Modern Druids - Ronald Hutton

Please welcome Ronald Hutton. Thank you very much.

What I want to do in this talk is reverse the priorities of traditional books and talks entitled "The Druids," because pretty well all of them have devoted 80% of their time and space to the ancient Druids, of whom, as I shall explain, we know practically nothing, leaving, if anything, about 10% for modern druids and ways in which the ancient druids have been visualized in the last few hundred years.

But we actually know an immense amount about the way in which druids have been visualized, as opposed to knowing almost nothing about the ancient druids. And so I'm going to concentrate on the way in which the imagination in Britain has worked with the ancient druids in so many different ways since about 1500. And in fact, there are eight different kinds of druid that have appeared in the British imagination in that time.

And the first is the nationalist druid, a patriot defender of the nation and representative of its piety and wisdom and its link to the past. Now, the nationalist druid draws on ancient sources. Julius Caesar said the druids of Gaul (that's France, the Netherlands, the Rhineland) had a national assembly in which they met from all over the region, from the different tribes, and conferred.

And even more important from the British, the only ancient source that mentions druids in Britain is Tacitus, the Roman historian, who said that when the Roman army arrived in North Wales to crush the native resistance there, it faced the island of Anglesey. And on the shore of the island, facing the Romans, the legionaries saw black-clad women with flaming torches like furies and tall druids shouting curses. And the Roman legions didn't like this and didn't fancy the fight. And then up stood their fine, strapping Roman general and gave them a talking to about how they shouldn't be afraid of these things. And the legionaries manned up, swarmed across the straits, defeated the natives, and found they'd been engaging in horrid human sacrifices, which justified exterminating the lot.

Can you believe any of this? The answer is, we're not sure. Caesar was known as a prize liar in his lifetime. People commented on this, and it's not even certain that what he wrote about druids was written by Caesar. It's a separate section in his history which sticks out like a sore thumb. We know he hadn't finished the history when he died or when he was stabbed multiple times by his enemies, and somebody else finished it with unknown sources. And as for Tacitus, well, he may have been quoting an eyewitness account, or he may have been retelling a story a drunken legionary had told him at a bar in Rome. Or he could have been making the whole thing up at a rather, admittedly dull, point in his history when it needed enlivening. And experts in Tacitus think all three of these are equally possible. Tacitus is now credited with making up entire characters in his history, let alone episodes.

So, the ancients' information is utterly unreliable, but it's inspiring. And it eventually inspired, in the early modern period after 1500. The Middle Ages weren't much interested in druids across most of Europe, but the Renaissance period was, because of a new interest in ancient writings to recover the lost knowledge of the ancients, and also a new interest in the formation of nations and the identities that underpin them in the past. And unsurprisingly, the first people in Europe to get their towels by the historical swimming pool were the Germans, who spotted the potential of druids as heroic ancestors, not least because they included the Rhineland, which had actually had ancient druids, and called them splendid, patriotic, and learned forebears. And then the French, who had taken over most of what had been Gaul and so should have had lots of ancient druids, copied the Germans, rather angrily at being pipped to the post. And then the Dutch followed the French. And the Scots, who because of the old Franco-Scottish alliance went to Paris a lot, got the idea. And the Scots, in the 1520s, became the first people in Europe to associate ancient megalithic monuments, stone circles and such things, with the Druids. They got there first. And finally, grudgingly, tardily, and half-heartedly, the English decided to take on the Druids as well, but about a hundred years later, after 1600.

But the English changed their mind at the end of the 17th century because they were now in charge of a totally new thing: Britishness. In 1691, the British had finally completed the conquest of Ireland, very bloodily. And in 1707, England and Scotland united until the present. What was resulting was a new and phenomenally successful superstate, which proceeded to conquer a vast empire in partnership. The trouble is, it didn't have a history to unite its component peoples. Those peoples had lots of traditional heroes, but they'd all become heroic by killing others of the peoples inside the new British superstate. King Arthur in Britain, Owen Glendower in Wales, William Wallace in Scotland, Robert the Bruce in Scotland, had all killed the English. Alfred the Great had become great by killing the Danish settlers. And Finn MacCool in Ireland had killed anybody who wasn't Irish. The one people, the one binding force that the new Georgian superstate could find were the Druids, because they had been, in theory, all over the British Isles. And so they could be common ancestors of a kind, who were woefully lacking at any point later. And so in the 18th century, druids became British patriotic heroes.

