The ancient Druids are still leaving a mark on western culture. They turn up in countless novels, films, and video games. Their holiday Samhain, our Hallowe’en, is now a big deal in North America as well as in Ireland and Britain. There is a modern Druid movement that seeks to revive the spirit of Druidism, especially its reverence for nature, and I wish the modern Druids well. This post, however, focuses on what we know about the original, ancient Druids. And the short answer is, not much.
The Druids were the priests of an ancient religion of the Celts of Ireland, Britain, and Gaul, or (very roughly) present-day France and a bit beyond. It’s believed the Celts originated in Eurasia between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago. They moved westward and arrived at the shores of Britain about 1000 BCE This timeline tells us that the Druids didn’t build Stonehenge or the other henges still standing in Britain and Ireland, which are at the very least a thousand years older. As near as scholars can determine, the name Druid originated as the Gaulish or Old Celtic Druides, which meant something like “those who know the oak.”
About the time the Celts reached Britain, the Old Celtic language began to separate into the Goidelic (Irish and Scots Gaelic and Manx) and the Brythonic (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton). These are all considered living languages today, I understand. This separation became the basis of what today are called the Six Celtic Nations — Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
The Ancient Druids: Encounters With the Romans
Sadly. the Druids left us no records in their own words. What we know of them come from outsiders observing them. The earliest descriptions of Celts come from Greek scholars such as Athenaeus, who wrote in the 3rd century BCE that when Celts were victorious in battle they sacrificed their prisoners to their gods. But most of what we know about the Druids comes to us from the Romans.
Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) warred with and eventually conquered the Celts of Gaul from 58 to 50 BCE. During that time he invaded Britain twice, in 55 and 54 BCE. (The first invasion achieved little. During the second, Roman troops defeated Celts in modern-day Kent, in southeastern England, and a bit further west.) Caesar left us some of the earliest and most detailed descriptions of the Druids in his commentaries on the Gallic Wars. The Druids, he said, were more than just priests. Beside their ritual obligations they also acted as judges of all crimes and disputes, from murders to questions of inheritance. Many young men go to the Druids for instruction, Caesar continued, and training for the priesthood might take as long as twenty years. (Note that there are many accounts of women Druids also; perhaps Caesar hadn’t heard of them.) They were not permitted to commit their sacred teachings to writing but must memorize them. These teachings concerned such things as the movements of stars, the size of the cosmos and the earth, and the order of the natural world.
From Caesar’s perspective, the Celts worshiped the same gods as the Romans, but by different names. Caesar decided that the Celts’ chief god was Mercury. Scholars today think that “Mercury” was a god named Lugus or Lugh. Lugh’s late summer festival Lughnasadh or Lughnasa marked the beginning of the harvest season and is still observed in parts of Ireland. Caesar and other Roman observers also said the Druids practiced divination, a craft the Romans held in high regard. According to Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), the Druids considered mistletoe to be sacred and worshipped only in oak groves. They were herbologists who gathered specific plants to use in healing and in rituals, Pliny wrote. Pliny also described the Druid lunar calendar. Some of Pliny’s descriptions — such as white-robed Druids climbing trees to cut mistletoe with a gold scythe — were used by illustrators ever after as a guide to what Druids might have looked like. Whether Pliny ever saw a Druid himself or was going by descriptions he heard, I do not know.
The Human Sacrifice Question
Did the Druids practice human sacrifice? The many Roman accounts certainly say they did, with many grisly details. Julius Caesar described the infamous Wicker Man, a giant effigy made of wicker in which humans were trapped and burned alive. Modern scholars have pointed out that a burning wicker container wouldn’t have trapped people for very long. Other than Caesar’s account there’s little credible evidence of the Wicker Man. Some scholars have said that the Romans were trying to show that the Celts were barbarians who would benefit from being governed by more civilized Romans. The human sacrifice stories are Roman propaganda, they say.
Mass graves found in western Europe have been interpreted as evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Druids. Other have suggested that the graves are of honored dead who were killed in battle. Possibly the most compelling evidence of human sacrifice among the Celts are the bog bodies of Ireland. Peat bogs have pH levels similar to vinegar, which preseves bodies buried in them. Bodies dating to the early Celtic period show clear signs of ritualized killing. But you can find scholars who study the Celts on both sides of this issue.
The End of the Druids
In 43 CE the Romans invaded Britain again, and this time they didn’t stop until they had reached the western shore. Until 410 CE Romans controlled what is now England, Wales, and Cornwall, although not much of Scotland. And the Romans never reached the Isle of Man or Ireland. The Romans responded to uprisings against them in Britain and Gaul by blamng the Druids. Although the Celts did have kings, queens, and chieftans, the Druids clearly were the real political power whose words even kings had to obey. Seizing on the ghastly accounts of mass human sacrifice as an excuse, the Romans began to oppress the Druids.
In Gaul, once the area was successfully subjugated the Druids were driven underground. In Britain, areas of Druid learning were singled out. One of the most important centers was on the island of Ynys Môn, better known today as Anglesey, off the northwest coast of Wales. The Roman troops who reached Anglesey in 61 CE were greeted by a display of black-robed Druids chanting and waving torches. The Romans at first were taken aback, but eventually they began a massacre of the priests that to this day is called the “last stand” of the Druids. It wasn’t really, but it was the beginning of an end. Eventually Druids of Britain either went underground or took a boat to Ireland. There is some evidence that in Wales some of the roles of the Druids were taken up by bards, who were poets and singers and keepers of history.
Druids remained spiritual leaders in Ireland until the rise of Christianity, introduced to Ireland by Saint Patrick in the 5th century. One assumes they remained active in Scotland and the Isle of Man also, although I found less information about them there.
After the Druids
The bottom line is that nearly everything we know about the Druids we know from the Romans, who were not unbiased observers. Although the Celts had adopted first the Greek and then the Latin alphabet to commit their language to writing, the wisdom of the Druids was transmitted orally and not written. Whatever it was that Druids-in-Training spent twenty years memorizing has been entirely lost to us. In Ireland and a few other places the four Druid holy days — Beltane in spring, Lughnasadh in summer, Samhain in fall, and Imbolc in winter — were still observed, even as the gods they honored were mostly forgotten. Otherwise their influence faded.
As Christianity became the established religion of former Druid territories, the Druids were re-written into history as sorcerers and workers of black magic. But beginning in the 17th century or so more romantic sentiments began to take hold. Popular writers re-imagined the Druids as venerable old men full of gentleness and wisdom. The gaps in knowledge about Druids were filled by imagination. By the 18th century some wealthy landowners decided to cash in on Druid romanticism by having “Druid temples” built on their property. One of these is the Swinton Druids’ Temple of North Yorkshire, built in 1820 to look like sort of Stonehenge-ish ruins. The “ruins” still draw tourists and neo-pagans who either don’t know or don’t mind that they aren’t really ruins.
In truth, other than the mass grave sites I already mentioned, there is very little archeological evidence of the Druids. Anglesey, for example, has a number of significant neolithic sites that pre-date the Druids. But of the Druids themselves there is nothing left.
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