Diary of a druid

I

The Dream

I was six years old when I had a dream. In the dream I was playing on the rope swing tied to the oak tree in our front yard, when I saw a car coming up the dusty gravel road. I recognized it at once as my grandfather’s car—a very new dark blue Cadillac with silver trim.

He lived far away, and we didn’t see him often, so I ran up to greet him. When he got out of the car, though, something was different. He was even taller than I remembered—and he had always been a very tall man—and there was something long and horselike about his face.

"Grandfather?" I asked timidly. In real life, I didn’t call him "grandfather".

He gave a snort like a mildly annoyed horse and said "Horse Father," correcting me. I looked into his eyes and felt that he was very, very old.

"How old are you?" I asked.

"Thousands," he answered.

I don’t remember what else happened in the dream. In the morning, I told my Dad about the dream. Later that day, he shaved part of the back of my head, from one ear to the other. He explained that this was a special haircut that druids could wear, to make their magic stronger. I already knew that druids were wise, magical people, and that our family had been druids for ages.

Later on, I learned that horse father was one of the names of the Dagda, the great god.

II

Talking in the wind

That winter my sister was born, the fourth and final of my parents’ children. She was named Kathryn O’Mara after my Dad’s grandmother, who was a druidess and seer. I never met my great grandmother, but Dad and Guv said that she could tell what people were thinking, and was always uncannily prepared for any situation. She was also the first of our line to come of age in the new world.

When my sister was born, we moved into a bigger house. It was on top of a hill, and in the spring it was very windy. I was standing outside one day in the spring, facing into the wind and yelling "Come on! Come On!" The hemlock tree was bending so low that some of its branches touched the ground, and my jacket was flapping in the wind.

Dad came outside and sat down, lit a cigarette and started smoking it, watching me. After a few minutes I went over and sat down by him.

"Why does the wind make me feel like that?" I asked him, confident that he would have a rational and detailed answer.

"Because you’re a druid," he said, "and you can feel what the wind feels." That sounded right to me. He went on to say that a long time ago, everyone knew that you could talk to the wind and the rain, and that they could tell you things too.

He said that the job of a druid was to pay attention and understand things, to learn as much as they could, and to be able to help people. Being a druid would enable a person to make a huge difference in their world, and help to keep the world balanced.

I asked if this wind told him anything. He said that this was the spring wind, and it always came around this time of the year. It meant that spring was here, and more and more flowers would come with more and more rain. He also said that today’s wind let him know that it would rain shortly after it got dark.

I looked up at the sky, and there were just a few white puffs of cloud here and there. We stayed outside and talked for hours. He told me that I must never forget that magic was real, that the trees had souls just like people. He said that the spirits of the ancestors were always with us, watching over us, and that some of our most ancient ancestors were the gods themselves. Their voices were there in the wind and thunder, in the sounds of rustling leaves and running water. The difference between a druid and a person who didn’t use magic was that a druid paid attention, listening and watching for guidance from the gods, the ancestors, and the spirits of nature.

We stayed out talking until it got dark, and started to rain.

III

Spirits of Stones

My Dad worked as a geologist for my grandfather’s oil company, and once in a while my grandfather would come down from Pennsylvania and visit. He was six and a half feet tall and had shoulder-length grey hair, thick black eyebrows, and blue eyes. He had eight grandchildren, who all called him "Guv".

When he came to visit, I would always ask him lots of questions, because Dad said he was old and wise. I would sit up late talking to him, sometimes, and he would tell me stories about our ancestor, Brian Boru, who drove the Vikings out of Ireland, or about what things were like before Dad was born.

I asked him once about how he found so much oil, and he laughed. He said that he was a druid—the earth spoke to him. He told me that stones had spirits, and carried their stories on themselves. After that I asked him what a particular rock told about, and he would say "there used to be a shallow sea here" or "This rock came from a volcano erupting, back before the dinosaurs were even around." He taught me what to look for in terms of understanding the spirits of the stones, and how to listen quietly to hear the voices of the land.

One thing that Dad and Guv both told me was that all the answers all the knowledge that there was, was already there inside of everyone, and that we just had to let it out.

For this reason, being told something by the spirits of the land (whom we call the Aoi in my family) is often more like remembering it than like hearing something in another person’s voice.

