William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) conceived of and began the creation of the Castle of Heroes during his training in the hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This ethos or "egregor" developed with his work over more than a decade with other adepti of that order as well as influence from Scottish mystical writer Fiona Macleod (who was actually his friend, William Sharp) into the Order of Celtic Mysteries.
“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—
(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness[…]”
- William Butler Yeats (G.H. Frater D.E.D.I.)
From “Magic” in Ideas of Good and Evil
Context in the Year 2020
The ORDER OF CELTIC MYSTERIES has from the outset not been intended by Yeats as a druidic order, despite the use of the four archdruids in the celtic versions of G.D. rituals. Rather, like the Order of the Golden Dawn the word “Hermetic” was not originally a part of the name, and so neither shall it be in this order.
That said, druidry and the various druid orders extant should be accepted as highly compatible with the Order of Celtic Mysteries and their pursuit, exploration and adaptations considered; insofar as you, the initiate, find them to be spiritually useful. As Philip Carr-Gomm says in his foreword to The Druidry Handbook by John Michael Greer:
Born, as we are, into a consumer culture, we may long for a readymade spirituality—one that is fixed and “pure.” Any study of the history of religion and spirituality shows, however, that even apparently revealed religions are actually made up of a number of strands of influence that continue to change to keep the spiritual tradition vital and not succumb to the arteriosclerosis of fundamentalism.
Therefore, as we develop these living mysteries we ought to most crucially avoid any hint of dogmatism or guruism so common today as in many ages past. As living legend Marylyn Motherbear often has said to me in this sixteenth month cycle of the Eleusinian Mysteries of which I am honoured to be a priest, the mysteries are your experience. Occult teachings are not the mysteries: you are.
Nature and Spirit are the only precategories upon which we co-create our interpreted reality, the sacred and the profane, the mortal realm and the faeryland of the sídhe. The presence of what is holy may live in whatever the matter is we call spirit, and certainly the holy can be found in nature from rocks and trees to wind, river and fire storm. But we must always meet it halfway, take that first hermetic step and share in a common meaning or fusion of horizons. This is a spirituality of naturalism as W.B. Yeats intended.
Still Yeats’ vision went beyond the escapism to a druid’s hermitage and confronted the political and social systems of his day, and we shall honour Yeats’ vision. Or as said more recently than Yeats by the modern druid and Golden Dawn scholar, “What’s needed in the crisis of the present age is a path that brings nature and spirit together in the here and now, in the world we actually inhabit.”
As a hermetic order we are not a new druid order but rather composed the nascent ecstatic and mythological shamanism found in Irish and actually all Celtic myths and legends channeled through the hermetic systems of alchemy, kabbalah, ritual, meditation, prayer, invocation and evocation of theurgy: god Work.
Initiation into these mysteries means an inextinguishable passion and devotion to the folk tales, music, celebrations and spiritual traditions of the Celts, whether Gaelic or Brythonic. William Sharp (the pseudonymous Fiona MacLeod) was the direct influence on Yeats that caused him to decide on an Order of Celtic Mysteries rather than an Order of Irish Mysteries. Though, since Brother John Michael Greer has so fabulously done the work of composing the Welsh (Brythonic) system of mysteries, what falls to us is the mission of doing as good a job for the Irish, and Gaelic mysteries. Yet we shall draw from any and all that is a part of the Celtic family.
