Exploring paganism : druidic experiences of nature

Abstract: Humanity could be considered to be alienated from nature due to us having adapted an intellectual relationship to it that is problematic. To become a society that is sustainable at its core we would thus need to change that relationship. As such there is value in studying individuals who have adopted different relationships to nature, Contemporary Paganism consists of such individuals. Paganism is still relatively unexplored within science and as such this paper stands on its own without any explicit theoretical framework outside of phenomenology. This paper focuses on modern Druids and the aim was simply to chart the subjective experience of nature among individual Druids in an attempt to find the essence of that experience, which was accomplished through a phenomenological approach based on Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Six interviews were conducted with contemporary Druids to gather material for the study, after which we performed the phenomenological reduction on the descriptions they provided to us of their experience of nature. It resulted in two different reductions, one based on descriptions of the conception and perception of nature, and one based on their descriptions of interacting with nature. The first one became the notion of ‘Nature as Everything’, and the second one became the notion of ‘Nature as a Subject’, and the former of these tells us of the context of our informants experience of nature, the horizon, and the latter one tells us of their attitude, the stance that they take towards it. These findings we believe point to the importance of continued studies of Paganism with an environmental focus through a more specified lens than what we have provided here.