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After I published my articles on the Druids and ancient Celtic culture this summer, Franklin O’Kanu wrote on his Unorthodoxy blog about the parallels to his own ancestral culture.

He said: “What’s interesting about all of this is how two cultures, across the world, Nigerian and Celtic, have the same spiritual view of the world”. [1]

And he commented on one of my posts: “From the Yoruba and Igbo perspective, what the Celts experience in one continent is what the practitioners of Ifa experienced in another continent: the same honor of the Divine”. [2]

I have now discovered similar echoes from a reverse direction, as it were, through reading Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman by Malidoma Patrice Somé (1956–2021).

Somé belonged to the Dagara, a million-strong people spread across the artificially-created nation-states of Ghana, the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso – he came from the latter, which was still called French Upper Volta when he was born.

The environment and particular customs of this African people are, of course, very different from those of the ancient Celts – roasted monkey would not have been on the menu at a Beltane feast in Ireland!

But there are similarities as well. In the essay series I cite Jean Markale’s account of how at their celebratory events the Celts drank copious amounts of alcoholic drinks, producing “drunkenness, in other words the trance thanks to which one can go beyond apparent reality and see the supernatural”. [3]

He adds: “For Greek and Roman writers, Celts already had a reputation for being passionate lovers of fermented drinks. Drunkenness is an oft-occurring theme in the epics, especially in Irish accounts.

“Gods and heroes compete in their unquenchable thirst for alcohol, in the form of beer, wine or mead. A religious festival never went by without a serious drinking session”. [4]

In his book, Somé writes: “Millet beer has always been a part of major rituals. Our rituals are long, and one gets thirsty”. [5]

He explains that his tribe was said to have been taught how to make beer by the Kontomboli, mysterious otherwordly beings who introduced a woman to their astonishing brew: “When she drank it, she was delighted. She felt merry and wanted to sing”. [6]

I was also intrigued to learn that the Dagara use a twenty-based counting system, so that eighty-three would be expressed as “four times twenty plus three”. [7]

In France the same number is quatre-vingt-trois, “four twenties and three”, after the old Celtic system, and we used to have the same concept in English with a score, meaning twenty, using which eight-three is “four score and three”.

A more important connection between ancient European and African societies has been the effects of colonisation.

From an African perspective it must be strange to hear a white man claim to be the victim of colonialism, but such is the case.

Following the destruction of our indigenous culture by the Roman empire and its religious wing, we were then colonised by the empire of usury and commerce and used as fodder for its insatiable industrial Leviathan. [8]

With our true identities further smothered, our vital energy was hijacked to allow that same empire to enslave and exploit other peoples across the world, including the Dagara.

Somé writes: “My own elders had experienced French colonialism and the culture of the West as a force that used violence as a means to eradicate traditional lifeways.

“They had seen their own youth stolen from them as they vainly struggled against the incursions of these intruders.

“During these years, in which my people were trying to make sense of a people whose every action seemed to go against the natural order of things, creating chaos, death, and destruction, the sense of unified community that sustained their tribal life was profoundly destabilized. These foreigners seemed to have no respect for life, tradition, or the land itself…

“In spite of the best efforts of all my people, the whites kept on coming; kept on doing whatever they pleased; and kept on taking more and more of our land, our beliefs and our lives”. [9]

“It is a sad thing to realize how much my people have lost and how much yet of our reality is to be buried in the pit of oblivion”. [10]

Although Upper Volta officially became independent in 1960 (it became Burkina Faso in 1984), this was really just a sleight of hand by the usurious puppetmasters who have always been behind European imperialism.

Somé condemns “this new colonialism, whose goal is to place the newly independent countries into a state of perpetual indebtedness”. [11]

He adds: “It is important to understand that modern Africa does not exist as it is by the will of its leaders, but by the will of the very powers that divided it between them”. [12]

The Church played an important role in destroying Dagara culture, as it did in destroyng Druidic culture.

Somé laments: “Religious colonialism tortures the soul. It creates an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and general suspicion. The worst thing is that it uses the local people to enforce itself”. [13]

He had personal experience of this religious colonialism, with his own father falling prey to its influence and refusing to carry out the traditional rite of burying two clay pots of root juice following the birth of twin chidren.

