Two years ago, when I studied abroad in England, we happened to take a trip out to Avebury. As soon as I stepped off the bus, though, we were told we’d only have a short while there: about 40 minutes. I had honestly never heard of Avebury until the trip, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect as we approached it. Little did I know that it would be one of the most important parts of my visit to the UK.
Stepping off the bus, there was an immediate change. We were already closer to the stones than we had even dreamed of being at Stonehenge (we did not get the inner circle tour, much to my chagrin). Something immense and humming was present in that place. I kept that to myself, as we walked into one of the fields where sheep were grazing amongst the standing stones. Between the usual tourist-y snapping of photos, I stopped at a few of them to pause and sense the energy. There was magic here, and I loved the cool feeling of the stone beneath my hand after having spent a day in the incredibly hot sun.
As we wandered around, I noticed a man sitting beside some of the smaller stones on a blanket. He had incense and a couple of candles burning. His hair was like a steely grey mane in the light breeze, and he had dowsing rods in his hands. Most of the group seemed to give him a pretty wide berth; I suspected that it was because they were uncomfortable with what, to average American college students, must have been a rather unusual sight. My roommate for the trip, Mary Jo, and I stopped a few yards away from him – definitely out of normal earshot. I smiled, sort of watching him, and explained to Mary Jo what I thought he might be doing: dowsing for the ley lines that intersect many of the stone sites in England and Ireland. I explained to her some of the practices associated with dowsing rods and ley lines, and suddenly, as though he had heard us whispering across the distance, he turned to look at us.
“Have you two got good imaginations on you?” he asked us.
I was a bit taken aback because we hadn’t expected him to notice us. We answered that we had.
“Do you know where that word comes from, imagination?”
We answered that we didn’t, though I was thinking to myself that it must be of some sort of Latin-based origin.
“I. Magi. Nation… A nation of magicians,” he said. “Merlin is one of my guides. Did you know he learned his very first magic trick right in this stone circle?”
Being interested in Arthurian legend, but not having explored it much as of yet, my interest was piqued. “Did he really?” I peered around, trying to imagine one of the greatest magicians of all time standing in the very same circle which I was standing in.
“He did indeed. D’you know what it was? He turned one of his friends invisible and couldn’t figure out how to turn him back again.” We giggled at that notion as he continued: “The Druids used to perform their initiations in this stone circle as well.”
Now my mind was filled with images of white robed Druids filing solemnly through the giant stones. “Really?” The hair on the back of my neck stood on end a bit.
He nodded, answering that it was in fact true, before staring at us intently again. “Ya know, I get Druid from both of you.”
It made me pause for a moment. How, when I wasn’t wearing anything that I thought particularly screamed “I’m a Druid” had this man I’d never spoken to know such a thing. “Well,” I answered after collecting myself, “I suppose that’s a good thing, since I am a practicing Druid.”
He nodded, and replied that he was glad, before turning back to his dowsing rods as though the conversation had never taken place. My mind was left buzzing after that. Nothing we had seen yet that day had left me feeling so in awe or energized. I remember talking so excitedly about it to one of my professors as we headed towards the bus that she told me to calm down a bit. No one else on the trip seemed to mention that we had spoken to him, either. I imagine we must have been speaking fairly loudly in order to make up for the distance between us, but no one said anything about it. Perhaps they didn’t notice. Perhaps there was some sort of magic going on. Every now and then, I like to think maybe I was speaking to Merlin himself.
What caused this memory to become so ingrained in my mind is the energy of the place, and the absolutely surreal feeling of those moments spent talking with “The Avebury Druid” (as I’ve come to call him). It wasn’t about whether or not the information was factual for me. Rather, it was about the connection I suddenly felt with, what I feel to be, one of the greatest parts of Celtic culture: storytelling, and in particular storytelling about the sacredness of the land. In that moment, I felt completely at one with all of the history of the place – and with the strange man who was standing just a few yards away from me. In that moment, I was welcomed – if only for a moment – into the tradition of Celtic storytelling, of Awen shining through in a seemingly unlikely place. That, for me, was the real magic of that day.
I’ve said in a recent post that Awen is a large part of my spiritual quest. Inspiration, the recognition and embracing of the fact that I am a co-creator with the gods, with those who have gone before me, with all things on this Earth, is essentially what I am always striving for. I think that this moment in Avebury was one of the first times I had ever really felt that. Every time I remember this story, the memory of the goosebumps I got, despite the still-warm, setting sun, comes to mind. This was the first inkling I had of what it was that I was truly looking for in my spiritual path and in life.