Druids and Druidism

DRUIDS AND DRUIDISM. - From the Celtic druis (dru- intensive and "vids" seer: "he who is very wise"; cf. Irish sui, Welsh syw with the same meaning), according to some; from the Celtic trúa ("to have confidence," "to believe"), according to others; or, again, from the Indo-European root of "oak" (cf. Greek δρύς): a Celtic priestly body based on recruitment by co-optation and instruction through initiatory practices of an esoteric character (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 14), charged with presiding over the relations between the population and the divinities. To its original esoteric character, which slowly became obliterated, druidism substituted functions of a social and civil order.

Concerning the origin of druidism, S. Reinach, M. Pokorny, A. Grenier and others believe they see in it the development of a priesthood of the autochthonous populations of Gaul, Britain, Scotland and Ireland, to which the megalithic constructions are traced; Hubert, Dumézil and others, noting on the other hand in druidism very close contacts with similar Indo-European priesthoods, and that it would be difficult for a supremacy of the autochthonous peoples to have come about in matters of religion uniformly in Gaul, Britain and Ireland, incline rather to place it within the framework of Indo-European religiosity.

To these two extreme theses must be added that of D'Arbois de Jubainville, who holds that druidism was brought to England by those first Celts who, known by the name of Goidels and Picts, settled on the island at a date between 1300 and 800 B.C. The druidic doctrine would therefore have found its elaboration in the course of the 1st millennium B.C., from the union of the beliefs of the autochthonous peoples with those of the Celts, and would have reached

Gaul in the course of the 3rd century B.C., brought by those Belgae who, driven from their original seats by the advance of the Germans, had arrived, through Gaul, in England and eastern Ireland, whence they would then have carried back to the continent the doctrine learned there.

In support of this thesis is the fact that druidism appears only among the Celts of the West, and not among those who, before 200 B.C., spread throughout all Europe, having as their starting point the West. The sole testimony to the presence of a Celtic priestly body in Cisalpine Gaul before the 3rd century (Livy, XXIII, 24), a priestly body interpreted by some as the druidic one, would not invalidate the validity of the thesis, inasmuch as the relations between the two shores of the Channel must have been frequent even before the settlement of the Belgae. And, further, it is to be noted that the presence of druidism among those bands which, probably from the 5th century onward, began, followed by others throughout the whole 3rd century B.C., to invade the Balkan peninsula, would have to be excluded: the drunemeton, an assembly charged with judging cases of murder (Strabo, XII, 5, 1), despite the phonetic affinity and the identity of the juridical function, would not, for philological reasons, be connected with the druidic institution. And, in any case, it seems logical that such a priesthood found its origin in a single place: either in England ("disciplina in Britannia reperta atque inde in Galliam translata esse existimatur" (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 13), whence the Celts would have subsequently spread it; or in the unfathomable cradle of the Celtic race, admitting also, for the second hypothesis, a European center from which the diaspora of the doctrine then began.

Literary sources for the knowledge of druidism are classical Greek and Latin authors and the writings of the evangelizers of Ireland. Both groups provide incomplete information; but while the first has value inasmuch as it is contemporary with druidism and represents a compendium of historical information and an honest attempt at interpretation, the second, both because of the diminished importance of druidism in the times of the spread of Christianity and because of the understandable hostility of the evangelizers, abounds in distortions and inaccuracies, for which reason it can serve at most as a term of comparison.

Setting aside a treatise on magic already attributed to Aristotle, and the Succession of the Philosophers of Sotion (in Diogenes Laertius), discredited for its scant reliability, only with Caesar, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo does one gather testimonies worthy of belief. To these (who also made use of the information of Posidonius of Apamea, who had stayed around 100 B.C. in Marseilles and in Gallia Narbonensis), are to be added Ammianus Marcellinus, who, although writing in the 4th century, drew on Timagenes (himself indebted to Posidonius), author of a history of Gaul written ca. 14 A.D., and many others.

The course of druidic instruction lasted twenty years (Pomponius Mela, III, 2, 19). The druids furthermore practiced a teaching magistracy in which all the youth of the privileged Gallic classes participated. The institution was ordered into classes, founded on different degrees of culture, of dignity and also, it is to be believed, of initiation. Diodorus Siculus (V, 31) distinguishes the druids into bards, druids and seers: the same subdivision is found in Strabo (IV, 4, ch. 197, 4), who however speaks of vates rather than seers, in Ammianus Marcellinus (XV, 9, 8) and in the Irish sources. Over the whole complex "praeest unus" (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 13; cf. the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick) who, in all likelihood, presided over the general assembly of the Carnutes, when, at a certain period of the year, the druids gathered in a place considered sacred (Caesar, De bello Gallico, XVI, 13). Such a meeting perhaps took place in a forest (Pomponius Mela, III, 2, 19; Lucan, Pharsalia, 447-48; Pliny, Nat. hist., XVI, 249), which modern scholars have identified as that of Orléans on the course of the Loire, or at Dreux, or at Chartres.

