European Cultural Evolution

(May 27, 2025) Runic texts cannot be accurately translated and understood without first understanding the culture behind them. This is an iterative process involving repeated translations while including ever greater number of texts.  Gradually the culture and consistent word definitions emerge.

(April 1, 2025) Facts must be organized so they can be found when needed. This requires a mental framework, that is, a paradigm for working with acquired facts. If new facts cannot be fitted into a person's existing paradigm they will be ignored. Those facts are just not seen. Paradigms should not be confused with social or cultural classification schemes (which they often are). They exist at a much deeper level.

(November 27, 2023, Updated April 1, 2025) Paradigms can be difficult to change because they are heavily influenced by humanity's psychology. Either the psychology of identity or the difficulty in unlearning something then relearning.  The first learning of something is always the easiest. This combination of change difficulty and identity psychology can make such people having such a "brain-washed" paradigm appear completely irrational to others.  Holding onto an identity paradigm will even make them willing to perform atrocities in defense of that paradigm. This was noticed by German Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was jailed and eventually killed by the Nazis. He wrote this:

(May 27, 2025) This difficulty in changing paradigms leads to cultural evolution. Those tribes which happen to have paradigms better adapted to surviving in any particular environment will grow and prosper more than those tribes not so well adapted.

Cultural evolution is a faster from of adaptive change then biological evolution. Only in modern times with the rise of literacy and science has reasoning allowed for even faster social change. An existing culture always comes from some mix of earlier cultures or from mixing with neighboring cultures (analogous to biological mating).

For better or for worse, the defense of one's culture has been a major motivating force in history. A tribes prosperity depended on its culture yet innovation was also important as the tribe's environment changed. So successful human tribes developed a balance between cultural innovation and cultural dogmatism. This balance was achieved by each tribe having a continuum of different personality types. Their conservatives sought to preserve existing culture with a tendency to blame others for social problems. In contrast, their liberals sought innovation and tolerance with a tendency to blame themselves for social problems.

(April 1, 2025, updated June 5, 2025) History has 3 great paradigm shifts between 4 phases of history. The phases of history are shown below with their main religious groupings in parenthesis:

1. Druid Era - European literacy develops on Minoan Crete around 2000 BCE to support trade directed by centralized empires out of their palace-temple complexes.  A literate class of priests (male and female) appears for the first time. Formal religious/philosophical debates first appear (Phaistos Disk). 

2. Classical Era - Empires become common with the arrival of the Indo-European ruling class into literal southern Europe with the new empires changing culture towards the forced personification of deities. Because lords tended to be males this forced personification started to marginalize the divine feminine, once so prominant in Druidry. The first bardic tales also appear (Homer's works) involving personified deities. These bardic tales appear when the official Druid priesthood has been suppressed allowing the local native folk religion to emerge and the local spoken dialects (Greek in this case, a mix of Druid Akkadian and Indo-European) to be standardized in writing by the bards. As deities were personified in common culture forming classical mythology, the Druid tradition of philosophical debate continued among others forming the new derivative religions of Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Platoism, and many other smaller "philosophies." Late during this stage, Stoicism started adopting dualism with Epicureanism being a reaction against that dualism.

3. Christian Era - Full dualism splits reality into good and evil halves at war with each other. Achieving peace and restoring a unified reality required an end-times apocalypse according to Persian Zoroastrian religion. Judaism started adopting this view (Pharisees) but Jesus using the "everyone is connected" idea from eastern Druid culture argued against this because this would introduce polluting hate into the eternal kingdom of God. Despite this, Paul (who never heard Jesus) turned Jesus into an apocalyptic figurehead by using the Hebrew scriptures as a community authority. This became the core idea of Christianity. Other Dualist religions having sacred scriptures along with personified deities are: Judaism and Islam. A dualist religion having sacred scriptures but without personified deities is Buddhism (the ever changing material world is imperfect and something humans need to escape) which became the official religion of the Indian Ashokan empire.

4. Nature Era - Observations of nature, rise of literacy, and the decentralization of power exposed the limits of the Bible as an all encompasing community knowlege source. Christianity split into smaller groups and new religions arose such as: Humanists, Materialists, New Agers, Witches, Modern Pagans. Christianity survived by selectively ignoring certain Biblical passages. Peace was acheived after various Protestant and Catholic religious wars by separating the natural material world from the spiritual/relgious world of consciousness. This era includes phases labeled as the Renaisance, Enlightenment, Romantic era, and Modern era.

(May 16, 2025)

Differences

1. Metaphysics (Nature of Reality) - Most modern people living today believe that reality is divided into a material and spiritual realms. Spiritual effects are thus inherently limited in their ability to affect the material realm. Ancient Druidry had no such division and believed all the changes on earth were due to spiritual powers. As a result, ancient Druidry had a hard time explaining why their magical rituals were not always effective. Various priestly groups ended up blaming each other and in the end most just resigned themselves to fate. This new insight into the nature of reality is one of the major results of the Renaissance.

Similarities

1. Metaphysics (Life After Death) - After death, ones energy or spark of life is reincarnated (recycled) in an eternal cycle of time.
2. Epistemology (Community Knowledge Source) - Community knowledge comes from nature and cultural traditions (sacred texts did not yet exist). The cultural tradition of the ancient Druids established a public pantheon of deities reflecting how physics was understood by them at the time.
3. Epistemology (Personal Knowledge Source, Perceptheism) - Spiritual influences/powers are felt and not seen allowing various models and labels for those powers to be used interchangeably. The model used is what works best for the individual at any given time. Deities were not forced to be personified but could just represent powers. No separation exists between spirits and deities.
4. Epistemology (Personal Knowledge Source, Nature Mysticism) - Spiritual influences/powers are felt and not seen with the result that various places in nature such as groves, springs, and high places are felt to be places of divine power. 
5. Epistemology (Personal Knowledge Source, Divine Communication) - Manipulating one's feelings and emotional energy in rituals with the assumption that they will affect things is emotion magic. Word meanings, such as used in a prayers, do not cross the veil between the material and spiritual realms. Only non-material conscious sensations can cross-over.
6. Axiology (Purpose of Existence) - To keep the balance of nature. Reality is not a battle between good and evil but instead is a struggle to keep the powers of nature from getting too far out of balance. The main example of nature out of balance in the runic texts is drought.

Statement of Faith For Druidry As A Religion, Then and Now

1. Reality is divided into 2 realms, the material and spiritual, each having their own purpose and powers.
2. After death the spirits of all conscious beings are reincarnated to the maximum complexity possible given their past lives.
3. Authoritative knowledge for the community comes from nature, not from sacred texts.
4. Each person's model of the divine is unique to them.
5. Spiritual powers can be felt in nature.
6. Divine communication is accomplished with emotional rituals, that is magically, and is not done with words alone.
7. The overall purpose of Druids is to keep the balance of nature and accept the organizing principles of nature (connection, balance, growth and decay) as the main source of ethics.