The Eleventh Mount Haemus Lecture
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE ORDER OF BARDS OVATES & DRUIDS MOUNT HAEMUS LECTURE FOR THE YEAR 2010 The Eleventh Mount Haemus Lecture Druidry & Transpersonal History by Dr Thomas Clough Daffern Table of Contents 1. Introductory: Transpersonal history, Druidry, and Synchronicity 2. Jung on the Transpersonal and on Druidry 3. Druidry in transpersonal history in general 4. The Druid revival in modern history: looking back through the lens of transpersonal history 5. Druidry and the transpersonal history of philosophy 6. Druidry and Philosophies of history through the lens of transpersonal history 7. Druidry and the history of suppressed narratives 8. Philosophies of history, revolutions, counter-revolutions and Druidry 9. Druid history and biblical history: Druidry and Judaism 10. Druid history and Christianity: 11. Druidry and freemasonic history 12. Druid history and Islamic and Sufi history 13. Druid history and Indian history – Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism 14. Druid history, transpersonal history, the history of religions and religious education 15. Druid history, transpersonal history and the Arts 16. Druidry, transpersonal history, ecology and the history of the sciences 17. Druidry, peace history and the transpersonal: conclusions 1. Introduction Firstly, what exactly is “transpersonal history” ? I defined it during my doctoral research as the combination of the entire gamut of professional historical scientific research plus the added-in extra of the insights culled from modern transpersonal psychology. That is, it is a branch or sub-discipline of the historical sciences, along with say, economic history, social history, political history, diplomatic history, or military history – which focuses on the spiritual life of mankind, the peak experiences, insights, enlightenment experiences, paranormal experiences, moments of inspiration, maximum creativity, breakthrough moments, genius, the capacity for love and altruism, moments of aha and awen… This branch of psychology, transpersonal psychology, arose out of the work of numerous thinkers, including Carl Jung, Assagioli, Abraham Maslow, Stan Grof, Sorokin, Victor Frankl, Jean Gebser, James Fadiman, Ken Wilber et al in the course of the 20th century. It arose partly in contradistinction to the school of psychoanalysis (associated above all with Freud[1]) which focused on the pathologies that people get into - the negative states, the depressions, neuroses, horrors and cruelties. It was realised by many advanced thinkers in psychology and its auxiliary disciplines, that some people exhibit states of maximum well-being, happiness, creativity and wisdom – and that psychology should also study these states. So in the last 30 years or so transpersonal psychology has come of age: it has established research institutes, MA courses, academic journals, and led to a huge cultural outflowing of books, talk-shows, websites, and even movies. It is very much the zeitgeist of the now. What I argued as a historian however, in trying to study the intellectual history of peacemaking and war prevention in the crucial period of world history from 1945-2001, is that by and large the historical profession is stuck with a 19th century model of psychology. Historians write still in terms of Newtonian physics and even pre-Freudian psychology. States have interests, power is the name of the game, and meaning is always relative. Thus the subtleties of mankind’s will to meaning, or meta-needs, or the craving people still feel for pattern, depth and content in their lives, has somehow eluded them. What I argued is that the resurgence of religious conflict and religious paradigm clashes in the modern post cold war world can only be understood against a historical meta-paradigm that includes transpersonal psychology as its foundation. Another way of talking about transpersonal history would therefore be to say it is the scientific study of the esoteric dimensions of history, which is not exactly the same as saying it is the history of esotericism[2]. In transpersonal psychology, there is the scientific recognition that human beings do have spiritual experiences, that strange states of altered consciousness are in fact quite common, that ever since the early Palaeolithic mankind has experimented with consciousness altering drugs and found that when handled correctly they can provide interesting insights and life changing revelations, that sexuality is as often as not a revelatory experience and that love definitely includes a strong element of the supernatural, or at the very least telepathy. And that angels, deities, prophets, miracles, mystical insights, enlightenments, past life regressions, clairvoyance, clairaudience, synchronicities, precognitive dreams, telepathy and the experience of joy and deep meaning and inner peace, are all widely reported and documented phenomena, and not just in the hagiographies of saints, but also in ordinary people’s life stories. Thus the field I am naming transpersonal history, would combine the