Instructions for the displacement of Druids
A weekend of index cards and the impact of the Age of Saints
I spent last weekend with a pile of multi-coloured index cards. I was trying to lay out the bones of the story so that perhaps I might be able to write from point to point instead of this weird channeling of a scene at a time and trying to stitch that against a timeline of real events. It was a modestly successful endeavour.
So many fascinating things happen both over the span of the lifetime of a character like Erna, but also The Age of Saints itself was a significant ripple in time for the west. And I want knowledge of that impact to resonate even in the earliest part of our tale.
In Erna’s world the power of the church is massing, but is not yet dominant. Colmcille and his followers very successfully undertook converting the people of Scotland from the idea of gods in the earth and its creatures—ones you could see and touch and meet—and put them in the sky as the Heavenly Father. And once that was done it was very easy to edit what form of human would see themselves in the gods. It was the first age of books and individual people made the choices of what to include in those gospels. Decisions made because of these times will roll over our futures—disconnecting the people from the landscapes, systematic patriarchy and erasure of women in spiritual leadership roles, the Crusades... And when we zoom ahead on the timeline to find ourselves in the now and people of the Celtic diaspora awakening and trying to reconnect with the wisdom of what’s been mostly lost and reconciling with all the harm participated in because of it. It’s a lot of index cards!
But mostly lost is not all gone. We find breadcrumbs of the old ways in names and places like the landscape that reflects a version of an Erna I can only imagine. There are cairns and stone circles still standing amongst modern housing and roads to call us deeper into other times and ways. Archeology keeps unveiling the complex beauties of the distant past that were previously painted as ignorant. And in it all we remember there are more possibilities than we’ve been taught.
The idea of the index cards was to get a few of the actual things that happened onto paper. Whether they happen in our novel or are simply known is yet to be seen. For example the king of Dal Riata must remove the Druids from Iona before he can gift the island to Colmcille for the monastery. How was that accomplished? Is it part of our tale? Iona has marinated for centuries now as the christian home. But for thousands of years before it was something else. It had a different name. It would not have instantly taken that transformation, nor without great effort. The relationship between conversion and colonisation is present from the arrival of Colmcille on the island.
Erna and the characters were part of the very front edge of world altering change. They lived in unsettling times without the understanding of what would hold. I feel like their time and ours has a lot in common. But the part that makes it a story and not a history text is that our characters were also trying to live individual lives of meaning too.
They were not yet saints.