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The Celts believed so strongly in relying solely on the oral traditions of poetry, song, and storytelling for passing on knowledge that their Druids chose not to write down their myths and stories. Even though the Druids could read and write in Latin and Greek, they memorized all the knowledge and wisdom of the communal tribal groups. Working within the context of the Celtic Cosmology, the Druids used their power to access the Otherworld and their knowledge of what they had personally seen to help and benefit others. Three was a Celtic holy number which had many different meanings beside the most traditional of the representations, that of the three realms of land, sea, and sky. In Celtic Druidry, there was also a threefold path of progressive Druidic service - that of the Bards, the Ovates, and the Druids. The Bards were singers and story tellers; the Ovates were time travellers and healers; and the Druids were teachers, philosophers, and judges. The Druidic spiritual teachings were encoded in their stories, songs, and myths. The modern reconstructionist Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids version of the "Threefold Path of Druidic Service" is described below.
Bards were the guardians
of the sacredness of the Word, keepers of the ritual memories, and poetic
warders of the tribe, the bards were inspired by the spirit of Awen. They were
musical dream weavers, creativity seers, sacred storytellers, and divinity
diviners. Bards were voice spinners, singing word magic into being.
Their melodies enchanted with the wonder of life. The songs of the bards renewed the land as they walked the Earth journeying to sacred sites where the ancient spirit of holiness lingered still. When the bards produced artistic works in healing lyrical lines and patterns of balanced love, light, and power, harmonic resonance was restored to the planet time and time again. The Ovates were the time travellers to the realms of the ancestors and the starry shores of future isles for information and inspiration to guide the clan or tribe, the specialty of the Ovates was Ogham, tree lore. Utilizing plants, herbs and other healing modalities the Ovate worked with the fires of transmutation, transformation, and regeneration. The journey of the acorn to the sapling to the oak tree to the sprouting spring leaves to the autumn falling gold, intrigued and totally involved the Ovate in the spiral circle dance of Creation. The Ovate studied the powerful mysteries underlying nature and the stars to find formulas to restore equilibrium to mind, body, and spirit. The Druids were the teachers of the oral traditions, ritual guides between the worlds, inspiration bridges between Awen and Earth, fluidic learned loremasters, and custodians of the knowledge keys, the Druids sang the universal lines of connectivity, of circularity, of cyclical change, and of creative inspiration down through the ages.
Warders of the ancestral
rites of the seasonal round and of the sacredness of the land, sea, and sky,
their soul fingers strummed the strings of balanced bonding with magical
precision until note after note, word after word, spiraled outward in
impassioned song lines that wove multicolored leaves of unity that entwined the
sanctity of all life onto the World Tree... Go back
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