The Urban Ovate

The Handbook of Psychological Druidry

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Contents

Your Culture

I am from an Irish culture, in that both of my parents were Irish. Despite the fact that I was born and raised in London, this is still the culture I grew up in. By this I mean that I share the characteristics of my race. Irish people like to have the 'craic', which is singing, dancing and drinking. We are sentimental and like slushy songs. We have been described as having an hysterical temperament, in that we are easily upset, don't control our emotions well and tend to bear grudges when we are crossed. If you want evidence of the Irish ability to hold grudges you just have to look at the Northern Irish problem. On the positive side we are happy, like jokes (even against ourselves) and like to talk socially.

Our love of drinking can be a bad thing, in that we get drunk easily, but don't stop when we have had enough and this can lead to fights or violence. In fact when I first went out with my future wife, we went to a pub and she jokingly asked me when I was going to start fighting! Fortunately I am also a coward and don't like violence. This shows that you don't have to subscribe wholly (or even partially) to the racial stereotype of your culture and a lot of people don't, but it is important to be aware of the cultural pressures that you are under, especially if you are unaware that you have any.

Incidentally, a lot of people don't like these cultural stereotypes and this resulted in my first rejection of an article for Touchstone, the Druid journal. I wrote an article about the genome of a typical Irishman being sequenced and thought I would make it more interesting by pointing out that the genes for drunkenness weren't located. Penny, the editor, rightly rejected the article by pointing out that many people put aside their sense of humour when they put on the Druid robe.

Another characteristic of Irish people is that they love to argue, frequently taking a stance that they don't believe in just for the sake of arguing. Yet another aspect of the Irish is that they love to tell stories, but a story is best told with a little embellishment for effect. I was flabbergasted to find out that my wife (who comes from a staunch Presbyterian background) calls this lying, but everyone does this when they tell stories don't they? So this is a trivial example of cultural heritages leading to misunderstanding.

If you are not familiar with the approach of discovering your cultural heritage, it can be somewhat confusing. So think about your culture and see if it has any influences on you or not. You might be surprised by what you find. When you have thought about this decide whether the cultural behaviour you display is actually appropriate to you now. You may find that it is, in which case that is great, but if it is not then why continue to do it? When you have done this you have completed the first stage in finding out what moves you.

1) What is your culture?

2) What characterises your culture?

3) Do you display any of these characteristics?

Your Genetic Inheritance

This can be a troublesome area as it smacks of eugenics and racial profiling, but it doesn't really. In fact, if you are European, your genetic inheritance shows that we are actually all brothers and sisters. This also applies to most Americans as well because many Americans originated in Europe. A guy called Professor Bryan Sykes wrote a book in 2001 called The Seven Daughters of Eve in which he postulated that all people in Europe were descended from just seven women, and 40 per cent of the people in Europe from just one. As many of the people in North America are also derived from European peoples, it is probably true for them too. This was a startling revelation at the time and caused a lot of excitement.

Subsequently there is evidence for another Scandinavian family and some dispute as to whether there should be 12 families, but the point still stands. We are all descended from a very small group of people.

Obviously there were more than seven women alive at the time that each of the 'Daughters of Eve' lived, but the theory goes that the others didn't give rise to descendants that crossed the centuries or only had sons. Yes, that's right only sons; the genetic material that they are tracking is only passed through the matrilineal line, so boys don't count. These women didn't live at the same time, but very roughly date back to about 50,000 years ago. I was talking about this in a lecture a few years ago and a student came up to me afterwards. I was astonished that a student had actually listened to what I was saying and had something to contribute! Anyway, he was Indonesian and pointed out that there was a super volcano that exploded in Indonesia 50,000 years ago and this may have nearly wiped out the human race. So it was entirely feasible that we could be descended from a small population of people.

In case you are interested, the DNA they are tracking is in the mitochondria of your cells (these provide the energy for your cells), which are only passed on by the female egg cells. They are not passed from the sperm, so only the female contributes to the transfer of this information. As you have probably also realised, the reason that female inheritance can be tracked back so far is because for a lot of history the fate of women was to wait for the next barbarian to knock down their door and slaughter their husband and children. Invaders rarely kill the women, and as women therefore didn't move around very much they have deep ancestral connections to where they live. A good example of this is in Neil Oliver's book on the Vikings (not Celtic so not in the reading list, sorry Neil) where he states that the women in the Shetland Islands can be tracked back for 12,000 years or so and all of the men are genetically Vikings.

If you would like to know which tribe you belong to you can get a determination from www.oxfordancestors.com for about £200. I am not an advocate for any commercial organisation so this is only given for information. They used to do it by sending you a scraper that you used to collect some cells from the inside of your cheek. I remember doing this with 14 students in a forensics practical once and only three of them turned out to be human, i.e. only three had any DNA at all, so you need to scrape thoroughly.

