Bates explains that the Middle-Earth sorcerer lived out a view of life termed wyrd: a
way of being which transcends our present conventional notions of free will and
determinism, and which like all expressions of shamanism has resonance in the
most important ideas of Jung, de Chardin, Corbin and Sheldrake but also the
principle of interdependence espoused in quantum mechanics, all of which perhaps
have their aetiology in the I maginal Realm.
I ndeed, the beliefs, rituals and practices of the Druids have a great deal in
common with those of the early Hebrew prophets and other esoteric groups in
ancient I srael and some scholars imply not only common practices but also common
racial, religious and esoteric roots. Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins cite
two instances in support of this theory: the first, a comment by Sir Norman Lockyer
who was amazed at the similarities and the second, an Assyrian inscription declaring
that the correct pronunciation of the most sacred name of God among the Semitic
people was Ya’u or Yahu and which is the same pronunciation in Welsh (Wallace-
Murphy and Hopkins, 1999:43). Posidonius, the Classical Greek philosopher, said
that Abaris, a Druid, was one of the principal teachers of Pythagoras, the Greek
philosopher and mathematician, who in turn influenced not only Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle but, according to the poet and mythologist Robert Graves, the Essenes (in
Wallace-Murphy and Hopkins, 1999:44). The Essenes are a particularly interesting
group within Palestinian Judaism because of the similarity of some of their rites with
those of the ancient Egyptian priesthood (Bloom, 1996:177).
Harold Bloom observes that ritual androgynization is one of the roots of
shamanism and that male shamans turn female and female, male, in what may be a
variant upon the shamanistic art of bilocation and, interestingly, that in Gnosticism,
the primal Abyss is called both Foremother and Forefather, and the Gnostic original
Adam, Anthropos, is actually an androgyn (Bloom, 1996:143). Bailey also asserts
that shamans were often transvestites or had undergone a gender change and that
shamanic androgenization may have been the result of a powerful Mother Goddess
cult, extant among northern Eurasian peoples, presided over by a triad of
goddesses; Mother Earth, Mother Water and Mother Fire. I n such a case, the
shaman identifies with the feminine solar principle, concentrating all aspects of the
elements and the environment into one being; the harsher the environment, the
more intense and mystical the representation from the shaman who was then more
able to conduct spiritual intercourse between the members of his tribe and the
ron
(Ron)
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