see only that which is made out of the same material as our bodies are, the same hundred and something elements of matter, and only a narrow range of the attributes, qualities and effects of that matter. Our selections are not universal; many aspects of a perceived reality are culture-specific and manipulable by diet, child-rearing methods, local living conditions, cultural considerations such as religion and education and more. So the question of what and who a Druid is must be asked with a flexible sense of reality in mind. A person whose whole shamanism is accessed while in deep fantasy through playing computer games depicting popular images of Druids and Druidry from fantasy fiction is not not ‘shamanising’. Some of our most potent and loaded out-of the body experiences occur while immersed in fiction. That’s why the world still reads Thomas Hardy with unabated enthusiasm. We’ve all been in the shadows of those ancient stones with Tess, and walked that snowy road with Tamsin’s babe in our arms. That’s why there’s yet another generation of small children fixated on the pure magic of Winnie the Pooh. That’s why the Snow Queen will never die. The way to understand who is a Druid and who isn’t might not be discernable until we have honoured all modes, including the childish (childish creativity accesses veritable shamanisms) the adolescent (so reviled it cringes – for never are we braver, more adventurous and more honourable, nor more vulnerable to ridicule and scorn than in our adolescence) and the sentimental (which also has been excessively reviled without justification – it accesses some of the most vitalising spirituality available to us, a vital essence without which we weaken and may sicken, like flowers without dew). Druidry attracts many of us because it is so very appealing to the fantasising, shamanising mind, at whatever age we come to it.
We respond to the archetypal image of the wise wizard of unimpeachable virtue, whose celestial wisdom, magical power and knowledge of natural philosophy exceeds that of the common herd as the dazzling sun outshines the feeble beams of the morning stars, by wanting to assume it, wanting to be one. The idea of the wise priest who mediates between the commonplace and the transcendent, thus channelling mysterious nwyfre and the power of Awen into the ordinary world for the good of all beings, awakens yearnings that ride roughshod over all rational misgivings, ‘commonsense’ goes by the board, and we step up to don the robe. Are we not taking ourselves on a glorious, but essentially vacuous ego-trip? Not everyone needs to deal with this accusation, but when it comes from within ourselves, perhaps we should. This question is being answered in the currently burgeoning literature in books and online about indigenous shamanisms and the role of the sorcerer in the maintenance of the holistic health of the community. It’s clear that all cultures have recognised that role, and routinely singled out those with the appropriate talents and trained them for the role, or else suppressed them as a group, as in our culture right up to the present day. Seers are still declared insane in mainstream psychiatry, and the ‘cure’ is all too often horrific. The dominant religion is still the one that enjoins its practitioners to live by the book that commands them to kill all witches and let no wizard live and is still declaring paganism to be the work of the devil. The frisson of recognition that makes sane intelligent people say, yes, I am a Druid, despite the alienating effect, despite the risk of an adverse social reaction, especially from family and friends, is a potent guide. One who has felt it betrays him/herself if ever he/she goes into denial over it. The pain of alienation is nothing to the joy of stepping into that role. It is like stepping into one’s greater self and feeling oneself come alive! Is that ego-tripping?
