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The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD)

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Morgana Post number 24495 Posted: 22nd May 2018     Subject:
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Still going strong...
DruidCast – A Druid Podcast Episode 134
https://www.paganmusic. ... episode-134/

Featuring music from OMNIA and an interesting interview with:
Professor Graham Harvey from AnderidaFest 2018 –
What we can learn from Indigenous Peopleshttp://www.open.ac.uk/people/gh2744


Graham Harvey: Professor of Religious Studies
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
School of Hist, Rel St, Soc, SP&C
Religious Studies
Morgana Post number 26185 Posted: 9th March 2020     Subject: In Honour of Pamela Colman Smith
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From: Damh the Bard:

In Honour of Pamela Colman Smith

That was a fabulous weekend.

Our annual pilgrimage to Cornwall for the Pagan Phoenix South West conference held at a holiday centre just outside of Bude. Some of you may know I was born in Cornwall and have a deep connection to the land that made my teeth and bones so this is my yearly pilgrimage to the wild country and coast of my birth.

The conference was fabulous with some really interesting speakers and I managed to record a couple for forthcoming episodes of DruidCast. Gary Lachman gave a brilliant history of Aleister Crowley, Pete Jennings gave a great talk on Pathworking, after lunch Karen Cater gave a talk and folk music presentation on the Spirit of the Hare that had the whole audience singing along, and the daytime activities were crowned with a talk/performance by our Druid buddy from Anglesey, Kristoffer Hughes, who spoke about Ceridwen. At 8pm I took the main stage with an opening reflective, singalong set, and after a short break kicked it up with a set of anthems and more upbeat songs.

What a fabulous night!

Sunday is our traditional journey to Boscastle for a walk up the cliffs and a Cornish Cream Tea in the village, but this year we made a detour on the way.

If you are reading this and you are interested in magic and the occult I would be happy to make a bet that somewhere in your house you have a tarot deck. And to make this bet a little more interesting I’d also be happy to say that at least one of those decks is either what was known as the Rider Waite deck, or a deck that is based on that deck. Rider was the publisher and the Waite is AE Waite, magician and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. What was so special about the deck was that, up until then, all of the Minor Arcana cards in previous Tarot decks had been what are called Pip cards, ie, the Seven of Wands only had an image of seven wands, like a regular deck of playing cards. This made the Minor Arcana much harder to interpret. The Rider Waite deck had full images for all 78 cards of the Tarot. It was revolutionary, and pretty much every deck for years have been based upon the images from that original Rider Waite deck.

But there was a problem.

Rider may have published the deck, and AE Waite might have come up with some of the ideas for the images on the cards, but Waite was not an artist, so he asked Pamela Colman Smith, also a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to create the art and images for the cards. A HUGE input to the creation of this legendary Occult tool, but for years and years her name was nowhere on the deck. In more recent years the deck has become known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck or RWS for short, and this is a very good thing. Pamela’s images have been of massive importance to the development of the Tarot, and also to everyone’s lives who have used her cards, and those based upon the images of her cards. Many believe that much of the imagery for the Minor Arcana came directly from Smith herself.

But still to this day, many know so little about her.

She was a contemporary and friend of poet William Butler Yeats, and she illustrated at least one of his poetry books. She was also a friend of Bram Stoker and her illustrations can be found in a publication of his final book Lair of the White Worm. She was the only daughter of Charles Edward Smith (who was the son of Brooklyn Mayor Cyrus Porter Smith), and Corinne Colman (sister of painter Samuel Colman). She was active as part of the Suffrage movement. Her life took her from Brooklyn, to Jamaica, to London. She was part of that amazing cauldron of Victorian magic that gave birth to so much of what we do as modern Pagans.

Her name should be much more widely known.

However, her later life did not go well financially. She struggled to make her artwork pay and subsequently built up a lot of debt. She moved to Bude in Cornwall and tried to make a living there, and she did for a while. She never married, but lived with Nora Lake, her long-time companion of 40 years.

Pamela Colman Smith died in 1951 aged 71. She never saw the full impact that her artwork had on the world. She was buried in a pauper’s unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Michaels and All Angels Church in Bude and the exact location was lost in a church fire that destroyed a vast amount of the parish records. Only local memory and word of mouth recall the grave was beside the wall next to the woods in the churchyard itself.

So on our way to Boscastle me, Cerri, Kristoffer and Ian took a detour to find that church. It was Sunday morning and Service was beginning as we drove up and parked our cars. I do love churchyards. Even when I was a child I used to sometimes ride my bike to the one in the centre of Haywards Heath and just sit there in the silence and peace. I never found them spooky, and this was no exception. It was a beautiful place of memory and respect. We made our way around the church and there at the back was a long stone wall that bordered a small woodland, and as we walked on so gaps in the marked graves began to appear, with unnamed graves between the older and leaning headstones. Somewhere, here amongst the graves, lay the bones of a lady who had the most incredible impact on so many lives, yet she never knew this while she lived.

