David Patten was born on August 28, 1940, at the geographical center of North America, Rugby, North Dakota, in the Chinese year of the Dragon, on the night of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, to Bertha Brewer Patten and Oscar M. Patten, a forester and Druid. He lived in Jordan for two years as a teenager while his father was a forestry advisor to Jordan.
He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Montana in History and Mathematics and his graduate work at the University of Kentucky for six years in Philosophy, specifically Phenomenology. He attended language school at the Defense Department Language School in Monterey and while employed at the National Security Agency in Ft. G.G. Meade. He has studied Russian, German, Indonesian, Japanese and French, and taught philosophy, economics, and political science at the University of Kentucky in Harlan County.
David published (and wrote many of the articles for) a quarterly Montana Trails and started a weekly newspaper in Stevensville Montana. For 17 years he was a cragsman of the mountains of Montana practicing the Old Ways.
David has traveled and studied intensively the spiritual life of Bali, Indonesia. He has been trained since early childhood in the Old Ways, the Druidic path, specifically the rich seed-bed of the Oghama, a natural correspondence system relating form with sound with sight with emotions with thought. The Great Order, as it is translated, is revealed through experiential initiation rather than through imitative thought.
For the last 18 years, David has been a teacher of the first gate of the Nine Gates Mystery School, a spiritual program intimately connected with ancient traditions and their masters.
He was raised in the tradition, unsuccessfully rebelled from it, and returned with ardor. He was able to leave the halls of academe with spirit intact and to thrive in the life world with ever-expanding soul.