IV

Old Stories

Old stories were among my favorite things about childhood. They taught lessons, but they were also entertaining. Stories made up one of the main ways in which I was taught These could be stories of personal experience, like the many adventures of my father as a young man (he once used a type of sorcery to ward off three people who held him at knifepoint), or about his father, or about his grandmother Kathryn O’Mara and her Father James O’Mara. Or they could be tales from very, very, long ago, like the story of Boann the white cow woman.

Through stories like this I learned how heroes and villains behaved, what great differences a single person can make if they have the right intentions, and how the world changes or stays the same. I learned many types of magic from stories, like corguinecht (a type of enchantment performed using one eye and one hand, while standing on one leg—the way a heron hunts), The use of the troscad, or fast, and the laying on of Geasa (unbreakable vows).

The stories we told, Dad would say, told as much about who we were going to become, as they did about who we had been.

One story that I liked, even though it was very short, was that Saint Patrick asked a pagan warrior what he believed in. His answer was "Strength in the arm, courage in the heart, and fire in the head."

V

Poetry

My father was a poet. Like all good druids, he had learned to use all the gifts—poetry and sorcery and healing—but poetry was what he was best at. The druid concept of poetry includes prophecy and storytelling and other sacred or magical uses of words.

Before I was born, Dad was a poetry teacher at a private school in Pennsylvania. He knew more poems by heart than anyone I have ever met. Thousands. Some were Latin poems, some were German Lullabies, some were beatnik poems and early rock-and-roll lyrics. He once said it would take him about two weeks solid to recite them all.

For a druid, learning stories and poetry is a spiritual discipline. It gives insight into how the human spirit works as well as making us familiar with the art of using words. There are many stories in which druids use their skill as poets to great effect—to persuade people, to inform them of sacred information such as prophecies, to praise or shame the deserving (and sometimes the undeserving), and to incite action from other people or from spirits. For all of these reasons, poetry is considered to be among the highest forms of art, and the most powerful types of magic.

As a part of my education, I learned a lot of poems. It didn’t matter so much the content of the poems. Just the practice of learning them and being able to compose poems of my own, which I did prolifically. I still remember many of them to the word, though I have not had cause to recite them in decades.

There are several exercises that can be used to strengthen the ability to compose an effective poem. One is simply crafting a poem the way you would build a building, piece by piece. You have a subject you want to write a poem about—that’s the building site. Next you figure out how you want the poem to sound, in terms of meter, rhyme scheme, tune, or whatever features it possesses—that’s the framework of the building. Different rhythms and cadences have different effects on the mind and spirit of the listener, just as different architectural structures serve different functions. Finally you put on the words, which are like the walls and roof and floor of the building. Just like you only see the walls and roof and floor of a building, the words may seem to be all there is to a poem, but they are given their structure by the subject and form of the poem. The more often one builds a poem in this way, the easier it becomes.

A second exercise is raising a poem, the way you might raise an animal or a crop. You need fertile ground to raise it on, which is the subject the poem is speaking about. You need a seed or breed which will thrive on that sort of ground, in other words, an aesthetic sense of how the poem is to come across—is it a tough, hardy poem, or a delicate and exotic sort? Finally, it must have the rain and sun and nurturing that are the poet’s wisdom, wit and ability. The poem comes into its final form slowly, perhaps over a period of days or perhaps over a period of years. The role of the poet in this case is to visit it often, give it the attention and nourishing of intelligence that it needs, and allow it to grow on its own.

The third practice that a poet can use is spinning a poem, the way a string is spun. It requires nothing more than the matter of the poem, which is the wool, and the means to twist it into lines, which are the form of the poem. Such a poem is composed spontaneously and in a short period of time by an experienced poet, although for a novice it may take a period of meditation in an environment without distractions. Many of the poems that have cone down from the ancient bards, especially prophecies, are spun poems. The spontaneous writings of the Beat writers and the ancient Sanskrit Sutras are also made in much the same way.

Conceiving of poems in these ways, and practicing these techniques, along with study and learning of good poetry, will allow a poet to obtain extraordinary powers of eloquence and foresight.

VI

Healing

At some point when I was very young, I started learning what would become my primary area of study—healing, and specifically the use of herbs for healing.

