Having decided to follow Druidry, or to become a Druid, you are almost certain to be challenged, at some time, by an idea which seems to cast serious doubt on the legitimacy and authenticity of the spiritual tradition you are attempting to follow. This challenge may come to you as you read about the Druids, or in conversation with someone, or perhaps in your own thinking. It is clearly expressed by Bob Stewart in his Merlin Tarot, when he says 'an indigestible mass of spurious nonsense has been written about the druids; unfounded pretentious claims from 'druid orders' derive entirely from nineteenth-century fabrication. None of these groupings may truly lay any claim to be druidic, separated as they are by at least a millennium from the last vestiges of practising druid religion.' Isn't he right? How can anyone legitimately call themselves a Druid when the last Druids died out over a thousand years ago? But Stewart, in common with many writers, sees Druidry as a human creation, with the gap in linear time between the demise of the Celtic Druids and the appearance of the Revival Druids, creating an unbridgeable chasm between 'real' Druids who lived thousands of years ago, and 'fake' Druids who have lived from the eighteenth century onwards. (Stewart's dating, incidentally, is wrong - the Revival groups began in the 18th, not 19th century). We believe Druidry emanates from a spiritual source, and is only secondarily a human creation in linear time. We sense it as existing in the spiritual or archetypal world as a source of inspiration, energies, images and ideas. Over linear time, a number of people have responded to this source of inspiration, including the proto-Druids who built the megalithic monuments, such as Stonehenge, the Celtic Druids, known to us from classical writings, the Bards whose formal schools continued to the eighteenth century, the romantic Druid Revivalists of the eighteenth century, and those who call themselves Druids today. Each group has helped to build the tradition that we now call Druidism or Druidry.

From this point of view we have as much right to call ourselves Druids today as others did in the past. And if the source of Druidry exists in the spiritual world, we don't have to fall into the trap of believing that the source lies in a distant past and is all but irretrievable. We can free ourselves from a concern that with every day that passes we are moving further away from the source of our tradition. And instead we can turn to the spiritual source, which transcends linear time, as opposed to the historical one - despite the fact that that is fascinating and worthy of study in its own right.

With virtually every aspect of Druid teaching and practice we, as a culture, have been led to believe that hardly any vestige remains. And yet, simply put to one side rather than buried deep, there are the myths and stories, the folk customs and sayings, the stone circles and sacred sites, the Bardic remains and historical references that, pieced together and united with commonsense and intuition, reveal a practice and a teaching that can be and is being revived - all over the world.