Druids

Preachers of Immortality

Anne Ross

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780752425764
• eBook ISBN: 9780750952484
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Druidism was the religion of the Celts and the Druids themselves were all-powerful taking precedence over the Celtic kings. Over and above the evidence of classical texts and of archaeology the richest source of information about the Druids is the vernacular material from Ireland and Wales. It is the authors unparalleled familiarity with the Gaelic texts and her ability to see Druidism through Celtic eyes that marks out this study from earlier books and strips away modern myths about the Druids.

Chapter 1

DRUIDIC ORIGINS

Druidic origins are an integral part of the Celtic society which created them and in which they served as the most learned priests and scholars.

Before considering the nature of the Druidic orders, it will be necessary to glance at the source material. The evidence of archaeology can add validity to the written sources; later the Celtic oral tradition plays its own important rôle. Temporally it is to the Classical authors that we must look, considering, first, the writings of the Greeks and, later, the Latin comments of the Romans the veracity of which cannot always be assumed by reason of the fact that some of their comments were written in their rôle as conquerors. As we know, history tends to be written by the victors.

Nevertheless, in this complex subject every fragment of evidence must be considered. The Greeks were at war with the Celts at an earlier period than the Romans (2); however, many of their comments are not concerned with military matters but consist of travellers’ tales for, contrary to uninformed opinion, the peoples of Europe and the British Isles travelled over great distances in the last two millennia BC, using ancient trade routes and also embarking upon military expeditions. There may be evidence for direct trade with China, perhaps as early as the late Bronze Age, when bronze votive bird chariots and socketed celts were exchanged amongst other goods for much-coveted Chinese silk and commodities rare in the West.

By the sixth century BC at least, lavish graves of Hallstatt Celts were being created in southern Germany and elsewhere, testifying to a strong belief in life after death. This continues in the different but equally important La Tène graves, dating to the period of Celtic expansion in Europe. The future, with its evermore-sophisticated technologies, may reveal more wonders and a broader human picture. Meanwhile, the evidence of archaeology, and the writings about and by the Celts must be our most reliable source material.

In Ireland the concept of the warrior Druid was very highly developed. In opposition to this, the classical commentators on the Gauls convey the impression – indeed, in some cases actually state – that the Druids did not take part in the seemingly perpetual battles and skirmishes of the Gallic warriors. We examine more closely the classical comments on the Druids in Chapter 2 and elsewhere but I should like to point out at this stage that the classics do not actually say that the Druids did not take part in battles, but rather that they were exempt from doing so. This obviously gave them the option of entering the fray, not necessarily by physically fighting with weapons, but certainly – as is attested by the classics and a regular feature of Irish warfare – by exhorting their own side by means of Druidic magic and spells and by adopting ritual postures. In the Irish texts the Druids are described in some instances as encircling the armies, on one leg, with one eye closed and one arm extended (see Ross, A. 2000, fig.26). This magic posture was known as corrguinecht, because it appears to have imitated the position adopted by one of the most sacred birds, the crane or corr.

It is also an attitude taken by geese. Having possessed six Welsh geese, now reduced to two by the depredations of fox and polecat, I was fascinated to be able to study them closely when they were taking their habitual sleep during daylight hours. Five of them would tuck their heads underneath their wings; the sixth would stand on one leg, with one wing outstretched and with one eye open – and even now, rather pathetically, one of the geese will sleep while the other keeps guard as if he were protecting a whole flock. I have always been particularly impressed by the ornithological accuracy, not only of the Celtic and Gallo-Roman artists, but the verbal verisimilitude which indicates an acute observation of birds and the wildlife with which Ireland and the continent of Europe were at that time teeming. This was of course heightened by the fact that the gods and Druids were shape-shifters, according to the tradition, turning themselves or others into bird or animal form while retaining their human reason and power of speech.