Intelligence, instinct, and all that other stuff
Unpacking ‘intelligence’ was a major work of IQ researchers in the late 20th century. There was a perception that the existing definitions were loaded, that IQ tests were biased in favour of certain skills that were valued more highly than others for all the wrong reasons. A very narrow range of mostly academic skills was being tested. Some researchers talked of emotional IQ, social IQ, physical IQ, and practical IQ, all of which are these days more highly valued than they were. The relevance of this to Druidry is that according to some traditions, the Druids were an intelligentsia. So is high intelligence a feature of modern Druidry, and if so, what sort of intelligence? Certainly, Paganism draws a lot of people with high academic qualifications. But it also draws people whose intellectual emphasis, while still intellectual, is not of the academic kind. I like to distinguish between intelligence (how much you know or can quickly access, or the data itself) and intellect (how you reason from the basis of your intelligence). In Druidry however the rather old-fashioned word ‘wisdom’ makes a welcome come-back, and fills (or refills) the gaping hole in our sense of what intelligence is. To me, and from observing how the word is being used among Pagans these days, it includes all the different ‘IQs’, and adds to it a moral dimension – an intelligent person can get the better of the unwary – a wise person is above such pettiness, is respectful and kind. Taking academic ability as a measure of wisdom is like taking highly developed tight-rope walking skills as a measure of physical competence. Such skills are spectacular specialisations, but those who lack them are not dysfunctional, they’re just not specialised for tight-rope-walking, though they may be just as effectively specialised for other functions just as vital and praiseworthy. So, are modern Druids exhibiting this ‘wisdom’? A perusal of the message-boards seems to indicate that we are! It’s an area for more research and discussion. But along with this kind of wisdom there is, some claim, an instinctual wisdom, and as it is implicated in transrationalism and intuition, causing us to take leaps of faith with serene confidence, and worry about justifying them intellectually later. What guides us in this? Why are we sceptical here, credulous there? The mechanism is worth a look. Perhaps there are Druidic instincts, and those who answer the call all have a set, or some variant of a set of them, and they help to define Druidry in the here and now. If so, we would not need a preconceived sense of what a Druid is to test each other by. Druidry would become manifest before our very eyes, and our instincts alone would ratify it. That sudden certainty that this quality or these are more truly Druidic than that or those would be a reliable guide. Again, an area in which insufficient research has been done to satisfy the rationalist, but there remains a feeling that we ignore or belittle this instinct at our cost. Perhaps it’s worth the trouble to research it.
The use and abuse of it all anyway
Why, when practically everyone who does the OBOD course is admitted as a Druid, does any of this matter? Within OBOD, a Druid is someone who has done the Druid grade, or at least started it. Outside it are members of a growing number of other more or less equally prestigious Druid groups, plus the smaller, less prestigious ones. And there’s a growing number of people identifying as Druids who are self-taught. Are some of these more truly Druidic than others? If so which ones? Once again we’re calling for judgment, and judgment itself must come under the lens. Whose judgment? In practice, within OBODry, judgment of well-briefed, usually experienced tutors is exercised to some extent, but other than weeding out obvious misfits (and mistakes can happen) the main filtering is done by the course itself. People who are not inspired by the course, or who just can’t get around to doing it for whatever reason, soon drop out. Is this because they are not Druids, or because the OBOD course deters some of the people who are Druids deep down inside while welcoming in by-catch whose non-Druidic mentality then warps our definition of a Druid? Sometimes there’s a lot of interpersonal politics in this, where some Druidry is perceived to be ‘better’ or ‘more authentic’ than others, and some affiliations bestow more prestige than others. This becomes a problem when Druids with less prestige are shown less respect than those with more, when their opinions are ignored, (perhaps because they can’t spell or speak a devalued form of English, Spanish, Dutch or French etc). Some of the more active Druids are conscious of this and are seeking ways to structure it out of the process of finding a common voice in Druidry, or common ground on issues that affect all Druids. Inclusivity is becoming the keynote and there’s a tendency to self-correct our own biases and lingering perhaps inverted, snobberies. A sensitive person’s Druidry, Bardry, or Ovatery might wither and die under harsh or dismissive judgment, and it would seem to be incumbent upon the Druids who feel themselves to be in the ‘in-group’ to withhold judgment. Would exclusive in-groups, as distinct from inclusive steering committees, form within true Druidry?
Nobody likes everybody, and some people are more alienated than others. It sometimes depends on what background you come from. If you came from a conservative mainstream background and still espouse most of its values, you may be shocked to find yourself swearing by peace and love to stand with foul-mouthed hairy hippies, witchy Goths with black tattoos and piercings, flamboyant wizards in be-runed silk robes and conical hats festooned with spirals and Awens, gay effeminates in drag, nudists, frizzy haired New-Agers and leather-clad bikers in crash helmets – or you may find yourself the only individualist in a conservative grove. These days you seldom hear what was once a common cry: you don’t have to be bizarre to be Pagan! – the implication being that you ought to be conservative, conformist, mainstream (however bizarre that might be to you). These days the conservative mainstream is beginning to be more realistically seen as just one more option in a world of thrilling diversity – even by mainstream conservatives – and Druidry is beginning to celebrate its own diversity with conviction. ‘We swear by peace and love to stand’. That oath binds us. The temptation to try to wiggle out of it in the case of the ones you fear or dislike most must be met head-on and not permitted to distort the pure love we swear to offer each other. Hoping or wishing that an ‘undesirable’ might drop out is counter-indicated. Arguably it is undesirable magic – perhaps even ‘unDruidic’. The temptation to ratify personal antipathies as righteous indignation against non-Druidic types infiltrating the realms of the ‘legitimate’ ones (i.e., the ones who agree with you about who is and who isn’t beyond the pale) must be recognised and dealt with. Similarly the attempt to ratify one’s own moral position, mindset, sense of sanity and ‘commonsense’, beliefs and ideologies as ‘Druidic’ while those you fear, dislike or despise are seen as ‘unDruidic’ ‘under-evolved’ or just ‘wrong’ is also problematical to say the least, and it’s sometimes easy to mistake these ‘gut feelings’ for infallible instincts. Probably, no Druid is in a position to pass such judgments on any others, and perhaps seeking such a position is itself unsound. It’s difficult to imagine a mind that could embrace all the contexts, criteria and sheer volume of knowledge to even begin to judge – or is it?
