Gutuater

They found it in the ground:

A basement shrine beneath

the site of a Roman villa;

Hidden, even then and for

two-thousand years since.

The villa’s Roman owner,

was also a Gaul, descended

to worship his gods, and spirits 

among them dru, a priesthood 

passed by then into the spirit world 

and invoked here with inscriptions 

on an altar and thuribles containing 

traces of cannabis burnt there

to scent the air, and to aid the vision.

Was the rite conducted by a gutuater?

(‘master of voice’, ‘inspirer of song’)

chanting to inspire a modern awenydd

stepping down into the smoke of the chamber,

hearing the uttered syllables, riding the waves

of sound in the torchlight, finding a way back

to that world, re-creating, even as they did,

a rite that is alive in vision, in the presence

of those spirits called upon to officiate

as before, and again when invoked

in that cellar, and so now in this present,

in this voice which calls and shapes a prayer

from out of the Cauldron, out of the depths

of an Otherworld of song here with us.

For ‘Gutuater’, a  word found on inscriptions in Gaul, and for an account of finding the cellar while excavating for a car park in Chartres,  see Miranda Aldhouse-Green Sacred Britannia (2018) pp.29-32.