Anti-Woke Druids and Radical Bards
What links Welsh 18th century romantic Druid-Bards, gathering around a circle of pebbles in North London, and the contemporary online right?
As the sun rose on the Summer Solstice of 1792, the Druid-Bards gathered in North London, at the summit of Primrose Hill. Led by Edward Williams, a Welsh stonemason and poet better known by his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, they enacted a series of supposedly ancient Celtic rituals â actually recent inventions, products of Ioloâs febrile historical imagination, helped along by his self-medication with hallucinatory quantities of laudanum. While Ioloâs fabricated ceremonies technically called for a stone circle, given the absence of megaliths in eighteenth-century Camden, he made do instead with a circle of pebbles.
Despite these limitations, Ioloâs purpose was deadly serious, and closely linked to the radical politics he espoused in the wake of the French Revolution. From within his ceremonial circle, Iolo asserted that Britain was ruled by âTyrantsâ. Conversely, the armies of revolutionary France carried the flame of liberty âin evâry veinâ. Chattel slavery, he said, was an abomination which demanded divine retribution. The name he chose for this eccentrically subversive institution had roots in medieval Welsh, but was drastically repurposed in Ioloâs neo-Celtic vision: this was the first of many Celtic revivalist gatherings to go by the name of Gorsedd.
This summer, in 2024, the sun has risen on a rather different Gorsedd. In a widely shared social-media thread detailing the results of a recent libel case, Nina Power â former academic philosopher and editor of the online magazine Compact â was confirmed as owner of the now-defunct Twitter account â@gorsedd6â.  Under a profile picture of bards dressed in the âunicoloured robe of sky-blueâ demanded by Ioloâs ceremonies, Power posted esoteric images, literary quotations, angry denunciations of the so-called âgender/trans cultâ, as well as a doctored photograph of Judith Butler, portraying this queer Jewish philosopher as a rainbow-painted lizard-person. Powerâs Gorsedd account also reposted a piece she co-wrote anonymously for the far-right blog Parallax Optics: this featured more anti-trans invective, and appeared alongside an article on ârace-realismâ which came to the conclusion that âsub-SaharansâŠjust arenât very smartâ. Compact has since accepted Powerâs resignation as editor, given this and the arguably more damaging release of her âironic and humorousâ WhatsApp messages about Mein Kampf. Power, for her part, remains unapologetic: sheâs gone out of her way to defend Parallax Optics as being âin no way âneo-Naziââ, despite a more recent article on the site which encircles the names of Jewish people and supposedly Jewish concepts within antisemitic triple-brackets.
As someone currently finishing a book about Iolo Morganwg and his fellow Welsh revivalists, the development has been difficult to ignore. Ioloâs reputation has gone through various transformations over the years, but internet poisoned alt-right crypto-fascism is not a context thatâs reared its head before within academic Iolo studies. Instead, Iolo has increasingly been touted as Walesâs premier labouring-class radical, his combination of revolutionary politics, cultural nationalism, and passionate anti-slavery making him particularly appealing to sections of the Welsh left.
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Born in 1747 in the Vale of Glamorgan, Iolo Morganwg was the son of a stonemason, and he too learned his fatherâs trade. This work put him in the educated class of artisans and farmers who did much to maintain Welsh literary culture, and his travels through England as a journeyman mason led him to an expatriate network of London Welsh revivalists, busy retooling Welsh identity for the age of revolution. It was in this context that Iolo launched onto the wider cultural scene, reinventing himself as a Welsh equivalent of Robert Burns for the English literary market, whilst claiming to be one of the last representatives of an ancient bardic order. His 1792 Gorsedd ceremonies were simultaneously an advertising stunt for this new poetic venture, an attempt to provide peripheral Wales with some kind of cultural infrastructure, and a projection of radical energy into the depths of Celtic tradition. The veil of druidic history also served to distract loyalist reactionaries, who at times chose to overlook the political connotations of Ioloâs Gorsedd, joining with him in âperfect equalityâ to proclaim âthe Truth Against the Worldâ. Through this historical sleight of hand, Iolo managed to bake a degree of subversion into the movement for Welsh cultural revival, which otherwise failed to sustain the fleeting politicisation it experienced after the fall of the Bastille.
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Despite his radical intent, the political flexibility of Ioloâs legacy is unsurprising. All of his most significant cultural contributions, including the Gorsedd, took the form of historical forgeries, ascribed not to himself, but to a vast imaginary cast of authors including ancient bards, medieval chroniclers, and seventeenth-century Welsh satirists. Many of these forgeries ended up in influential published collections of medieval Welsh literature, and werenât fully exposed by scholars until the twentieth century.
When it came to inventing traditions, Iolo was a virtuoso, his work even serving as one of the case studies in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangerâs Invention of Tradition, which introduced this term to the historical lexicon. And if the reception of oneâs writing depends on a claim that it was produced in ages past, the actual political context of its creation is likely to be overlookedâeven if you insert the language of revolutionary France into your druidic ceremonies, or smuggle references to radical parliamentary reform into your bardic triads.
