As a druid I work with mental imagery to facilitate connections to sources of intelligence and wisdom beyond the confines of my own psyche. The format of those mental images, the focal points if you like, are fairly arbitrary for the most part. Although we have created some cultural thought-forms (many of which have energy and sentience all of their own due to that energetic input) I believe that the best use of these mental focal points is for them to be a visual gateway into The Otherworld. The cultural images we use are a sort of universal pass to get you into a frame of mind that allows a connection to one source or another of Otherworld information. This Otherworld is a realm of ideas and knowing that is beyond the ordinary five-sense reality that we spend most of our time in.
Druid Archetypes
I want to define a specific phrase to contain the ideas I am trying to express here. Let me call them “druidic archetypes”. You may call them Gods or The Goddess. You may call them any host of ‘mythical’ names such as from the Arthurian tales, or The Mabinogion. Whatever source you choose to derive your druidic archetypes from (you may even have created or found your own) let me define them here as “druidic archetypes” as a shorthand. I may refer to them as “sources” too, if generalising.
I found some of these druidic archetypes useful at the time when I opened up my DNA to changes related to healing. During that process I employed Arthurian archetypes in order to work with energies that I discovered were available at particular sacred sites. During that process I was able to adopt their energies, utilise them, and gain a great deal of insight as part of that assimilation process. However, time moves on, and after that process had completed I pretty much forgot about all but the main archetypes I was using such as Merlin, for example. To be honest, I didn’t really know their extent, or how to use them as part of any kind of ritualistic or seasonal basis.
The Cross
As druids we tend to shy away from The Cross, given its associations, yet as Julian Cope always says we need to reclaim this icon. It’s far more useful for us than it is for ‘them’. It had a far older history than the current religious paradigm of the western world. For me, I have found that The Cross is a framework upon which to place the four main division points of the year. In this context The Cross also provides me with a means to place the druidic archetypes against these four annual divisions, and to link the two concepts together. Of course, it also allows for elemental associations, and for cardinal positions too. Such a useful framework!
Rediscovering the archetypes
Something prompted me to re-discover these sources. A task this year involving Merlin startled me into a recognition that these archetypes weren’t a one-off symbol that I was using – they were becoming part of the way I worked with the land and the elements. So I began to explore what benefits they could bring me. Certainly I will never be worshipping any of them as gods, but as psychological archetypes could it be possible to externalize their energy forms such that I could learn something about my own spiritual development by aligning myself with one of the Arthurian figures at a specific time of the year or for specific purposes?
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