There I was strolling through Albertson’s when I spied a cobalt blue bottle winking at me from a bottom shelf in the international foods section. Well, I guess in reality what caught my attention was a label which said Ty Nant. You see Ty Nant is Welsh for house by the brook or house by the stream. Naturally I was curious about this lovely bottle with the Welsh label.

As it turns out Ty Nant is bottled spring water from the village of Bethania in northwest Wales.

Bethania is a small village just south of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The closest large towns are Caerarfon and Bangor both of which are about 40 miles north through the mountains. Of course one can always take the Ffestiniog narrow guage railway to Porthmadog on the coast. Once noted for local quarries, Bethania now reaches from the wilds of north Wales to the world with spring water!

Who is to say that this water, pumped from the earth and bottled, is not from an aquifer serving the sacred wells of Wales? Certainly it has percolated through the stone heart of some of the most sacred landscape in all the world. But then it’s just water…water that just happened to find its way to a shelf in a market in Louisiana and just happened to catch the eye of a confirmed “Cymruophile” who just happened to be walking by. It’s just water…or is it?

Sacred Wells of Wales
They wait in silence,
those Wells of Wales,
those Sacred Wells.
They wait in stony, earthy, watery silence.
I hear snippets of stories told
by those silent stones of old,
stones that protected well
those Ancient Wells,
some clearly defined as in the light of
of a sunny, summer’s day,
some crumbling until there’s only gravel
scattered in that moist and blessed soil,
some have vanished,
hidden in the mists of time.
Look you then, for guardian trees,
sacred trees, Hawthornes perhaps, inhabited by faeries
and if you’re still, very still,
you may yet see the well that was –
you may even feel the dragon’s breath.
Will they welcome me,
those sacred wells,
when I am old and my journey’s nearly done?
Will the oldest of the ancients
share their secrets?
For even though their stones have crumbled
and the seep is almost dry,
the Goddess dwells, I know, in that moist and scared soil?

- Vi Jones ©May 18, 2004

It is said that the druids were masters of memory, retaining the entire body of Celtic lore and wisdom in superbly trained minds. While the druids were, in fact, literate, it seems they felt that truly important things were too important to write down. Consider the phrase “to know by heart.” It is saying that one has devoted so much of themselves to the importance of a memorized item that it is no longer just in their mind, but in their heart as well. If something is truly important to you, you will know it by heart.

Commonly, it is the secretiveness of the druids that is given as the reason for their refusal to record their wisdom in writing. I think that is a valid point, but I think there was a practical reason, too: books are not very portable and have a considerable amount of upkeep.

The Celts were a people on the move. They couldn’t very well haul libraries around with them. The highly literate cultures are also very stationary ones. They build large buildings and stay in one place with their buildings full of books. Memorization is the ultimate in portability. Once something is properly memorized, it can never be lost or taken away. Additionally, what is memorized is always “at one’s fingertips.” One doesn’t have to spend hours in researching a question. When the king wants a piece of information, the bard is right there with the answer.

I consider memorization as part of my druid training — one, I must admit, I haven’t really developed yet. There are many things that are worth memorizing and are suitably “Druidic.” By memorizing them, you are making a statement that they are truly important to you.

Rituals are an obvious choice. It’s a lot smoother to hold a ritual with all the words and actions memorized instead of reading along. Legends and Lore such as knowing every detail of every god your entire pantheon; or being able to recite from memory the Great Stories of the gods that can then be told as part of offering or other part of a high day ceremony. Your own family tree as far back as we have records is also a good choice. It’s good to honor one’s ancestors by being able to recite who they are and how they are related. Memorization for omen taking is an obviously worthwhile endeavor. A good seer will know by heart the symbols they use, their meanings, and their interrelationships.

I would think the druids were masters of mnemonics, and I’ve seen many theories about the kinds of techniques they might have mastered. This section of the Mind Tools website has a great deal of advice and techniques to use for memorizing lists or large bodies of information, and I highly recommend it to those who want to delve in to this under-appreciated aspect of druidic training.

The ancient Celts distilled their knowledge and wisdom into what are know as “triads,” pithy three-part sayings. Wolf’s Den has one of the best collections of the triads I have yet come across, with a very good introduction to understanding them and the Celtic way of thought. A few of my personal favorites:

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Three candles that illume every darkness: truth, nature, and knowledge.Three false sisters: “perhaps”, “maybe”, and “I dare say”. There are three whose full reward can never be given to them: parents, a good teacher, and the Mighty Ones [Gods].

