I'm glad to see you following this thread a little further along, and I look forward to your expanded thoughts - it's a topic I've also given some thought to, as we've discussed on previous posts.
I wasn't regularly following the Dreamwidth journal when that thread was posted, so I'll have to read it to catch up, but a few thoughts based just on what you have here:
1) On the breadth of Revival Druidry: when I first read JMG's descriptions of Revival Druidry, it did not sound appealing to me at all. At the time, I was deep in the grips of reconstructionism as my guiding religious light. After taking up magical practice, though, I ended up getting nudged to find a complete system to work through instead of trying to kitbash my own, and the Druid Magic Handbook seemed flexible enough to handle where I was religiously while still giving me a complete path that would require discipline and will to finish. Over the past year (almost exactly!) working with the rituals and doing the meditations while still keeping up a primarily Germanic prayer practice, I have come more and more to appreciate what a fine balance Revival Druidry as presented by JMG strikes between "believe what you want about the Gods" with "here's a solid spiritual and philosophic core and set of ritual practices that you should mostly stick with". Now, to be fair, I've only done solitary practice, so I don't know how well it would actually work in practice for me to try to celebrate the summer solstice with a handful of other Revival Druids. Considering the whole point of an organization would be to have some kind of shared experience with others, this could be a problem.
2) On the Guild as a model: your last comment intrigues me greatly, as I've been reading more about guilds of late. The Ealdrice Theod (Theodish group in Virginia) actually changed their model of local religious groups from "Kindreds" to "Haliggilds" (Holy Guilds). Their founder has a pretty interesting essay on the history of the concept in Anglo-Saxon times here: https://ealdrice.org/guild/ . JMG also has had a lot to say about guilds in at least his fiction, and I've started to track down some historical books on the concept. For the current topic, one of the things that seems promising about a guild is that you can have broader bylaws for the overall guild, and then local guilds can be more specialized. Have a large group that worships Germanic Gods in your city and others who worship the Roman Gods? You could either have two different locals or one more open one. The default "apprentice, journeyman, master" structure also allows for fairly flexible governance - masters mostly get to do what they want with their groups, bigger questions get decided by a meeting of masters, and every level has certain rights and duties associated with it. Perhaps advancing in levels requires demonstrating some level of ritual, scholarly, or artistic competence. These are all just vague ideas so far, but a very interesting line of thought!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-07-12 06:48 pm (UTC)I wasn't regularly following the Dreamwidth journal when that thread was posted, so I'll have to read it to catch up, but a few thoughts based just on what you have here:
1) On the breadth of Revival Druidry: when I first read JMG's descriptions of Revival Druidry, it did not sound appealing to me at all. At the time, I was deep in the grips of reconstructionism as my guiding religious light. After taking up magical practice, though, I ended up getting nudged to find a complete system to work through instead of trying to kitbash my own, and the Druid Magic Handbook seemed flexible enough to handle where I was religiously while still giving me a complete path that would require discipline and will to finish. Over the past year (almost exactly!) working with the rituals and doing the meditations while still keeping up a primarily Germanic prayer practice, I have come more and more to appreciate what a fine balance Revival Druidry as presented by JMG strikes between "believe what you want about the Gods" with "here's a solid spiritual and philosophic core and set of ritual practices that you should mostly stick with". Now, to be fair, I've only done solitary practice, so I don't know how well it would actually work in practice for me to try to celebrate the summer solstice with a handful of other Revival Druids. Considering the whole point of an organization would be to have some kind of shared experience with others, this could be a problem.
2) On the Guild as a model: your last comment intrigues me greatly, as I've been reading more about guilds of late. The Ealdrice Theod (Theodish group in Virginia) actually changed their model of local religious groups from "Kindreds" to "Haliggilds" (Holy Guilds). Their founder has a pretty interesting essay on the history of the concept in Anglo-Saxon times here: https://ealdrice.org/guild/ . JMG also has had a lot to say about guilds in at least his fiction, and I've started to track down some historical books on the concept. For the current topic, one of the things that seems promising about a guild is that you can have broader bylaws for the overall guild, and then local guilds can be more specialized. Have a large group that worships Germanic Gods in your city and others who worship the Roman Gods? You could either have two different locals or one more open one. The default "apprentice, journeyman, master" structure also allows for fairly flexible governance - masters mostly get to do what they want with their groups, bigger questions get decided by a meeting of masters, and every level has certain rights and duties associated with it. Perhaps advancing in levels requires demonstrating some level of ritual, scholarly, or artistic competence. These are all just vague ideas so far, but a very interesting line of thought!