Awakening to the Wisdom of the Oak

Kristoffer Hughes is the chief of the Anglesey Druid Order in Wales, and his mission—through his school of myths and workshops and books—is to provide everyone a bite from the cauldron of modern Druidry.

- STEPHEN KIESLING

Your spiritual journey started with a “wild awakening” in Wales. That sounds about as wild an awakening as one can have.

[Laughs.] I grew up within a landscape that is particularly mythological. Not only is it a place that’s steeped in myth and legend, it’s also a place that is literally littered with ancient Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. The island I currently live on, Anglesey, is where my mother’s family comes from, and it’s the ancestral home of the British Druids. But as a kid growing up in [the] seventies and eighties in Wales, there was really only one option available, and that was Christianity. And that didn’t quench my thirst. I found the whole thing totally alien. So I spent time alone in the woods at the back of the house, which was an incredibly magical place—one of these small, ancient Celtic rainforests. And I became aware of the numinous and the subtle within the landscape, but I had nobody to talk to about it. I didn’t think anybody else could possibly understand. Not a single member of my family has any spiritual inclinations whatsoever. So, I was a little stuck.