We opened ourselves and spoke words into the air. Telling her of what had happened since she had passed away. We thanked her for her art, her life, her vision. We asked ourselves questions as to why there was no sign, no marker at all, that said that she lay somewhere in that earth. As we were speaking so birds began to sing, louder. Our eyes were drawn to the countless primroses that covered the ground of the churchyard, then to our feet, where upon one unmarked grave, a single pink primrose grew, one among many, around which a large black beetle walked, alone.

One single pink primrose among a sea of yellow.

Not everything nature gives us is a sign. Sometimes nature is just doing nature things. But sometimes one gets a distinct feeling that something else is going on, and that was one of those moments.

I reached down and touched the earth of the unmarked grave.

Was she there?

Who knows.

And in truth, it doesn’t matter. Her Spirit was in the grass, the trees, the very air of that place, her Spirit is in the card I pulled from my RWS deck this morning. We just wanted to show her some respect, some love, and speak her name so she would know that she is remembered.

For what is remembered, lives.

We left, listening to the hymns being sung by the congregation in the church as we walked back to the cars, and made our way onwards, to Boscastle.

https://www.paganmusic. ... olman-smith/
Morgana Post number 26828 Posted: 11th February 2021     Subject:
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Druidcast – The OBOD Podcast

Welcome to the webpage for DruidCast - provided by the Order and downloaded over 2 million times. Produced monthly around the 20th of each month.
Your host is Damh the Bard and each episode features poetry, story and song offered by Bards throughout the world. There are also interviews with people involved in the Druid tradition, and related areas, plus seasonal thoughts, explorations of Celtic mythology and history, reviews, and competitions. Please send contributions for the podcast to: druidcast::at::gmail.com, or through the post to: OBOD DruidCast, PO Box 1333, Lewes, E. Sussex, BN7 1DX.

Dive straight into the DruidCast archive of over 150 episodes. Shownotes include links to all of the artists and speakers we have featured on DruidCast over the years. Stream and download the show using the player below. Full show notes here.

DruidCast - A Druid Podcast Episode 166 and many other episodes.

https://druidry.org/resources/druidcast-the-obod-podcast
Mountain Post number 26884 Posted: 12th March 2021     Subject: Re: The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD)
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Hi Morgana, I appreciate this topic. The three ranks!
Morgana Post number 27069 Posted: 20th June 2021     Subject: Back to the Blog – Under a Pagan Sky Documentary
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Damh the Bard and others are featured with interviews here

https://www.druiddocumentary.co.uk/interviews.html

and also here:
Back to the Blog – Under a Pagan Sky Documentary
Published on June 11, 2021

Things have been a little quiet on my blog over the past few weeks. I think as with many people across the world, the 18 months of social change came to a head (well, my head) a little more recently. Maybe it’s that there seems to be an (admittedly moving) end in sight. Maybe it’s coming from some inner searching about how I want my life to be going forward, and that inner searching has caused some confusion, and hence some things have taken a back seat while those little boxes are opened, explored, then either discarded, closed once more, or put to good use. The process is ongoing, but it does feel like some clarity has returned, and that feels good.

So on to the reason for this post. Two years ago Kristoffer Hughes, Cerri and myself, went to Australia for a musical tour, and as guests for a camp organised by friends who run an OBOD group in Southern Australia. If you have my albums you will know how much I love Australia and it was three weeks of fun, depth, laughter, tears, music, ritual and food. We were due to return this year but that didn’t quite go to plan. While we were there one of the gigs was at an event called the English Ale, an event of Morris Dancing, Punch and Judy, Ale (obviously – I love hearing Australians ordering a pint of Adnam’s Ghost Ship and calling it Goat Shit), music, and a torchlit procession with ‘Obby Oss, Mari Llwyd, Giants, masks, the lot, and the procession leads to a giant Wicker Man who, with ritual, is then put to the torch. Last year Kristoffer, Cerri and I were invited to lead the procession and it was wonderful.

During the day and evening, there had been a film crew who were making a documentary about Paganism in the Southern Hemisphere and they asked for an interview. They were respectful, kept a distance from the rituals, and asked sensible and interesting questions. It was a pleasure to have been there and been part of it. Two years later and the documentary is finished and will be shown on Australian TV on the 22nd of June. It’s also being shown at various film festivals and has been entered into some award categories. When the film was done I was sent a link to watch it and to approve the use of my words and music – something that had never happened before when I’d been involved in anything for the media, and it was brilliant. Professional, sensitive, beautifully filmed. I really hope that it will be made more widely available so more people can see it outside of the Southern Hemisphere, but right now I’ve not heard anything. If I do, I will certainly post that info on my social media sites. Or you can follow the filmmakers here on Facebook and hopefully they’ll keep us all in the picture.

But for now here it the trailer for the film. It really captures the vibe wonderfully.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/558124992

https://www.paganmusic. ... documentary/
ChristopherBlackwell Post number 27073 Posted: 20th June 2021     Subject: Looks like it is interesting
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Looks like they were lucky enough to get someone who wanted to do a serious and honest report on it. That alone is rare enough in our modern Pagan history.

Wisdom is what is left after you have done all the dumb stuff
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