“They should have been ridiculous — but the hairs on the back of my neck prickled at the sight, and some small voice inside warned me: I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was an unwelcome voyeur to something ancient and powerful.”
~Claire, in “Sassenach” (Season One, Episode One)
Almost everything in the book you’re reading now is subordinate to these facts: Scotland’s ancient antecedents, the Celts, included communities that were more socially, sexually, and morally well-adjusted than the Scots we read about in history.
The pagan ancestors of the Scots - and their Druid leaders - were more akin to prehistoric models of society: models superior to ours, free of patriarchy, misogyny, and bigotry, models of humanity that exalted the very best of us and refused to indulge the worst.
The most ancient Scots, then, were the very best Scots – and their social, moral, and sexual examples could very meaningfully inform our status quo.
Men and women oversaw human affairs as one; mating was at least as much the province of female choice as male, if not more; and cooperation between the genders was superb, rendering the contemporary gender conflict utterly dysfunctional by comparison.
Where there is no patriarchy, there is no religion – or, at least, no authoritarian religion. If there is no authoritarian religion in place, the human impetus is to seek out a focal point, and in our prehistoric past, that focus was Nature.
Whether or not the worship of Nature qualifies a person as “religious” is dubious at best, as any sane atheist/rationalist recognizes that Nature is humankind’s existential survival machine, and its veneration is no ideological conceit. Most of those who have no trouble dismissing God(s) as fictions likewise have no trouble conversely embracing Nature with religious fervor.
What does it mean, then, to worship Nature? The pre-Roman Druids of Scotland can tell us: worshiping Nature means worshiping Nature’s greatest, most important component – Sex, the creation of life.
More specifically, among the ancient Celts, the women were every bit as strong as the men; there were females in abundance among the nation’s warriors. The essence of sex, for men, was the worship of women – strong, capable women.
And more fundamentally, Celtic women were the sexual choosers, more so than the males, and it was commonplace for a female Celt to have multiple husbands, all of her own selection. Women had the upper hand in the mating game.
This is in keeping with Paleolithic humanity. Patriarchy is not stitched into human thinking; it was born alongside agriculture and the invention of property, a mere 12,000 years ago. Cro-Magnon humans, who prevailed for hundreds of centuries, were far more like the Celts, who managed to preserve our original (and more healthy) social and sexual values and mores, rendering the genders equal (with a slight bias toward the feminine, as it should be), and building out social behaviors based not on power but on personal liberty. Each woman selected a small group of suitable men – subject to change - and the men happily responded. So it was in ancient pre-Scotland Scotland, among the Celts.
And along came the Pagans, and among the Pagans, the Druids.
Worshiping the Universe Through Sex
In Druidry, the earliest inhabitants of Scotland enjoyed all the best of human thought and spirit. The Druid class - priests and priestesses charged with connecting the people to nature through ritual and mores - created paths of serenity, cooperation, respect and self-awareness that bound the people to one another and to the life around them.
And the most natural expression of this connection was, of course, sex.
The Druids taught the people that sex was magic, the source of the energy it was made of. Through sexual ritual, energies were created and offered up by participants for the casting of spells that would enrich both the individual and the group.
The Sex Magic Ritual, where these energies were created and these spells were cast, were highly detailed and practiced with reverence and precision (and still are, by modern-day Druids).
The core principle is simple: the orgasm of a woman or man is potent with energy, and it is imperative to experience them in ritual ceremony and direct them for the enrichment of the group. This involves an array of participants: a Priest/ess, who leads the ceremony and incantations (and stimulates the Principle Conduit, the group itself (the Circle), a Principle Conduit (the receptacle of sexual energy, either a male or female).
The ritual is very complex. Per Druid ritual expert Jon Hughes1, it is encapsulated in a Projection Cycle, which interweaves the energy of human orgasm with Nature, detaching here-and-now awareness from the moment into a broader consciousness.
I don’t know what that means, either, but this Projection Cycle is orderly, broken into seven distinct phases: Awakening, Augmentation, Intensification, Quickening, Projection, Continuance, and Relaxation. But we’ll get to that shortly.
There are many such rituals, and most take place within the context of a “Gathering” - a group of pagans assembling to participate. They form a Circle at the direction of a Priest/ess, within which the Priest/ess and Conduit perform the ritual.