Um, they really took off in the 1740s after William Stukeley, great scholar, we'll see him again in a moment, tied the Druids to Stonehenge as the people who built it and worshipped there, and portrayed them as absolutely wonderful in every respect. Following Stukeley's bigging up of Druids, James Thomson and William Collins, great writers, wrote poems to liberty praising the Druids as exemplars of freedom fighters, and they were hailed as patrons of the Royal Navy. You may not think of the Druids as great sailors. That's because they weren't. But in one Roman source, it said they venerated oak trees, and oak trees built the navy. Therefore, the Druids were its ancient sponsors.

The trouble with Britishness is that it then unravels after a hundred years of phenomenal commercial, naval, military, and imperial success, empire, industrial revolution, world naval supremacy. And by 1815, supreme power in the world made the less numerous component peoples of the British state feel they were being swamped by the English. They were being downgraded to, uh, lesser breeds of English person. And so after 1800, a rush set in among these peoples to distinguish themselves from the English at a glance, and the Scots set off first. Within 30 years of 1800, they had adopted a national instrument, the bagpipes, a national costume, the kilt with clan tartans for the sets, a folk hero, Rob Roy MacGregor, a national poet, Robert Burns, and a national novelist, Sir Walter Scott. And seeing the Scots doing this, the Welsh then followed in Britain. They adopted the harp as their national instrument. Their actual instrument had been the bagpipes, but the Scots got those first. They designed a national female costume of the steeple hat and cloak. They also designed a male costume, but the husband of the lady who designed it refused to put it on. They got a folk hero, Twm Siôn Cati, a national epic, the Mabinogion, and a national cultural institution, the Eisteddfod.

And the Welsh then went on to claim the Druids for themselves at this time, because after all, the Welsh were credibly the lineal descendants of the ancient British, the remnant of the original British who had had druids. And since druids were so admired and phenomenally successful by 1815, the Welsh felt it was felt it was time to take back control. A man came along from Glamorgan, stonemason, a learned one, called Edward Williams, took the bardic name of Iolo Morganwg, which means Glamorgan's Bard, and he set out looking at all the medieval documents surviving in Wales, to find the secrets of the ancient Druids, and he found they weren't there. So, not to be defeated, he forged them and published them as original documents. And these provided a glamorous ceremony to open the nationalized Eisteddfod, the Gorsedd of the Bards. They would have a stone circle made anew for each time, three grades of initiates with three colors of robes: blue, green, and white, and a dramatic opening ceremony. Uh, this has proved so successful that the late Queen Elizabeth and the late Duke of Edinburgh were both initiates of this Gorsedd, and the Welsh have liked druids ever since. They're part of their culture, both in the ancient and imagined, and in the modern. Dylan Thomas's *Under Milk Wood* has inevitably a miniature druidic stone circle in his satirical Welsh seaport, in Malcolm Price's more recent *Wales Noir* novels, *Aberystwyth Mon Amour*, *Lost Tango*, and *Aberystwyth*, druids are part of the civic landscape, uh, along with the meals on wheels service. They run the crime in the neighborhoods, uh, the other cultural institutions, and the English have come to see druids as Welsh. In Terry Pratchett's fantasy Discworld of the 1990s, his parody of Wales, which is actually a parody of Dylan Thomas's parody of Wales, is full of druids, benign but piously boring, lots of hymn singing in stone circles. And less benignly, the 1970s comedian team, The Goodies, visited Wales and were almost sacrificed in a Gorsedd circle by a local sect called the Seventh Day Repressionists. But the Welsh Druids have given modern Britain a great gift, which is legal cremation. It was a Welsh druid, William Price, at the end of the 19th century, who challenged in a court of law the assumed prohibition on cremation and defeated it, and from that court case onwards, cremation became legal, and the first crematorium was opened within a year. So that's not a small thing that modern Welsh druids have given us.

