The Druid Magic Handbook: Ritual Magic Rooted in the Living Earth

John Michael Greer has been a student of the occult traditions and nature spirituality for more than twentyfive years. He is the author of numerous articles and more than ten books including Natural Magic, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook , and The Druid Magic Handbook . He is also the coauthor of Learning Ritual Magic and Pagan Prayer Beads . He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife Sara. Since returning to the United States from Findhorn in the early seventies, David Spangler has continued to travel and lecture widely. He has developed and taught classes at a number of institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, Seattle University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. He also teaches classes for the Lorian Association for Incarnational Spirituality. Read David Spangler's blog at [email protected]. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The DRUID MAGIC Handbook Ritual Magic Rooted in the Living Earth By JOHN MICHAEL GREER Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC Copyright © 2007 John Michael GreerAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-57863-397-5 Contents Foreword by David SpanglerIntroductionPart One The Foundations of Druid MagicChapter 1 The Ways of the Life ForceChapter 2 The Alphabet of MagicChapter 3 The Essentials of PracticePart Two The Practice of Druid MagicChapter 4 The Gates of the ElementsChapter 5 The Grove of the DruidsChapter 6 The Art of EnchantmentChapter 7 The Secret of the GrailPart Three The Way of Druid MagicChapter 8 The Reenchantment of the WorldAppendix: Deities in Welsh Druid TraditionsBibliographyIndex CHAPTER 1 The Ways of the Life Force Max Weber, in his famous 1904 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism , gave a startling name to one of the realities of modern life: "thedisenchantment of the world." Weber was a sociologist who studied the impact ofindustrial society on human thought. Before scientific materialism seized theimagination of Western culture, he pointed out, people saw the world around themas a place full of magic, where trees and stones could speak, birds traced outthe shape of the future in their flight, and those who knew the secret couldsense and shape the flow of enchantment in the world around them. This living,breathing, magical world was one of the first casualties of the IndustrialRevolution. As materialist beliefs spread, magic trickled out of the world,transforming it—at least in most people's minds—into a mass of lifeless matterrelevant only as a source of raw materials or a place to dump waste. Like most educated people of his time, Weber did not believe in magic. He meantthe word disenchantment as a metaphor, and he saw the banishing of magic andmeaning from the world as a necessary part of progress and the end of an ancientillusion. Still, he recognized that the psychological and spiritual price ofprogress weighed heavily on the modern world—heavily enough, perhaps, tooutweigh its material benefits. In a disenchanted world, he showed, even themost basic human values lose their anchor, and the only things left are themechanical values of profit and efficiency, the basis for what passes forrational thought in a modern industrial society. The irony of the phrase is that Weber spoke more truth than he realized. Neitherhe nor most of his readers saw disenchantment as anything but a metaphor. Still,those who know the living power of magic know that Weber's phrase points to acrucial reality. Our world is literally disenchanted. It suffers from a shortageof enchantment that cuts people off from magical realities and makes their livesless meaningful and magical than they could be. Enchantment is the art of awakening spiritual presences in material things. Theword literally means "putting a song in something"—en- chant -ment—a turn ofphrase that reflects the living experience of a world in which every part of thelandscape and every turn of the seasonal cycle sings its meaning to the awakenedmind. In traditional societies around the world and throughout history,enchantment has had a vital role in bringing people into harmony with theirgods, their environment, and their communities. Magic provided the toolkit forcreating and maintaining enchantment. Using magic, the priestesses and wizardsof the past wove nature and humanity into a single fabric that kept bothbalanced and whole. As far as anyone knows, the Industrial Revolution marks the first time in humanhistory that a civilization tried to banish enchantment from the world. WhenWeber assessed the results of this experiment in 1904, cracks were alreadyshowing in the bright facade of progress. Now, more than a century later, thecollapse of communities and collective spiritual life across the Western worldhas been joined by the specter of catastrophic environmental change. Dwindlingfossil fuel reserves, massive ecological changes, and wild swings in the world'sclimate announce the coming of an age of payback in which the survival ofindustrial civilization itself stands at risk. A little more than forty years have passed now since the environmental crisisfirst forced itself onto newspaper headlines around the world. During that time,a great many historians have traced the roots of our civilization'sdysfunctional relationship with nature, and an even larger number of activistshave proposed solutions. Magic has rarely seen mention in either context. Ahandful of perceptive writers have followed Weber's lead and traced out theconnections between a way of thinking about the Earth that strips it ofenchantment and a way of acting toward it that strips it of everything else. In The Reenchantment of the World , one of the best books of this kind, MorrisBerman comments: For more than 99 percent of human history, the world was enchanted and man sawhimself as an integral part of it. The complete reversal of this perception in amere four hundred years or so has destroyed the continuity of the humanexperience and the integrity of the human psyche. It has very nearly wrecked theplanet as well. The only hope, or so it seems to me, lies in a reenchantment ofthe world. (Berman, 1981, p. 10) Yet neither Berman nor the handful of other writers who have pursued thesethemes have considered