Robes in the rear-view mirror

I seem to be drifting into more philosophical waters lately. Perhaps it’s age, or the intellectual weather, or simply the fact that my metaphysical itches have become louder than my appetite for robes and ritual. Whatever the cause, I find myself looking back at my years in neo‑Druidry with a mixture of fondness, gratitude, and a faint, almost comic embarrassment — the kind you feel when you remember a phase of your life that was sincere, meaningful, and just a little bit theatrical.

1. The Post‑Millennial Bloom

When I first encountered Neo‑Druidry around 2004, it was enjoying a kind of post‑millennial renaissance. OBOD was thriving, The Druid Network was on the up, and there was a sense — naïve perhaps, but real — that something ancient and imaginative was re‑rooting itself in the modern world.

Now I never believed I was practising the rites of Iron Age priests. I knew about Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries, his opium‑fuelled cosmology, and the way Barddas stitched together the Western Mystery Tradition, dissenting Christianity, and a romanticised vision of the Celtic past. I knew how this stream flowed into a flood of post-World War II neo-pagan, eco-spiritual and counter-culture movements, from the 1950s to 1970s and beyond, changed and evolved. But that didn’t matter. The point wasn’t historical accuracy and a proven lineage; it was symbolic resonance.

And yes, I wore the robe. Yes, I stood at Stonehenge at Summer and Winter Solstices. Yes, I attended handfastings, naming ceremonies, and seasonal rites that were also more heartfelt than historical. None of it was satanic, sinister, or a gateway to anything dark — despite what the evangelical imagination likes to conjure. It was gentle, communal, and often quietly profound.

2. The People, Not the Pantheon

My spirituality was never polytheistic in the literal sense. I leaned toward the naturalistic, archetypal, pantheistic, and animistic ends of the spectrum. I loved the stories and the folklore, the megaliths and the liminal places, the sense of standing in a landscape that remembers more than we do.

But what drew me in most deeply were the people. After growing up among what I sometimes jokingly call “the Taliban of the Welsh chapels,” the Druidic world felt astonishingly open. There was acceptance, eccentricity, kindness, and a willingness to let people be who they were without theological interrogation.

For a time, that was enough.

3. The Embarrassment of the Robe

Now, years later, I feel a faint embarrassment when I talk about Druidry — not because it was foolish, but because it was earnest. It’s the same embarrassment one feels about cosplay, or student theatre, or the first time one tries on an identity that doesn’t quite fit but teaches you something anyway.

Druidry is unfashionable again — though, appropriately enough, its popularity seems to move in cycles, like the seasons it celebrates. But I no longer call myself a Druid, or even Druid‑adjacent. The word doesn’t quite fit the shape of my spirituality anymore.

4. What Remains

What remains is not the robe or the rites, but the orientation:

• a love of nature as a living presence
• a sense of the world as layered, symbolic, and more than material
• a taste for liminal times and places
• a metaphysical curiosity that refuses to die down
• and a quiet loyalty to the stories of my ancestors, even if I no longer frame them as literal

If there is such a thing as “Celtic spirituality,” it is plural, not singular — a constellation rather than a creed. I no longer feel the need to belong to a tradition to honour the things that once drew me toward it.

5. A Nature‑Oriented Mystic (With Metaphysical Itches)

If I have a label now, it is something like nature‑oriented mystic — though even that feels slightly too tidy. What I know is this:

I am drawn to the deep patterns of the world, to the metaphysical architecture beneath experience, to the sense that consciousness and nature are intertwined in ways we barely understand. Druidry was one chapter in that exploration — a warm, generous, slightly eccentric chapter — but not the whole story.

I don’t regret it. I don’t disown it. I simply recognise it as part of the path that brought me to where I am now: thinking more philosophically, writing more reflectively, and following the thread of meaning wherever it leads.