Plants are everywhere. All plants have spirits, which like our own spirits give rise to their physical bodies. These, in turn, can be consumed or made into preparations, which carry some imprint of that plant’s original nature into the body. This produces the healing effect of the herb. Explanations of how that imprint is carried are forever being refined by science. Five centuries ago, people said that violet leaves helped to prevent heart attacks because the leaf is shaped like a heart. Now, they say that violet leaves help prevent heart attacks because they contain blood-thinning chemicals called salicylates. Five centuries from now, unless science grinds to a halt, there will be a new and more detailed description that makes today’s paradigm look naïve and superstitious. The fact will remain, however, that violet leaves help to prevent heart attacks, and that they do this through some material imprint of the plant’s innate spirit.

Dad and Guv both knew a lot about plants, and even more about balances and imbalances, which make up health and disease. Both of them had been very sick in their youth. Guv had polio, and everyone expected him to come out of it crippled. His mother had healed him somehow of it, although I’m not sure what method she used. He was an extremely able-bodied person, even as an old man.

One of the most important things they taught me, which would shape my practice in the years to come, was that the plants were my real teachers. If I listened to them, they would tell me what they knew, and what they could do. My father and I were behind the shack in our back yard one day, and he showed me some type of berry that I had never seen before. "What is that berry?" he asked me. I said I didn’t know.

"Well, even if you don’t know what it’s called, what does it do?"

"Grows?" I ventured lamely.

"All right, wise guy, but what is it good for?"

By this time I was starting to get frustrated. "I already said I don’t even know what it is! How should I know what it’s good for?"

"Ask the plant", he said. We had talked before about how plants, animals, and other things in the universe communicate. They communicate through different types of signals, not just through sound as we do, but humans have the facility for perceiving all the different types of communication.

I took a striped yellow-green berry from the plant and held it between my thumb and forefinger, squeezing it just enough that some juice came out. I smelled it, and it wasn’t offensive. I touched my tongue to it. It was very sweet, but also quite sour, so that it made my tongue feel a little dry. I put the whole thing in my mouth and chewed it, watching Dad’s face for any signs of wariness or approval, but there was none. His face was unreadable.

I also paid attention to what the plant was telling me. It was sour, and had a cool taste to it. It made my mouth felt wet and dry at the same time.

"It’s edible," I said. "It would be good for someone with a fever. Or maybe if someone had an upset stomach, but too much would make it worse."

He told me I had the general idea, and that that plant was called gooseberry. To this day, I have never seen another gooseberry with yellow fruit growing wild in this country, nor even in gardens in this part of the country. But geese do migrate a long distance, and could have brought the seeds from further north.

After that, whenever I was in a place where plants grew, I would try to understand them. Scents, tastes, colors, and shapes are all ways the plants would use to communicate (Changes in a plant’s scent can change just as fast as the words coming from a person’s mouth). An experienced worker with plants comes to recognize such communication, and learn what it means. There are also times when the communication just occurs as a sudden insight, an understanding of what a plant wants or is able to do.

VIII

Games of Magic

Just about every morning, Dad would wake up at 5 am and have a cigarette and whiskey on the rocks. I didn’t have to be up until six to get ready for school, but many mornings I would get up with him and talk to him while the house slept.

One morning I got up and he had a six-sided brass die. He rolled it to me and it came up on the side with only one dot. He told me to roll it a dozen times and see how often it came up on "one". I rolled it, and it only came up "one" once or twice. Then he told me to watch, and rolled "one" ten times in a row.

I asked if it was magic, or something he was doing with his hands. He said "Well, of course it’s something I’m doing with my hands," Looking down at his palms as though their very presence was what I had been asking about, or to make sure they were still in plain sight.

Then he told me about how it was possible to use your willpower to influence luck. He told me to roll the die, and he would try to influence how it came out.

I rolled it a dozen more times, and it came up "one" nine of those times. Then he said it was my turn. I rolled several more sets of twelve, keeping count of how many times the "one" came up. Mostly I was not very successful, and in one set it didn’t come up at all.

While I was doing this, He told me about the two kinds of luck. One, which we call dán, is something that might be called fate, which we do nothing to deserve. The other sort, which we call diachbha, is the fortune we make for ourselves in life, the world’s reaction to our actions. This sort is what mostly determines how a roll of the dice comes out.

We played our dice game several mornings in a row, always rolling the dice onto a pad of yellow legal paper to keep it from rattling on the enamel tabletop. He gave me the die, and I continued to practice on my own, but I never got quite as good as he was.