The ‘paired ritual’ is an example.
‘Pair’ refers to the Priest/ess and Conduit2. One is dominant, the other cooperative. The Priest/ess is facilitating the ritual, while the Conduit will project the energy it generates.
In more blunt terms, the substance of the ritual is sexual union between the two, encouraged by the Circle, with the goal of synchronized orgasm, with the Conduit in particular achieving peak potential. The point is that the energy generated by this orgasmic expression carries the spell being cast.
Gender is of no consequence in these roles. Any combination will do.
The paired ritual begins with a series of incantations intended to heighten the awareness of all participants. Candles are burned, each with a particular symbolism. There are two “stones” within the Circle, bed-like surfaces (they are seldom actually stones; the point is that people can lie down on them) perpendicular to one another, precisely oriented according to compass-north; one is called the Working Stone, the other the Convocation Stone. This is where the action takes place. First, however, the stones must be consecrated by the Priest/ess with candles, a wand, and moon-cleansed water.
The Conduit then presents him/herself to the Priest/ess and asks to lie down on the Convocation Stone. The Priest/ess escorts the Conduit to the stone, aligned north-south, and the Conduit lies down on the stone, head pointing south, dead-center of the Circle.
A cauldron of moon-cleansed water, the wand, and various oils and incense are waiting on the Working Stone. The Priest/ess uses the cauldron, wand, and moon-cleansed water to anoint the Conduit3, then gets down to business.
Standing between the stones, the Priest/ess welcomes the Circle and speaks the spell. The Conduit repeats the spell three times.
Now the fun starts. The Projection Cycle is underway, beginning with the Awakening phase. In this, the Priest/ess and Conduit massage self and one another with oil, as incense and soft music drift in the air. The idea here is slow arousal. There is light physical contact between them, with fingertips, lips, tongue, and so on.
Next comes the Augmentation phase. This is overt sexual stimulation: the Priest/ess and Conduit touch the genitals of self and other – foreplay, to use the candid term. Care is taken here by the Priest/ess to begin synchronizing their stimulation.
Then comes Intensification, an intimate exploration that is aimed at achieving orgasm. The Convocation Stone is functionally a bed at this point, and oral stimulation begins (69 is not uncommon). At the discretion of the Priest/ess, penetration commences, and the Priest/ess will be actively pacing the stimulation to ensure simultaneous orgasm. Each is focused on maximizing the stimulation of the other, in order to generate the most powerful conclusion possible.
When the Priest/ess senses unequivocally that shared orgasm is imminent, the Quickening is announced, and the Priest/ess and Conduit actively synchronize their orgasms by repeating the spell together as it approaches, speeding up the words and pacing their orgasms to the incantation. If coupled at the point when the Priest/ess declares the Quickening, they must uncouple – it is not proper for the orgasm to occur while the pair is coupled! - and the two stimulate one another to Projection (the orgasm).
This is the orgasm, the release of their energy, that will carry the spell.
The Priest/ess then initiates the Continuance, intended to propel the spell on its journey. It is achieved through the continued stimulation, usually oral, of the Conduit by the Priest/ess.
Finally there is Relaxation, during which the Conduit returns to the Circle and the Priest/ess ends the ritual through the repetition of the spell and extinguishing of the candles.
Whew! Wasn’t that fun?
There are, of course, endless variations on this theme, but the essence remains the same: Druid sex magic is intended to celebrate human mating as the ultimate self-expression, and is intended to bind the community together, and to bind the community to Nature.
Such communities were (and are) obviously far more liberated, both sexually and spiritually, than those practicing competing religions, and it is no surprise that the invading Romans found Druid sex magic to be offensive to both God and man. Once Christianity was firmly shoe-horned in place in the emerging Scotland and Ireland, the pagans and their Druid clergy were forced underground, where they remain even today.
Once again, however, we note that their practices conform far more closely to the human community and intimacy norms experienced by thousands of generations of our more distant ancestors – and we can be certain they were happier then than we are now.
And what of the Scots remaining, following the pagan diaspora? What were they left with?
That’s easy to see: their strength, their passion, their lust for life – and somewhere in the back of their minds, an ancestral memory of a better existence, for which they continued to strive...
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