“The truth was that he did not want to offend the white priest, appearing like a pagan devil worshiper in his eyes. My father genuinely feared going to hell”. [14]

This refusal was followed, not coincidentally in his son’s view, by the deaths of both girl twins, a brother and then their heartbroken mother.

Somé, the offspring of a second wife, was then literally kidnapped from his village home at the age of four and brought up in a Jesuit school where, having been taught some French, the boys were forbidden from speaking their native Dagara language, even amongst themselves, this being “a sin”. [15]

When he was twelve, he was transferred to a Jesuit seminary to be trained as a priest: “This titanic religious establishment was the dream-come-true of the missionary crusade that had followed imperialism into the continent of Africa. The kids came from everywhere in French West Africa: Mali, Niger, Togo, the Ivory Coast, and Benin”. [16]

It was here that Somé first began expressing his opposition to colonialism, particularly in defiance of an African priest/teacher called Father Joe, whom he describes as “a fine specimen of European brainwashing and indoctrination… he had been brainwashed to brainwash us”. [17]

He recounts that he once told Father Joe in a class discussion about a certain textbook: “I am suggesting that perhaps colonialism cannot be justified on the grounds that some people decided it was their right to disturb the quiet lives of others.

“Obviously this book was written by someone who thinks it is right to put whole villages into forced labor or to summarily liquidate them. Somebody who does not care about other people!” [18]

Young Somé’s reward for this insight was to be told he was becoming an “ideological delinquent” and bashed with Father Joe’s rubber truncheon. [19]

Colonialism goes hand in hand with modernity – the whole process of its insatiable industrial gobbling-up of nature and human lives is presented as badly needed “development” which “underdeveloped” peoples have the right to enjoy. [20]

Remarks Somé: “Indigenous people find their rhythms in nature. Westerners, on the other hand, seem to seek meaning in the realm of the machine, where one finds neither peace not wholeness, but ceaseless movement. In the West, people are always frenetically rushing somewhere in the countless lanes of the multiple highways of progress”. [21]

The author writes about a vision of that strange foreign world which was communicated to him by his beloved shaman grandfather on his deathbed: “Grandfather had taken me into a world of wonder, for I myself was transformed. Thousands of images of a civilization I had never seen rushed at me, all alive and real: immense metal birds gliding high above the sky, their bellies loaded with humans; dwellings and roads covering the earth as far as the eye could see; houses that challenged the vault of heaven and dwarfed men, trees, and anything around them”. [22]

He also relates a dream he once had, which reminds me of René Guénon’s understanding that the predomination of metal in the modern world is an aspect of our ongoing civilizational descent into a lower (mineral) phase of existence. [23]

Somé recalls: “The diviner picked out another item, a metallic object. Holding it, he spoke of faraway countries and cultures of wires and metals. He described men riding in strange boxes that moved by themselves; restless, moving parts hidden inside these boxes; and many other mysterious metal things not of his world”. [24]

For indigenous peoples everywhere, the shock of encountering industrial society for the first time must have been the equivalent of some ancient Celts suddenly time-travelling 2,000 years into an unrecognisable and dystopian future.

Somé, whose life straddled two very different worlds, says it is difficult even to find the right words in English to describe indigenous African life and thinking.

“One of my greatest problems was that the things I talk about here did not happen in English; they happened in a language that has a very different mindset about reality.

“There is usually a significant violence done to anything being translated from one culture to another. Modern American English, which seems to me better suited for quick fixes and the thrill of a consumer culture, seems to falter when asked to communicate another person’s world view”. [25]

“Every year I have to return home to my elders, not to visit them, but to be cleansed. After several years of doing that, I have come to understand that being in the West is like being caught in a highly radioactive environment. Without this periodic checkup, I will lose my ability to function”. [26]

Being ripped out of village life, says Somé (pictured), left him with “anger and inner turmoil” [27] as a young man and, despite being initiated back into his tribe, he never completely regained his belonging – “I can’t even think in my native language”. [28]

He describes what was going on his head during this delayed initiation at the age of twenty: “Myriads of questions were slowing down my journey toward traditional knowledge.

“I longed for debates, for theories, for criticism: clearly a legacy of the white world. But, I kept telling myself, one cannot continually ask questions. One cannot always sculpt theories to frame experience, or top experience with the roof of theory.

“The techniques of indigenous learning were revealing themselves before my eyes, sweeping away my preconceived notions of how learning was accomplished.