the possibility that the best way to reenchant the worldis to use the same magical methods that enchanted it in the first place. Bermanhimself claims that "we cannot go back to alchemy or animism" (ibid.). Behindthis argument stands the immense emotional force of the modern faith inprogress, with its conviction that "going back" is the one unforgivable sin. Yetif a traveler on unfamiliar roads finds that he has gone down a blind alley, theonly option that will get him out of it is to go back the way he came. From the perspective of Druidry, a return to magic is simple common sense.Modern Druidry itself was born alongside the Industrial Revolution, crafted by ahandful of British visionaries in the early eighteenth century, who saw thefirst stirrings of today's ecological crises and recognized that the gap betweenhumanity and nature opened by industrial society had to be healed if Westerncivilization were to survive. The founders of the Druid Revival took the radicalstep of embracing the name and legacy of the ancient Celtic Druids at a timewhen "going back" in religious matters was as unthinkable as doing the samething scientifically and technologically is today. They recognized that whatmatters about ideas is not how new they are, or for that matter how old theyare, but whether they reflect truth in a way that meets the needs of humanityand nature in a particular age. The revival of magic in recent decades thus speaks to one of the most criticalneeds of our time. While magic cannot solve today's ecological crisis by itself,it offers crucial tools for healing the gap between humanity and nature. Tounderstand how magic can accomplish this, and to begin making sense of magicitself, we need to pay attention to a part of human experience that has droppedentirely out of modern awareness. The Mind-Body Problem For the past four hundred years, one of the major intellectual puzzles in theWestern world has been what philosophers call "the mind-body problem." Like mostof the really tough conundrums of philosophy, the problem can be stated simplyenough. In Western cultures, most people experience themselves as two verydifferent things—a material body, on the one hand, and an apparently nonmaterialmind, self, personality, or soul on the other. The problem is how to explain theconnection between them. Theories about the relationship between mind and body nearly all fall into twocamps. The first approach, called dualism , claims that there are two completelyseparate realms of existence, one mental, one material, that somehow come intocontact inside each human being and nowhere else in the cosmos. The other,called reductionism , claims that only one of them is real, and then finds someway to explain away the other. Arguments over the mind-body problem have swung like a pendulum from dualist toreductionist viewpoints and back again. Nowadays reductionist approaches are invogue, and most scientists and many laypeople accept the reductionist claim thatmind is a side effect of the physical body's nervous system. This latter notionis quite often presented these days as simple common sense. Like most thingslabeled "common sense," however, it relies on a whole series of assumptions thatmay not bear close examination. The pendulum keeps swinging because dualism and reductionism both have seriousproblems. Entire books have been written about these problems, and since theydon't bear directly on the subject of magic, they can be left to students of thehistory of ideas. What makes the wild swings of this intellectual pendulumrelevant here is that they started abruptly with the birth of materialistscience in the seventeenth century. Before then, people understood the relationship between mind and body in a verydifferent way. They experienced themselves as three things, not two. A thirdfactor—the life force—existed between mind and body and linked them together. Inthe magical traditions of the Renaissance, this force was called "spirit," fromthe Latin word spiritus , "breath." To this older way of thinking, spirit is thesource of life, energy, and vitality, enlivening the dense matter of the bodyand connecting it with the mind. In the Renaissance view, spirit surrounds andpenetrates all material things, uniting them and weaving the universe into awhole. If this description sounds like something from a very famous movie, there's goodreason for that. George Lucas borrowed the concept of "the Force," the powerused by the Jedi Knights of his Star Wars movies, from teachings about the lifeforce in the Japanese martial arts, where it is called ki and has exactly thesame properties Renaissance mages assigned to spirit. The Druid name for the life force is nwyfre (pronounced "NOO-iv-ruh"). Nearlyevery other language on Earth has a word for it, too. The only languages thatdon't are the ones spoken in the industrial nations of the modern West. The banishing of the life force from the worldview of industrial society is noaccident. The founders of modern materialist science fought hard to keep theirnewborn ideology free of any trace of the life force, and you can still reducemost scientists to spluttering indignation by mentioning it. Anything thatstrays too close to vitalism, as modern philosophers call the idea of a lifeforce, comes in for unrelenting criticism. A great part of the prejudice againstalternative healing arts in the modern Western world comes from the fact thatmost of them, unlike the current medical mainstream, treat the life force as areality and use it to heal. Thus there's a deep irony in the past four centuries of debate over the mind-bodyproblem. The relationship between mind and body poses no problem at alloutside the modern industrial worldview, because anywhere people recognize theexistence of the life force, its role in connecting mind and body is obvious.The relationship only became a problem in the Western world when materialistscience threw out the connecting link. It's as though the first modernscientists decided that their chests didn't exist, and then spent four centuriesarguing about what could possibly connect their heads with their bellies. What makes this all the more fascinating is that the life force is not just atheory or a belief. It's something we experience in the same way that weexperience our minds and bodies. Outside the industrial West, the life force