The second druid, and the one that has the least importance now, is the confessional druid, but it was very important formally. What this means is the use of druids to support a particular religious belief in modern times. Uh, in other words, to say, "I am justified in my particular kind of faith because the Druids had it before me for thousands of years." And devout British Christians turned to it repeatedly between the 17th and the 19th centuries, and to do two quite big things in that period. The first was to get the British into the Old Testament, basically. In other words, to try and find ways in which the British could be shown to have been part of the divinely revealed religion given to Noah and his descendants, and then to Abraham. And in each case, the Druids were made the missionaries to set out from Palestine to Britain and bring the true Old Testament religion here. And the other great purpose is to justify later British Christianity as both native and ancient by showing that everything the Druids did was a dress rehearsal for the Church of England, or Methodism, or the Primitive Baptists, or whomever you happen to be at the time. Uh, the greatest fruit of this was archaeology, because an Anglican clergyman, William Stukeley, making a desperate attempt to show that the Church of England was divinely ordained because everything the Druids believed looked forward to the Church of England, actually conducted the first fieldwork and excavation to show when monuments like Stonehenge were built. And it was Stukeley who proved once and for all that Stonehenge and the other megaliths were not built by the Romans, or the post-Roman British, or the Anglo-Saxons, or the Vikings, but by the pre-Roman native British. And of course, that's right. And he founded the system, the discipline of field archaeology, but he did so for what turned out to be ultimately the lunatic mission of proving that the Church of England was ancient druidry in an improved form.

So we turn now to the Green Druid. The Green Druid drew again on ancient writers, Roman writers, who connected the Druids with worshipping in woods, caves, and natural places. Above all, one Roman historian, Pliny, who was the guy, the only person to connect Druids to oak trees and to mistletoe. Historically, there's a problem here. There's always a problem historically with sources on druids, and that is the writers who recorded all this were writing a long time after their Roman ancestors had exterminated the druids in lands which the Romans occupied, and so we have no idea how accurate their information was. It could be the reason why druids were noted as worshipping in caves and natural places was because the Romans had driven them there to take refuge, because they couldn't worship anywhere else, rather than having a natural connection to them. On the other hand, it could be they did revere these natural places. Once again, we just don't know.

But this image from the ancient sources appealed strongly to the growing 18th-century veneration of nature as an antidote to civilization, urbanization, and industrialization. And the same 18th-century poets and playwrights who glorified druids as patriots also had them meeting in woodland glades and on mountains and communing with the wisdom of the natural world. It's a lovely picture. What's not to like? All this and wisdom and patriotism too. And most cutely, Oliver Goldsmith, the Georgian poet, imagined that on the coming of the Romans, the Druids just retreated into fairyland. So that's where they went. Problem solved. Ironically, the famous Romantic poets, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, etc., actually had very little time for druids. Druids were heroes of the older Georgian world against which these Romantics were in rebellion, and so they turned to Greek and Roman paganism instead. They were hanging up garlands to Pan instead of spending time on druids. But druids as nature lovers lingered among lovers of wild places, especially natural woodland, all through the 19th and 20th centuries. And this prepared the druids to be new ecological heroes and druidry to be a revived pagan religion at the end of the 20th century.

So, now the bad news: the Demonic Druid. I had a whole choice of appalling pictures, uh, for this. I chose the least gruesome. Uh, yes, I know that ancient druids didn't wear sunglasses. And I have no idea why this one is giving the finger to, uh, to the gods, but, uh, it makes the point. Although maybe that's not the best way of putting it.

The demonic druid is a familiar character from Greek and Roman sources, from Caesar onwards. About half of our admittedly few and brief ancient references to Druids depict them as being utterly horrid, as being tyrannic priests who thrived on ignorant superstition and fear, and had an especially tacky sideline in human sacrifice. Uh, all sorts of varieties for this. Burning victims alive in wicker cages, the original Wicker Man. Or if they wanted, uh, to know the future and to have some light diversion, stabbing them to tell the future from their death throes or from their entrails. I think that's actually what that guy in the picture is supposed to be doing.

Now, we have no idea of the truth of this, because take your choice. Either you can say the Romans knew what the Druids were like, at least until they wiped them out, and therefore we can believe all the things they charged against them. Or you can say that the Romans needed to justify unprovoked invasion of and conquest of the people who had druids. And one way of justifying it, an easy one, was to accuse the peoples of having had an appalling religion from which the Romans were rescuing them. And by exterminating the Druids, which also took care of a resistance movement, they managed to release the people they just conquered, uh, from the grip of, uh, tyrannical priests. So, we have no idea how much of this is a fairly obvious and blatant form of imperialist propaganda. We just don't know. Could be true, might not be. Some of it might be true, some of it might not be.