Ioloâs ideas were mixed, without attribution, into the broiling cauldron of nineteenth century ethno-historical fantasy. They then turn up in some of the unlikeliest of places. Take, for instance, the correspondence of one Karl Marx: in letters to Engels written in the 1860s and 70s detailing his research into Celtic political history, Marx highlighted books containing Ioloâs fabricated tenets as evidence that the medieval Welsh were âentirely communistâ, and âborn dialecticiansâ, who allowed âvoting rights for women in the tribal assemblyâ. Ioloâs actual opinions about women in politics were not so enlightened, but here at least there was genuine connection between the levelling radicalism preached by Iolo and the excitement he awoke in Marx â who was then living, incidentally, just down the road from Primrose Hill.
But Ioloâs inheritors can also be found amongst those whom Pankaj Mishra has called the âethnic-racial chauvinistsâ of the early twentieth century, who offered âvisions to uprooted peoples of a rooted organic society in which hierarchies and values had been stableâ. One of these was the Cornish revivalist and nationalist Henry Jenner, who in 1928 became a founding member of the Cornish Gorsedd (Gorseth Kernow)âa successor group to the Iolo-inspired Gorsedd that still gathers annually at the Welsh National Eisteddfod. A right wing neo-Jacobite who supported the cause of the deposed Stuart monarchs, Jenner took pride in believing that among the ethnically variegated peoples of Britain, the Cornish were âprobably of the most unmixed Aryan or white raceâ. Incidentally, it was a painting of Jennerâs âGorsethâ which served as the profile picture for Nina Powerâs Twitter account.
It's difficult to tell whether Iolo would have been amused or offended by a Cornish arch-monarchist adapting his ceremonies, which in the 1790s had involved adulatory verses to the giant âRhitta Gawrâ, a mythic serial regicide who âdestroyed so many despots, that he made himself a robe with their beardsâ. But it is equally misleading to try to cordon off âcorrectâ leftist takes on the Gorsedd from its more reactionary appropriations. As Mary-Ann Constantine has argued, Iolo could not always comfortably synthesise his attachments to universal radical justice and particularised cultural tradition. In opposition to less nationally-minded Welsh radicals, Iolo insisted that â[he] who loves not his own parent will never, can never love man. who loves not his native home will never in a proper sense be a Citizen of the Worldâ. He felt the need to ground his internationalist radicalism in the familial subordination and natural patriotism of the Burkean conservativeâno matter that the anti-revolutionary Burke was himself, according to Iolo, a tyrannical âdoltâ.
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Ioloâs historical forgeries can be a similarly mixed bag, embodying on the one hand radical democratic utopianism, and on the other political exclusion sanctified by appeals to nature and tradition. Take the pseudo-historical legal âtriadsâ that so fascinated Marx: working from Ioloâs patchwork of genuine medieval legal language and contemporary political radicalism, interpreters discerned a primeval British polity absent from actual history, in which democratic assemblies influenced every layer of government, and land and suffrage were granted to âpob Cymro cynhwynawl [each native Welsh person]â. Excluded from these rights, however, were illegitimate children and foreigners, whose descendants would not gain such privileges until several generations of intermarriage with natives. These draconian exclusions were justified as safeguards to the nationâs morality and security, ideals held to be more important than the political participation of all.
These triadsâ assertion that Britons had restricted âymordderchu llwyn a pherth [fornication in bush and brake]â since time immemorial shows the limits of interpreting Ioloâs Gorsedd as a prefiguration of 60s counterculture. His often misunderstood drug-use, for instance, began as an attempt to treat chronic asthma, and his morality was shaped by a fervent attachment to Unitarian Christianity. And, as much as Iâm fond of the Gramscian âorganic intellectualâ Iolo constructed in Gwyn Alf Williamsâs Marxist-Nationalist histories of Wales, it is not the only version of Iolo on offer. His bardo-Druidic radicalism maps imperfectly onto modern left/right divides.
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Which brings us back to Nina Powerâs reactionary tweeting as â@gorsedd6â. Despite defining the word âGorseddâ semi-accurately as âa Welsh bardic choirâ, Power does not profess any great attachment to Ioloâs legacy. Her choice, she said, was âjust a sort of random nameâ, used online to protect anonymity. But though her engagement with Iolo appears limited, his mixture of popular libertarianism and esoteric conservatism is not a million miles away from the politics she herself has tried to claim.
Power has long since moved away from her once-fĂȘted position on the feminist left, advocating now a supposedly unaligned stance on the post-liberal post-left. Her more recent views have combined anti-capitalism, conservative communitarianism, and not-quite-paganism, all mixed together with vehement opposition to âliberalâ identity politics. Beyond the contemporary anti-wokeism, much of this stance is redolent of Iolo. And in the âfree speechâ media ecology of Powerâs Compact and its smugly contrarian cousin UnHerd, practitioners of Iolo-influenced Druidry have staked out similar positions.
