Reformed Druids of North America - Principles

Principles

Reformed Druidism emphasizes its lack of institutionalized dogma. Each Druid is required only to adopt these basic tenets:

• One of the many ways in which the object of Man’s search for religious truth can be found is through Nature.
• Nature, being one of the primary concerns in Man’s life and struggle, and being one of the objects of Creation, is important to Man’s spiritual quests.

The original group were not Neo-Pagan — most identified themselves as Jewish, Christian, agnostic, atheist, Marxist or as members of other faiths — and the movement still includes many who do not consider themselves Neo-Pagan.

Chas S. Clifton, an academic scholar of Neopaganism, made several suggestions as to where the early RDNA founders may have got their ideas about Druidry from, noting that there were British Druid groups such as the Ancient Druid Order operating at the time, who held annual ceremonies at the megalithic monument of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, attracting much media attention. Accompanying this, there were ideas about the ancient druids to be found in the "American literary consciousness", where they appeared as guardians of the natural world in the Romanticist poetry of Philip Freneau.

(As ingenious as Clifton's speculations are, they are unfortunately completely ungrounded. At a meeting in Fisher's dormitory room about the religious requirement, Cherniack volunteered that his family had always responded to questions about religion by claiming to be Druids, and the group adopted this moniker. When someone pointed out that none of the group knew anything at all about Druids, the suggestion quickly arose that the new group call itself The Reformed Druids of North America, so it could create tenets and rituals out of whole cloth without having to know or care anything about any previous Druids.)