Trinities and Allies: Working Druidry Thoughts

[chronarchy]

Over the past few years, I have noticed that even though my path is one of Druidry and nature worship, I tend to talk mostly about the Deities and the Ancestors; often, I speak less specifically and with less honor to the Spirits of Nature than I do to the other two Kindreds

Comments

[chronarchy]

Sooner or later, for sure. The Discipline 2 work, we've decided, has to stay "private" until a person becomes clergy, but we've found it valuable to take some of the work we do and make it fully public, too (such as the Prayer to the Ancient Wise). Mostly, it's not so much that it's soopur-seekret-drooidee stuff, but it'll include some specific directions to our "astral congregating place" (which we commonly refer to as "the Mound"), so we don't want to spoil the work for the new Priest by giving them the script in advance.

I did tell Ian that we need Secret Decoder Rings, though. He told me we needed a code to decode first. I say, "Details, details."

So some of the work that is done on this front is likely to trickle out to the membership pretty soon, much as the Prayer to the Ancient Wise did shortly after it was written. . . and we'll encourage our First Circle graduates to take up the work with these "Celestial Spirits" (as I've been calling them most recently: we are quite likely to call them something else, I suspect), along with the rest of ADF.

I'm pretty excited about it, obviously. :) We'll see how it pans out.

[prophet_maid]

That's neat, but I wasn't even thinking about the Clergy Order work or anything like that. I just think the ideas behind the Nature Spirits isn't really fleshed out. It feels like a "hey, we're a nature religion, let's worship nature" tacked on. I was actually thinking about this the other day, and lo and behold you post about it now.

[chronarchy]

It feels like a "hey, we're a nature religion, let's worship nature" tacked on.

I think that I sometimes get that feeling more about my own personal religion than about ADF's general religion: I've seen people who get a lot of "bang" out of the NS portion of our rites.

I hope that more people getting those personal experiences will help flesh us out as an organization with the NS getting more attention, though: I can see (and feel) that we lack some of that.

I also like that we can chat about what we think we're lacking and what we'd like to work on. . . and that it's okay :)

[autumn_hearth]

I find other terms such as Land Spirits, Worldly Spirits and Spirits of Place (that some groves use interchangeably help me see the "Nature Spirits" place in our cosmology. I look to how various Indo-European cultures viewed the spirits around them, be they of the home, barn, fields, boundaries, woods, marketplace, city etc. Roman religion is helpful for this but you can also find its survival in the Gaelic, Norse, Baltic and Slavic cultures. House hold and agricultural spirits most likely evolved out of the ancestral cult (as did some of our gods) and some may indeed think of these spirits as lesser gods. Our categories of the three Kindred are by no means cut and dry and "Nature Spirits" seem to include "everyone else" but I don't think it was a choice of hey "let's worship nature" except in so much as the wording being more appealing/familiar to neo-pagans.