A Reading of Rowan Williams' 'Posidonius and the Druid'*

*from The Poems of Rowan Williams, Oxford, The Perpetua Press, 2002

by Mark Williams

THIS struck me as a remarkable poem written by a remarkable man, who is after all a cultural, Eisteddfod-style Druid himself. I was startled at the insight with which the world of the ancient Druid-as-shaman is depicted by an Anglican priest. Make no mistake: Rowan Williams is a very, very good poet, whose work is complex, compassionate and austere, with a luminous gift for word-music and metaphor. Go here for an excellent review of the volume from which this poem is drawn which opens as a PDF file. This might just be, in my opinion, the best poem about Druidry ever written.

Posidonius was a Stoic philosopher from Syria of the early 1st century BC, whose lost writings on south-eastern Gaul seem to have formed the basis for the descriptions of Druidism by Diodorus Siculus and Pomponius Mela, which survive. In this eerie poem, Rowan Williams imagines the encounter between the Hellenised ethnographer and his Druidic informant, an encounter veiled in multiple layers of irony. The setting must be somewhere in what is now Provence.

We see through Posidonius' eyes, the careful analytical observer, impressing us with the realness of the Druid. He has the freckles, pale eyes and red hair of the stereotype of the Celt, and the impaired eyesight of the intellectual. Here as throughout the poem Williams alerts us to the preconceptions and prejudices that are beneath the surface of any exchange between cultures. No surprise that his voice is fluent - a bard's voice, one who is used to commanding respect with his words; but also one who perhaps wrong-foots Posidonius at once by speaking his own Greek fluently. But here too we find the naturalistic detail that his voice is hoarse (because he only speaks rarely?) and not deep, as one would perhaps expect the tones of a 'primitive sage' to be.

Then we, like Posidonius, hear longed-for first words direct from the mouth of a Druid: Well. Like so much else in the poem, this single word is double-edged. It seems bland and conversational: So, here we are then. Ah. Hmm. But in this word, the swirl of water imagery that the Druid defines as his natural element when his soul is loosed from his body is anticipated. He begins 'Well', and his speech ends 'in these wells...' What he has to say is circular or spiral-patterned, like a river-eddy, confusing to Posidonius' linear, rational mind. We remember that his voice was fluent - literally 'flowing' - a few lines back. 'People come', says the Druid, 'like you...' (The Druid continually turns to his interlocutor, involving him - a formidable rhetorical technique; we see how skilled in speech the Druid is.) He instantly begins to deconstruct the expectations of this urbane, foreign traveller. He's seen it all before - people 'looking for secrets', like a contemporary shaman weary of starry-eyed Westerners solipsistically in search of their own idea of what he represents. The Druid's voice drips with irony; 'what we learnt from Pythagoras' - oh yes, he knows and recognises the arrogance of the civilised world that can only conceive of mystical secrets beyond its borders if it has exported them itself. He lets Posidonius know instantly that he knows the expectations with which his visitor has come - and that looking for 'a consoling echo' is intrinsically patronising. And how 'fluent' the Druid's speech is - he can bandy philosophy with the philosopher, and speak Greek with accomplished subtlety, irony and music. (Listen to the elegant sound of lines 5-7 when read aloud.) The effect is calculated to unsettle.

Parentheses enclose the detail that the Druid is 'leaning to me.' (Is Posidonius recounting his conversation with the Druid at a later time, perhaps to a friend?) Here the Druid's speech changes - 'Do you like what I've to show you?' - sharp and colloquial, we see that he is on the attack, showing that judging another's culture and thought can cut both ways. He undercuts Posidonius' abstract conception of his calling (Pythagorean primitivism) with something concrete: a well-worn knife, with its associations of sacrifice and sharpness. It's as if the Druid is saying: this is about the body and the world, not the etiolated conceptualisations of the mind. He dismisses the Greek concept of the 'logos' - that principle of meaningful order and cosmic rationality that formed a bridge in Alexandria between Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism, before being identified with Christ in John's Gospel. I understand your philosophy, says the Druid, even as you fail to understand mine - and I don't think much of it: 'Your logos is a child...chattering to itself / as it plays on the sand...' The sand is the safety of philosophical abstraction, unlike the vast sea of shamanic, experiential knowledge that is the Druid's realm. He finds the conception of the universe to which his visitor is heir trivial and childish.

