Male Archdruids

Now the vexed question of whether or not men can be archdruids has constantly raised its head.  Many people would think this is a step too far from our Beaker tradition - after 4,000 years of female archdruids, how could we take this radical step, cutting us off from the rest of Beakerdom, most of which has not even accepted male druids yet?
And yet the appointment of those male druids, controversial as it was at the time, has generally proved to be a success.  Hnaef and Drayton, despite their obvious flaws (being posh and being a scheming, plotting traitor respectively) have managed to avoid making a complete bodge of it.  Those who said that men couldn't do the job, being more suited to cutting wood, filling the car up with petrol, growing nose hair and banging the holes out of doilies, have had to think again.  OK, they've not changed their views but at least they thought about it.

Drayton, who seems to have a vested interest in the situation, has come up with a whole series of suggestions about how male archdruids could work.  If a male archdruid were ever created, and in a community other than Husborne Crawley - as I own the Great House and all land pertaining to it.

One suggestion that is clearly completely unworkable is that such an archdruid should be on a level with any other archdruid, able to set their own policies on tea lights, chanting and howling at the moon.  They should even be entitled to attend the Archdruidical Synods held annually (in the Seychelles this year, as it happens) just as if they were real female archdruids.  Well, it's not going to happen is it?

Another idea that I found quite workable was that, as a controlled experiment, a Beaker community could have a male 'archdruid'.  We would distinguish the role in written communications by always putting the word in inverted commas.  When speaking we could make that little gesture where you put speech marks up around your head as you say the word.  This would in no way detract  from the dignity of the role, but make it clear that they weren't real archdruids without inverted commas.

Finally, there is a proposal that would get round the problems that many female druids would have in reporting to a male 'archdruid'.  Put simply, we would be prepared to appoint male archdruids provided they would only have male druids reporting to them.  This would avoid the bizarre situation occurring where female archdruids had to resort to Alternative Druidical Arrangements (ADA) by reporting to a separate flying archdruid - or, as she's better know to the Archer Folk of Amesbury, Archdruid Ada.

All in all, I'm not sure we yet have all the answers.  I think the best thing we can do is appoint another committee to look into it, to report back in - what, say ten years?