The Druid’s Prayer: a closer look

(Taken by me on a trip to southeastern Poland. Filters, obviously.)

I want to talk for a second about the Druid’s Prayer, because I’ve been thinking about it since I learned it.

The Druid’s Prayer is a prayer composed by the bard Iolo Morganwg around the beginning of the 19th century. There are actually six versions of it in Barddas, the original text in which it appears, which means that Druids will often move it around and adapt it according to their needs; flexibility was baked-in from the beginning.

Here’s the version I say:

Grant, O God, Thy protection;

And in protection, strength;

And in strength, understanding;

And in understanding, knowledge;

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;

And in that love, the love of all existences;

And in the love of all existences, the love of God.

God and all goodness.

Druids and other Neopagans often substitute “Goddess” or “Deity” for “God”, for obvious reasons. I’m personally comfortable with “God” and in my mind it’s a flexible word, so that’s what I stick with.

I love this prayer. I love it because it’s a progression; one thing builds on another, unable to properly exist without the foundation of the thing before it. As request prayers go, it strikes me as pretty perfect in terms of what to ask for in order to live a good life. I think it stands out in some ways from prayers like the Lord’s Prayer, because none of what it asks for is material in nature. It’s all about what kind of person you are and how you live in the world. The Lord’s Prayer (which I also love and do not intend to disparage here) asks for “daily bread”—our most basic sustenance, the minimum we need in order to survive. That has all kinds of beautiful religious and spiritual implications as well; the Lord’s Prayer is a wonderfully complex and rich piece of devotion (I love Rob Bell’s take on it here). But I feel that what the Druid’s Prayer asks for and how it asks for it make it highly distinct and really interesting.

Here, let’s dig into it line by line.

Grant, O God, Thy protection.

In many ways this is the closest the prayer comes to asking for something material, and I think in part that’s because the beginning of the prayer is where God/Goddess/Deity is addressed most like a parent. This prayer is on some level constructed like a passage from childhood to a higher maturity, and what’s one of the the first and most important things a child needs from a parent?

Protection. We’re defenseless as infants and young children, and if our parent—or whoever is our adult guardian—doesn’t protect us, no one will. That word, in fact: Guardian. We recognize the paramount necessity of protection for a child.

But protection is also important because if we don’t feel safe, we’ll find it very difficult to learn anything else in a healthy way. Children who don’t feel safe are abused and traumatized children.

So what we pray for, first and foremost, is protection.

And in protection, strength.

This is where everything else begins in earnest. From a position of safety, we can flourish and grow, and a fundamental part of growth is the recognition and development of our own agency—our own strength. Our strength to learn and to make our own choices, to eventually no longer be dependent on the protection of a parent.

Now, one may feel that a relationship with God/Goddess/Deity is in some respects intrinsically a parental one, and that that relationship persists throughout life. But depending on what kind of afterlife you believe in, if any, this life you’re living now may only be a kind of childhood. After death, perhaps we move on to a new stage of the soul’s maturity. Perhaps in our old age we’re still only beginning to grow up.

And in strength, understanding.

And in understanding, knowledge.

This part is fascinating, because understanding precedes knowledge, and I think one might expect the order to go the opposite way. One accumulates knowledge and then understands it. But Iolo is suggesting something more profound: that our ability to understand anything at all must work on all levels, not merely the intellectual, and furthermore that we only develop understanding when we’re secure in both our safety and our strength. We can’t know, he implies, until we can understand. If we have no ability to comprehend in the deepest part of us, if we haven’t worked that muscle, it doesn’t matter how much knowledge we accumulate. It’ll be data with no discussion or conclusion.

So first comes understanding, born from a place of strength. Only then comes knowledge.

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice.

Justice as a notion and a practice is a core aspect of Druidry. While we have almost no real sources on who the Druids were and what their nature in society was—and what we do have may not be completely reliable for a number of reasons (Romans were frequently writing propaganda when they described other cultures, and also seem to have been frequently reporting on the basis of unverifiable hearsay)—one thing written about pretty clearly and consistently is that Druids performed the role of learned judges and keepers of the laws of their tribe. They reportedly arbitrated disputes and handed down punishments to criminals. Justice, in other words, is intrinsically a Druid’s business.

But Iolo is also talking about a more powerful form of justice—cosmic justice, the justice that comes from righteousness. One can learn and understand the letter of the law, but that’s only a superficial understanding of what justice really is. Indeed, justice and the law aren’t always in agreement; laws are unjust all the time. So a Druid has to both know and understand justice in its richest meanings.

