We note that Druidism, or druidry, has become an official religion in the UK. According to the Associated Press:

The Druid Network, a group of about 350 Druids, will receive exemptions from taxes on donations after the semi-governmental Charity Commission granted it the status of a religion charity, just like mainstream religions such as the Church of England.

I won’t attempt to inflict here a long and tedious description of what Druids – some of them at least – believe in. The Wikipedia article on Neo-Druidism should satisfy most of us.

The story reminded me of a visit I made to Iceland in the early 70s. There, a revival of the old Norse religion, or what purported to be the old Norse religion, was underway.  There had been, regrettably, a certain number of horse sacrifices, and some of the meat had been shipped off to Norway for the benefit of sharers in the cult. A woman I knew there had a Drekka, or dragon, painted across one wall of her apartment. Smaug would have been pleased.

I happened to be visiting the president of the Icelandic Writers’ Union, Sigurthur Magnusson. He seemed more than a little skeptical and weary of the cult. “It’s a 19th Century romantic revival,” he told me.

Undoubtedly, he was right. And yet I remember hearing about another kind of paganism that was anything but romantic, and certainly no revival. Back in the late 60s and early 70s an anthropologist I knew spent almost two years of research for her doctorate in the Peruvian Amazon, living with a group of indigenous people – they numbered 86 souls at the time. They had experienced contact with the dominant Hispanic culture of Peru, wore hand-me-down western clothing, and hunted with shotguns instead of spears and bows.

And yet, for all that, their life style and religion were mostly as they had been before contact with European-derived society. Almost every night the men of the tribe – never the women – would prepare a potion from a powerful hallucinogenic plant. Then they would have visions of their deities: The snake woman, the tapir man, the jaguar – all of whom lived in some sort of netherworld at the bottom of a lake.

These were people under great stress. Their numbers had been very much reduced by a smallpox epidemic. When their visions were kindly, they would see beautiful women and children dancing up to the village. When their visions showed them their fears, they saw Peruvians coming upriver with shotguns to kill them all.

If these people had believed in the existence of Smaug, they would have seen the smoke of his passage across the face of the moon, and they would have been afraid.

The Icelanders will see Smaug if Peter Jackson’s version of The Hobbit makes it to the screen.

I hope that Christ will have replaced the snake woman by now, and that the Druids will find less romance and more truth in Communion with the One God who rules over the world.