Celtic Spirituality
One of the great things about Celtic Spirituality is that it is rather hard to define. It appears to include several branches of Christianity and Paganism including, of course Druidism, which appears to have been more of a philosophical path than a religion.
The Awen
The primary symbol
of Bardism is the Awen - three pure rays of light and
sound. It represents the triplicity of all things: Love, Truth and
Justice; God, Goddess and their Sacred Marriage; The three pillars of
memory and history: vocal song, letter and symbol. Geomantically it marks
the alignments of the sunrise points. The symbol represents three vowel
sounds - I, A and O
which can be intoned as an invocation of divine inspiriation from the
Muse, in a similar way to the Sanscrit invocation AUM it also represents
the sound of the creation of the universe. The Awen is sometimes referred
to as the Mystic Mark.
Three Circles of existence
Barddas defines three circles of existence:
- Ceugant: where there is nothing but God.
- Gwynfyd: Where all things spring from life.
- Abred: Where all things are derived from death.
The Early Bards
Our cultural heritage, rooted in ancestral tradition, was born and bred within our own indigenous, sacred landscape, and bardism today continues to be inspired by its pagan origins. The first artists, storytellers, musicians, poets and singers were undoubtedly found among the shamans of old, who were practicing the bardic arts over 30,000 years ago. Inseparable from both magic and religion, ancient bardcraft was an essential prerequisite for the priestly function in tribal society. Sacred verses, chants and ritual songs were given directly to the shaman by the denizens of the spirit world, of whom the tribal myths and legends told in order to transmit spiritual knowledge. Poetry not only formed the basis of devotional hymns and prayers, but played a vital part in prophecy, healing incantations and spell-making; also facilitating religious ceremonies and shamanic journeys.
In oral folk tradition, inspired by the earth herself as a living Muse, Druids of the Celtic priesthood used the bardic arts as their primary teaching medium. Druidic Bards committed occult lore to memory using the secret language of the Ogham. Each seed-syllable of the Ogham was recognised as a mantric sound that shaped a particular creative force both in nature and in the psyche. Through harmonic resonance, these creation codes were recognised as the actual formative energies that manifest the landscape itself. Undulating sound waves, like the mythic rainbow-serpent, crystallise to become mountain ranges, hills, rivers, valleys and so forth. These waveforms are the so-called Songlines, reproduced by the shaman-bard on hearing the Earth 'speak' in the channelled language of spirit. The rising and falling of notes in tonal sequence synchronize with the shape of the sound waves, interpreting the topography of the geophysical environment as 'frozen music'.
Sound travels through stone remarkably well, and the Earth resonates to harmonic keys. From the power-points and sacred sites (the original 'bardic chairs'), the Orphic Bards transmitted specific frequencies along the serpent leylines, thus governing the realm by maintaining peaceful and harmonious vibrations throughout the land. The ground-plan of Herefordshire's 'Wheel of Perpetual Choirs' is a good example of integrating sacred geometry - another aspect of musical ratio harmonics, also incorporated into temple architecture designed to resonate as 'symphonies in stone'. Sacred structures, landscapes and even biological organisms are today verified by science as being sustained by sub-sonic morphogenetic fields. Inaudible frequencies may even have been used to move or even levitate large blocks of stone into position. Thus for the modern bards, there is still very much to learn from the Dreamtime ancestors of our native Druid land.
Merlin of the Woods
A tidal wave as deadly as an iceberg
Druidism as a Transcendental Process Philosophy
The Druidic world-view
includes further dimensions to the universe in which qualitative
experience and spiritual aspects of existence such as aesthetics, ethics,
love and compassion move and have their being. The mind is not considered
to be a thing, it is a process or mental continuum. Mental processes
interact with and affect 'physical' processes at all levels of reality.
The mental dimensions are all-pervasive. The act of observation is more
fundamental than the division into subject and object. Since nothing, not
even God, has any fixed, defined essence, freewill becomes possible.
God provides the physical, temporal and mental space in which all phenomena occur and is thus the source and upwelling of possibility, freedom, potential, intuition, inspiration and creativity. The Druids called this upwelling 'awen'. God provides the mental continuum with an escape path from conditioned biological existence and rebirth.
Druidism sees the ultimate nature of reality in terms of three types of dependent relationship. Firstly, by dependence upon causes and conditions. Secondly, by dependence upon the relationship of the whole to its parts and attributes. Thirdly, and most profoundly, phenomena depend upon mental imputation, attribution, or designation. All these relationships are constantly changing and so all produced phenomena are impermanent. Existence is merely impermanence viewed in slow motion.
These dependencies are are also fundamental to the Druid world view and are known as gwyar (change, causality), calas (structure) and nwyfre (consciousness). The triskele represents reality arising from these three dependences and may have been used as a meditational symbol by the Druids.
The currently unimaginable completeness to which all things are ultimately destined is called Gwynwyd.
There is no anger which will not at last be pacified
There is nothing beloved lost which will not at last be returned
There is no soul born which will not at last attain the perfection of
Gwynwyd
from: Druid Philosophy as a Celtic Process Philosophy