There was another game we played, a card game, that was about the other sort of luck. It was called war, and it was purely a game of chance. Once the cards were dealt, they were not shuffled again, and no more were introduced. So the whole game was set as soon as the cards were shuffled, even before the dealing began. And yet, it was a very long game, and the player who appeared to be about to win at one point might ultimately lose. This game did not really practice a skill the way the dice game did. It just demonstrated the nature of fate.

One other game we played sometimes was chess. It was actually an ancient game, which our ancestors used to improve their skills, not only at strategy, but at foresight.

IIX

Scrying

When I was almost nine years old, I learned about scrying. It was a morning during summer break, and my Dad was sitting at the kitchen table in the pre-dawn darkness. Usually there was a small light on above the kitchen sink, but not today. I came into the kitchen and sat down. Dad said to get something to eat, so I poured a bowl of cornflakes and milk for myself. We talked for a while about yesterday’s newspaper, or the baseball game he was coaching and I was playing in tomorrow. He asked if I knew what "scrying" meant, and I didn’t. I went to my room and looked it up in my dictionary, by the light of the reading lamp that was mounted on my headboard.

When I came back to the dark kitchen, he asked me again, and I said that it was what a gypsy did with a crystal ball. He laughed. Many years later, I met lots of gypsies and even a few gypsies who could see the future. None of them did any sort of scrying, as far as I know.

He told me that scrying was used by druids as well. The technique is to hold a question in your mind, and look into a dark mirror or some other shiny surface. The room must be just light enough to see into the mirror, but not so bright that you can actually make out what you’re looking at. The all-knowing mind fills in the missing information, allowing you to see the answer to your question.

He got me a mirror from the wall by the door—one that my older brother and I had found in the barn at our previous house years earlier, when my younger brother was still a baby. I practiced the way he described it, until it got light out. I don’t remember seeing anything important, or even intelligible.

"Just keep practicing and you’ll get better. Just like anything else," he told me. "The easiest time to do it is usually the hour before dawn, as it’s starting to get lighter, or twilight, when it’s not fully dark yet."

I asked if that was how "The Twilight Zone" (A TV series about paranormal events) got its name. He shrugged.

"Promise me something," he said, "Don’t scry in dark water."

"Why not?"

"Don’t scry in dark water."

"Okay. I won’t. Why not?"

"Don’t scry in dark water," was the answer a third time, and then he left for the day.

IX

Bruno

When I turned nine, my parents got me a book about physics. I really loved science and learning about the universe. I felt, and still feel, that learning about nature , practicing a love of nature’s wisdom, is one of the best and most ancient spiritual disciplines.

After I had finished reading the physics textbook, Dad brought me a library book about physics throughout the ages. It was called "The Continuous Revolution". Early in the book there was a scientist , sorcerer, and priest named Giordano Bruno. He traveled around Europe, teaching about astronomy. The church hunted him down and killed him, because he said the earth revolves around the sun, which is true.

Then there was Galileo, who had similar troubles, but he came out of it with his skin.

This was my first introduction to the fact that certain people and organizations profited from ignorance, and were violently opposed to truth in principle.

When Dad asked me about the book, I told him that I thought that part was upsetting. He started talking about it, and sounded like he was even more upset by it than I was. He made sure I understood that it was the Catholic Church who were responsible for the death of Bruno and thousands of others like him.

He said in the end, "You’re going to be a young adult, very soon. You can talk to me about magic, and there will be a few other people in your life you can talk to. But don’t go around telling everyone you’re a druid."

"People might think I was crazy," I said.

"A lot of them would, and a lot of them wouldn’t care. But they’re not the ones you’d have to worry about. The ones who believed you would be the people who might lock you up. Or worse."

That moment, that conversation, was when it became something graver and more serious for me. I was no longer just a kid learning old magic. I was the keeper of an ancient flame in a sometimes hostile world. Even so, I was never truly secretive about my beliefs. If someone asked me about my religion I would tell them I was a druid. If they asked for more information, which hardly anyone ever did, I would tell them what they wanted to know. My peers at school had long since worked out that I wasn’t Christian, since our family didn’t go to church with any of their families. We were generally presumed to be devil worshippers, the whole lot of us. Being a druid is not quite as bad.

On the other hand, I didn’t, and still don’t, talk very openly about my beliefs with very many people. Like Dad and Guv, I have found it useful to be private, but not clandestine, about being a druid.

