#ethnocentricity

I was at an ADF (Ár nDraíocht Féin) spiritual retreat in 2016. There was a member of OBOD (Order of Bards Ovates & Druids) there who had also been studying the RDNA (Reformed Druidism) and ADF for some time beforehand. During one of the lunches at the ADF retreat, we were all casually discussing pantheons and cosmology, and got into talking about Dalon Ap Landu who is the Lord of the Groves in the RDNA.

The OBOD member asked if Dalon Ap Landu would ever be welcome as the deity of the occasion in an ADF Core Order of Ritual. Ian Corrigan, one of the members of the ADF Mother Grove in attendance interrupted sharply saying "absolutely not!" This caused an immediate awkward silence, and it gave me the impression that the subject had come up numerous times before in Mother Grove meetings, and that it was decided long ago that non-Indo-European deities could never be the deity of the occasion in an ADF ritual.

That was one of the first times I started to wonder if European ethnocentricity had been codified into ADF regulations. Though little by little it seems they are now considering permitting non-European deities to potentially be honored at the focal point of the ceremonies. Namely they mentioned they were considering allowing the Kemetic gods in.

There was some debate over the Hittite gods, as the Hittites had some crossover with mesopotamian cultures which were not Indo-European, however the Hittite language is of the Indo-European family. This gray area allowed further discussion though some people still have strong opinions on that topic.

In retrospect if Dalon Ap Landu hadn't been given a Welsh name and the RDNA would have just stuck with the original "Lord of the Groves" epithet, the deity would have more credence. Lord of the Groves exists in the historic record as mentioned by the first century Roman historian Lucan in his Pharsalia where he mentioned the druids feared to disturb the Lord of the Groves.

That phrasing has a pro-Roman spin on it, as some historians speculate the druids didn't fear the Lord of the Groves but perhaps respected him. By making the druids (and by extension, the Gauls) seem fearful and timid, it elevated the Romans. Especially when in the paragraphs beforehand it mentions the Roman soldiers being too afraid to cut down the sacred groves to build siege towers (for the Siege of Massilia), and that the only thing that emboldened them was when Julius Caesar himself started to cut down the first tree in the grove. Allegedly.

As part of our first project we were required to pick out two random words from an envelope which will act as a guideline when generating ideas about people and places.

The first word was Identity - The fact of being who or what a person or thing is, but it can also mean the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is e.g. age

and

the video she showed us had a British narrator.

Everyone immediately started to freak out when they heard his accent because they somehow thought no one else learned Spanish but Americans. Because we're just more special than the rest of the world. Learning Spanish is exclusive to us.

These are the kind of people I encounter every day.