What is instinct anyway if it isn’t gut reaction?
Instinct is innate smartness. So how did it get there? Culturally conditioned attitudes and immediate reactions are not instincts – but perhaps, over a longer span of evolution, race memories and inter-cultural conditioning can be inherited as genuine instincts. A dog’s instincts are popularly considered to be infallible, yet we understand that a few generations of house-training, or neglect of the sport or work that formed their instincts can distort or blur them. But just as personal conditioning can warp and distort a person’s response to the world, couldn’t distorted and warped instincts be developed in cultures or subcultures long subjected to unnatural, oppressive conditions – the cultural predicament of many indigenous nations today, including many low-status people within the dominant culture. The dominant culture’s political instincts too are warped in unjust situations. If so, they can be changed, we can reprogram our innate attitudes towards more enlightened, more inclusive attitudes. Is it a proper preoccupation for Druids, to find ways, perhaps magical ways, of restructuring our inner attitudes to allow ourselves to evolve more freely in milieus admitting greater and ever more exuberant diversity? It appears than that instinct, along with the gut reactions it gives rise to, is malleable, and can be crafted over a few generations to fit changing conditions. The highborn lady who has an ‘instinctive’ horror of ‘rough types’ may be responding with a ‘gut feeling’, but most of us would want her to work with that instinct, and become less of a snob. On the other hand, ‘gut’ feelings may sometimes alert an intuitive person to possible danger or benefit. We have to honour them, but know where they’re coming from.
How fluffy are those fluffy bunnies and what use are they? In one’s own Druidry, in others’ Druidries and in Druidry ‘out there’?
You can spin all sorts of yarns off ‘fluffy bunny’ thinking, and while you can often be confident that the ‘fluffy bunny’ doing it is not able to explain the logic, it may be wrong to assume that there isn’t any. But although little or none of the logic of such thinking might be accessible to the unsubtle, unintelligent thinker with a disqualifyingly limited imagination, who may try to appear elevated by putting others down, that kind of assumption is surely counter-indicated. The strictest conscious reasoning in the most rational of minds is really only the tip of the ice-berg when the whole mind, incorporating many layers and levels of consciousness which may or may not communicate with each other according to laws of which we know almost nothing, is taken into account. Our thoughts are brewed deep within, through many processes still mysterious to scientists studying them. The end product, our expressed thought, is subject to strange laws of which we know nothing. Who can judge their worth? The phrase itself is used variously by different speakers, usually hurtfully, often to deny another person’s account of their own inner experience, or in reaction against statements made on the basis of dreams and fantasies, ‘gut’ feelings and intuitions, presented without any reasoning, or with reasoning that doesn’t obey the rules of academic thought. The implication is that it should, that only thinking arising from an orderly personal data-base of ratified fact and ‘truth’, using the reasoning appropriate to academic thinking, is valid for thinking about spirituality, magic or the mysteries of one’s own inner experience. But is that true? In reality, fluffy bunnies are often totem animals (now there’s a prime example of a fluffy bunny statement). Many of us will have connected with them as pets or farm animals (bred for meat and fur) during our childhood. They are shapeless things in full fur, with poorly defined outlines, but under the fur there’s usually a perfectly sound rabbit. Perhaps Druids need to be not gullible, but open-minded, lucid and free-thinking, or anyway, cautious about dismissing the results of reasoning which may be on the surface unclear, or ill-defined, and invisible under the fluffy surface; especially those of us brought up on the strict, restrictive, rationality of academic discourse. Anyway, derision rarely leads to true wisdom.