X

Poison

Dad started teaching me about poison around the same time. Not very many plants, and only a few mushrooms, are poisonous enough to be dangerous to a healthy person. As a child, though, I was very susceptible to toxic substances. If I took medicines, I got all the side effects. If I got stung by a bee, I nearly died. If I ate raw tomatoes, my body would react to the minute amounts of poison in them, as though I had eaten deadly nightshade. Not only did poison ivy cause horrible rashes for me, but all sorts of soaps, fabric dyes, and other substances did the same.

I began by simply learning about poisons, which ones stopped the heart, which stopped the lungs, which ones caused damage to the mind, the liver, the kidneys, or caused the body to suffocate.

When animals use venom, like a snake biting, for instance, it’s usually to protect themselves. When plants use poison, though, they’re generally already eaten. Protecting themselves is not so much the goal. Making an example of the one who ate them is.

There are many different ways to prepare poisons, to make them more powerful, to mask their tastes, which are usually bitter, or to deliver them in some form other than food or drink (many can be absorbed through the skin).

I have never had occasion to use poison for offensive purposes, but learning about it was good discipline, and some of the same actions of the substances are healing in smaller amounts, or in a very imbalanced person.

The most important thing about poison training, and its main use historically, was to prevent and protect against poisoning. Someone who really knows the poisons—their tastes, their properties, their unique voices and essences, can detect them even among lots of other tastes, like picking out a familiar voice—or the sound of a blaring trumpet—in a noisy room. Kings and queens used to keep poisoners in their employ, to taste their food and make sure it wasn’t poisoned.

If someone is poisoned, there are things that can be done about it, and each type of poison has its own best antidote. Some of these expel poison from the body, some of them transform the poison into less poisonous substances, and some of them balance the body by counteracting what the poison does.

Someone who is skilled in the lore of poison can overcome poisoning in their own body, without using antidotes. This is done by recognizing the poison, understanding what the poison is stimulating the body to do, and ignoring that stimulus. It requires that you listen to the poison, but do not obey the poison, treating it as a harmful spirit whose whisperings must not be heeded.

Once I had learned this skill, I no longer had allergies. They were merely poisons, although the same substances might not have been poisonous to another person. I was not stung by a bee or wasp again for many years, but when it finally did happen, there was no reaction to the venom. I was also able to consume many times the normally lethal dose of some poisons.

Being able to take this much poison meant that I could make my own body poisonous. This practice is called carrying poison, and I would do it throughout my teen years.

XI

The Animals

All of the animals were revered by our ancestors for their own special type of wisdom and strength. Stags, seals, salmon, herons, hounds, horses, bulls, boars, and beetles are all sacred. It would be too simple, though,, to say "Bulls represent Strength", or "Salmon represent wisdom." Each of these animals is a law unto itself, and much can be learned from watching them. The silent salmon, who has been to the deep places and returned home, the mighty bull, who is peaceful when he can be and violent when he must, and even the steadfast and loyal hound, are our equals. They have different kinds of intelligence than we do, because they live in different bodies and have different types of experiences, but it would be wrong to deem them less intelligent because they do not meet the standards we set for ourselves-- dogs may just as well think we’re foolish for being unable to differentiate scents like they can.

Growing up, I was able to experience many of these animals for myself. We had dogs, and cattle and horses were common on the farms around us. Beasts of the forest, like deer, we saw now and then but we learned even more about their behavior from the tracks my siblings and I would often see in the woods. For someone who pays attention, animal tracks can be read more easily than an open book.

Other creatures, like seals, were never around, and so knowledge of their attributes came only from stories. I have never felt as much understanding of and connection with these animals.

Dad told me that when he was a little boy, one summer, there was a deer that was his companion every day, when he went for walks in the woods. He would feed the young buck, and it would walk with him.

I learned that if you make an effort to empathize with animals, to observe their thoughts and feelings, and take them on as your own, it will make you like them. I think that it is not possible for many people to physically change their bodies into the bodies of other animals, but any person can change their mind into an animal’s mind.

Perhaps surprisingly, this makes a person almost indistinguishable from that animal. I have often, in broad daylight, managed to walk right into the middle of a herd of deer without them noticing that I was other than of their kind. Then I would speak, or make full eye contact, or even think about being a non-deer, and they would scatter.