Your genetic inheritance is, of course, also related to the Human Genome Project, which promised so much and gave us an exciting race between the academics and the commercial company that tried to be the first to do it. Yes, maybe I should get out more. Anyway, one of the main conclusions of this was a somewhat surprising one, but important for Druidry. The DNA in your cells codes for the proteins that make up your body, so one would expect that in a complex creature like a human there would be lots of genes coding for a wide variety of proteins. This turned out not to be the case, the human genome codes for only about 20,000 proteins. This number of genes is not significantly more than those of a fruit fly. This is a sobering thought, that you are no more complex from this point of view than a tiny black fly! So there is no evidence in the genome for our complexity. This is an area of hot dispute at the moment, but from a Druidry point of view it highlights the commonality of all life on earth, which is something that many Druids believe in.

Incidentally, as you have probably realised, there is currently nothing in your DNA to account for consciousness. So the current theory is that consciousness comes from outside ... hmmm, what does that sound like? Incidentally, I love telling students that they are no more complex genetically than a fruit fly, but that is just my perverse sense of humour.

So if your genetic inheritance only demonstrates the fact that we are not different, what is the point? The point is that there are certain genetic peculiarities that characterise certain peoples. The most well known of these is the lack of the gene for the protein alcohol dehydrogenase in Chinese people. This protein serves to detoxify alcohol when it is taken into the human body. Chinese people in general tend to lack this protein and as a result can't drink much alcohol. So knowing this, if you are Chinese, drinking may not be a big part of your life. Clearly this is a trivial example, but the point stands. Incidentally it is also possible to induce the ability to drink alcohol if you are Chinese by drinking and being sick until you can take it. I know of at least one young person who did this because she wanted to associate with her friends who were not of Chinese origin and did drink. However, as you can see, it is not recommended.

Another well-known example is sickle cell anaemia in people of Afro-Caribbean origin, where the sickle blood cells confer immunity to malaria, which is why it evolved, but it also confers a disadvantage in the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood. These effects of single mutations also go by the name of epigenetics or personalised medicine these days, so is becoming more important and may revolutionise the way we are all treated by medicine in the future.

Recently the complete genome of a representative Irishman was sequenced (if there is any such thing as a representative Irishman!). The results from this study showed that the Irish are genetically distinct from the rest of Europe and they may have identified markers that they can use to define 'Irishness'. This is the good news and is perhaps not unexpected as the Irish are a race that was isolated at the edge of Western Europe and the population is, to say the least, a little 'inbred'. Obviously the Irish are also over-represented in the populations of North America and Australia. The bad news is that they have also isolated markers with the potential for chronic liver disease and inflammatory bowel disease. This just means that Irish people are susceptible to these illnesses, not that every Irish person will get them.

Scientists who know about DNA speak of two influences, the genetic one and the influence of the environment (which is called phenotypic). What this means is that we are not slaves to our genetic makeup and can be different depending on what we are exposed to. To take this analogy further, you share a great deal of your DNA with your brothers and sisters, but you may look and behave completely differently. This phenotypic difference comes into the next influence.

1) What is your genetic inheritance?

2) What traits characterise your genetic inheritance?

3) Do you display any of these traits?

Your Local Environment

How you grew up affects how you do things. When I was growing up in the mid-1960s and early 1970s in the East End of London, things were very different to how they are now. For a start personal computers didn't exist, there was no internet, televisions were black-and-white and music was played by putting circular black plastic discs called records on to a record player. Consequently we spent most of our time outside playing in the street. The lamp post outside my house was the congregation point for the neighbourhood kids and there was a kind of initiation that involved having to climb the lamp post and swing from the parallel bar on it that was about six feet from the ground. Very few people had cars in those days so we had to only rarely interrupt our games to let a car go past. I remember my mother coming out to complain when we kicked our football against the wall opposite, which was the wall of the convent. My mother was afraid that we would disturb the nuns! We even had our own Tardis (if you have watched the BBC TV programme Doctor Who, this will mean something to you). The police box was on the corner of the road, so formed a centrepiece of our games. I can't remember if anyone actually went inside it. In fact I think no one did because we were all afraid of the police. This was despite the fact that there was a kindly old sergeant on television on Saturday nights in Dixon of Dock Green. Most houses in those days had coal fires, there was no central heating and in the winter we had to wait for my mother to get up first and light the fire before venturing out of bed ourselves. We were adept at getting dressed without getting out of bed because it was so cold.