Once again, and not for the last time, we must ask the question as to where and how the Celtic world began:

In a restricted area of East Europe, the occurrence of female figurines in the settlement débris has led to unverifiable assumptions about the cult of a Mother Goddess; in Western Europe, an alien and unknown set of beliefs must have been involved in the building of megalithic or rock-cut collective tombs. We are, in fact, ignorant of what may well have been many varieties of religious experience among the European and Neolithic communities from the sixth to the late third millennium BC and their contribution to later Celtic religion is a wholly unknown factor. ... By the time of the historically documented Druids the background of possible religious tradition would then be roughly as follows. Taking as a starting-point the forms of Celtic religion as inferred from archaeology, epigraphy and the classical and vernacular texts, there are three main antecedent phases. The first would be the traditions, predominantly Indo-European, going back to the second millennium, and perhaps to its beginnings. Behind this again would be the wholly obscure religions of the Neolithic agriculturalists with, in Gaul and especially Britain, eastern and western components mixed from the end of the fourth millennium BC. And finally, underlying all, there would be the beliefs and rites of the hunting peoples of pre-agricultural Europe which might well have contained elements surviving in shamanism. It is a pedigree which could be a good twenty thousand years in length. Druidism, when we first encounter it, is an integral part of the social structure of Celtic Gaul; it is an Indo-European institution with, whatever criticisms may be levelled against the over-elaborate schemes of Dumézil and his school, analogues in the Brahmin class of Sanskrit India or the archaic priesthoods of early Rome. But there are distinctive [my emphasis] elements which may owe their existence to those earlier sources of European religious tradition we have just sketched out.

(Piggott 1968, pp.185 and 187)

Without, I hope, appearing to step beyond the bounds of rational surmise, I have recently become much intrigued by Lepenski Vir, a site on the River Danube near a point known as the ‘Iron Gates’ (Serbia/Romania) (3). Although this remarkable settlement in wild, remote and almost inaccessible landscape, close to the wide reaches of the river, pre-dates the presumptive origins of the Celts by at least two thousand years, I want briefly to consider whether there is any evidence to suggest that it played some rôle as the cradle of Celtic origins. What evidence is there that could possibly justify such a tentative assumption? There are certain features which would seem, perhaps, to point to some sort of link with the much later Celts as we have come to know them. First of all, this settlement, in remote and difficult mountainous terrain, was built on the very verge of the River Danube. Danube itself is a Celtic name, as are many of the river names of Europe. It stems from a root dana which simply means ‘water’. Moreover, it is traditionally the favourite cradle of the Celts for scholars. The king of the tribe – who often was also a Druid – was an immensely powerful figure, but the Druid took precedence even over the king. In the early Irish written tradition we learn that: ‘no man may speak before the king but the king himself may not speak before the Druid.’ The Druids of antiquity claimed that their origins and their doctrine were extremely old. They were clearly not thinking in terms of two or three centuries but of perhaps two or three thousand years.

Let us look now at some of the most prevalent of Druidic beliefs and teachings, some of which we have already noted. Relevant here is the universal importance which was accorded to the severed human head – animal heads too were displayed but did not possess quite the same powers. Fire also was a magical and essential focus of cult, and fire festivals at ancient sacred ceremonies have persisted on the same dates as those sacred to the ancient Celtic peoples. The hearth – like the threshold under which sacrificial offerings were often made – was likewise the focus of superstitious belief and worship and this belief has not yet died out in the surviving Celtic areas. In it, the sacred fire burned. Before it, a human head, perhaps of an ancestor was buried – even today in the Celtic lands a human or animal head, often that of the horse was, and perhaps still is, buried under the threshold and under the hearth and often two heads were also built into the upper part of the fireplace. At Lepenski Vir a human jaw (mandible) was found buried in front of the hearth. We may perhaps compare this to the much later central hearth in an Iron Age house excavated in South Uist, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, around which pig jaws had been carefully buried. Ancestorworship was (and to a certain extent, still may be) therefore a very important aspect of Celtic superstitious belief and at Lepenski Vir, our Neolithic site on the Danube, the impressive finds yielded by expert excavations in the last decade or so are strikingly reminiscent of those of the early Celtic world.

