from People of The Earth - The New Pagans Speak Out,
by Ellen Evert Hopman
Excerpts from an interview with Sable Taylor and Tony Taylor, Co-founders
of The Henge of Keltria, an American based Druid order:
" WHERE DO YOU THINK PAGANISM IS HEADED RIGHT NOW?
I think it's growing. I think it's going to be the religion of the twenty-first
century, but it has a lot of hurdles to get over such as battling the mainstream
religions and being recognized. There are still people out there who think
of Paganism as somthing Satanic or a joke. They don't take it seriously.
We need to organize. We need to get back in touch with the life continuum
and realize that we are all connected to the past, to the future, and to
each other. Western society tends to idealize individualism to such a degree
that we have lost contact with community. We need to let go of some of that
"rugged individualism" and feel our connectedness with others.
By doing that perhaps we will be able to get enough cooperation from each
other that we can effectively build our temple. We will then become something
that other people are attracted to.
DO YOU FIND THAT DRUIDS AROUND THE WORLD ARE ON A SIMILAR WAVELENGTH?
There are some very fundamental differences. Some Druids throughout the
world are not even neo-Pagans. They are reaching back to a former Celtic
experience that they want to reclaim or recover. I've run into a full gamut
of a few smaller groups (of English Druids) that do appear to have some
sort of racist agenda that is also a nationalistic agenda. They are seeking
to reestablish Celtic nationalism.
But the vast majority of them seem to be neo-Pagan or meso-Pagan. The latter
are groups with a fundamentally Christian worldview, yet who have a Pagan
overlay of ritual practices laid on top of it. The neo-Pagans have a truly
Pagan worldview, but they do not have a tradition that carries back into
ancient times."
ISBN 0-89281-559-0
Published by Destiny Books, One Park Street, Rochester, VT, 05767 USA
Distributed in the UK by Deep Books
Archive Library
The Druid Grove