Welcome
Greetings and Welcome to Geal-Darach Grove, the Grove of the White Oaks. We are a druid group in the Twin Cities area of Minneapolis & St. Paul in the North Star State of Minnesota. Geal-Darach is a seed-group of the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD), one of the largest modern Druid orders with its roots in England and its branches in many countries. Through its distance learning course, OBOD teaches a Druidry that balances love of ancient Celtic lore and the needs of the modern world. This web site is intended to provide information about our grove for local members of the Order and those who are interested in joining the Order. It contains information about druidry in general and about the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids particularly. Please read and enjoy and contact us if you have any questions or live in the area and would like to visit on of our seasonal celebrations.
As an OBOD seed-group, we are a resource for OBOD members in the area who want to get together in person with other members of the order. The order’s teaching program is conducted entirely via distance learning with the aid of specially trained tutors, so our seed-group is not a teaching group as such. OBOD’s study courses are elegant programs for personal transformation calling upon the ancient wisdom of the Druid tradition in Britain. Click on “Our Grove” at left for more about that.
What is Traditional British Druidry?
Traditional British Druidry is a movement that has been evolving for at least the past 250 years and is one of the branches of fraternal orders that grew out of Freemasonry and the many other spiritual movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Within this tradition druidry is a philosophical and spiritual path. You are free to adopt it as your religion, as a philosophy of life, or simply as a way of living. Unlike most religions, this kind of druidry is not rigidly reconstructionist or Neopagan. It has no dogmas, few rules of any kind, and individual druids are free to pursue their own enlightenment and understanding.
Among druids there is no central authority that dictates doctrine, and within OBOD teaching is not oriented around charismatic leaders. We are not, for the most part, engaged in trying to adopt an Iron Age way of life, but are fully engaged in the modern world. Don’t let the druid robes fool you: Modern druidry is a movement that is focused on the way we live now, the way we engage with nature and the planet, and with other groups of people on political, religious, or practical grounds.
In the world of modern druids there are three basic types — religious druids, political druids, and philosophical druids. Political druids devote their time and energy to protecting stone circles, burial sites, or places of natural wildness and beauty. Religious druids may be hard to distinguish from the mass of neo-pagans, partly because the modern neo-pagan movement borrowed many ideas from both Freemasonry and Druidry early in the 20th century. OBOD represents mostly the last approach, one of philosophy and way of life. Members are at liberty to practice any religion they wish or none at all. They may personify the Divine All or the nature spirits, commune with the Tuatha Dé Danann, or approach Nature from a purely scientific point of view.
Are Druids Witches?
Some druids are also witches but for the most part those druids today who practice their druidry as their religion do so as a distinct practice descended in lines that are distinct from the various lines of Wicca or other modern witchcraft traditions. You will find many similarities because both broad streams of spiritual practice benefited from tributary streams coming from the ancient Mediterranean cultures and the many centuries of magical and alchemical work done by our ancestors. Neither witchcraft nor druidry today represents any sort of “purity” of religion or teaching that is completely uninfluenced by the Judeo-Christian schools, Kabbalah, or Hermeticism. However, druids tend to find their symbolism and concepts not through kabbalism and medieval grimoires, or in the accounts of witchcraft that come to us from the Early Modern period of the witch hunts. Druids today tend to create their own systems based upon nature and the particular places they live.
Like most witches, druids structure their rituals around the concepts of the four directions and the four elements but add to these the three worlds of Celtic myth and the Otherworld, the dwelling place of the ancestors and the Hidden Peoples, those various species of creatures commonly called elves, dwarves, fairies, and so forth. Raising magical energy either singly or in groups is not the primary focus of druidry. Magical working in the form of spell-casting plays almost no part in druid practice. Instead, inner work with spirit guides and with the ancestors, work with the elements in nature, and exercises which reconnect us to our natural selves and to our lands on a spiritual and physical level.
