The Gorsedd Prayer, Part 1

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The Gorsedd Prayer is one of Iolo's most famous and enduring contributions, and forms a major part of the piety of many modern Druid organizations and individual Druids. In Barddas he gives several different forms, but that which is best known and used most often reads as follows:

Grant, O God, Thy protection;
And in protection, strength;

And in strength, understanding;

And in understanding, knowledge;

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;

And in that love, the love of all existences;

And in the love of all existences, the love of God.

God and all goodness.

Grand, Oh God, that we may unfold into light the knowledge contained in this prayer, for herein is the entirety of the Druid theology condensed.

Let's look at the beginning of the prayer, and what I think of as its first division:

Grant, Oh God, Thy Protection,
And in Protection, Strength,
And in Strength, Understanding.

We begin with an invocation of God.

Now, it is the nature of Druidry that no doctrine is given as an imperative, so that even a holy invocation may be modified according to the understanding of the individual Druid. Some pray, rather, "Grant, Oh Gods," or, "Holy Ones," "Goddess," or "Great Spirit." We will return to this point at the end. For now, let us consider the prayer as given: We begin by invoking God, with no specific denomination given. And so this is an invocation of God-as-such, or "Divinity Itself." This is identical with the First Principle, also called the Good or the One.

Now, the First Principle, being the Good Itself, wills by its very existence the good of all things; and being One, causes the unity of all things. To become unitedly that which we are is to become good, and this occurs only ever by participation in the First Principle.

Following the invocation of God, we first ask for three blessings: Protection, Strength, and Understanding. Each unfolds from the prior: From God, Protection; form Protection, Strength, from Strength, Understanding. We must therefore understand these three individually and as arising from each other.

"Protection" always means "to be preserved from harm." What is harm? Any deviation from the good-- and to be good, remember, is to be united, which is to say, is precisely to be. We first, then, ask for the preservation of our being and-- what is the same thing-- its union to God.

Being-Life-Intellect: We know these well as the three terms of the Intelligible Triad. Being is the first term, and the second, which unfolds from it, is power or life. Everything which is has a vitality to it: that which does not act at all is Dead and is very Death, which is Annwn and Cythraul. We therefore ask that, having been united to our true being, our true vitality may unfold. The third term of the triad is Intellect, which is the same as Understanding: This is true awareness, the capacity to, as it were, "turn around;" to look back upon our origin.

These terms, Being, Life, and Intellect-- or Being-Life-Intellect-- define the Divine Intellect, and they define every participant in the divine intellect. In Christian terms, they can be understood as the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Son. In the thought of Proclus, they are the first Gods which proceed immediately from the One, and which unfold many succeeding triads which recapitulate the same basic scheme, until we arrive at those we know: Saturn holding the place of Being; Rhea, the place of Life; Jupiter, the Intellect. I have written elsewhere that in the terms of the Celtic theology we may understand the First as Hu the Mighty, the Second as Ced the Earth Mother, and the Third as Hesus, Chief of Tree Spirits, all of which unfold from and are supernally united to the OIW, the First Principle.

And so as we pray to God for Protection, Strength, and Understanding, we may be understood to say, "Grant that I may have my being perfected and united in thee."

At this point we are invoking the highest level of Being, the extremity of Gwynvydd at the unknowable boundary of Ceugant. As the prayer proceeds, we descend into the fullness of Gwynvydd, and then to Abred and Annwn, before returning again to our source, as we shall see.