On Druids, Magic Mushrooms and Cultural Memory

News that the psilly season is officially underway (with early reports that this might prove to be a bumper year) means it's a good time to return to the question of whether psilocybin mushrooms were ever used in British prehistory.

When I was researching Shroom I found a complete absence of evidence for anyone consuming magic mushrooms before the eighteenth century, and even then such reports as exist show ingestion remained accidental and unintentional right up until 1970, a staggeringly late date. Many lines of evidence have been put forward to suggest our Stone, Bronze and Iron Age forebears deliberately used mushrooms, but sadly none are categorical and each is open to alternative and typically more parsimonious explanation.

The absence of evidence in the archaeological record is unsurprising given that fungi rot away to gloop unless actively dried or preserved in some way. Nor does consuming magic mushrooms require any special paraphernalia - pipes, grinders, pouches or so on - the kind of things that do turn up in excavations. So until Liberty Caps are found jammed in a pot or preserved in the stomach contents of a bog-body, we're left in the unsatisfactory position of not knowing one way or the other. It does mean, however, that we're pretty much free to believe whatever we want.

I concluded that if prehistoric people had used psilocybin mushrooms then they must have done so in a small-scale and localised manner. For if psilocybin mushrooms formed the backbone of prehistoric religious practice, as so many have claimed, there there surely would have been more unequivocal evidence than the occasional bit of 'possibly-trippy' artwork in a passage-grave or on a cave wall. But the traces just aren't there. Now I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't too hasty.

What got me thinking again was watching an old episode of Britain BC in which archaeologist Francis Pryor likened the Roman slaughter of the Druids on Anglesey in AD60 to the much more famous burning of the library at Alexandria. In that dreadful inflagration countless precious papyri, the great works of the ancient world, were permanently lost. The Druids famously eschewed the written word, so why the connection?

As Ronald Hutton demonstrates in his magisterial Blood and Mistletoe, much of what we think we know about the Druids comes from the works of classical sources and is therefore not necessarily to be trusted. Authors like Pliny the Elder and Julius Caesar either romanticised the Druids from afar, or regarded them with suspicion as the enemy to be overcome. Nonetheless it does seem likely that the Druids were a kind of priesthood, involved in law-giving, settling disputes, divination, performing sacrifices and so on, and that becoming a Druid was a long and complicated process in which the noviciate was required to commit vast tracts of cultural lore to memory. It was this oral knowledge that Pryor was alluding to. All of it was lost when Gaius Suetonius Paulinus sent his troops across the Menai Straits to cut down the sacred groves and put every last Druid to the sword.

Once again absence of evidence has allowed every generation to reinvent the Druids, for example as devil-worshipping heathens or as proto-Christian prophets or even stoned-out hippies.

And as a child of my time I tend to think of the Druids as woojied-up, tattooed shamans with a profound knowledge of plants, animals and the land. In other words I'm starting to wonder if they might n't have known about and used magic mushrooms after all. To be clear, this is at best an inference, most likely pure fantasy, but, well, it's a hypothesis.

To illustrate the kind of knowledge I mean, here's an excellent talk by anthropologist Jeremy Narby recalling his ontologically-shattering encounter with indigenous Amazonian worldviews as a PhD student back in the 80s. Then he was as unable to countenance the indigenous view of plants - that, when seen through the ayahuasca telescope, they talk to us - as I suspect the Romans were that of the Druids.

So Pryor's observation has opened up the possibility for me that Iron Age Druids might have known about and used magic mushrooms even if there's no way of testing it.

Either way, it's a sobering reminder of what happens when cultural memory is lost. For in the Amazon, as elsewhere, we continue the Romans' work with renewed virulence. And with every shaman that falls so too do whole libraries that would put Alexandria to shame.

Red Dog Green Dog and Wod

What happens when Red Dog Green Dog and Wod get together to jam, late at night, a little worse for wear, for the benefit of the last remaining dancers in an eighteenth century barn on an organic farm in Dorset?

Why this, obviously. The tune is one of Jim's, a rondeau called Bright Silver Dog.




Should you want more, we're doing another joint gig on Dartmoor in December. See you there.

On Hats and Looking Like Guy Fawkes

Owing to the vagaries of genetics I have rather limited options for playing with pogonotrophy. My facial hair grows naturally into the d'Artagnan 'tash and goatee I've been sporting for years. Apparently this gives me the likeness of one Guido Fawkes, but I don't see it myself.

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to be invited to do a Round Table interview with Howard Gayton and the elusive occult artist, Rex Van Ryn during which Rex asked if I'd consider modelling for the character of Guy Fawkes who is to appear in the forthcoming second volume of their excellent graphic novel series, John Barleycorn Must Die. Naturally I said yes, for though I prefer my protests to involve a little less blowing up, like Guy I do love a good hat. Hat-wearing is one of the few perks of middle age.

Before...

...and after.

This weekend, love of a good hat took me to what is possibly the best hat-shop in the world, Snooks of Bridport. Friendly staff, great service and definitely no snook-cocking whatsoever.