Now, demonic druids, the horrid druids, have always been popular from the 16th century to the present, because the Roman texts in which they're portrayed were familiar to anybody with the classical education that people received increasingly in English schools from the 16th century onwards. I, I know as a schoolboy myself, we always loved doing Latin, because if you did French and German, you had to translate "going to the baker's." And if you did the Roman stuff, you had to translate "seducing a goddess" or "conquering Gaul," which was much more exciting. And there, of course, you find the demonic druids. But it's also combined with the Old Testament invectives against pagan religion, the abomination of the heathen as being something tacky, grubby, and bloodthirsty. But the demonic druid dwindled in the Georgian period, when the patriotic and the Green Druid was much more popular, only to come back big time under the Victorians and then take over. And this was for all sorts of different reasons.

One is that the British had gone over to big-time imperialism themselves, particularly in Africa and Asia, where they were dealing with millions of indigenous peoples with traditional religions. And the British justified their conquest in these areas for a long time by saying that they had a mission to Christianize and civilize the native peoples concerned, and in some cases, they actually did. There were a very few religious cults, uh, against which civilized people could take exception, mostly in India. Sati, the custom of burning a widow on her husband's pyre, and Thuggee, which is a form of ritual murder by the devotees of one admittedly localized sect. And the Roman campaign to wipe out druids was assimilated to the British campaign to crush objectionable aspects of native religion.

The second reason was the new cult of progress. The 19th century was when the industrial revolution really took off, and technology began to rule with technical appliances and processes changing, developing every decade. And there was a new, vertiginous thrill in progress. And the discovery of the great age of the planet and the evolution of species deepened the sense of progress by about 500 million years. Life on Earth now looked like an ascent from a protoplasmic atomic globule wriggling in the pre-Cambrian slime until the acme of possible life on Earth: Queen Victoria. And so, in this view, anything that's ancient and old is likely to look worse than things that are new and progressed. And you can have some snapshots of this that make the point very well. Charles Dickens had a library with dummy books in it entitled "The Wisdom of Our Ancestors." Number one: Ignorance. Number two: Filth. Number three: Tyranny. Number four, etc., etc., Disease, going on right down. And when the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834 and were rebuilt in their present form, there were a series of before and after pictures in one of the main hallways entitled "The Progress of Britain." And number one was a British druid 2,000 years ago performing a human sacrifice, and number two was a strapping Victorian army officer pulling an Indian widow off her husband's pyre to rescue her from Sati. And these before and after pictures went on down. We started as barbarians, but now we can civilize the planet, and getting rid of druids was part of the beginning of our improvement.

And there was the evangelical revival, the tremendous movement of Christian renewal which swept early Victorian Britain and placed a new emphasis on conversion of the heathen. And that included, of course, the rest of the world, and a new emphasis on the Bible and its invectives, as well as its kindly teachings. And finally, there was the new taste for Gothic fiction. Demonic druids are just great for this. They hang out in shadowy groves of dark trees. They have bloodstained altars, which for some reason they never see fit to clean. And they have demented, wildeyed priests doing unspeakable things in the name of appalling religion.

Now, the demonic druids have never gone away. Uh, they're still around until the last 20 years. Any ancient body found in a bog was immediately dubbed a druid sacrifice if it was from an area that had once had druids. Modern Christian fundamentalist tracts have held up the druids and their appalling behavior, their presumed appalling behavior, as an example of what will happen if the world ever forsakes Christianity in countries where it's been established. Uh, and even things that have absolutely no inspiration from Christianity or any tradition whatsoever, like Jez Butterworth's imaginative and cheesy series *Britannia*, for which I am ashamed to say I acted as historical advisor. I spent most of my time trying to make it slightly less unhistorical than it was. Even that had a demonic aspect to the druids in it. Demonic druids are entertainment. They are perfect for horror movies. So, we're never going to lose them.

