Britain decaying under modern Druidism

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 17

Britain decaying under modern Druidism

I seem to have upset a number of readers, most of them Welsh, by pointing out (in “The Press,” June 25) the importance of forgery in the forging of a nation. Let me try to sort this out. I was not saying that nations have to pass an authentication test, like the Hitler Diaries, before admission to the United Nations. Their validity doesn’t stand or fall by the element of fakery or fantasy which goes into creative nationalism. Painters of portraits depart, sometimes amazingly, from the precision of a photograph. Novelists are by definition liars. In fact, as Muriel Spark once remarked, they are also theological criminals of the worst kind, for they create human beings without the power to redeem themselves. None of this matters when it comes to judging the soundness of a portrait, a novel, or a nation. What does matter is that historical nonsense can get in the way of progress. A people which clings to a quite fraudulent vision of its own nature and the origin of its institutions is revealing that it is in bad trouble, that it is refusing to adapt to new conditions in case its whole social structure falls apart in a cloud of rust. Britain seems to me to be suffering from trouble of this kind. Accordingly, as this was the week of the Summer Solstice in which the Druids were forbidden to appear at Stonehenge, I have de-

cided to write about Druids. The first point, which still dismays some people in spite of the popularisation of archaelogy in recent years, is that Stonehenge and the Druids have nothing whatever to do with one another. Stonehenge is a megalithic monument erected some 4000 years ago by people whose language, and beliefs remain unknown. The Druids, as far as we can make out, were a priestly caste common to the Celtic peoples who inhabited northern Gaul and the British islands in the centuries before and after the Roman conquest. But the question of who the Druids really were and what they did is less interesting than the revival of the “Druid idea” in recent centuries. Welsh, Irish and, to a lesser extent, Scottish cultural nationalism disinterred this pagan Celtic priesthood and invented suitable myths about it. Much more extraordinary, the English did so as well, although the Druids had no more connection to the SaxonNorman tradition than they had to Stonehenge. The Druids and the “Ancient Britons” were co-opted by the English as ancestors of the modem British State. Virtues which were — and are — thought of as English were given pedigrees, back to the “dark groves” in which priests, clad in white, sacrificed bulls with golden sickles. When Milton wrote to

By

NEAL ASCHERSON,

the London

“Observer” columnist.

Parliament in 1643 to argue for a divorce law, he claimed that “it would not be the first, or second, time since our ancient Druides, by whom this Island was the Cathedrall of Philosophy to France, left off their pagan rites, that England hath had this honour vouchsaft from Heav’n, to give out reformation to the World ... Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.” There was some argument about whether heathens supposed to have burned people alive in huge wicker containers could properly be seen as precursors of the Church of England. But by the eighteenth century, the Druids were generally seen as pre-Christian Christians with a gentlemanly taste for the countryside and a passion for patriotic liberty. William Blake came to believe that “the patriarchal religion,” including that of Jesus, began in England: “All things Begin and End in Albion’s Ancient Druid Rocky Shore.” When Labour M.P.s dedicated to pulling Britain out of the Common Market sing “Jerusalem,” they are actually singing about the Druidic origins of Christianity. Blake’s mystical Anglo-centric nationalism suits them well.

Have we got the Druids finally out of our system? Certainly, with the exception of Wales, selfdeclared Druids are thinning out. Since 1919, five different Druid bodies have lodged requests to celebrate Midsummer Sunrise at Stonehenge, but only one — the British Circle of the Universal Bond — seems to survive. The Ancient Order of Druids, a secret society established in 1781, enrolled the young Winston Churchill at a ceremony in 1908, and is still going. Apart from that, English Druidism seems to have faded into woolly paganism. In another sense, we are still living in Druid country. Everything in England, in order to be good, has to be ancient. This attitude has two results. One is the unfortunate assumption that what is ancient is therefore good. The other is the habit of pretending that institutions and rituals invented rather recently are part of the Ancient British fabric. In the dim, hallowed places where Britain worships itself, many of the bones in the reliquaries are made of celluloid or even polyester resin. The “age-old pageantry” is often newer than living memory. Many royal rituals, including much of the

coronation service, are concoctions ; and the uncritical reverence for royalty is not very old either. With a few exceptions, the orders of chivalry are Victorian. The English rural landscape, so “immemorial,” would make Milton suppose himself in a foreign country. Parliament meets in the replica of a Victorian chamber, but the nature of party, Cabinet and State have little to do even with the nineteenth century. This modern Druidism (this habit of assimilating the new into the old) can be seen as a wonderful capacity to adapt without pain. But Britain pays — increasingly — a penalty. The mania for continuity is obscuring the difference between what is new and what is not merely antique but thoroughly worn-out. Curiously enough, the only British institution not considered to have venerability is the economy. This leads to what, in my view, is the fundamental misjudgment about this country: “Britain has the finest institutions in the world, but they find it hard to function properly just at the moment, because our economy doesn’t work.” The truth is the exact opposite. The reason that Britain’s economy doesn’t work is that British institutions are in terminal decay. The decay is at its most advanced in the proudest institution of all: in Parliament. At a time

when state power is stronger and more pervasive than it has ever been in years of peace, the citizen has less power to examine and to fight against official decisions than in any other democracy. England in the seventeenth century experienced the first modern revolution. Parliament destroyed the absolute right of kings, but took the doctrine over itself. This doctrine of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament reached its full, absurd stature in the Victorian age. It has become as much of a Leviathan as the divine right of kings, preventing the emergence of any doctrine of popular sovereignty, of any constitution which puts the people and their charter of rights above Westminster. A Parliament which claims it has total power cannot, rather naturally, face up to the fact that the state machine has now escaped its control. It cannot supervise an economy. It cannot share power with its subjects, or imagine anything except the House of Commons which could represent them or defend their rights against power. It cannot imagine being overruled by a Constitutional Court. Like an animal, it cannot think about itself. And yet there are still those who believe that this archaic doctrine must not be touched, that this is still the same Ark that “free-born Englishmen” built three centuries ago, that it is the rabbit’s foot which keeps nasty things away. Now, that is what I mean by Druidism.