Druids at Wayland’s Smithy: Tracing Transformations of the Sentient Body in Ritual

Abstract

Drawing on the description of a Druidic ritual on the archaeological site of ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ in England, this essay advances a particular understanding of the body, thesentient body (Leib), in ritual theory. In this field, the body has so far primarily beenconceived semiotically, i.e. as a passive recipient of meaning (constructed through/by minds) or as a communicator of meaning, expressing in non-verbal, multi-modalmeans messages of propositional content. Since the 1990s, a new phenomenologically inspired ‘embodiment approach’ toritual has enriched our view of the body.It has been shownthat and how the body, our bodily being-in-the-world, forms the basis of ourexperience and meaning-making. I argue that we need a fuller appreciation of states ofembodiment in order to trace the potential range of transformations inherent inhuman experience, in particular in ritual experience. As these hitherto underrepresenteddimensions of embodiment take us not outwards into the world butinto ourselves, we will necessarily tread on ground that is commonly reserved forthe mind or the soul. Hence, an exploration of these dimensions of embodimentquestions the boundaries between body and mind just as the exploration of ourbeing-in-the-world has questioned the boundaries between subject and object.

Contemporary Druidry is a spiritual movement – sometimes described as a ‘nature religion’ – which originated in England in the seventeenth century (see Hutton 2007) It sees itself as being in line with a tradition that goes back to the religion of the ancient Celts and their priesthood, the Druids For that reason the British Isles are a sacred landscape to them Archaeological sites, in particular, are highly regarded in Druidry as visible and tangible links to the past and the sacred Moreover, Druids try to live in correspondence with a sacred Nature, in particular the cyclic pattern of the changing seasons, and perform rituals in order to achieve such a correspondence Samhain (better known as Halloween) is one of the important days of the ritual calendar which marks the beginning of the dark days of autumn (the dying sun), of dying Nature and the dead/ the ‘ancestors’