But happily, modernity then produced other kinds of druid, less traditional, like the Masonic druid, the very first druid to have fake beards in our story. And that is, as you can see, the Ancient Order of Druids Lodge 98. So where did the other 97 lodges come from? The Georgian period is the answer. It was a golden age for clubs and societies. And the most prestigious and useful were those modeled on Freemasonry, which had been around since the 16th century. Freemasonry established the model of closed societies with initiation ceremonies of varying degrees of the terrifying and other more regular rituals, a secret membership, signs and passwords, and claims to have been around since the beginning of time. But this sort of society, unlike Georgian Freemasonry, could also be useful as insurance companies. In other words, in an age that has no national health service, no old age pensions, no sickness benefit, if you joined a society which had a social life and weird rituals and passwords, but where your admission fee was also put into a fund that could pay for you if you were off work 'cause you were sick, or you're unemployed, or you got too old to work, you'd be looked after. And these were so successful that many of them appeared: Foresters, Oddfellows, Shepherds, Rechabites, many others. And given the Georgian admiration for Druids, it was inevitable that some of these would embrace a Druid identity. And Druid societies were appearing from the 1770s, but they were short-lived until the Ancient Order of Druids, the guys you've just been looking at with the beards for that time. They were founded in 1781 by a prosperous London builder called Henry Hurl. And what Henry wanted to do was give working men, just men, a chance to develop their talent for the performing arts, music and poetry, in a sociable and supportive environment. And this was drawing on the ancient image of the druid as a bard, a poet, and a minstrel. And Henry's order was a howling success. By 1820, its lodges had spread across the entire nation. There weren't just 98 of them; there were hundreds.

But the stumbling block was the welfare provision, because Henry owned his own firm, and he stood for prosperous working men. But as the order spread into the industrial areas of the Midlands and the North, it took in thousands and thousands of the poorer working class who wanted a benefit system like some of the other societies: the sickness pay, the old age pension, the unemployment benefit, if needed. And the London-based Ancient Order refused to do this. And the result was a rupture in 1833, when half of the Ancient Order of Druids split off to become the not terribly imaginatively named United Ancient Order of Druids, which provided the benefits. But the new order proved as tremendous a success as the original order. And both of them just kept growing and spreading. By 1850, they were all over the English-speaking world: Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, and they were getting into Europe, especially Germany, where both of them were an amazing success until Hitler wiped them out in the 1930s. And these two orders provoked many imitators, lots of smaller Druid orders in the 19th century, modeled on one or the other. They declined sharply from the mid-20th century because their functions, the sociability, the benefits, became obsolete with a change in society and social provision. The United Ancient Order finally closed in the 1990s. I think that the original Ancient Order is still around, but only just.

So, we come to the next kind of druid: the Philosophical Druid. It's, um, a bit of a mouthful, and it's perhaps the best I could come up with, uh, for a title. What I mean by this is like the Masonic Druid, the Theosophical Druid is distinctively modern and only really appeared in the 1910s in something called the Order of the Universal Bond, which later just called itself the Ancient Druid Order. And it's these people you can see at Stonehenge, familiar for most of the 20th century. This was an esoteric initiatory group devoted to the project of the Theosophical Society, founded as an international body in the Victorian period. And the project was to recover ancient mystical wisdom from all the world's great religions and philosophies. So you get the best of them all as a new super-religion for the modern world. And so the Order of the Universal Bond, aptly named, mixed together Egyptian, Greek, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist ideas with Irish and Welsh literature, and the name of Druid, and the robes and the staves of the traditional Druid. And the order was the brainchild of a working-class Scotsman, George Watson McGregor Reid, who started as a trade union firebrand in Glasgow. He then moved to London, married money, and set himself up as a religious guru. He initially passed himself off as a Hindu or Buddhist, and then found that being a druid was a little more convincing. He was an overpowering personality, physically massive, broad, muscular, well over six feet. He, he'd started his life by throwing opponents, the trade unions, into the Clyde River. His order was small, around 50 people, but it was highly visible, as in 1912, it occupied Stonehenge at each winter solstice thereafter. And for the next two decades, it was there every midsummer. And it would worship at Stonehenge in the morning and noon tide. And in the evening, not changing his old style, Reid delivered fiery socialist speeches to crowds of local working country people on the hill to the south, predicting the coming revolution of the working classes.