Old stories from Ireland are replete with instances of people doing this very thing, and escaping notice of other deer, or other humans, or both.

XII

The Togair

By the time I turned ten years old, I had learned a few different methods to tell the future. One was soothe-saying, simply speaking from a place of inspiration. There is no real trick to it, just a simple matter of having the right frame of mind at the right moment. Often, when someone speaks in this way, they do not even hear the thought until they speak it aloud.

Another way was scrying, with a mirror, or some other shiny surface. All forms of augury that people use around the world—tarot, reading of entrails, I ching, casting staves or stones—work along the same line as scrying. The mind is given a situation to interpret, and the all-knowing part of the mind fills in the missing information. Besides the scrying glass, I also used a method of scattering pebbles or breaking an egg, and interpreting the resulting patterns. For any of these to work well, it is necessary to be in a receptive and open yet perceptive and alert state.

Yet another state of consciousness can be experienced through the simple practice of staring at the moon. A candle flame or some other focal point also works for this, but not as well. If this is practiced for a long time, with a still mind, the vision will begin to tunnel, until the moon is all that can be seen. The focus will be drawn to one point on its surface, and soon that one point becomes the entire focus of the conscious mind. At this time, the mind is very acutely focused, and like a sharpened blade, is able to cut a passageway between this world and the otherworld, where the dead live, where time and distance take on no form. This is a very difficult state to hold onto, and because it distracts the focus away from the body, leaving it unprotected, it can also be very draining to the body.

After this technique has been used a few times, achieving the state of mind gets a lot easier. I think that by the third time I did this, I was just about able to slip into the trance state, without a lot of waiting.

The next step was to do the same sort of meditation, but with the eyes closed, and the focal point supplied by the mind itself—an imagined moon or disk or some other object for the mind to focus on.

While the moon-gazing was done on an empty stomach (fasting always tends to heighten focus), this version of the magic is performed while well-fed. The body is also wrapped in a blanket. This makes the magical state a little harder to get into, but makes it more profound and able to be maintained for longer. The food supplies energy, and the blanket keeps the body from getting too cold, and helps to block out outside stimuli.

I’ve read that in ancient times, the druids at Tara used the hide of a freshly killed bull for this purpose. In the 1980’s, when I learned the technique, I used a dark blue checkered polyester blanket. Perhaps not as insulating as a bull’s hide, but serviceable.

The first time I did this, it was at night, after the house was quiet. I went out onto the cement cistern attached to the house, which overlooked a neighboring farm. This was early in the summer, sometime after mayday but before midsummer. I had been doing the moon-gazing, and now had learned about this new technique, but not tried it yet. I laid the blanket down on the cracked cement surface, laid myself down on it, held one edge of it, and rolled myself up so that I was covered, head feet and all. I closed my eyes (even though they were covered and it was dark), and imagined a bright full moon, shining between my eyes. I focused on this just as I had on the real moon, until my awareness was focused to a point. I could see right through the darkness and into the otherworld. First it looked like fire, then it just looked like a field with grass and some trees and bushes and a lit-up house at the edge of some woods. My sight was not limited by the abilities of my bodily eyes, and I could see things in much greater detail than in my own world. I could see the details of the wood grain on the door of the house, half a mile away. I could make out every blade of grass in the field. It was very exciting to me. I just looked at the field and the house for a long time, until I felt very tired. The darkness closed in around me, and I was back in the blanket. I was cold. I fell asleep.

When I woke back up, it was just starting to get light out. I was stiff and sore and cold, and I stumbled back into the house, dropped my dew-wet blanket on the floor, and went to sleep on the couch.

After that, I practiced the togair (as we call this technique) often. It was as exhausting as walking ten miles, which I also did from time to time. It got easier, though. I would talk to Dad after every time I tried it. It wasn’t that I could actually leave my body. It was more like looking down a passageway into the otherworld.

The first time, I didn’t see anything especially significant, because I didn’t wish for it. Going into the process with a focused intention, it is possible to contact the ancestors or gods directly, to have a two-sided conversation with them, and also to see visions of things happening in our world, past present or future. I think that when people speak of clairvoyance, that it is a very similar phenomenon. It takes a lot of practicing the togair to be able to do it without any preparation, but a few people may be born with an extraordinary talent for it.

XIII

The Imbas

For the next couple months, I practiced the togair more and more often, until I could do it without feeling such a great strain on the body. Afterwards, I would often feel what I can only describe as a giddy sense of extreme calm.