isjust as much a part of life as bodies and minds are. In modern Japan, forexample, people still talk about the state of their ki on an everyday basis. Theword for courage in Japanese is yuki , literally "active ki"; depression is fukeiki , "sluggish ki"; a strong personality is described by the words kisho gatsuyoi , "the quality of his ki is strong"; and illness is byoki , "disturbed ki." The same sort of talk was every bit as common in medieval and RenaissanceEurope, and it's just as common in most other traditional societies.This same way of experiencing the world also has intensely practicalconsequences. Asian martial arts, for example, treat the life force as anessential factor and use special training methods to strengthen and direct it.When a martial artist breaks a pine board with a punch or shatters a stack ofbricks with a palm strike, the life force flowing into the striking hand doesthe job. A way of looking at the world that enables flesh and bone to shatterwood and brick is clearly something more than a primitive superstition. People who experience the life force as an everyday reality have no special"sixth sense" lacking in those of us who live in industrial societies. We dwellin the same world and have the same potentials for awareness that they do. Thedifference is that their vision of reality makes room for the life force, andours does not. Children in traditional societies learn to pay attention to thelife force in themselves and the world because the people around them notice it,talk about it, and treat it as a reality. Children in industrial societies learnnot to pay attention to it in exactly the same way. Even so, when people in themodern industrial world talk about gut feelings and hunches, or the "vibes" or"feel" of a person or a place, most of the time they are talking about their ownperceptions of flow and pattern in the life force. The life force is close enough to the surface of awareness that various simpleexercises can make most people conscious of it in a few minutes. Here is anexample. Read through the following paragraph, and then do the exercise beforeyou read any further. Start by standing comfortably with your feet parallel or a little toed out, yourheels a foot or so apart, and your knees slightly bent. Let your hands hang atyour sides, and shake them for a full minute, making them as loose and floppy aspossible. Then rub them together for another full minute, keeping them relaxedas you rub. Then hold them in front of you, palms facing one another, as if youwere holding a basketball in front of your chest. Breathe slowly and deeply,keep your hands and arms relaxed, and concentrate on your palms. After a fullminute of this, begin moving your hands toward and away from each other a shortdistance, no more than an inch. This is the final step. Keep doing it for alittle while, and see what you notice. What did you experience? Most people, when they do the exercise the first time,as they move their hands back and forth, feel a gentle pressure against theirpalms, as though their hands were magnets repelling each other. The longer theback-and-forth motion continues, the stronger the sensation of pressure becomes,and if you do the same exercise daily for a week or more, the sensation becomesas firm as if you held a physical object between your palms. What you feel pressing against your hands, according to the magical view of theworld, is the field of life force between energy centers in your palms. Shaking,rubbing, and relaxation, the basis of the exercise, release muscular tensionsthat block the flow of life force through your body, so that the fields aroundyour hands become strong enough that you notice them. Those fields are alwaysthere, whether you notice them or not, and so are similar fields that radiateout from other centers in your body, filling a roughly egg-shaped space thatextends a few feet out from you in all directions. Every living thing has asimilar field, and so do many of the things people in the industrial worldconsider nonliving. As the bridge between mind and matter, the life force can be influenced in manyways using mind, matter, or the two in combination. The exercise you justperformed uses body movements to shape the flow of nwyfre. This is a traditionaland powerful way of working with the life force. Martial arts and Easternsystems of spiritual practice such as yoga and qigong rely on this and also onbreathing exercises, another classic method. Other spiritual and magical systemsrely on physical substances that concentrate certain qualities in nwyfre, or ona knowledge of the times and places where nwyfre flows most strongly. Ritual magic approaches the life force from a different way—the way ofimagination. This is another aspect of reality that has come in for more thanits fair share of neglect by modern thinkers; to call something "imaginary"nowadays, after all, is to say that it's unreal. Yet imagination is a potentreality. Imagination, in fact, is the human mind's way of experiencing patterns in thelife force. When you imagine something, that image takes shape in the life forcearound you. The more powerfully you imagine it, the more strongly the imageshapes the life force. This equation works the other way as well. When anunexpected thought or feeling drifts into your mind, most of the time what hashappened is that you picked up a pattern in the life force created by some othermind. The movement of patterns in life force from mind to mind explains mostpsychic phenomena, as well as less controversial experiences such as the spreadof fads and fashions and the behavior of crowds. It also explains the workingsof ritual magic. You can begin to see how this works by repeating the same exercise you just didwith a slight difference. When you move your hands to face each other, imaginethat an actual ball appears between your palms. See it, but also imagine thefeeling of it pressing against your palms, and notice the texture of the ball'ssurface. Concentrate on the imaginary ball as intensely as you can for a fullminute, and then start moving your hands toward and away from each otherslightly, as before. Do this now, before you read any further. (Continues...) Excerpted from The DRUID MAGIC Handbook by JOHN MICHAEL GREER . Copyright © 2007 John Michael Greer. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.