“The contrast between this state of mind and what I had been accustomed to at the seminary was the same as the difference between liquid and solid. It seemed to me that Dagara knowledge was liquid in the sense that what I was learning was living, breathing, flexible and spontaneous. What I was learning made sense only in terms of relationship. It was not fixed, even when it appeared to be so…

“By contrast, I could see that the Western knowledge I had been given had the nature of a solid because it is wrapped in logical rhetoric to such a degree that it is stiff and inflexible.

“The learning one gets from a book, from the canons of the written tradition, is very different from the living, breathing knowledge that an elder has to offer – and different from the knowledge that comes from within, from the soul”. [29]

“Unlearning” [30] his 16 years of enforced European education was not something that could be fully achieved.

“It dawned on me that literacy, from the traditional point of view, occupies a space within the psyche that is reserved for something else. So my knowing how to read and write meant that I would never be able to access certain traditional knowledge”. [31]

A chapter in one of my own (written and Western!) books, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, is entitled ‘Denying reality: from nominalism to Newthink‘.

Here I complain of a modern ideological manipulation which is built on “a misunderstanding of the relationship between human language and actual reality”. [32]

I write: “Postmodernists have fallen into the nominalist trap of believing that the reality of human language and thought – the subjective truth of human beings – is more real than actual objective truth. They mistake word for reality, shadow for object”. [33]

Somé makes the same point when he insists: “Reality exists independently from language”. [34] “Remember: the word is not the meaning and the meaning is not the word”. [35]

“Words entrap meaning , torture it, slice it into pieces the way a butcher cuts the meat of a slaughtered animal and serves it to us. The speed of silence has profound respect for the integrity of meaning as an entity separate from language. In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt; and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning. Meaning is made welcome as it is and treated with respect”. [36]

The indigenous outlook portrayed by Somé is essentially the same thing as the via antiqua of the European Middle Ages [37] and “the completely different way of thinking” I found embraced by the ancient Celts. [38]

It is a deep and ancient wisdom, a life-rooted value system that had to be swept away by the via moderna, the industrial Newthink, in order to turn us all into disempowered slaves of the imperialist Mega-Racket. [39]

This “progress” is surely the worst thing ever to have been experienced by humankind and its architects are surely the worst human beings ever to have lived. As Somé notes with sadness: “As modernity crept into my village, everything I held dear in my heart was disappearing”. [40]

I have shown how the ancient Celts made no distinction between history and myth and “their thinking was not square or linear, but spiralling and spiritual, capable of embracing paradox, of soaring beyond the rules of the material world”. [41]

Likewise, Somé explains: “The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination… In the realm of the sacred, this concept is taken even further, for what is magic but the ability to focus thought and energy to get results on the human plane?”. [42]

Key to this different way of thinking and being is our all-round sense of withness. [43] Somé declares: “I understood that what makes a village a village is the underlying presence of the unfathomable joy of being connected to everyone and everything”. [44]

Traditional customs have the purpose of strengthening this connection, not least through drumming, singing and dancing.

Somé describes one particular dance where he “lost the analytical part of my mind and was drawn irresistibly into participation”. [45]

He felt the presence of the others around him: “The feeling was wonderful. Never before had I experienced something so real, so true, and so befitting a human being”. [46]

He also remarks: “When one of our elders carves a double-headed serpent or an amphibious mammal, he is not just creating an image out of his imagination, but cooperating with the spirits of those beings for the maintenance of the natural order”. [47]

“The purpose of ritual is to create harmony between the human world and the world of the gods, ancestors, and nature”. [48] “A stable community reflects the laws of nature and dances with them”. [49]

“It is my belief that the present state of restlessness that traps the modern individual has its roots in a dysfunctional relationship with the ancestors.

“In many non-Western cultures, the ancestors have an intimate and absolutely vital connection with the world of the living. They are always available to guide, to teach, and to nurture. They represent one of the pathways between the knowledge of this world and the next.

“Most importantly – and paradoxically – they embody the guidelines for successful living – all that is most valuable about life. Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos results”. [50]

Somé warns us that even in a stable community there will always be evil people who set out to do harm to others – those who are “possessed by bad spirits”. [51]

He stresses that “the indigenous world is not a place where everything flows in harmony, but one in which people must be constantly on the alert to detect and to correct imbalances and illnesses in both communal and individual life”. [52]

This is pretty much my response to those who ask me how anarchists, if we achieved a free society, would hope to keep it that way in the face of those who would seek to conquer and dominate it.

