Welcome to Gaia! ::

I guess I just expect things that are older than I am to not be new anymore. xd


Alas, it's just not my area of expertise. But if you do ask Blackrose about it, I'd be curious to hear her answer. 3nodding

The 80s were like centuries ago in psychology wink In the 70s being gay was still mental disorder. Particularly if the word "neuro" is involved anywhere, 1980 is like the stone age, because our technology and knowledge of the brain is now so much more advanced.

We looked a little at psycholinguistics, but I can't remember anything about it. I think we studied mostly language development in infants and briefly some social psycholinguistics, nothing neuro.

Psychology itself as a science is only recent, like 1870.

Magic was common practice for druids, as I understand it. Magic was integral to their role in society. It still does not make them priests or specifically a religious caste, any more than it makes any other kind of witch or magician a priest or priestess right now. They -were- important, but as chiefly and kingly advisers, poets, healers, builders, astronomers, lawgivers, keepers of records, legends, lineages, and other knowledge. They were the white-collar class of their time.

That being said, we have no way of knowing how accurate Roman records about Druids are. Considering that History.com article was taken straight from Encyclopedia Britannica, it shouldn't be taken as anything but a brief preface on the subject - a subject whose main source materials were written by the conquering side of conquest. It's all we've got to work with - the folks with the oral tradition were killed off without recording anything - but we still can't be certain that the Romans didn't exaggerate, or slander the Celts and Gauls in the historical record.

We know that the Druids had a rigorous 20 year training for their roles, which was strictly oral. Given that no Druids survived the Roman purge, that lineage and knowledge is long dead and gone.
Rather like modern-day Wiccans, a Druid could not be said to be a Druid without that training. Modern 'Druids' not only do not have any way to access said training, they do not have enough information necessary to reconstruct it in any kind of accurate way.

It's all well and good to say Druidry is a 'way of life'. That's so open and vague as to be impossible to label correct or incorrect - which I think also makes it useless as a descriptor.

So much of modern 'Druidry' is based on the romantic recreations of the vaguely paleo-pagan men's orders of the 18th and 19th century. It's also heavily influenced by the Celtic Revival, wherein the Victorians took massive swaths of Celtic cultures from various nations and re-wrote them to be jolly, bucolic, twee and ever so toothless. Combine this with the fact that we really have very little factual information regarding the Druids, and you end up with people using a name to describe something that does not resemble in the least what the name originally represents.

We're not arguing that 'Druidism' is bad. This is the same argument as with Wicca - just use a different name to describe the path in question. In using the term 'Druid' to describe your path, you are misrepresenting your practice. If you wouldn't claim to be a Wiccan because you haven't been initiated, you shouldn't feel entitled to call yourself a Druid without having your 20 years of training in an oral tradition.



I'm sorry.

A) I will always speak out against cultural misappropriation when I see it. Wrong is wrong, whether it directly involves me or not. I would not want any unrelated culture attempting to pass themselves off as another, using the reputation and image of my culture as a validation of another, and potentially destroying the image or reputation of my culture through their actions.

It doesn't make you look like the bigger person, walking away from a discussion in this manner.

Aa) NOONE grew up in the ancient Druid tradition, that is alive today. NOONE. The Druids are extinct. What the Druids were are dead and gone - and what the Druids did for their society we have replaced with individual professions. What we have are a load of Celtic reconstructionist neo-pagans calling their path 'Druidry' - and for all we know their religion might resemble the Druidic teachings of long ago in the way that a plastic Rubber Ducky toy resembles a female Mallard...or an orange, or an aardvark, or a Wagnerian opera, or a particle accelerator.

We by and large don't have a beef with their religious or spiritual leanings. We simply feel it's intellectually dishonest for 'Druids' not to come up with a more appropriate name for themselves, and rather to trade upon modern imagination of things Celtic and over-romantic notions from the neo-gothic and Victorian eras.

B) You were the one who started the discussion on this subject. You don't stir up s**t, then walk away saying 'Oh, none of us are directly involved so we have no right to call anything right or wrong', as if it never happened. Take responsibility for your actions, and deal with what you stirred up. I don't know what you expected to happen after starting a conversation on not one, but two subjects contentious enough to have both their own FAQs and their own extant discussion threads, but you should have expected at least some reaction. And you didn't even use the extant discussion threads - you grabbed even more attention starting new ones.

If you do not intent to finish something, in the future it's better not to start it.

The parts of it that deal with human behaviour do take a bit longer because humans are capricious. The brain parts people will accept more readily. Also psychologists are pretty argumentative. whee It really sort of depends... but if you're using an article that's older than like '95 you'd better have a really good reason for doing so. You know?

A lot of interesting ideas were developed in the 70s that we've since built upon so the 70s feels like an age ago.