One afternoon, when we were driving home from somewhere in the blue bronco, Dad told me about the imbas. It was a way of actually leaving the body, or detaching the spirit from it, so that it can enter the otherworld and go from there to anywhere in the natural world. Every point in the otherworld, I learned, touches every point in the natural world.

By this time, I could do the togair without the blanket if I needed to, without losing my focus. Dad told me that I would need to do something very similar to this, but instead of envisioning the moon, I was to picture a certain symbol, a circle made up of three teardrop-shaped parts, Like the Chinese yin/yang symbol but with three parts instead of two.

When the pathway opened up, it would be to a forest that is in the otherworld, the home of a white stag with red antlers. I was to follow this beast, which would take me into the otherworld. Once there, I could travel to places within the otherworld, or this world, as long as I was in that state of mind.

If I wanted to come back into my own body, or if I got lost, I was to look for a green deer with golden antlers, and follow its hoofprints back.

We were almost home by the time he explained all of this to me. I asked him what came after the Imbas, and he asked what I meant by this. I said "What comes after I’m done learning the Imbas?"

He said "The rest of your life." I got the impression that this meant it was the end of my training as a druid.

On my eleventh birthday, I got up in the morning, before light, to talk to Dad. It was Sunday, the weekend after the first week of sixth grade. He asked me if I was going to take a journey that day, and I said I thought so. He smoked, and drank his whiskey, and we talked about some astronomical phenomenon that was happening that morning, an alignment of the planets, that only happened once every several centuries.

He wished me a happy birthday, and then left. Everyone in the house was asleep, even our dog Jake. I went outside and sat cross-legged on the ground with my back to an old oak tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I wasn’t especially well-fed, and wasn’t wrapped as I would have been for the togair.

I closed my eyes and pressed the heels of my palms into the hollows under my cheekbones, while my elbows rested on my thighs.

I envisioned the sigil, focused on its center until there was nothing else, and then I saw the forest. There were trees young and ancient, some that must have been growing before the world was made. There were beeches and oaks and yew trees and many others that I have no names for. I saw the leaves and bird nests on the branches, and heard the sounds of worms and snails sliding over the ground.

Then I heard a breath, and looked up to see a big, white deer. Its blood red hooves and enormous red antlers, and its snow-colored coat made it visible a long way off. I stood there for a minute, with no idea what to do. With an enormous effort, I made a single step.

My footstep resounded like the beat of an enormous drum. The white hart ran, and I chased it, seeing myself run forwards toward it and feeling myself flying backwards, my soul leaving my body through the shaved place on the back of my head. I heard and felt a huge brazen clash, as though I had just run or flown through a brass gong.

Then my feet were in the forest, running down the white deer’s path, and all the sense of heaviness that had made my first step so difficult was gone. I ran after the deer, and I was as fast as it was. I chased it through woods and mountains, skies and seas, over barren rocky places and down all the seasons of the year.

The passage of time, so commonplace as to be invisible, did not seem to exist in this realm. The stories had called it the sweetland, the land of promise, the land of youth. It was all of that, and much more besides.

I stopped chasing the deer and drifted from place to place for a while. At length I found myself up in the oak tree, looking down at myself sitting on the ground. I tried to re-enter my body but it didn’t feel normal. I got up, walked into the house, and sat down at the kitchen table. I just stared at its mottled grey enamel surface for a while. Then I looked up and saw myself sitting across the table. Rather than being alarmed I just made faces at it, like I might have done in a mirror. There were bits of cornflakes in my teeth.

I got up and went to my bed, in my bedroom. While I was dreaming, I remembered about the green deer, and followed it until I felt my feet growing heavy, and the darkness closed in again. I woke up, somehow in the chair in the living room, and felt reasonably normal again, as though my spirit and body had been reunited. There was some ringing in my ears, though.

That was the last entirely new form of magic I learned, and I knew it would be even at the time. Before I had done the Imbas, I felt a sense of finality and even dread about it, as though that meant my education was coming to an end, or I would no longer feel this great sense of growth I had felt from learning druid magic. Afterwards, though, It felt more like I had just learned all the rules of chess, and was now able to really play the game, and get good at it. Or like I had just planted the last seed of an orchard that would grow and grow in the years to come, until it was finally ready to bear fruit.