Tag: archetypes

The Arthurian Earth Energies

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Ancient Sites, Spirit Guides

In early June Kal and I visited The Druid’s Circle at Penmaenmawr near Conwy. We arrived there in time for sunset, and the western skies filled out with ever-deepening shades of red until the whole sky turned inky-blue as the sun retreated beneath the sea. Before the light around us completely faded I had some work to do. I was here to try to find out more about my spirit guide who was relatively new to me. My previous guide Theodora had been unfathomable, but honestly I had stopped trying to know more at the first hurdle, not wanting to upset her. Now I had Ash, and he seemed more amenable, so I felt it was incumbent upon me to make the effort to forge a strong relationship that could be mutually beneficial.

With that in mind I made my way towards the stone circle’s long teeth and stood poised at the edges while I worked out what I needed to do next. I needed somewhere to “be”, so I used the dowsing rods to find me a suitable location to make the connection. Surprisingly they led me not to my usual stone, but to one of the larger stones next to it. I hadn’t worked at this stone specifically before. I had worked at those on either side of it, but not this one. I stood in the lee of the stone, against the flat of its back. The stone was almost my height at its peak, and I’m tall.

The tall stone in Druid's Circle was my workplace
The big stone in the foreground was my workplace

It was time to get to know this guide of mine. I was eager to know whether the tarot reading I had done fitted with how he revealed himself through this spiritual connection, rather than through divination. What was he here for? What could we learn from each other? Time to find out.

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Questioning everything

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Hedge Druidry, Spirits

At the start of the year I remembered that I had been chatting to Kal about the idea of questioning everything. Not absolutely everything – I had done that once before during a Philosophy degree. Rather, this was the idea of taking all of the things that I had come to rely on in the … Read More “Questioning everything” »

Arthurian Archetypes of the Cross

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Hedge Druidry, Magick, Natural Magick
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.
 
Archetypical druid (c) Chris Young/PA
 
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?

A Song for Merlin – Part 2

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Ancient Sites, Dowsing, Hedge Druidry, Natural Magick

Here is the second part of the Merlin Song story – and it gets to the interesting part of the experience – the appearance of Merlin. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about these Arthurian archetypes recently and the excellent words of Ross Nichols – former OBOD chief – have been very revealing to me about the possible ancient and current uses of such figures from a historical, magical and psychological perspective. I recommend reading his work “The Book of Druidry“. It’s fascinating, and I’ll come back to that at a later date when I talk about the Arthurian archetypes in another post.

In the meantime, we left our protagonists struggling to avoid certain wet feet as they mooched across the marshy moorland in search of a new stone circle, reputed to be of extensive size and infrequently visited. Only one of those qualities turned out to be true!

The Cockpit – fight of flight?

At the Cockpit stone circle the Merlin Quest details were explained to me. I would need to protect myself when working in the Sanctuary. I didn’t understand why yet. Then I would have to draw down the energy from the star Arcturus. I knew this star was part of the Bootes constellation, and that the name was linked with Merlin, being known as the protector of The Great Bear (King Arthur). That was the additional information I got, but I already knew that I needed to recite the Welsh phrases that I had extracted from the various power places around the country.

“The name of the star derives from Ancient Greek Αρκτοῦρος (Arktouros) and means “Guardian of the Bear”, ultimately from ἄρκτος (arktos), “bear” + οὖρος (ouros), “watcher, guardian”. It has been known by this name since at least the time of Hesiod. This is a reference to it being the brightest star in the constellation Boötes (of which it forms the left foot), which is next to the Greater and Lesser Bears, Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.” (source: Wikipedia)

With thoughts of Arthur and the Polar constellations spinning through my head I turned my attention to Merlin. Why was I being drawn to a Cumbrian stone circle? What was the purpose?

Cockpit circle – no spirit of place here

I needed a little reassurance. I knew that this was the second time around the spiral for my work with Merlin, but I didn’t understand why I had to do a similar quest as last time (August 2010). I used the energy of the circle to call upon my spirit guide and ask about the purpose of the meeting with Merlin. What was the outcome all about? I was a bit of a cheeky question, bit I felt I needed to ask. The answer was interesting: I  was not going around the spiral a second time, I was going up the spiral. It was different this time. Last time I was waking Merlin by visiting him in the underworld. This time he was trapped in the Otherworld, and I was freeing him.

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