by Searles O'Dubhain

Searles O'Dubhain was the most prolific scholar on alt.religion.druid, author of the Summerlands Druidic curriculum and dozens of essays on Ogham, Irish mythology, and Druidic practice. In this 2011 piece, he takes on Ronald Hutton — the British historian and author of Blood and Mistletoe (2009), the landmark academic survey of Druidic history — who argued that so little can be known about ancient Druidry with certainty that modern practice necessarily rests on preference rather than tradition. Searles disagrees: he argues that Hutton's academic skepticism, however well-intentioned, cuts the living root of tradition and denies the testimony of generations. The tension between scholarly rigor and spiritual continuity runs through everything Searles wrote — here it comes to a head.

In most of his works on Neo-Paganism and neo-Druidry (including his latest, Blood and Mistletoe), Ronald Hutton has maintained a position that not much could be known for certain about its connections to ancient traditions except to say that modern groups are basing their ideas and practices on unsubstantiated opinion and personal preferences. Hutton lays pretty much the same approach on the members of the early 17th century Druid Revival in England. He's right in some respects and wrong in others. The idea that history is subjective and expressed by all-too-human historians cannot be denied. The best one can do is compare reports and whatever comes out of science to match or patch together which subjective reports seem to match up best with the best data science can derive from the surviving evidence. Linguistics, archaeology, tree ring and pollen analysis, DNA studies, written documents from eye witnesses, anthropological and folkloric studies, and astronomical observations and events, are all used to correlate historical records and reports. The science of today is obviously superior to the science of the 17th century, though 17th century Revivalists were certainly closer to some of the surviving traditions in terms of the surviving folklore and folk practices.

In his quest to be coldly objective, Ronald Hutton says that the best of the historical information available from Classical historians might be right and it could well be wrong. According to Hutton, one simply cannot know what actually happened and so we are reduced to embracing what we would prefer had happened. To me, this is simply unacceptable. It flies in the face of what we do know about the ancient Druids. It is in opposition to what their surviving traditions thought and preserved. It is even at cross purposes with what the folklore and folk practices of the cultures that the Druids had once guided maintained. Christianity even preserved some context about the Druids and it is a culture that existed concurrently with Druidry before supplanting it as an official religion to the Celtic kings and their people. Simply put, our ancestors had beliefs about the Druids that they passed down from age to age until we have them today. When Ronald Hutton says that we cannot know whether the historians were right or wrong about the Druids, he is also saying that our ancestors were less certain or factual about them than that. He does not say they were wrong. He just implies that they were probably not right.

In so doing, he is basically saying that our ancestors were fooling themselves in believing their traditions to be true. He is also telling us that our present practices and research into the ancient ways have little chance of being right either. In being so ruthlessly academic about the matter he is cruelly and unnecessarily thrusting a knife into the heart of traditions. He seems also to be ignoring or distancing himself from any sort of spiritual or esoteric connection to the practices and traditions in question. That is to be understood because he writes and works in an academic environment — no matter what he may practice or experience in his spiritual life. Even Christian scientists compartmentalize their spiritual life from their academic or scientific life. I give Ronald Hutton the benefit of the doubt about the chance of him having such a dual relationship with the materials. I hope that he does because all that we are is not limited to body and mind. We are in the finest Celtic belief, also spirits inhabiting those bodies and minds. Unlike hard facts and physical forms, spirit never dies and is an unbroken stream from the earliest of times until there is no time to measure. Life would not be possible or even bearable without the gifts of spirit to sustain us in our bodies and our thoughts. We cannot let what has happened for our people vanish under an academic objection or a world of hard and unforgiving forms. It's time to walk the Druid way with other Druids and to experience the truth against the world. Perhaps our lives should have a certainty at their centers even though there may be an uncertainty that exists beyond the boundaries?

Colophon

Written by Searles O'Dubhain and posted to alt.religion.druid in June 2011.

Searles O'Dubhain (1955–2010) was the founder of the Summerlands, the primary online school of Celtic Druidry in the 1990s and 2000s, and the author of hundreds of essays on Ogham, Irish mythology, the filidh tradition, and Druidic cosmology. He died in 2010 — this post was written while the community was still mourning his death and archiving his work, or just after the archive posts that circulated following his passing. Ronald Hutton's Blood and Mistletoe (2009) was the immediate occasion of this response.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: 2ddb7ad0-c4e8-4eb3-8475-a1508af2e371@g12g2000yqd.googlegroups.com

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