Now here, Williams has done a clever thing. In Proverbs 8, God's personified Wisdom, Sophia (significantly, often identified by Hellenised Jews with the Logos) is described as being present at the beginning of creation: 'When he established the heavens I was there, when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep; when he made firm the skies above, when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth; when he set for the sea its limit, so that the waters should not transgress his command; then was I beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing on the surface of his earth...' This well-hidden Biblical allusion suggests several things. First, that the Druid has unknowingly and dismissively lighted on a truth about God, revealed in the Bible - that the Logos really is like a child playing, and there is its profundity; it suggests that the Druid's art is in some sense cold and inhuman, not 'proper to talking beings.' This is bolstered by the line in Proverbs about the sea being set in its limits, under God's command - the very 'sea' in which the Druid is a swimmer and a shapeshifter. Perhaps the Logos 'playing on the sand' also echoes John 8 (the Gospel of Christ as Logos) where Jesus does not judge the woman taken in adultery, but 'bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.' Thus, Christianity brings a humanity and a humaneness not to be found in the Druid's shamanic identification with nature.

Having dismissed the architecture of Hellenistic, Platonic philosophy, the Druid constrasts his own experiential faith. In words that echo Insular Celtic texts such as Amergin's famous invocation 'Am gaeth i mmuir' ['I am a wind upon the sea'] and the poetry of the so-called mystical Taliesin, he says: 'I am a swimmer. I am a salmon and a seal...' We are in the incantatory world of the shaman, who can take on animal form. Williams has chosen to emphasise the element of water, perhaps noting the number of bog-sacrifices and ritual deposits of jewellery and regalia in water-shrines in Celtic religion. The evocation of the eerie underwater world is masterful - 'dark swaying planes', the layers of the world through which the Druid's soul can travel at will. Sibilants swirl around the Druid's speech like tendrils of waterweed. Wherever there is water and the juices of life, the Druid is able to go, 'still as sleep'. This last phrase sounds like 'still asleep', perhaps suggesting Williams' Christian critique of the delirious loss of self in shamanic experience. The Druid's speech is intoxicating, rapt, and full of pride. Why should he want foolish, literally dry abstractions when his craft lets him swim and dive in ecstasy, tasting the sweetness and bitterness of the world? Darker notes of sexuality and wounding pulse in his speech - the severed vein, ejaculation, the hanged-man's jerkings amid the leaves, 'whose motions speak to me...' (Does he mean he divines from the leaves' rustlings, or from the convict's death-throes, as Roman authors alledge the Druids to have done? Williams leaves it ambiguous.) In the sensuousness of the Druid's exploring tongue, 'drinking words', we see that his ecstatic dwelling within nature lends him a cool apartness from humanity, whose sorrows and passions are as neutral as sea and stream to him. They are the medium in which he travels.

We shift back to Posidonius, taking the Druid's knife. What has this knife seen and done? For a second, the Druid gives him, the eager ethnographer, a glimpse of the experience of his world, by touching the knife. As though by psychometry, 'like rubbing fingers on a worn inscription', the knife's history flashes in his mind. Williams gives us an enigmatic image - these people trundling across the plains of central Europe, silently, on a mysterious journey. Are they prisoners of war to be sacrificed, 'knowing and not knowing' what is to happen to them? Or people on pilgrimage to the 'dark quiet waters' of an ancestral lake-shrine? I incline to the former possibility, the 'unfamiliarity' of the carts suggesting that they are travelling against their will. The long sentence captures Posidonius' panic at literally being immersed in the Druid's swirling world; it forms nearly all of the second stanza. It is as though holding the knife is a form of drowning, so that he strikes out 'breathless for the shore.' There he knows he'll find 'children and sand' - the Logos of his philosophy, according to the Druid's mocking characterisation - the debris of the seashore, and its mysterious 'unsafety'. What does he mean? I think it is a lack of certainty, the vulnerability of a philosophy based in reason to being overturned by new formulations and arguments. Philosophy and rationalism bring no certain answers, unlike the Druid's aqueous submerging of self, deliriously trancing in the viscera of the world. Rationality means being vulnerable to having your view of the world overturned by argument; but that is 'the anchorage / proper to talking beings'. (Unlike animals, the salmon and seal with which the Druid identified himself.) Grounded in speech and discourse - we remember the Druid was hoarse - we protect the Self and do not lose it in identification with the world, however ecstatic. In that discourse, our common humanity dwells, from which the Druid is set apart by his craft. 'Do you like / what I've to show you?' the Druid asked, mischievously, knowing his 'civilised' visitor would be repulsed by the alien, terrifying reality of the Druid's 'secrets'. Instead of what he expected, a 'consoling echo', Posidonius has found something quite different; old, frightening, even repellent to him.

There is a delicate mastery here; Rowan Williams has crafted the two voices, the ironies of exchange between to incompatible traditions, with a deft hand. We feel the surge and archaic fierceness of the Druid's world, even as we, heirs to Platonism whether we are Christian or not, feel Posidonius' fascination and fear.

Mark Williams

April 2006