The thing is that the anarchist philosophy, like the indigenous one, includes the understanding that human beings are not perfect and that we need to be permanently on our guard.

This understanding acts as kind of psychological innoculation to the danger of falling under the domination of malevolent individuals or groups and, together with the deep-seated belief that freedom is worth dying for, is a powerful defensive tool.

The ancient Celts believed that through nature we can touch the divine [53] and that is true of pretty much all indigenous human spirituality, including that of the Dagara.

Somé writes: “Grandfather used to call the rain ‘the erotic ritual between heaven and Earth’. The rain represented the seeds sown in the Earth’s womb by heaven, her roaring husband, to further life…

“The grasses that pop out of the Earth’s womb shortly after the rain are called the numberless children of Earth who will serve humankind’s need for nourishment. The rainy season is the season of life”. [54]

“I could even hear nature, its relentless vibration of love and its slow movements. Its nurturing power fed me through my nose and my pores, sustaining my vital senses”. [55]

One mystical encounter in Somé’s account, which happened while was contemplating a tree as part of his initiation, could have formed part of my 2017 book The Green One. [56]

Out of nowhere, in the place where the tree had stood, appeared a tall woman dressed in black from head to foot… She wore a veil over her face, but I could tell that behind this veil was an extremely beautiful and powerful entity.
I could sense the intensity emanating from her, and that intensity exercised an irrestistible magnetic pull. To give into that pull was like drinking water after a day of wandering in the desert…
I had to lower my eyes. When I looked again, she had lifted her veil, revealing an unearthly face. She was green, light green. Even her eyes were green, though very small and luminescent. She was smiling and her teeth were the color of violet and had light emanating from them.
The greenness in her had nothing to do with the color of her skin. She was green from the inside out, as if her body were filled with green fluid. I do not know how I knew this, but this green was the expression of immeasurable love. [57]

The “Green Lady”, as Somé calls her, is clearly a representation not just of nature, but of our love-filled belonging to nature and thus also to the divine of which nature is an earthly manifestation.

A final connection between ancient Celtic and ancient Dagara thinking is the idea of a life mission, or quest.

Markale tells us regarding the Celts: “Every human being, according to druidic thinking, has a ‘mission’ to achieve something… each human being has a role to play to perfect the world, to complete it and this completion can only be brought about by individual action within collective action”. [58]

And Somé points outs: “For the Dagara, every person is an incarnation, that is, a spirit who has taken on a body. So our true nature is spiritual. The world is where one comes to carry out specific projects.

“A birth is therefore the arrival of someone, usually an ancestor that somebody already knows, who has important tasks to do here”. [59]

In order to carry out our tasks we have to know who we are, who we are meant to be. The young Dagara men are told during their initiation: “No one’s center is like someone else’s. Find your own center, not the center of your neighbor; not the center of your father or mother or family or ancestor but that center which is yours and yours alone”. [60]

Somé comments: “This kind of education is nothing less than a return to one’s true self, that is, to the divine within us”. [61] “I began to realize that everything I had experienced in my month of initiation was about learning how to recall what I already knew”. [62]

“At the seminary, I had grown away from myself into a mold that tried to make me someone I wasn’t, while all the while I craved for myself. As long as we are not ourselves, we will try to be what other people are. If these people are also not themselves, the result is terrible. During the Dagara initiation process, I grew into myself. The problems I had became resolved as I entered into my own true nature”. [63]

Colonisation of all kinds prevents us from being ourselves. The societies we live in are geared to the requirements of the colonisers, not to the people. They are shaped by their rules, their attitude towards us – their contempt for us and their fear of our possible rebellion.

Without the nourishing soil of a world rooted in their own cultural values and reflecting the way they see and experience life, an individual will inevitably find it immensely difficult to find their true self and their task in life.

But perhaps that is a good thing in that this inner effort will harden their determination and sharpen their instincts in their struggle against the oppressing empire.