best insights of professional historical research (attention to sources, lack of bias, thoroughness in research methods, sympathy for the subject matter, a willingness to follow where the evidence leads, a love of books and literature and scholarship, a commitment to study[3], education, knowledge and rational thought etc.) with an openness to research the sometimes strange material that the transpersonal dimension throws up. Of course, for a historian who denies the existence of such paranormal, or transpersonal phenomena, transpersonal history would be at best a study of strange and deviant intellectual history - the weird beliefs of strange sects. And there are intellectual historians who adopt this kind of arms-length approach, which is indeed sometimes necessary[4]. To be a good transpersonal historian doesn’t mean that one swallows every single miracle in the literature as if it were “true”. One can still deconstruct the context of the narrative – for example, for a transpersonal historian to write the history of the early Celtic Christian Church in Ireland would require a great deal of sifting out – which stories, legends and miracles might be based in fact, which might be based on second hand hearsay, and what are “facts” anyway. For example, in the famous confrontation of the Archdruid and St Patrick at Tara, when the Druid is held aloft in the air – in what sense is this a “true report” ? What might have actually happened in this encounter ? And from whose side would one listen to the true version of events ? The Druid side of the story has never been told so far as I know, because in imposing Roman alphabetic literacy, the Christians imposed the medium in which history would henceforth be told. Orality as a vehicle of truth was somehow diminished and lessened and cheapened. Truth and history was now equated with “what is written”. Druids however also practised history as a high art, but theirs was the oral and musical kind. They spoke the past, and kept it alive by speaking it, reciting it, memorising it, and singing it as bards. This 2 was how the ancient King Lists of Ireland were retained well into the era of the mediaeval Christian chroniclers who finally wrote them down – this was how the Druid traditions of the succeeding waves of invasions into Ireland and the stories of the roles of the Druids involved, and also in Wales, were preserved generation after generation. Transpersonal history also acknowledges therefore that all forms of remembrance are valid as historical records, the written form (archives), the spoken kind (oral) and the thought kind (the termas, or akashic records). The question I want to explore in this lecture then is this: to what extent might this new concept of transpersonal history be of value in helping us to understand, appreciate, reconstruct and value the heritage and history of Druidry ? As a brief foray into a potentially very large topic, this lecture will be a scouting mission – reporting on a huge unexplored terrain, which hopefully future generations of scholars can open up inch by inch, and mile by mile. My job is to chart the overall coastlines of the work to be done. Others can come later and fill in the details[5]. Firstly then, the nature of time itself – this is a theme of great significance to Druids. Druidry often plays with time. The work of the Ovate is about understanding the patterns and rhythms behind time. We know that Druids and Ovates were sometimes especially skilled at prognostication, and both classical and medical and living sources confirm this. Transpersonal history has also always been interested in the strangeness of time. Time seems to move in spirals – we repeat patterns, get stuck in grooves of samenesses, like going round and round in the ditch at Avebury, repeating the same old mistakes, until we finally advance and move up a notch, and next time we repeat the thing, it ends happier, like the labyrinth that Geoffrey Ashe and others found sculptured into the slopes of Glastonbury Tor. Often in Celtic art we can reconstruct the metaphysics of Druidry, and from the labyrinths and spiral patterns which the Celts so loved, we can tell they adored and understood the complex meanderings of time, as it plays with our karma and wyrd, as we all roll along on the path to enlightenment. Many Celtic stories tell the same tale: the sage who wanders into fairyland, where time is different. This is true of the father of Gwion Bach, who finds his bride in fairyland; it is also the experience of True Thomas, the Rhymer, the Scottish sage who on Huntly Bank spies a maiden all in green and follows her down to fairyland…. It is true of the way that all good fairy-tales begin.. Once Upon a Time. What that is saying is: “this tale you are about to hear is eternally true, it is a forever story, not simply a once off story”… Transpersonal psychology has studied the weird and strange psychology of precognition- how it is that some people seem to know things are going to happen before they do; spiritualists sometimes can access this data that normally would be locked up “in the future”.