Awen is a Welsh word for poetic inspiration, used in medieval Welsh verse of the gift that makes a poet, and modern Druidry has put it at the centre of its practice. It is chanted in ritual as three drawn syllables, carried by a symbol of three descending rays, and understood as something a person opens to rather than produces. Inspiration so understood is the mark of the bard, the first of the three grades most modern Druid orders use, so creative work is a religious activity in this tradition rather than an ornament attached to one. The symbol of the three rays is not ancient. It was devised by Iolo Morganwg in the late eighteenth century, along with a good deal else in modern Druidry, and Iolo also forged a substantial body of material that he presented as medieval Welsh tradition. Druid orders now generally know this and say so, and go on using the awen symbol because it works in practice and has two centuries of their own use behind it. That is a fair statement of how the tradition relates to its origins in general.
Facts
Structure
StructureIt is chanted in ritual as three drawn syllables, carried by a symbol of three descending rays, and understood as something a person opens to rather than produces. Inspiration so understood is the mark of the bard, the first of the three grades most modern Druid orders use. 1 Doctrinal category (class)Revelation, Covenant and Prophecy 2 Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteThe symbol of the three rays is not ancient. It was devised by Iolo Morganwg in the late eighteenth century, along with a good deal else in modern Druidry, and Iolo also forged a substantial body of material that he presented as medieval Welsh tradition. 2 Origins
Origin of the NameAwen is a Welsh word for poetic inspiration, used in medieval Welsh verse of the gift that makes a poet. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 2 Learn More
The Forgeries Modern Druidry Keeps and Names Openly
Iolo Morganwg's role in modern Druidry is unusually well documented for a religious founder, because the forgeries themselves survive alongside the scholarship that exposed them. Writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Iolo produced a substantial body of material, most consequentially the collection later published as Barddas, that he presented as medieval Welsh bardic tradition transmitted to him, when in fact it was his own composition, drawing on genuine older sources and genuine Welsh poetic vocabulary but woven together with a great deal of invention closely enough that separating the strands took specialists the better part of two centuries.
The awen symbol and its three descending rays belong to that invented layer rather than to any medieval source, and the honesty with which contemporary Druid orders now say so is itself notable within new religious movements more broadly, where a founder's fabricated lineage is more often defended than acknowledged once discovered. Modern orders have generally chosen to keep the symbol and the practice built around it while explicitly relabeling their relationship to the Iron Age druids as inspiration rather than unbroken transmission, treating two and a half centuries of Iolo's own tradition, forgeries included, as a real religious history in its own right rather than as a failed claim to a different, older one.
Connections
Belongs to Tradition
Source Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in BritainRonald Hutton
Sources
1. The Druids
2. Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain
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