Still in the time of Caesar the druids represented a privileged class (De bello Gallico, VI, 14): they were exempt from military service and from the payment of taxes. Exemption from military service, rather than as a religious veto present also among other priestly bodies, among the Brahmins, for example, may appear as a recognition of the intertribal function of the druids, which made them extraneous to internal strife and placed them in a position to subject, if necessary, a given people to judgment, or to intervene in the midst of a battle to separate the combatants (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 13; Strabo, IV, 4, 4; Diodorus Siculus, V, 31, 5).

The druids also had functions as judges in disputes, in cases of homicide, of inheritance, of boundaries. Whoever did not respect their sentence was barred from the sacrifices, a penalty that entailed exclusion from society (in Ireland the exercise of justice belonged to the "fili," corresponding to the vates of Gaul). Furthermore they had the power to appoint the king or other magistrates (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VII, 33).

As a distinctly religious activity the druids had that of assisting at sacrifices (Diodorus Siculo, V, 31, 3; Strabo IV, 4, ch. 198), practiced with the aim of securing larger harvests: an agrarian motive to which the custom of execratio was not extraneous, by which the Celts tended to destroy with fire, iron or water the entire booty. Caesar (De bello Gallico, VI, 16) and Strabo (IV, 4, 189) speak of a colossus woven from herbs and hay, filled with men, which was set on fire. The victims of the sacrifice were criminals, but, in their absence, recourse was had to the innocent, perhaps prisoners of war. Before being sacrificed the victims were kept alive for five years: either to give their relatives the opportunity to procure the sum necessary for ransom, or because the sacrifices were quinquennial. The immolations were also carried out by striking the victims with arrows or crucifying them (Strabo, IV, 4, 198). The sacrifices also had a divinatory purpose through the convulsions of the human victims or from the manner in which the blood flowed (Diodorus Siculus, V, 31, 2-5; Strabo, IV, 4, 198). Sacrifices were also offered to preserve oneself from death in battle (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 16). With the passage of time the sacrifices for divinatory purposes were replaced by a rite during which a few drops of blood were drawn from the presumed victim (Pomponius Mela, III, 2, 18). The druids also gathered oak mistletoe (Pliny, Nat. hist., XVI, 249), the samolus, the selago and other plants whose therapeutic virtues they were acquainted with (id., op. cit. XXIV, 103-104). The cult of megaliths also seems established, in particular of menhirs, which the Gauls would have continued to worship because of the druids' prohibition against giving an anthropomorphic form to the divinities. Even in the medieval age in Gaul the cult of stones is present, in syncretism with Christianity; a cult against which the Councils of Arles (452), of Tours (567), of Nantes (658) and a capitulary of Charlemagne (789) pronounced.

Among the heritage of beliefs the most elevated was certainly that in the immortality of the soul (Caesar, De bello Gallico, VI, 14) which reveals a yearning for the continuation of life after death, and connects to the thesis that even the megalithic monuments were the fruit of a conception of the survival of the soul. To this belief is linked the habit of the Celts of cremating whatever could serve the dead in the afterlife (Caesar, op. cit., 19; Pomponius Mela, III, 2, 19), the use of throwing letters onto the pyre so that the dead might carry them to the others who had preceded him in the underworld (Diodorus Siculus, V, 28, 6) and that of lending money repayable in the afterlife (Valerius Maximus, II, 6, 10; Pomponius Mela, III, 2, 19). All had this certainty of immortal life until the day when fire and water would destroy everything (Strabo, IV, 4, 197, 4). Always connected to this doctrine of immortality was the belief of the Gauls that they were descended from Dispater, the god of the dead, from whom everything begins and to whom everything returns.

The fortunes of druidism declined with the Roman conquest of Gaul; given the function of national leaders that the druids might have assumed, the Roman State sought to relegate them as much as possible into the shadows. To this end Augustus, according to Suetonius, prohibited the practice of druidism to Roman citizens and Tiberius, first, and then Claudius (Suetonius, Claudius, XXV) abolished it entirely. The institution persisted instead much longer in England where it strenuously opposed the introduction of Christianity.

Mario Camozzini