Another writer published by Compact is Rhyd Wildermuth, a Druid and âAutonomous Marxistâ for whom âWoke Ideology and other identitarianisms are symptoms of our alienation from the sacredâ. There is not much of Ioloâs robe-clad vision in Wildermuthâs Druidic persona, but the Welshman does get a mention on the latterâs blog, and Wildermuthâs Compact published case against leftist family abolition shares much with Ioloâs commitment to the family structure. Then there is John Michael Greer, a former Grand Archdruid and self-identified âBurkean conservativeâ, whose publications have helped to promote Ioloâs legacy within contemporary Druidry. A regular contributor at UnHerd, Greer expounds a magical-ecological-economic sympathy for Trumpism, which according to Greer succeeded in 2016 in part because of the ârepression of American masculinityâ by âwoke ideologuesâ.
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It would be a mistake to erase the significant differences between Power, Wildermuth and Greer, but they do share common features beyond simply an association with Ioloânot least a conspiratorial animus against so-called âgender ideologyâ. Wildermuth, for instance, paranoically characterises âgenderâ as âone of the bludgeons the neoliberal order is using now to dismiss the material concerns of the poorâ (here eliding evidence of the higher rates of poverty and homelessness among trans people). And, with echoes of Iolo, all three base their more-or-less Druidic rejection of âwokeâ modernity on an appeal to nature.
Nature with a capital-N was at the heart of Ioloâs GorseddâPrimrose Hill, for instance, was selected as a Gorsedd venue thanks to its openness to the elements. As he wrote in one of his bardic triads: âThree things well understood will give Peace: the tendencies of Nature; the claims of Justice; and the voice of Truthâ. Iolo thus appropriated the old Classical-primitivist association of Druidism with nature, but retooled it for his own radical ends, portraying the tyrannical, commercial, enslaving monarchies of Europe as the enemies of natural order. This spiritual and political appeal is also shared by Ioloâs inheritors: Wildermuth evokes âour disconnection from natureâ as a species of Marxian alienation, Greerâs eco-conservatism is founded on a sense that âNature chuckles at our incompetenceâ, and Power has spoken emotionally of the role nature played in her recovery from an alcoholic breakdown. Power insists that âjust because the Nazis liked nature doesn't mean nature is Naziâ, which, of course, is true. But as Adorno observed, Nazi attacks on minorities were based on the stateâs elevation of a âpseudo-natural criterion such as the race, which seems to be inescapable and can therefore be appliedâŠmercilesslyâ. Such mercilessness (then as now) also falls upon those who reject the pseudo-natural dictates of authoritarian gender.
In Adornoâs writings on Wagnerâa classic case study in pagan-fancying proto-fascismâhe identified the central issue at stake. When in âthe social process of life âossified relationshipsâ form a second natureâ, the reactionary imagination âgazes transfixed, mistaking [this second nature] for the firstâ kind. This is why Iolo Morganwgâs primeval British democracy still reflected the sexual mores of a nineteenth-century Christian. It also helps explain why appeals to gendered ârealityâ and the ânatural process of pubertyâ structure Powerâs attacks on trans peopleâs campaigns for accessible healthcare, labour rights, and social acceptance. For Power, these campaigns represent an ideological âsmashing of the bodyâ and âthe destructionâŠof sexual differenceââ claims she made in a speech at the National Conservatism conference in 2023. This increasingly radicalised transphobia, founded on pseudo-natural conservatism, is clearly implicated in Powerâs decision to write for a âNeoReactionaryâ site full of rancid racism.
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Here, I must make an admission. In researching this piece, Iâve been combing through the sordid details of countless social media scandals while reading repeated neo-Druidic exhortations to get outside and âtouch grassâ. In the end, the latter suggestion became undeniably alluring. Abandoning my computer, I went out to the nearest patch of what seemed like nature, standing âin the eye of the sun and the face of the lightâ like one of Ioloâs Druid-Bards. Iâm not saying it was, precisely, a Druidic experience, but it definitely made me feel betterâand it does similar things for many modern Druids.
So by all means greet the sunrise, go out into the forest, pay homage to the stones. Iâd also, on behalf of the Welsh-speaking community, love to invite more of you to join us in using it. The language and literature through which Iolo channelled his revolutionary imagination is not one I want to see snuffed out by the homogenising forces of global capital. Something about Iolo's story is indisputably attractive â an erratic agent of chaos from the Welsh labouring classes, he saw visions of the future in an imagined past, and dragged them determinedly into his present. Anyone who, like Iolo, forced local magistrates to monitor seditious gatherings of bards on Glamorganshire hillsides deserves some respect. But if Ioloâs fabricated yet enduring Gorsedd teaches us anything, itâs that nature and tradition can become entirely what we make of them. Unless we keep that in mind, radical appreciation of the natural and traditional can denature rather quickly.
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Rhys Kaminski-Jones is a Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies. His book on Welsh Revivalism, Britishness, and Empire is forthcoming from Boydell & Brewer in 2025. Rhys is also a member of the Anti-Fascist Celtic Studies group Carantes, whose mailing-list can be joined by emailing caranteswg@proton.me
Thanks to Alex Heffron and Steph White for their invaluable help with this piece, and to Luke Turner for providing additional documents.