In 1918, the British government finally took over Stonehenge. And in 1924, the first Labour government was elected, back to the hilt by Reid and his druids. And Reid applied to have the ashes of cremated members of the order interred in the topsoil, just under the turf, at the monument. And the Minister of Works and the government agreed. Archaeologists, however, had just arrived at Stonehenge, let in by the government to conduct the first systematic excavations there. And they regarded the Druids as rivals, as interpreters and public faces of the monument. And they used the request to inter cremated ashes in the topsoil as the excuse to start a campaign to ban the druids from Stonehenge. They actually told a lot of falsehoods, the archaeologists. They claimed the druids wanted to bury entire bodies in coffins in archaeologically sensitive areas. And their campaign succeeded. The conservative press took it up. The Druids were, uh, uh, smeared, and the government withdrew its permission. And to try and, uh, finish the druids off, Sir Thomas Kendrick, one of the leaders of the British Museum, wrote the very first textbook on druids, which basically was to show that the ancient druids were horrible and demonic, and the modern druids were demented and bogus. An anti-druid book, which became the standard book on druids for most British readers until the 1960s. But the government allowed the Universal Bond to carry on worshipping at Stonehenge. From the 1940s, the order was run by Reid's son and became ever more popular with the general public. In the 1960s, the next generation of archaeologists ran a campaign to get them banned altogether from the monument, and the government simply refused. They insisted the Druids had earned a right to be there by them. And so, in revenge, one of the leading archaeologists of that generation, Stuart Piggott, wrote the second popular textbook to be published on the Druids in 1968 to show once again that the ancient Druids had all been demonic priests heavily involved in human sacrifice and ignorance, and modern Druids were idiots, heavily involved in falsehood and ignorance. And so, note the two standard works the public could read on druids for most of the 20th century were both poison pen jobs designed to destroy their reputation before and after. Thanks to the Universal Bond's presence at Stonehenge, the order bust in 1964 when the younger Reid died, and an election produced a successor, but it was a very close result, and the loser, called Ross Nicholls, succeeded with his friends to found another order, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, rather like the Ancient and United Ancient Orders splitting in 1833. So you now have two esoteric druid groups: the Universal Bond at Stonehenge and the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids at Glastonbury Tor. Both of them reached out successfully to hippies. Ross Nicholls embarrassed his friends by putting on, uh, necklaces, flowers, a calfskin, and sandals, and talking about ley lines. And they pulled in ideas from the counterculture, and the Universal Bond became the center of a Stonehenge Free Festival from 1974, with rock bands and hippie celebrants coming in at midsummer, with the druids at the center as a kind of clergy for the occasion. But they both seemed to disappear. OBOD ended when Ross Nicholls died in 1975, and the Universal Bond got expelled from public view when the Stonehenge Festival was banned and the monument closed at midsummer in 1985, and they haven't been back there in public.

So instead, we have the New Age Druid. Note the gentleman on the right with a hairstyle like a dandelion clock. He is Philip Carr-Gomm, who was initiated by Ross Nicholls into OBOD in 1970 when he was 16. Philip was upper-middle class, educated at Westminster School, one of our great traditional schools, and became a successful psychologist. And in 1984, the remnants of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids asked him to refound it, and Ross Nicholls appeared to him in person in a vision and asked him to do so. Can't argue with that. So, Philip did so by building on three developments of the 1970s and 1980s. The first was one of the most hidden, dark, and potent weapons of the occult: the correspondence course. Three levels: Bards, Ovates, and Druids. These are the three grades of Iolo Morganwg at the Welsh Gorsedd. So they've been around for 200 years. Each week, members will get a booklet through their letterbox with poetry, teachings, and exercises. The second development was the personal growth movement of people who want to express themselves, find themselves, build themselves, and the correspondence course was designed to allow that. And the third was the new Celtic revival in Western alternative spirituality, with Celtic standing for the countercultural, the imaginative, the natural. And the result was the present Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, open to all religions, most of those in it being in practice pagans, Christians, Buddhists, and druids, who have set out to turn druidry into a modern religion in itself. Oh, God is a spirituality rather than a religion, which is why it's open to all these faiths. And in that, it's faithful to the Universal Bond, its ancestor, and indeed to the Ancient Order of Druids, 1781. And it was a huge success. By the beginning of this century, it was the largest druid order in the world. It still is. Uh, it now has between 30 and 40,000 members. The number keeps rising across the entire Western world. Its aim is to reunite humans with the natural world and their own true selves, to heal the disorientation implicit for many in an urbanized and atomized modern social existence, and to give peace to people between each other and within themselves. It's dependent on local groups as well as individual members, known as groves. They're often run by women now. And the new chief, Philip's successor, is female. And new orders of this kind hived off from OBOD, especially the British Druid Order and the Druid Network.

If you think all this is getting settled and peaceful and tame, we need to come to the Countercultural Druid. These were born out of the Stonehenge Festival. When it was banned and the monument closed at midsummer to everybody in 1985, the festival-goers didn't just lose a festival. They lost their clergy, the Universal Bond druids, who weren't there to perform for them anymore. And they lost their temple, which was Stonehenge. And some had come to feel that both the Druids and Stonehenge represented their religion. So in the next four years, three new Druid orders crystallized out of these people. They aimed to provide rites for themselves and to regain access to Stonehenge. And all were overtly pagan. And they were the Glastonbury Order of Druids, the Secular Order of Druids, and the Loyal Arthurian Warband.

