Can you practice Druidry outside of Europe?

[gothnick]

Following on from a post yesterday on this community, I got to considering this

Comments

[sidheblessed]

I also think ancestry is important. I don't connect with the Australian Gods at all. The land, yes, very much so, but not the deities or myths associated with it.

I do however connect with the Celtic Gods. That connection is part of my blood, my ancestors were Irish, English and Scottish. I also have German blood and connect with Germanic deities. Again, ancestry counts for me.

[thepixeltypo]

I too find it odd but don't think it should be either disallowed or sneered at. Many Americans have European ancestry, and if Americam Europeans continue to marry American Europeans their DNA doesn't change, only the piece of ground on which they were born.

[7rin]

I know I've read this in a few places, and I think for some it's very true: "we don't choose our gods, they choose us" (paraphrasing).

Yes.

[bittercat]

That's been my experience, anyway.

[alfrecht]

One of the issues in your question/statement is that the "Celtic ur-culture," if there ever was one (as opposed to a number of similar smaller cultural units), spread over a great distance, and in each locality, the larger myths became localized. So, the fact that Cath Maige Tuired takes place on a plain in Roscommon, and also has scenes in Tara, Co. Meath and Leitrim, etc. with the characters Lug, Nuada, and so forth does not necessarily mean the "myths took place" there; the same characters from the same ur-culture were Lludd and Llewellys in Wales, and some of the incidents in that tale take place in Oxford, and various other locations. So, it's a localization, not so much that they actually happened in this or that location. This is one of the reasons why the story of the Caillech Berri, which originated in Cork on the Beare Peninsula, and in a Middle-Irish poem of roughly the 10th century, were then later localized in lots of other places under the same name, including many places in Scotland. Scotland and Beare, Co. Cork

[geekling]

Personally it's more about climate-type and nature-type.

I find that many deities or spiritual practises are heavily centered on the landscape/climat where it originated.
You have your mountain gods, desert gods, sea gods, deciduous forest gods, grassland gods, savanna gods, your jungle gods etc. and so forth.

It just doesn't really make sense to invoke a sea god or adopting practises related to the sea when you live 100 miles inland, hold rituals for a dessert deity when you're surrounded by lush wetlands, that sort of thing.

It's not about continents and fixed geographic loactions as much as about biomes.

So to go back to druidry, the eastern half of north america, southeastern Austrailia, Central Europe, south west russia, japan and so on all share the same biome as the UK and druidic practices would make sense as far as I'm concerned.
But less so if you're living in a desert biome - like say Arizona.

[ladymorgaine]

Being a Celtic Pagan living in Arizona, I'd have to agree with you. It's more difficult here than when I was living in Maine, for example. At the same time, I'm not going to change my spiritual path based on where I'm living, I just have to deal

[urthlvr]

i didn't know the NA tribes in the southwest had river dieties. iirc, NA don't have river dieties (and i'm prepared to be proven wrong). also, having lived in new mexico for 8 yrs, i don't remember that feel from the rivers that i got from other places.

ymmv

[ladymorgaine]

You're probably right. I was just using that as an example, since there isn't even a river with actual WATER in it within 50 miles of me. I've never heard of any canal or floodwash deities, NA or otherwise. Probably a bad example, now that I think of that. I still don't feel it would be proper to invoke a Celtic deity into a desert river, but that's just my thoughts on it