Omega, Alpha

Tonight I have, in a way, come to the end of a spiritual path... I have decided that I will no longer be studying the history or the archaeology of the celts in order to learn about their spiritual practices, especially druidry.

I came to this decision tonight in a roundabout way... I started out thinking that it didn't make sense for a people like that to face extinction and not make some effort to preserve their accumulated knowledge and wisdom for future generations. I started thinking that they must have hidden it, somewhere, most likely in plain sight for us to find... then I stopped and realized I wasn't actually thinking of what the celts might have done, but what I wished they had. My own desire for the knowledge was clouding my perception of them.

I thought about that for a moment, and tried to think of how they would have really seen things, and what their reaction to the loss of their knowledge might be. And I came to a realization that I believe is reasonably close to the truth. If the celtic druids were faced with the idea that their knowledge would be lost, I believe that they would have laughed. This was a people who did not keep books, did not commit what they considered sacred to writing... and, most importantly, who had no need to. Their wisdom came from observing the earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars. The land, the sea, and the sky. Nature itself. The secrets they knew were already preserved, written in the fiber of the universe itself: in every part of it, from pebbles to constellations, in a language older than time. Anything they could have written in a mortal tongue would have been a pale imitation of that preserved wisdom.

So tonight I close my books on the celts. An ending... or perhaps a true beginning?