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Druidry Druid Druidic Treelore
Druids as Celtic Shamans
The Druidic Shamans were devoted to helping the Celts maintain their spiritual balance and sacred connectivity with the Natural World by teaching them to treat all things "Hallowed" with the respect and reverence they deserved.
The living waters of rivers, springs, and wells were venerated because they were believed to have both magickal and curative powers. The Divine Forest, typified by the Sacred Grove or "Nemeton" was hallowed ground for the Celts who worshipped and revered their Goddesses and Gods in natural spaces.
Sacred Groves were the settings for ceremonies, meetings, and sanctuaries. The Druids who travelled widely among the Celtic tribes, were also the Shamanic Keepers of the Celtic Calendar which corresponded the months with the Celtic Tree Alphabet and the vowels of the Ogham.
So for each of the months there was a corresponding tree from which an overall Tree Calendar emerged. Druidry Shamanic traditions included deeply held beliefs in an afterlife, fairy mounds, immortality, magic, nature spirits, and supernatural and mythical beings and monsters who made their home in the Otherworld.
The Celtic Year was
divided into thirteen months with an extra day or two adjustment at the end of
the year. Even though there were thirteen months in the lunar Celtic Calendar,
only eight seasonal festivals were celebrated.
Sacred Grove Shamanic Lion and Lamb Druidess Una
Painting by Briton Riviere
The two solstices and two equinoxes marked the passage of the four seasons, while, the four fire festivals inbetween the passages commemorated the changes that ensued.
Druids also often acted as Shamans and Shamanism was practiced by the ancient Celts. In Druidic Shamanic traditions, the veils between the realms, worlds, and dimensions were gossamer thin, dancing about with the winds of cyclical change and the poetic rhythms of divinity.
The boundaries between this world and the Otherworld to the Druids were adaptable, fluidic, and malleable. Druids used their power to access the Otherworld and their knowledge of what they had personally seen there to help and benefit others.
Many Druidry tales focused on the ability to shapeshift or to morph or phase from the shape of a human into that of an animal, bird, or fish for purposes of knowledge, initiation, training, travel, reconnaissance, or escape.
Some of the most superbly
crafted and enchantingly enduring of the Druidry Shamanism tales, like those
about Taliesin and Fionn mac Cumhail, were richly textured with the Shamanic Symbolism about alternate realities, animal totems,
divination, drumming, ecstatic dance, journeying, healing, oracles, shamanic
trance, shapeshifting, soul loss retrieval, spirit guides, transformation, and
vision quests... Go back
Read Druidry Treelore Articles
Druids as Celtic Shamans,
Glossary Terminology,
Hallowed Symbols and Holy Ground,
Megaliths and Sacred Mounds,
Ogham Storytelling and Oral Traditions,
Reverence for Natural World Animals and Birds,
Spiritual Beliefs of Druids,
Sacred Wheel of Seasons,
Sun Talismans and Holy Wells,
Threefold Path of Bards Ovates Druids,
Treelore and Sacred Groves
Visit other Beliefs Faiths Religions Traditions
Aboriginal Dreamtime,
Alchemy Alchemist,
Cosmos Astronomy,
Buddhism Buddhist,
Christianity Biblical,
Daoist Confucian,
Druidry Treelore,
Heathenry Ásatrú,
Hinduism Vedas,
Islam Sunnah,
Judaism Talmud,
Native American,
Paganism Wiccan,
Shamanism Shaman,
Shintoism Kami
Druidry Druid Druidic Treelore Copyright © 2002-2008 Maureen Grace Burns, Blessings Cornucopia. All Rights Reserved.
Public Domain Image Sacred Grove Shamanic Lion and Lamb Druidess Una Painting by Briton Riviere, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Unalion.jpg]. Accessed January 11, 2007.
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