Читать книгу Druidcraft: The Magic of Wicca and Druidry - Philip Carr-Gomm - Страница 12

With the coming of Christianity to Ireland, many of the pagan ways were not lost – they simply took on a Christian gloss. Luckily, the old art of storytelling did not die. The new dispensation allowed the Bardic schools that were already established to continue taking pupils, and these flourished until the seventeenth century in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, retaining their memory of the old stories and their teachings of the creative power of music and voice.

So there you have the most amazing thing happening – the spiritual tradition of the Druids and Ovates as embodied in the Bards and their tales, is taught for over a thousand years, in modified and Christianized form in the Bardic schools. By the time the last of these schools closed its doors, the old tales were well and truly embedded in the collective mind – in folklore and in the popular imagination. The very landscape of Ireland and the British Isles is steeped in these tales, and all we need to do, to connect once again with their power and the teachings that they convey, is to journey into the land and listen to these old stories once again.

The tales then become our teacher, the wilderness and the forest our school.