Most noteworthy is the remarkable series of stone heads, the expressive power of which makes a deep and unsettling impact upon the viewer. They are disconcertingly reminiscent of certain, later Celtic carved heads and like them, in spite of the ‘human’ features, one is reminded of the grim images which are conjured up by the early Irish descriptions of such dark and dangerously magical characters as the Fomorians, against whom the people of Ireland waged war. What stories could these almost sentient heads tell? The similarity to early Celtic stone carvings is further paralleled by the complex carved patterns on the socalled ‘altars’, reminiscent of the Newgrange style of stone decoration. For the time being the mystery of Lepenski Vir must be borne in mind but much remains to be explained before we can, if ever, link the site to the presumptive Danubian origins of the early Celts.

Or again, did the Celts originate, as some scholars have suggested, in the far West, in Ireland, which was described by Avienus as Insula Sacra, the Sacred Isle? There are certainly many indications that this could have been so. The ancient stonebuilt burial chambers and passage graves which stud the landscape, the hillforts which are now coming to be recognised as ceremonial sites rather than solely as structures for defence; the cult of the human head, the skull or a part of the skull or images of the head in stone and other substances, reveal traces of a great antiquity, as do the complex spiral and meandering decorative carvings on and inside such structures as passage graves, standing stones, lintels and so forth. All this, and much more; the very archaic nature of the Irish language, for example, which was committed to writing at an unusually early period; the prolific and complex nature of the legal system and the rigidly organised structure of Celtic tribal society, must be considered. Most remarkable is perhaps the richness and longevity of the vernacular literature, especially the amazingly complex nature of the poetic metres and the accurate knowledge of time and seasons, special days and periods, the astronomical phenomena, and the fact that they counted their days in nights and called themselves ‘sons of the god of night’. The Druids of Gaul are accredited by the classical commentators with having a triad of moral codes which are worthy of the Christian ethic. These, as noted above, are ‘Worship the gods, tell the truth, be manly.’ Reading through the Irish Triads again recently, I was struck by a very similar triadic dictate: ‘Three things that show every good man: a special gift, valour, piety.’

‘A special gift’ (Irish dón) could have one of several connotations: according to Marstrander’s Dictionary of the Irish Language (1913) it could mean ‘a gift, endowment, present ... a divine gift from God [or the gods, presumably] ... a grateful gift is speech without boasting ... in a special sense a latent endowment, faculty, ability ingenium ... skill in applying the principles of a special science ... the art of poetry ... a man versed in a certain art [magic?]’.

Ireland, then is an attractive and perhaps tempting choice for the ultimate place of origin for the complex and highly talented, war-mad peoples whom, for the sake of convenience we term ‘the Celts’. Tribally organised, each tribe had its own name which had clearly been bestowed upon it for a good reason; the Morini (sea people) who dwelt on the coastline of what we now call Pas-de-Calais, to name but one example. Whether they all knew themselves by this collective term must remain in question. The Greek ethnographers of the second and first centuries BC certainly used the term ‘Celt’ for the ‘barbarians’ who lived in the hinterland to the north and came to pose a constant and terrifying threat to Greek society. They did, however, state categorically that these people knew themselves as Celts (Keltoi). Their religion, with its ‘barbaric’ cult practices, shows a great homogeneity throughout the wider ‘Celtic’ world. Perhaps the most striking of these, as we have seen, is the veneration which was accorded to the severed human head. Other objects of veneration were the cult of ancestors, of graves, of the hearth, fire, certain kinds of trees and particular animals. The symbol of the cauldron was also widespread, either portrayed in some medium such as stone or metal (4), or as an actual, practical vessel (5 and 6) for various sacred or domestic purposes or, in the mythology, as a cult object possessing its own powers – as did weapons which were believed to be inhabited by demons. Miniature cauldrons, which were probably of a votive nature, have been recovered from various sites, and recently from a hoard found in Wiltshire (see Stead, 1998). Magical cauldrons also occur in the rich mediaeval literary tradition of Wales and Ireland.

