"It was the Ovates who, to the greater degree, were responsible for understanding the mysteries of death and rebirth, for transcending time - for divining the future, for conversing with the Ancestors - traveling beyond the grave to bring counsel to those still on earth.
The Ovate as master or mistress of prophecy and devination needed, and still needs today, a reorientation in relation to Time. To travel within time requires a conception of its nature and dynamics that is radically different to post-Enlightenment thinking, and more akin to the understanding now being offered by the New Physics.
The belief in the cyclicity of life was fundamental. In common with the Hindus, the Buddhists and the Christians before the Council of Trent, the Druids believed in reincarnation. The Realm of the Ancestors was not the realm of people dead-and-gone - it was the repository of tribal wisdom - the realm in which the Ancestors lived while awaiting reincarnation and to which the Ovate could turn for guidance and inspiration on behalf of the tribe. It is to these realms that the shaman travels, to bring back guidance from Past Souls and insights into the future.
The Ovate is concerned with new life, with regeneration. She knows that to be born she has to die - whether that means in a literal sense or in the figurative sense which is the essential pre-requisite to change and healthy development of the psyche. In working with the processes of death and regeneration, the Ovates particular study is tree-lore, herbalism and healing. The plant world is a great teacher of the laws of death and rebirth, of sacrifice and transmutation, and the tree is the supreme teacher of the mysteries of time, with its roots for the most part invisible in the past and in the subconscious and its fruit and leaves likewise mostly hidden from us in the heights of the superconscious holding the potential of the future in the seeds that will in due time fall.
The art of healing concerns the application of natural law to the human body and psyche. If the heart, mind and body is out of tune with nature we suffer. The application of natural remedies, with plants, with the four elements, with solar, lunar and stellar power are studied by the Ovate. Knowing that it is only death to one state that we achieve a wider life, the Ovate is in this sense also a psychotherapist. The Ovate learns and teaches that it is only by letting go, rather than holding on, that we truly find what we have been seeking."