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No study of Druidism would be complete without a thorough study of the triads.

One of the beauties of Druidry, and also of Neo-Paganism in general, is that it is largely a “blank slate” that practitioners can make of what they wish. This is also its greatest weakness. Because there is no central authority, there is no consistent guidance on matters of ethics. Because it is left to the individual to figure out, it is often mistakenly believed that “what is right and wrong for one person may not be what is right and wrong for another.” Each person gets to choose what is moral, and all choices are often seen as equally valid.This is sometimes inaccurately referred to as “moral relativism.” As critics of Neo-Paganism are quick to point out, if morality is truly this relative, then why not burn witches if doing so is “right for me?” True moral relativism, as a philosophical theory, says that morals are relative to a culture or society, not to an individual. This individualistic “moral relativism,” then, is not philosophically sound. If morality exists at all, it is universal at least to a culture. But I would argue against any kind of relativism and suggest that morality truly is universal. We would not have much of a leg to stand on if morality were dictated by a culture since, being minorities in our cultures, many of our activities would have to be considered immoral inasmuch as they diverge from the majority’s sense of morality.

Therefore, it may be in our interest to consider morality a universal that transcends time and culture. Not only does it allow us to break free from the often stifling local mores of the predominant culture to the extent they diverge from “universal” morality, it gives us a stronger reason to explore the past and seek to understand what our ancestors thought about morality and virtue.

Because there is no central authority to hand down proclamations concerning morality, we must find our universal principals from other sources - the same ones the ancients did. The three pillars of Pagan morality are reason, experience, and intuition. Any rule or system of morality must be supported by all three. They must withstand analytical scrutiny, comport to our every-day experience, and ring true in our hearts.

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Inspired by a recent post on Brenda Daverin’s blog, I’ve been thinking about the difference between taboo words in ancient times and those of today. From what sources are available, it seems that taboo words in ancient times were taboo out of respect for the power of the word or the deity to which they were connected.

To the ancient Hebrews, the name of their God was a taboo word. There is linguistic evidence that certain words connected to the gods of the Proto-Indo-Europeans were taboo. Peter Ellis in his book, The Druids, speaks of the work of Paul Meillet on the subject of taboo words:

Meillet pointed to the fact that there seemed to be no identifiable common Indo-European root for the hand or arm and concluded that the word was a subject of taboo. The word for hand/arm varies so much in each Indo-European language … suggesting that a euphemism was used in each language. He pointed to this being due to an ancient Indo-European cult of a god with a large hand or long arm.

This long arm god becomes Lugh to the Irish Celts. There is also similar evidence concerning astronomical words such as “sun” and “moon” — words also obviously linked to key deities.

In contrast to the ancient world, most taboo words today, in American English at least, are taboo because we want to diminish them and ‘clean’ them from our public discourse. But, I think the ancients understood something that we don’t today. They understood that to make a word secret gives it power.

Consider how much power our taboo words have simply because they are taboo. The more taboo they are, the more powerful they are. We feel that power when we release them in fits of anger or frustration. There’s a scene in the movie “A Christmas Story” where the little boy, in a moment of desperate frustration, yells, “Oh FUDGE!” But as the little-boy-grown-up narrator makes clear: “I didn’t say ‘Fudge.’ I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the ‘F-dash-dash-dash’ word!” The ‘F-dash-dash-dash’ word has power, but only because we gave it power as the ‘ultimate’ taboo word.

I think what this means for us, in trying to reconnect with the ways of the ancients, is that we should be careful how we use words concerning our deities. We should speak of them with respect, obviously, but maybe more than that. To the Celts, it seems, it was not the names of the deities themselves that were taboo, but what they were associated with. There was a ’secret’ name for ‘moon’ and for ‘hand.’ Perhaps, we should meditate on the secret names — the True Names of the Moon and the Earth, the Sun and the Sky. I don’t mean to try to figure out what those names are. They will be forever secret to us all. I mean to meditate on the truth that they have secret names — names that only They will ever know. We should appreciate the power of secrets, guard the secrets we have been entrusted with, and not disrespect our gods by speaking carelessly of them.