Who’s a Druid and who isn’t and the problem of by-catch
The filtering process mentioned earlier begins with the presentation of the materials. Like the bait set to attract animals, they have to generate the right ‘flavours’, they have to cast the spell that will capture the imagination of the range of personalities that are most truly ‘Druidic’. People with their own conceptions and biases craft that enchantment, choose the words, images, and design elements that will capture the imaginations of the ‘right’ people. Feedback from the ‘catch’ will alter the original conceptions slightly and so when the materials are up-dated it’s from an ever-evolving, better informed, more mature sense of what a Druid is, or could or should be. But its general features are still determined to a large extent by the conceptions of Druidry held by those who prepare and keep up-dated the materials that draw people to the path. A number will always drop out, disappointed in, daunted by or disliking the gwersu, or simply not motivated enough to finish the first grade. Whether all of these were not really Druid types, or whether the gwersu failed to address or actively intimidated some nevertheless truly ‘Druidic’ types is a subtle and difficult question. No doubt the best-prepared materials from the best-equipped people are going to be flawed, especially at first, so some such losses are inevitable. OBOD also attracts members who are not intending to be Druids, but only to do the course to add to their widening base of shamanic and magical knowledge from a range of systems. Not really by-catch, these ‘collectors’ are often welcome valuable contributors to the Druid mindscape – and some of them even finally succumb to the enchantment, remaining to become Druids in the simple, direct sense of the word. Clearly these are not by-catch. Odd-balls and weirdoes are often happily absorbed into Druidry, where for the first time in their lives, sometimes, they begin to make sense, real magical sense, to themselves and others around them. Not all of them are by-catch. Some may seem to have jumped on the band-wagon to attract attention to themselves, or to make money, or both, having more skill to seduce the gullible than real genuine knowledge or love for Druidry. But many Druids do find their way rather rapidly to lucrative uses of their new knowledge, and effective advertising may be a legitimate part of an authentic Druidic career. Judging another person’s sincerity is a tricky business. Not being mind-readers, most of us are thrown back on the gut feelings that we’ve seen may not be a sound basis for judgment. Occasionally you may meet someone who identifies as a Druid but who adamantly denies the possibility of magic, or of the existence of anything beyond the reach of our five bodily senses, or of the value of dreams, fantasies and the inspirations that come to us in reverie. Most of us feel that this denies most of what identifies us and our fellows as Druids, and yet perhaps it too can be a position from which to build a legitimate Druidry. Many such sceptics engage very intensely with these fundamental concepts of Druidry, participating in discussions that stimulate profound thought – surely a truly Druidic pass-time.
Is every presence a blessing?
Before we can make any judgments we have to be sure of our ground. I for one am not claiming ever to have been on solid ground with any of it yet. I have an evolving general sense of what a Druid is, and I’m aware that Druidry itself is evolving all around me. It’s a chaos situation, where everything is constantly changing everything else even while being itself changed. Perhaps, like Buddha’s foot, we have to come to this sure ground of Druidry, this philosophical(?) religious? fantasy? position, creating with all our faculties the very ground we’re to land on as we land. Through the guided visualisations leading us to totem animals, the dreamscapes of fantasy, the spirit worlds, the fairy lands, the appropriated and misappropriated dreamtimes and happy hunting grounds, fluffy bunnies find their way home with sure instincts, even without a scrap of sound logic to explain how – and maybe just sometimes it’s they who are doing it best!
1. Educated traditionally, I had the impulse when planning this essay to argue cogently towards a neat conclusion, but I found the Awen insisting on a more explicative treatment; not a honing of arguments that then ‘close in’ on a final ‘point’, but an ‘unfolding’ of ideas and questions as of a map of contexts and criteria, an array of relevant ideas to explore – a switch from trying to show where the pathways of our enquiry might end to seeking possible starting points. So expect discursive discourse here, leading to new avenues of enquiry, not to a series of neat, conclusive points. Perhaps this is a distinguishing feature of some kinds of Druidic thought, possibly to do with the fact that in OBODry at least the Druid grade doesn’t hand us the answers, but sets us all a-questing?
2. For an account of the Pope’s stand on Paganism: http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_pope.htm
http://www.mental-health-abuse.org/schizophrenia.html
3. THE DRUIDS Peter Berresford Ellis, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publish Company, 1994
4.Wonderful discussion on the forum at http://www.druidicdawn.org/