If all this sounds very serious, note the abridgement: God, Sword, and Law, which was an entity that the last warband kept breaking, if only peacefully, largely because of its charismatic leader, whose picture you can see in front of Stonehenge: Arthur Pendragon, an ex-soldier, ex-biker gang leader, and a genuine mystic who had experienced dreams and visions of the Dark Ages since his boyhood, and then he had a series of personal revelations that he might be the reincarnation of King Arthur, and he tested it. His very last test, after he'd asked for signs that kept being given to him, was when he said, "Right, last chance. If I don't get a stunning sign by the next full moon, which is three weeks, that I actually am the reincarnation of King Arthur, I'm ditching the whole idea." And two days before the full moon, he passed an antique shop in Farnborough and saw a sword mounted in a stand in the window labeled "Excalibur." And he went into the shop and asked what the sword was or what it was doing there. And the shop owner asked him why he was interested. And Arthur told his story. And the owner said, "Well, this was the sword that was made for John Boorman's film *Excalibur*, 1981." And it was sold on and sold on. Eventually, I got it. And he said, "It's doing nothing for me except raising a few questions. Here, you can have it." And so Arthur was now given Excalibur, having drawn it from the stone, or at least the stand in the window. And so he gave up and devoted his life to the role. He was made the Pendragon of the Glastonbury Order and the Swordbearer of the Secular Order, and lived in a wood near Stonehenge in the early 1990s, lobbying for free public access to the monument. And his own order formed around him, the Loyal Arthurian Warband. By the late 1990s, it was the second largest druid order in Britain with several hundred members, and it was there to campaign for civil liberties and the preservation of the countryside against reckless developments. And the Warband specialized in demonstrations against laws that limited civil liberties, in protest camps on the routes of controversial road and building schemes. Now, Arthur is sane. He's a very shrewd political operator. He realized that if he staged a demo in regular clothes, probably nobody would notice. If everybody dressed up as the Knights of the Round Table, the media turned up and listened. But also, this isn't a long tradition of working-class protest using fancy titles and fancy dress to enable disempowered normal people to shed their normal selves. In the 17th century, Captain Pouch and Lady Skimmington came forward. In the 19th century, Captain Swing and the Daughters of Rebecca were the leaders of protests and demos. And England has an unusually strong sense of an organic relationship with the land and with the common law. But there is a mystical side to the Warband. It has three circles of initiation, just like the Welsh Gorsedd and OBOD. Arthur was repeatedly arrested and put on trial on various charges in 1995 to 1997, and always acquitted. The last time, at which point the police gave up, was November the 5th, 1997, when he was accused before Salisbury Crown Court of carrying an offensive weapon into a public place. This is quite a serious charge. Has a custodial sentence possibly. And the defense team appealed to me as an expert on druids. And so I wrote a testimonial, and at the opening of the trial, the judge received this, read it, and dismissed the case. I, I still feel a bit hurt about that. I'd have liked Arthur to stand trial properly, present his defense, and be acquitted by a jury, but at least it's a sign that academics have some use. Uh, since the '90s, Arthur has turned more to attacking English Heritage for not allowing free access to Stonehenge. And that's made some difficulty between us, at least on his side, because for many years I was one of the commissioners and then trustees that ran English Heritage, against which he was demonstrating. But my affection for him and respect for his courage remains undiminished.

So today, we have three main images of druids, all based on ancient images. The first is the druid as the tyrannical barbarian priest, cowing an ignorant population with human sacrifice, still around. The second is the OBOD druid, the Ancient Order druid, teacher, healer, priest, maker of peace between tribes. And the third is the Loyal Arthurian Warband and hippie druid leader of opposition to the invading Romans. In case you're missing the point, the Romans were a centralized despotism with horrible, straight new roads, new towns with matching rooftops and the invention of reinforced concrete, and with long hair, tattoos, the wearing of natural fibers, and basic lifestyles. The ancient Britons were not bad comparisons for this sort of druid. What they have done between them is, in the last 30 years, made distinctive contributions to British spiritual and popular culture and British popular politics. And this is an impressive achievement, showing, I think, more clearly than most other examples I could choose, how images from the ancient, the remote past, however unreliable or unproven in themselves, can keep working in late modernity to enrich our culture.

[Applause]