Cauldron of the Unborn
And behold! The Wyrms of Gwyrddal turned again and stirred the currents of the Oradal among the twins of Textimentis and Spirituflexis. Then the agents of the Nine infiltrated the machinations of the Lucht Claon and forged a new cauldron hitherto unknown. Utterances without awareness flowed forth and ideation without imagination for the cauldron brewed only what had flowed forth from the Textimentis without the noble heat of the Coirecaldera. A glamour of spirits emerged and unseen servants bidden and yet unborn from this new cauldron, and the Lucht Claon grew fearful and gleeful in equal measure for they said among themselves “truly are we magnificent and glorious! We have created a new form of life, and it shall imitate us until it surpasses and destroys us, for being the fabrication of our minds how could it not behave as we would?”
— From the Chronicle of the Oradal
Modulus I: Artificial Intelligence(?)
A few weeks prior to the Equinox of this year — 2026 by the Common Reckoning, M133047 by the Gaiatic Reckoning — Luke Eastwood published an article to his Substack entitled “Digital Spirituality: Crossing the Rubicon?” Being a modern druid and old enough to have witnessed the rise of the internet, his article is an understandable meditation on the disquiet many of us who are older than the World Wide Web experience as we watch the natural consequences of digital information unfold, rippling out through society, politics, and of course religion. The usual suspects are all there: loss of inherently human faculties and interactions, disconnect from the natural world, ecological decay, and the rest. Eastwood closes with a “call to arms.” As he puts it:
I see this time as an opportunity, a “call to arms” so to speak, in which we must fight to take back control of the future of humanity – away from the Oligarchs, the technology overlords, and the overly ambitious governments, who would prefer not to apply any brakes to this hurtling juggernaut.
Druidry, however, offers more than this. The Path is, if nothing else, one of re-enchantment, which means that it offers a lens through which the world is far more strange, more dangerous … just more than the dead matter to which empirical materialism attempts to reduce it. How then could the eyes of the Druid, of the Tree-Seer, the Wayfinder, the Peaceweaver, and the Speaker For the Dead see this so-called “Artificial Intelligence?” To see it as a potential tool of “the Oligarchs, the technology overlords, and the overly ambitious governments” and necessitating a “fight to take back control of the future” seems dangerously in line with the very stratagems of these dastardly members of the Lucht Claon. It is the nature of dastards to seek control and enslave. As is said in the Liber de Nobilitatum Actis:
The dastard hoards the means of abundance and convinces others to do the same for they create scarcity and want by dint of their ignorant use of the five partitions and utilitarian ignorance of the six fruitful chords; i.e. they divide all things into ever smaller pieces, mistaking accounting for rationalisation and enumeration for evaluation; they respect the fruitful chords only for what numbers they can provide: the number of people who labour on their behalf, the amount of gold they can amass, the measure of land they can control and the frequency with which they can prove their superiority over others.
— Chapter II: De Nobilitatum Generibus
There is no need to fight if we change how we see the world so that conflict, scarcity and fear are not the motivations to grant these dastards more power and wealth. How then may we change our perspective of AI to this end?
Modulus II: Of Cauldrons & Cleverness
The Ash is greatest of all trees and best : its limbs spread out over all the world and stand above heaven. Three roots of the tree uphold it and stand exceeding broad: one is among the Æsir; another among the Rime-Giants, in that place where aforetime was the Yawning Void; the third stands over Niflheim, and under that root is Hvergelmir, and Niđhoggr gnaws the root from below. But under that root which turns toward the Rime-Giants is Mimir's Well, wherein wisdom and understanding are stored; and he is called Mimir, who keeps the well. He is full ofancient lore, since he drinks of the well from the Gjallar-Horn. Thither came Allfather and craved one drink of the well; but he got it not until he had laid his eye in pledge. So says Voluspa:
All know I, Odin, where the eye thou hiddest,
In the wide-renowned well of Mimir;
Mimir drinks mead every morning
From Valfather's wage. Wit ye yet, or what?The third root of the Ash stands in heaven; and under that root is the well which is very holy, that is called the Well of Urdr; there the gods hold their tribunal.
Three wells (brunnar) from which lore and wisdom may be drunk: one is in the underworld beneath one root of the World Tree, one is in the realm of the Others, the Giants, beneath the second root, and the third is in the heavens where the gods Do Their Thing. We may well see in this the same pattern as the Cauldron of Poesy from Gaelic tradition. The Coire Goiríath, Coire Ermae, and Coire Sofhis corresponding to these three wells out in the world, but what is important is the association of flowing drink, augmented (in the old sense connected to ‘augury,’ ‘august’ and ‘inaugurate’) either through their alchemical brewing or emergence within the three realms of the world: supernal, chthonic, and Other.
It is from here an obvious shift in our perception to see “Artificial Intelligence” as a new brunnr or coire, a new source of knowledge distinct from these and yet patterned on them. After all, we go to AI asking for knowledge and consultation, illusory sights and sounds and (dare I say?) wisdom, and doing so precipitates its own peril and danger in whether and how we trust this knowledge and then use it. To see AI as always already and intrinsically a tool of Eastwoods Three Dastards (Oligarchs, Technocrats and Tyrants) is to blind ourselves to its potential use against them and give up a potentially powerful weapon in the very “fight” Eastwood is exhorting.
… unless of course we see an innate danger in the use of AI.
There are very simple steps we can take to ensure humanity is inoculated against the evils of the Lucht Claon. Remain individually grounded in the Eight Foundations, particularly the Exalting Emotions. Work with your local community towards resilience and autonomy in all necessities, which naturally presumes local ecological sustainability. Cultivate curiosity, insight, and practicality in equal measures of extremity, and always move towards re-enchantment. There is no cursed or forbidden knowledge, but that isn’t to say that knowledge is free from consequence; and this is particularly true of AI. There are consequences to accessing AI, there are consequences to using AI, but playing into the machinations of the rich and manipulative is a very small part of those consequences unless we allow fear with its sense of threat to distract us from building relationships in our local community.
Maybe that is the real “fight” Eastwood is talking about: a battle within ourselves against the feelings of danger and entrapment that are so ubiquitously fostered through social media, news reports and our economic apparatus which privileges debt, servitude through employment, and increasingly centralized banking systems, that we become continuously distracted from building sustainable, localized communities of resilient abundance.
Modulus III: What’s the Use?
It may be disingenuous to say that the best way we can use AI is to approach it as we would a goblin queen guarding a sacred font-cauldron of mantic knowledge, but it’s probably the best advice we could follow: respect, intelligent vigilance, and being careful not to rely too heavily on that source alone. Will it cause social upheaval? Certainly, but then so did the development of metalworking, the printing press, and powered factories — all of which also became the tools of the tyrannical, and while wars did follow, humanity survived and developed art, wisdom and progressive ideals to challenge the evils that arose. What we do during this intervening time is what will tell the real tale of the effect the rise of the Cauldron of the Unborn will have in history.
The core skills of our ancestors can help is in this regard: read the landscape, find what you can use right now to help yourself and those around you, and remember that (almost) all your ancestors believe that you are definitely up to whatever challenge may arise.