And Druids also have to know and understand strength, because strength makes and enforces the law, and strength isn’t always just either. Strength is frequently unjust, because it often works to maintain a status quo that benefits the strong.

So the progressive order of requests in this prayer actually works backwards as well. It isn’t linear so much as it is—like so many things—recursive and cyclical.

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it.

To truly understand justice, to know justice, to be strong enough to practice justice, you must love justice, and you can’t understand or know or practice it fully until you love it.

This is why I said this prayer is cyclical and recursive. In that respect it’s also something of a paradox. You need X before you can do Y but you can’t really have X until you can do Y.

Does this mean it’s impossible? No. It means that what’s being asked for here is a process—and again, it’s not linear. You’re scattering yourself across it as you scatter across anything, as we actually live simultaneously in the past and present and future. Something like life can’t be built methodically one stone at a time. It’s always a big fumbling work in progress. It’s always complicated.

But you need love in order to have justice, and you can’t have true justice without love.

True justice is also merciful. This is what you find when you dig into the notion of divine justice in a host of faith traditions, especially when you pay attention to mystics. On my right bicep I have the Arabic word رحيم (rahim)—one of the names of God—tattooed in calligraphy. I’m not Muslim, and if I had it to do over again I might not get that exact tattoo because it feels maybe just a bit appropriative, but I originally chose that word because of the depth of its meaning: the divine compassion of a God of justice.

Divine justice, in other words, and divine love.

(The root letters of rahim are R-H-M—which refers to the womb. God by this name, in other words, is feminine: a nurturing, loving mother. More about that here. Arabic is a fantastic language.)

In the Druid’s Prayer we ask that we might know and understand justice, so that we can love it. The goal is love of justice.

But of course it doesn’t stop there.

And in that love, the love of all existences.

A common belief among Druids—and many Pagans in general—is that souls reincarnate; in addition, that reality consists of planes far beyond what human beings can perceive. There are multiple existences—of the universe as a whole, and of the soul’s experience.

We also treat the entire universe as sacred. All existence is sacred. Everything sacred is worthy of love—love built on strength, grown in understanding and knowledge, braided with justice. We experience existence fully when we learn how to love, and so we ask for the guidance to love not merely the existence we experience now but every existence there is and every one we might ever have (personally I’m agnostic about reincarnation, as I am about most things, but, y’know, who knows).

And in the love of all existences, the love of God.

Beliefs about God(s)/Goddess(s)/Deity(s) in Druidry are tremendously diverse. That being the case, beliefs about the relationship between those entities and the universe are diverse as well. But many of us are either pantheists (God is everything) or panentheists (God is in everything) in some capacity. I consider myself the latter, but really the details don’t matter tremendously when it comes to this prayer; when you believe in a Deity or a Deities who love and delight in creation, then you come to understand and know them through understanding and knowing creation.

I believe that loving the universe is how I love God, and vice-versa. In the Druid’s Prayer, I’m asking to be guided into opening myself to that divine love, to being in it and of it as I’m in and of the universe itself.

God and all goodness.

The universe is good. God/Goddess/Deity is good—good in the profound and profoundly simple way it’s written and meant in the Genesis poem. When we understand and know and love the things that are good, we’re reaching for a state of deeper wisdom that we ideally spend our whole lives trying to attain.

If you believe in the divine, then communion with the divine is found in that deeper wisdom, that deeper understanding and knowledge and love—none of which can be comprehended or exist without justice.

Like I said: The Druid’s Prayer is a path. It’s a prayer to be guided on a journey through that existence we ask to be able to love, from the immaturity of dependence to the maturity of wisdom. Yet it’s also a journey on which we’re always circling back to repeat the process, at every step re-experiencing what we’ve gone through before. None of us are strong all the time. None of us understand things all the time. None of us live just lives all the time. Sure as hell none of us are loving all the time.

Which is why we pray for those things. And as we pray, as we recite this progressive litany, we meditate on what it is to work toward them. We meditate on the journey we’re praying for.

Therefore, the prayer isn’t merely a passive request. It’s active participation in the process. Which means that even if in reality we’re praying to nothing technically real... the prayer is still real.

And so are the things we’re praying for.

So that’s why I love the Druid’s Prayer, and what I think about when I say it.