Somé’s own individual task was to act as a bridge between the Dagara people and the people of the West – his first name Malidoma roughly means “be friends with the stranger/enemy” and this role was apparently known before his birth. [64]

We can certainly learn from what he communicates to us, including the idea of “conjuring up the world of the ancestors for protection against evil forces” [65] and “restoring the old wisdom of the ancestors”. [66]

Today we are told we are not allowed to think that way – by a judeo-supremacist mafia that seems to be interested in nothing else than its own past and self-interest.

Remembering who we are, not just in terms of our tribal ancestry but in terms of our belonging to divine nature, gives us a solid psychological basis for resisting the great evil that is industrial imperialism.

But the process does not end with the internal transformation. As village elder and mentor Guisso told Somé: “You cannot be who you truly are until you can put what you remember into action”. [67]

[1] Franklin O’Kanu, ‘Homework before tomorrow’s article’,

[2] https://paulcudenec.substack.com/p/life-a-sacred-and-heroic-mission/comments
[3] Jean Markale, Le druidisme: traditions et dieux des Celtes, (Paris: Payot, 1985), pp. 199-200. cit. Paul Cudenec, ‘For a future inspired by the past’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/07/13/for-a-future-inspired-by-the-past. My translations.
[4] Markale, p. 231, cit. Cudenec, ‘For a future inspired by the past’.
[5] Malidoma Patrice Somé, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, (New York: Penguin Random House, 1994), p. 81. All subsequent page references are to this book, unless otherwise stated.
[6] p. 69.
[7] p. 195. The example Somé actually gives is “three times twenty plus three” for sixty-three.
[8] Paul Cudenec, ‘England under occupation: neither great nor glorious’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/10/09/england-under-occupation-neither-great-nor-glorious/
[9] p. 3.
[10] p. 52.
[11] p. 5.
[12] Ibid.
[13] p. 95.
[14] p. 33.
[15] p. 96.
[16] p. 99.
[17] p. 116.
[18] p. 113.
[19] pp. 113-14.
[20] Paul Cudenec, ‘A developing evil: the maligant historical force behind the Great Reset’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2022/08/02/a-developing-evil-the-malignant-historical-force-behind-the-great-reset/
[21] p. 178.
[22] p. 41.
[23] Paul Cudenec, ‘Modernity, metal and infernal inversion’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/10/07/modernity-metal-and-infernal-inversion/
[23] Paul Cudenec, ‘Modernity, metal and infernal inversion’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/10/07/modernity-metal-and-infernal-inversion/
[24] p. 250.
[25] p. 2.
[26] p. 12.
[27] p. 168.
[28] p. 174.
[29] pp. 203-04.
[30] p. 203.
[31] pp. 178-79.
[32] Paul Cudenec, ‘Denying reality: from nominalism to Newthink‘. Nature, Essence and Anarchy (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2016), p. 32, https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/nature-essence-anarchy-w-1.pdf
[33] Cudenec, ‘Denying reality’, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, p. 34.
[34] p. 244.
[35] p. 258.
[36] p. 272.
[37] Cudenec, ‘Denying reality’, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, p. 23.
[38] Paul Cudenec, ‘Another way of being’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/07/24/another-way-of-being/
[39] Paul Cudenec, ‘An A-Z of the modern Mega-Racket’,
https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/09/04/an-a-z-of-the-modern-mega-racket/
[40] p. 304.
[41] Cudenec, ‘Another way of being’.
[42] p. 8.
[43] Paul Cudenec, The Withway: Calling us home (2022), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/the-withway-paul-cudenec.pdf
[44] p. 301.
[45] p. 214.
[46] Ibid.
[47] p. 61.
[48] p. 32.
[49] p. 61.
[50] p. 9.
[51] p. 62.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Paul Cudenec, ‘Through nature we can touch the divine’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/07/20/through-nature-we-can-touch-the-divine/
[54] p. 75.
[55] pp. 262-63.
[56] Paul Cudenec, The Green One (Sussex: Winter Oak, 2017), https://winteroak.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/the-green-one-1.pdf
[57] p. 221.
[58] Markale, p. 274, cit. Paul Cudenec, ‘Life: a sacred and heroic mission’, https://winteroak.org.uk/2026/07/27/life-a-sacred-and-heroic-mission/
[59] p. 20.
[60] p. 199.
[61] p. 226.
[62] p. 287.
[63] p. 288.
[64] p. 1.
[65] p. 84.
[66] pp. 123-24.
[67] p. 309.