American Druidry: Crafting the Wild Soul

Approaching Druidry as an emerging religious movement, Kimberly Kirner analyzes her own life as a Druid through the lens of her profession as a cultural anthropologist.

Interweaving lively personal stories with accessible analytical essays, Kirner draws on literature from the anthropology of religion, the anthropology of consciousness, organizational anthropology, cognitive anthropology, and ethnoecology. Through this multidisciplinary angle, she leads the reader into an experiential and conceptual understanding of Druidry as a way of life, and as a contemporary Western new religious movement that challenges Christo-centric definitions of religion.

Reflecting on three domains of the Druidic life, the author describes the Druidic worldview (place, time, and the body), community (relational spirituality), and vocation (ethics and action). Kirner's essays question the boundaries and nature of religion as it is generally conceived in the Western world, and suggest how Druidry might be understood using concepts more appropriate to Druids' conceptualizations of themselves.