My old Rat Pack had started to whiff a bit like old rat and to everyone's relief I decided it was time for something new. Sadly I lack the necessary je ne sais quoi to pull off the Silk-Cut-purple fedora so settled instead for a black Stingy Brim.

Alas, I think I look more like Guy Fawkes than ever. Better keep my head down in the coming weeks.

Drawing Inspiration

As any creative person will tell you, there are times when inspiration strikes and the work pours out as if it comes through you, not from you. For poet, essayist and novelist Robert Graves this produced what he called Muse poetry, poetry that is 'composed at the back of the mind; an unaccountable product of a trance in which the emotions of love, fear, anger, or grief are profoundly engaged, though at the same time powerfully disciplined.'

The quest for inspiration, poetic or otherwise, is central to contemporary Druidry where it is called awen. This Welsh word can be translated as flowing spirit and may ultimately derive from an Indo-European root meaning to blow. Awen is said to course through the universe like a benign electricity where it can be channelled by anyone into creative acts.

Druidry has also given us an increasingly popular way of depicting inspiration, the awen symbol: three rays of light descending from heaven. Or perhaps three drops of inspiration flying from the cauldron of Ceridwen, a witch who appears in the medieval Welsh story of Taliesin.

Though I live for those rare moments when inspiration calls I've never particularly warmed to the awen symbol. Perhaps it's because of its unfortunate resemblance to a cricket stump (a game I despised having to play as a child), or to those uncanny Mason's marks you see on old buildings. I find it too rectilinear and a bit too goddy.

Indeed the symbol was the creation of Iolo Morgannwg (1747-1826), Welsh nationalist, Romantic, laudanum addict and master forger, whose own inspired writings laid the foundations of modern Druidry. Iolo saw Druidry as a kind of radicalised Christianity and I can't help but think that in creating the symbol he was thinking of the Holy Spirit descending from on high.

Well, I prefer to think of inspiration - in as much as it is helpful to do so - as a triskele or triskelion, an ancient symbol often, though not exclusively, associated with the Celts. It's a symbol for Brittany too, which is where I picked up this key-ring.

In the triskele, I see inspiration welling up from the centre rather than descending from on high. In its flowing curls I see waves surging round rocks, the unfurling of fronds, the lick of a flame, the leading edge of a cloud. I see ingress and egress, ebb and flow, a reaching out and a drawing back. Threeness is preserved but in the ever-moving shape of the equilateral triangle, itself a time-honoured symbol of the transcendent.

I think we often fall into the mistake of thinking that symbols mean something in an X equals Y kind of way. The first thing we ask of an unfamiliar symbol is 'what does it mean?' But if that were so symbols would be words and we wouldn't need them. Symbols don't mean anything; rather they are fecund triggers to the imagination that allow meaning to arise through their contemplation.

Either a symbol works for you or it doesn't and all I'm expressing here is my personal preference. But for me the triskele is a more faithful representation of the experience of inspiration which comes as soft summer rain, never hard light through clouds. It always wells up unbidden and can never be invoked. The trick, then, is to make it good with craft - Graves' 'powerful discipline' - before it ebbs away again.

The Homeliness of English Folk

An old friend Sam came to stay and as he's one of the best English fiddlers of his generation we naturally got talking about English folk music.

The reason he loves it so much, he said, was that it makes him feel truly at home, rooted, like he belongs. When he hears a Morris tune he knows it's 'his' and that he can 'muck about' with it (though Sam's mucking about is everyone else's sublime and careful  handling).

My relationship with English folk music has been far less straightforward. That I've learned to love it has everything to do with The English Acoustic Collective. They persuaded me - through seeing them live, hearing their album Ghosts, and in person at their summer school - that there's more to English folk than the rumpety-pumpety, humpty-dumpty, fal-da-ral-daro I'd always despised. It's not all relentlessly upbeat and sweet: there are dark undercurrents and rhythmic complexities lurking there.

But the fact that I've had to learn to love it is telling. The very homeliness that Sam loves instilled in me a kind of musical wanderlust, a yearning for something else, for other times and places. I looked South to France, East to the Balkans and India, and backwards to the to the Middle Ages. I've always liked music that makes me feel distinctly unhomely.

Actually, that's an exaggeration - I struggle with abstract free-form jazz for example - so it's fairer to say that I love music on the threshold.

Perhaps it's down to the fact that he plays fiddle and I play bagpipes. However much it limped its way into the twentieth century there was nevertheless a tradition of English fiddling for Sam to pick up. Southern English bagpiping - whatever that was - died in the seventeenth century, maybe even earlier. No one bothered to write it down. So while there are many English country dance tunes you can play on the pipes, there aren't many bagpipe tunes (unless and until you head north). That layer in the musical archaeology has gone, which is possibly why English folk as we know it lacks the goatishness I've found elsewhere.

But whatever the differences in our relationship with English folk music, our respective hankering for the homely and the unhomely, I'm extremely grateful to Sam for turning me on to Polish band Mosaic. I'd be hard pressed to find a better example of what I mean.