In druidry there is no “God and Goddess” pair, though some druids find these generic divinities useful concepts. Usually, when druids engage with the Divine it is through the mediation of particular mythic figures drawn from Celtic, or sometimes Norse, or even Egyptian and Christian imagery and stories. Like Freemasonry, traditional British Druidry regards all religions as valid and valuable to the extent that they bring Light to their faithful. It regards symbols as the language of spirit and religious stories as just that, stories (mythos in Greek). It is not which stories we like that is as important as what we do with those stories to understand ourselves and our lives as human beings in the world. The non-human world, in all its manifestations, is our great teacher.
Seedgroups & Groves
OBOD seed-groups are those gatherings of order members who do not yet include more than one member of druid grade. As a seed-group, Geal-Darach Grove welcome members of other druid orders, such as ADF or AODA, as well as hedge druids and seekers who are not members of any order. What unites us as friends is our shared values. Principal among modern druid values are the love of nature, respect for all living things, and respect for the Earth. This also means respect for each other, so among the behaviors we cannot tolerate are power struggles and head-butting within the grove. If you can’t get along with other people and respect their views compassionately, or if you believe that you have all the right answers, this won’t be the community for you.
In OBOD the term “Grove” has two meanings. One refers to a local group that has at least two members of Druid grade in the order. The other meaning is a gathering of members in one of the three grades of the Order. Thus, for example, a Grove (in the large sense) might hold a “grove of bards” or a “grove of druids” to do work with the meditations and content particular to that grade in the order. These grade-specific groves permit large groups or gatherings to break out into smaller groups and to focus on the work of their particular grade. Within Geal-Darach Grove our Grove of Bards is very active with new members joining as they discover the order or are called to druidry. Bards work on understanding the world through the creative imagination in the symbolic language of directions, seasons, elements, and the cycles of sun and moon.
Religion & Philosophy
OBOD is not a religion, church, or a cult, nor does the order require you to renounce other faiths that form a part of your identity and heritage. Some OBOD members are Neopagan polytheists, some are Christian, some atheists preferring to see gods and goddesses as constructs of the mind and of culture. Some have dealings with Elves and the Sidhe folk, while others study and commune with Germanic gods and goddesses. OBOD Druidry has clear affinities with Buddhism and Taoism as well as other mystical and magical traditions throughout the world, and has certainly been influenced by the last two hundred years of interest in Eastern ideas and practices. However, the traditional British Druidry we practice finds its core inspiration in the past three hundred years of Western searching for an indigenous British and Celtic spirituality, and for inner knowledge. In addition, OBOD has a distinctly psychological approach infused with the wisdom of contemporary depth psychology.
There are no clergy or laity in OBOD’s Druidry, no priests or priestesses and no explicit declaration to turn ourselves into “gods” and “goddesses.” Ther are only the three grades of Bard, Ovate, and Druid, which are three parts of a gradual study program that delves into the psyche, spirit, and myths of Celtic culture, ancient and modern. Belief in and engagement with nature spirits or the Good People (also called the Sidhe in Ireland) is left up to the conscience of the individual, but you will meet people who do talk about meeting “Faerie folk” and spirits. Similarly, the practice of magic is entirely left up to the interests of individual members. Some practice various magical methods, but collective spell-casting or raising cones of power are not a part of OBOD’s Druidry as such. The magic of Druidry has to do with self-expression, self-transformation, and creating relationships between one’s own soul and the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World.
In short, Druidry is a philosophy or a religion or both, as you choose to see it. There are no dogmas and no authorities. Each druid decides if he or she wishes to self-define as a druid and each decides what he or she believes according to individual conscience. If you move on and decide not to call yourself a druid anymore, you will still be welcome in the grove and if you choose to go on to other things, that is perfectly normal. That is, after all, what a spiritual path is about: The metaphor of the path in the woods comes from hunting and we each seek our own White Hart in our own forest.
Links at the left will take you to more information about Geal-Darach Grove, about OBOD, and about our past and future gatherings. The link to our Yahoo group will take you to our calendar. Send a request to join that group, if you want to receive email notices of upcoming events. If you want to have tea, discuss OBOD, or inquire about visiting a grove meeting email Sean Nilsen, Grove Pendragon or Alferian, Chief Druid.
