Spring Time for Druids: in 2007 the Spring Equinox was on 21 March, although I believe in most years it’s a few hours earlier on the twentieth. Yesterday, in 2025 it apparently got here at 9.01am, although for me it had come round ten days earlier when a patch of my backyard was deep in flowering crocuses (or crocus or croci.) And for climate forecasters Spring begins on March 1st.
Later within the day The Druid Order may have come out at 12 midday yesterday at Tower Hill Terrace, however I didn’t really feel moved to go to affix them. I photographed their ceremonies on a number of years, each there and on the Autumn Equinox on Primrose Hill, and likewise printed some extra detailed reviews (having performed some analysis within the Mount Haemus lectures and different sources) with a few of my photos of later occasions.
The images listed here are from March twenty first 2007, the primary time I had attended a Druid ceremony and I then knew little or no about them, and my feedback on My London Diary maybe mirror this. However the photos I made had been somewhat just like these I made in later years and as with another occasions I now not really feel I’ve something new to say and now not go.
I believe druids may say their ceremonies had been timeless, and positively The Druid Order nonetheless use the order of service which they invented and printed aproaching 100 years in the past and I believe the banners they carry and the opposite objects used have an identical inter-war historical past. However I perceive they solely started this anunual occasion at Tower Hill in 1956.
We’ve little or no actual proof of the druids of the distant previous in our nation, although I believe their ceremonies might nicely have concerned somewhat extra bloodthirsty sacrifices than the present somewhat anodyne public festivities.
However listed here are a few of my ideas from this primary encounter again in 2007:
It was in some methods spectacular, with their white robes, however somewhat to staid and measured for my style. Celebrations have to be performed with way more pleasure. This had extra the sensation of a funeral – regardless of the white costume.
There was an air of dusty scholarship, of lifeless Victorian scribes attempting to main on gravitas within the Order of Service, and a sermon of mumbled although presumably worthy boredom. Onerous to think about William Blake as chief druid of this tribe, I’m certain they should have performed issues in a different way in his days.
I’m unsure how far again these celebrations go at Tower Hill. Fashionable Druidry revived within the eighteenth century, partly as archaeologists re-discovered websites comparable to Stonehenge and Avebury and requested themselves what went on there. What relationship the rites they got here up with bear to these of pre-Christian occasions is inconceivable to know (although one suspects somewhat little.)
My photos on My London Diary (hyperlink at backside of this put up) are within the order they had been taken and along with the captions give a reasonably detailed account of the occasion, though I believe I did it slightly higher in some later years.
William Blake was amongst an extended checklist named within the ceremony as a former druid. In keeping with the article A Word on William Blake and the Druids of Primrose Hill there is no such thing as a proof for the claims that William Blake was a druid or chief druid, though he might have identified some who did participate the annual rituals on the hill which had been begun by some Welsh Bards in 1792 claiming that their Bardic traditions “had preserved the true esoteric lore of the Druids.”
The truth is Blake commented negatively on Druids in his writing and pictures, significantly objecting “to reported Druid practices of formality human sacrifice, and compelled submission to priestly rites and rituals.“
Extra photos and captions from the 2007 The Druid Order: Spring Equinox on My London Diary
Flickr – Fb – My London Diary – Hull Images – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Images
All pictures on this web page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to purchase prints or licence to breed.
Tags: 2007, ceremony, druid circle, Druids, fertility, London, London Images, My London Diary, peace, peter Marshall, Spring, Spring Equinox, The Druid Order, Tower Hill, William Blake
You possibly can depart a response, or trackback from your personal website.
A narrative of ‘forgiveness and redemption’. Rosie’s #BookReview of Within the Becoming a member of of Souls: Echoes of Yesterday by Jordan Grey. #BookTwitter #booktwt
