"It's party time for druids" by David Sexton

This Sunday, June 21, is the longest day, the solstice, a word derived from Latin, meaning �the standing still of the sun�. Few of us are probably planning a celebration. For druids, pagans, and the like, though, the solstice is a highlight of the year. They do have plans. They�ll be lighting fires and dancing in circles, some in robes and some, �skyclad�, not. So, if you go down to the woods on Sunday, you may get a big surprise.

Unless, that is, you feel like trying it for yourself, with a few like-minded friends. All you need is an instruction book and there are plenty about. One of the most surprising growth areas in publishing - leaving aside footie, B. Jones clones, and self-help manuals so tiny you could swallow them whole like Shreddies - is Celtic mysticism.

Celtic myths, Celtic Art, Celtic Women, Celtic Tips, they pour forth at all levels, from the severely scholarly to the educationally sub-normal. Naturally, for every publication in the for category - the new Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology (edited by James Mackillop, �30) for instance, which firmly says that most of what is currently believed about the druids is �romantic misinformation�- there are 20 or 40 in the latter.

Some of these romantic misinformers call themselves Celts, some Druids, some Pagans, Shammans, Witches or Wiccans. It doesn�t matter. Many make it all up anyway. Emma Restall Orr, for example, who this week publishes Spirits of the Sacred Grove: The World of a Druid Priestess (Thorsons, �9.99), rejects such restrictive definitions as true or false. �If the journeys I take you along are to you pure fantasy and creative imagination, then it is so,� she blithely grants.

Fine. It is so. So mote it be. Her book is an engaging concoction of New Age jargon and advanced delusion. She pleasantly describes turning into any number of different creatures, including and owl, a Kodiak Bear, an Otter, a Forest Bulb and, really quite frequently, a cat.

And she gets up to all sorts of things. She see spirits and hears magic sounds (�just as if a harp were being played in the depths of my womb�). She dances with a character called Silverwolf (�I am overwhelmed with such a flood of release that, when I come to, a moment later, my first thought is that I�ve wet myself�). For those eager to share these excitements she includes an address and a website for The British Druid Order, �an eclectic Order of Druidry and Bardcraft� of which she has the honour of being joint chief.

If you�d rather go DIY, Dilys Gater is full of tips in Celtic Wise Woman: The Secrets Revealed (Hale, �12.99). �It is up to you to swirl your magician�s cloak magically about you as you stride through the day,� she says. �On Monday, hold a piece of wood in your hand and look at your reflection in a bowl of water ... on Sunday at midday, you can work on your spiritual progress and link your body with your spirit by allowing a handkerchief with four knots at the end to rest on your head ... And for added security, never cut your fingernails on a Friday.� You haven�t just risked it have you?

In Celtic Lore and Druidic Ritual (Capall Bann Publishing, �9.95), Rhiannon Rhyall describes a ritual circle dance suitable for this Sunday, complete with matchstick men illustrations, showing something akin to the caperings of the Teletubbies. She also explains how to summon a spirit called Herne, whom, she says, she has always found to be �friendly but very earthy�, smelling �a bit like old compost�.

In the section on Midsummer in Paganism: A Beginner�s Guide (Headway, �5.99), Teresa Moorey has a splendid tip for the Ally McBeals among us: �A woman who wishes to conceive should walk naked through her vegetable patch on Midsummer�s Eve, preferably picking some St. John�s Wort.� An attractive alternative if IVF. But don�t try it if all you�ve got is a window box.

Ms. Moorey is quite a stylist. �it can be said that every woman is a witch at heart, if we peel back the layers to the black rose at the centre,� she writes. �Womanliness is about wild strawberries, honey and lilies; but it is also about garlic, nightshade, compost, the coil of the cobra, the siren�s song and the flutter of bat�s wings at midnight.� Many husbands could scarcely have put it better themselves.

Perhaps the most illuminating introduction to paganism, however, is still that handy primer Principles of Paganism by Vivianne Crowley (Thorsons, �5.99). She wards off all kinds of misapprehensions. Pagans do not believe �in sex with goats or those under the legal age of consent,� she insists.

For her, paganism, is a compendium of contemporary orthodoxies, incorporating feminism, �heritage�, community action and �deep ecology� but not blood sacrifice, patriarchy or other nasties. Moreover, she neatly get around the fact that almost nothing is known of what real paganism and druidism were by a woozy embrace of the Jungian �collective unconscious�, which �contains the full repository of all human knowledge, past, present and that which has yet to be revealed�. All pagan need to do to access this treasury is to lower the barriers between the conscious and unconscious mind. A trivial operation for some.

In this way, your up-to-date druid can easily get over the awkward fact that her religion is completely repro, of recent manufacture. All the experts agree on this. In The Pagan Religions on the Ancient British Isles, (published in 1991) Ronald Hutton concludes that �the paganism of today has virtually nothing in common with that of the past except in the name which is itself of Christian coinage�.

In The Druids (second edition, 1975), the late Stuart Piggott carefully explains how the image of the druids has been a construction of ignorance and fantasy, ever since the Romans. Nearly all of what passes for druid lore dates from such 17th and 18th century antiquarians as John Aubrey and William Stukely at the earliest, including the bogus association with Stonehenge, which predates the druids by thousands of years.

Sadly, it even turns out that Midsummer was never one of the four Celtic festivals at all and its druidical name of �mediosaminos� is another recent invention. But never mind. If these Celtic mysteries are a fiction, they are a thriving one.