Everyone went to Saturday morning pictures at the local cinema where we were encouraged to sing along to the Lambeth Walk by watching a little dot go over the words on the screen at the correct pace. We saw serials such as Flash Gordon, Superman or Batman and a main film, which was some worthy offering from the British Film Institute encouraging us to be tolerant of others, for example. When I say everyone went, I do mean everyone, even those who couldn't pay. The first few kids in would open the fire escape doors for everyone else. We couldn't work out why they didn't lock them, but as they were fire escapes I guess they couldn't. I also wondered why the cinema owners couldn't work out that there were twice as many people in the cinema as they had sold tickets to.

Going to fetch the coal was a regular event, which involved going down the stairs into the coal cellar (which all houses had). My brother never tired of turning off the light and locking the cellar door when you went down. You had then to bang on the door until help came or climb out of the coal hole cover into the porch of the house and knock on the front door to get back in again. Children weren't trusted with keys then.

As there were six children in my family, no one had their own room and sharing things was a way of life. It was also a way of life to steal someone's chair if they got up to do something or go to the toilet, so there was a constant shuffling back and forth all evening as we competed for the best chairs in the living room. This was a source of great embarrassment to my mother when the local Catholic priest was visiting one day and got up to visit the toilet and someone stole his chair. Naturally the priest came from a large family himself and was quite happy to get involved in the rough and tumble of family life, but my mother was still mortified.

When my future wife first came to tea with my family, she waited politely to be offered food, but to no avail, as my brothers and I just helped ourselves to everything. Maybe this is why I eat so fast, though my wife reminds me that no one is going to steal the food off my plate now!

There wasn't a lot of contact with green space in the East End of London. The local park was policed by park keepers whose sole function seemed to be to keep kids out of the park. However, like most Irish families at that time, we spent our entire summer holidays in Ireland on my aunt's farm. So we had every opportunity to get out in the rain and be free. As an aside, I experienced the evolution of farming from horses through threshing machines to tractors, to combine harvesters, but that is a story for another time (can't resist the Bardic urge).

I was sitting in a course on unconscious bias a while ago and realised that my upbringing in the East End of London meant that I wasn't in the least bit unconsciously biased, in fact I was pretty much consciously biased about everyone and everything! As an aside I also discovered that if I spoke as I should, meaning with a strong cockney accent, then only 11 per cent of people in the UK would think that I was intelligent! There were three of us in the course who were university professors and the other two professors were from Liverpool and Somerset. All three of these accents have the lowest percentage of perception of intelligence in the UK. Suffice it to say that none of us actually spoke with our native accents, having all adopted an indeterminate posh version as a form of unconscious intellectual camouflage. So, if you thought that Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady (Shaw's Pygmalion if you are a theatre-goer) was only relevant to the Victorian age in the UK then think again. This is a classic example of an assumption that you are consciously unaware of, leading to treating someone differently.

As I have travelled through life and become conscious of the spiritual path I am travelling I have noted that life has presented me with opportunities to confront all of my biases. As a first generation Irish Catholic growing up in London, I hadn't met a Protestant until I was 18. I didn't quite expect them to have horns and a tail, but almost. I remember a progressive teacher in school asking us to write down as many Protestant factions as we could and we all gaped in astonishment, there were Catholics and Protestants – that was it! One of my Greek tutees once told me about the priest in his school expostulating about the bloody Catholics, the bloody Protestants and the lovely Greek Orthodox. Anyway, suffice to say that when I actually met Protestants at university they turned out to be perfectly nice people.

As I continued my journey I was offered the opportunity to remove my biases against women, gays and so on. Strangely enough, I wasn't biased against black people because the next door neighbours were from the Caribbean and they were really nice people and we played together in the street. My wife likes to gently chide me about my prejudices and recently she pointed out to me that I was confronting my last bias, having found out that one of my Druid tutees was a policeman, who invited me to have coffee with him. He is also a perfectly nice person, which is a great change in my attitude from my childhood, where we hated the police. In fact the police had a good reason to dislike us, as it was the Irish who were bombing London at the time and it is easy to spot an Irishman. Actually I have become more Irish-looking as I got older and this can actually be useful because in a big customs queue in Boston airport once, the official spotted me and said, 'You can come through Sir!' having spotted a fellow countryman!

Racial bias can be a frightening thing; I was exposed to it on an underground train in London in my youth. I was going to work in the morning and the train had stopped at Stepney Green tube station. A man got on and started shouting at me accusing me of being Jewish. I was very young and didn't know what to do, so I tried to get off, but he followed me until he felt he had harassed me enough and left me alone. I thought about telling him that I was not Jewish, but Catholic, and that curly black hair and large noses are common between the two races, but realised that it would make no difference.