Phillip Carr-Gomm is a well known priest, teacher, and Chosen
Chief of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD). From the age of fifteen
he studied with his teacher, the Chief Druid Ross Nichols. Phillip's books
include 'Druid Mysteries', 'The Druid Way', 'The Elements of the Druid Tradition',
and 'Druidcraft'. You can find out more about Phillip's work here,
and through the OBOD website: www.druidry.org
The Interview
What are your earliest memories of paganism?
I was brought up in the city (Notting Hill in London) but quite
often we would go to the country, to visit my grandparents in Sussex and Hampshire.
My father’s parents lived near Burgess Hill and had, to my child’s
eye, a huge garden with a great cedar tree that I loved. (My grandfather was
a friend of Alfred Watkins and started the Straight Track Club to explore
ley lines). I used to love lying by the tree in the sun looking up at its
branches. My mother’s parents lived in an ancient cottage in West Meon
with a stream running through the garden which was small enough for a little
child to wade in. So I think my earliest memories of sensing the spiritual
in nature (which is how I am defining paganism in your question) come from
my early childhood memories of these two gardens in southern England. Later,
when I was 18, I went to live in Ireland and was just knocked out by the numinous
power of nature I experienced there.
Did you ever have any sort of
moment of realisation?
I think my first conscious awakening was on reading the book
‘The Life of the Buddha’ by L.Adams Beck, which is a wonderfully
lyrical account of the Buddha’s life. I was 11 then and it switched
something on inside me and I started trying to meditate. I also read the Lord
of the Rings and the Narnia books and longed for the Otherworldly realities
they conveyed. Soon after, when I was 12, I met my Druid teacher Nuinn (Ross
Nichols) for the first time.
How difficult was it as a younger
pagan?
Well the term pagan wasn’t the one being used around me,
it was just the word ‘druid’. I was really lucky because my father
knew Nuinn and they were friends, so Nuinn used to come to our house for dinner,
and I gradually became interested and started visiting him at his place in
Baron’s Court, west London.
How did you find Druidry, what
made you pursue it?
It was through Nuinn. He asked me if I’d help out at an
autumn equinox ceremony, and I went along to Parliament Hill when I was about
15. I remember having to wear a blue ‘tabard’ (a sort of simple
robe over my clothes) and hold one side of a withy structure that me and another
chap were to hold over ‘The Lady Ceridwen’. It was horribly windy
and cold that September and the whole experience was a physical ordeal –
my hands were going blue and I was freezing. Towards the end of the ceremony
it began to rain and the procession down the hill disintegrated as we ran
for cover. The following year Nuinn learnt that I had taken up photography
and had my own darkroom, so he asked me if I’d photograph the ceremonies.
I did this for about a year and would go and visit him with the contact sheets
which he’d look through to order enlargements, and we’d talk about
Druidry, Stonehenge, and spiritual and occult subjects in general. Gradually
the photography seemed to fall away until I was visiting for the Druidry rather
than the photography, and I asked if I could be initiated into the Order.
But I had to wait until I was 18 before I was allowed to join.
As a young pagan, did frustration
or difficulty ever make you want to give up?
No I never wanted to give up my search, and the only frustration
was not being able to learn fast enough! I was so eager I wanted to devour
books and knowledge and experience! But just for clarification I need to say
I didn’t consider myself a young pagan, more just a spiritual seeker.
I was open to all sorts of approaches including Theosophy and Rosicrucianism.
Looking back now, what would you
say about your young days, how have your experiences shaped your own vision
now?
It hasn’t really changed – that impulse is still there with me
– the desire to grow and learn and experience deeply. The eagerness
has been tempered a good deal though by experience. After a while I discovered
that rushing headlong at things doesn’t yield the required results –
some things just take time. So my biggest lesson has been perhaps to learn
patience. When you’re young patience doesn’t sound a very interesting
thing – in fact it sounds downright boring! But the initial vision,
which was also very much a collective one amongst my friends and my generation,
has stayed with me and still guides me. We were all hippies at that time and
I strongly believe the hippies were right, and that the unfolding story of
humanity and the earth is now showing this. Neil Young sang ‘Look at
Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s’ and here we are over 30 years
later and by goddess was he right! So the ecological awareness and cautions
of the hippies were spot on, as were their universalist spiritual ideals,
and their sense of justice that informed their political and economic beliefs.
So I think those early days, despite their sense of frustration from being
a clumsy adolescent who always wanted to know more, set the tone or direction
for the rest of my life.
What would you say to any young pagan/Druid
who came to you asking for advice on 'where to go' and 'what to do'?
Openness and focus are what you need. Be really open to what’s
going on around you – there are so many wonderful people, ideas, books,
music and so on. But at the same time you have to learn to focus otherwise
you can’t get any sense of direction, and you can get too much breadth
without enough depth. So ideally you have to hold this sense of awe and curiosity
and adventure, while also having a sense of what you really want to pursue
and focus on. So to give an example – I’ve always tried to learn
about lots of different spiritual ways (the Qabalah, Sufism, Buddhism, etc)
but I’ve put my focus in Druidry. Openness and focus is like the chalice
and the grail – you need both.
And finally, is there anything
else you'd like to add, in general?
Well I’d just like to say that anyone who is young now
has chosen, I believe, to incarnate at a critical time on Earth. The following
few decades are almost certainly going to be difficult in global terms (not
necessarily for the individual person reading this) simply because of the
way we’ve treated the planet. So they will be very challenging times
to live through. But challenging times can call forth the deepest qualities
in people, and although things might look very gloomy, I believe we are living
at a time of tremendous opportunity. In some mysterious way I think the alchemists
were right – the gold will emerge out of the darkness.