Chapter 2

THE CLASSICAL COMMENTATORS

We depend for such knowledge as we have about the Druids and their Order in early Celtic society, on the commentaries of the Greek and Roman writers. These can be used for comparative purposes when we are studying the vernacular writings of the insular Celts, Welsh (Brythonic) – sometimes known as P-Celtic – and especially Gaelic, both Irish and Scottish, the early and medieval Irish texts being the more prolific. This group is known as Goedelic (Q-Celtic). The Irish hagiographies (lives of the saints) contain many mythological elements, and not a few references to the Druids; likewise the early Irish Laws – the oldest laws in Europe in the vernacular – and the Penitentials. Irish poetry and the Metrical Dindshenchas – literally, ‘stories about prominent places’ – have their own contribution to make to the study, as have the ancient names of places, some of which are discernible in the modern nomenclature. Breton and Welsh literatures and hagiographies are likewise invaluable as source material. The enigmatic Pictish sources have a contribution to make, as do writings in the Ogam script. One of the most rewarding disciplines is that of archaeology in Europe and the British Isles, and this is increasingly the case. As the availability to archaeologists of new technology increases, it is becoming possible to obtain the necessary evidence without inflicting too much damage to a given site.

The earliest teachers

Who then were these Druids? Druidism flourished among the Celts of Gaul where Druidism had a long history, no one as yet knows quite how long; but they themselves believed their order to be very ancient indeed. A good deal of information on Gaulish Druidism is given by Greek and Latin writers from the first century BC. Druidism may have come to Ireland with the coming of the Celts, if indeed they ever ‘came’, and it was to develop slightly differently from that of Gaul. The chief authors who wrote about the Gaulish Druids are Posidonius (c.135–c.50 BC); Julius Caesar (102–44 BC); Strabo (63 BC – AD 12 – who is the first to use the term Vates); Diodorus Siculus (floruit under Julius Caesar and Augustus and lived to at least AD 21); Pomponius Mela (c.AD 43) and Lucan (c.AD 39-65).

Of these Caesar tells us most, and his account, which we consider in some detail below, is clearly that of a man with a wide knowledge of religion in general. Julius Caesar is famous for, and usually associated with, his successful suppression of Gaul. His comments on the religion of the Gauls are sometimes treated with less respect than is their due, being dismissed as the mere observations of a soldier and brilliant tactician. He was, however, himself a priest of the Imperial Cults of Rome, being one of the 16 pontifices of these cults. His ultimate triumph was not perhaps in his conquest of Gaul, but in his election in 63 BC as pontifex maximus. It can thus be seen that the particular interest he took in the religious cults of the conquered were not merely observations of a triumphant general but were born of a priest’s natural interest in comparative religion. He equates the deities of Gaul with those of other peoples and so provides us with a great deal of interesting information.

The work of Posidonius was probably used by Caesar and other, later writers. These writers all state that the Druids were the learned class of the Gaulish Celts, philosophers and theologians. Pomponius Mela calls them ‘teachers of wisdom’. He says they profess to know the size and shape of the world, the movements of the heavens and of the stars, and the will of the gods. (This I think gives us strong proof that they were in fact priests, no matter what else may have been their special concerns.) Caesar seems to substantiate this statement when he says the Druids hold ‘many discussions regarding the stars and their movements, the size of the universe and the earth, the order of nature, the strength and the powers of the immortal gods’. Caesar had lived for a long time in Gaul and must have been satisfied that these statements were correct. Strabo says that ‘the Druids, in addition to natural philosophy, study also moral philosophy’. Diodorus calls them ‘philosophers and theologians who are held in much honour’.

The Druids were lawyers and judges, according to Caesar: ‘It is they who decide in almost all disputes, public and private, and if any crime has been committed ... or there is any dispute about succession or boundaries, they also decide it, determining rewards and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword – The Celtic languages
• Introduction
• 1 Druidic origins
• 2 The classical commentators
• 3 Questionable death and unusual burial
• 4 The symbolic head
• 5 The vernacular literatures
• 6 Druids and Fenians
• 7 Assemblies and calendar festivals
• 8 Unity and diversity
• 9 Folklore and festival
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Further reading