What Druids Have to Teach Us Now about Digital Age ?
When the Roman Empire invaded and destroyed the Celtic Atlantic civilization, they came with their legions, their religion and their writing. Writing is the main tool for building empires. The Celts were not interested in building empires. The druids who ruled Celtic society knew about writing but refused to use it for anything other than trade with foreign travelers.
With the digital age, we enter a new layer of abstraction after the writing revolution.
During the writing revolution, we chose an abstract and conventional way of representing the world as outside of us, on a physical support (clay, skins, paper…), reducing our sounds, thought and emotions to a sign on an external object. We extract ourselves from the world, taking the role of gods observing the universe through our abstract signs. We then build in our minds a transparent wall between ourselves and the non-human. We have thus cut off our access to this sensitive world, considering it more and more as a mere resource and becoming strangers on our own land.
I’ve always been fascinated by the inextricable relationship between humans and nature, the problematics of language, the fact that we are nature. By using words we create a divide, an invisible barrier separating one from the other. When we name things we confuse the name for the thing.
Katie Holten in an interview by Amy Brady (https://medium.com/@amybradywrites/how-to-write-in-trees-4e2b1b2f2db3)
Till then, language was a part of us. Our words were sounds, amplified through our mouth, our flesh and bone, resonating in our landscapes. We weren’t separated from Nature. Our territory was a part of us, we lived in our territory and our community, including animals, plants, rocks and landscape, then foreign warriors came, drawing lines on the ground and telling us this square of earth is ours.
Ancients believed that naming something or someone gave one power over that thing or person. Naming on a writing gives power too. Like in the Far West, some named internet domains and got big fortunes for it. Naming became possessing. Immense wealth of a few digital aristocrats came from disappropriation of the commons. At the dawn of computing, universities exchanged freely programs. Then came Bill Gates, putting a patent upon some of these free programs.
The life forces are confronted with the Empire, with accountants and predators, arrogance and desire to annihilate any other civilization. Why ? Just because they know they, themselves, are imposters and their fake power is based upon fear and that any other way of living calls into question their own behaviour.
Writing allowed us to accumulate things, to create taxes and debts, to write laws. We have all been written in legal documents, fully documented. Now we are written through data drawing a fake portrait of each of us. Are we written beings or data beings ? Are we just defined by what we shop or by our behavior ? People are reduced to what algorithms can deal with. We live in a virtual world disconnected of the real and living beings. It is easier to lie with written words than saying lies in front of someone.
Religions came then from sacred books. Books allowed to keep memories and sometimes to change or remove some parts of them. Very often people focus on written words rather than spirit inside.
Druidic religion is strongly set on Nature. They did not represent their gods or goddesses except after roman invasion. They knew Greek scripture because they had relations with merchants but they refused to use it because it condemned their civilization, cutting their privileged link to trees and animals, and to their own territory and more to their very being. They knew people would take images and words for truth.
Territory was coded with stories that resonated with ancient myths. Language was part of territories and part of the body. Culture was intertwined with Nature. Present was intertwined with past and ancestors.
As soon as we were separated from Nature, Nature was condemned. We can live into several virtual layers like writing or digital world but we need to put Nature at the center of our lives if we want survive on this planet.
David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous speaks about the flesh of language or the landscape of language.
Now with the digital, we are on the threshold of a new revolution, when we’ll setup a new layer above writing, the digital world. Our part of Nature is disappearing with all alterations we have created.
Druids foresaw the advent of the religions of the book. They knew world was changing and that their world view based on Nature was going to mutate so they had wisdom to spread some teachings inside the new religion.
Now the religions of the book are dying with the advent of digital media but Nature is in danger. We need the mother goddess to come back and take her place so that our link to Nature become spiritual and not only for entertainment, so that sacred feminine would be respected and recognized as divine like our planet herself.
Up to one million plant and animal species face extinction, many within decades, because of human activities, says the most comprehensive report yet on the state of global ecosystems.
About 75% of land and 66% of ocean areas have been “significantly altered” by people, driven in large part by the production of food, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report.
Now our challenge is to connect ourselves with Nature and our very being. What we call civilization is very fragile and our digital network could die without electricity or with a change in electromagnetic earth field leaving us helpless in a violent environment.
Druids really go on speaking to us in this digital age.
