Searching for genuine druids
Druids … did they exist? who were they, and what did they do? Where did they come from and where did they go? Answering those questions, if possible, will take time – a true deep dive.
I quickly found learning about druids is not as easy as reading Wikipedia, or any other text (popular or academic). I started researching those questions because I felt some affinity to what I ‘believed’ the druids were. Much of this derived from visits to Newgrange, Stonehenge, my affinity to natural spaces, and of course reading a broad set of sources about them – both fiction and non-fiction.
Druids as a study subject are incredibly opaque … some would articulate – purposely so!
Like much of pre-history (my assumed placement of real druids), fact, myth and outright fabrications challenge any learner. I found one academic study that takes this full on: Blood & Mistletoe — Ronald Hutton. Hutton’s study starts with the generally accepted ‘first mention’ in Caesar and other early Greek / Roman authors – who all wrote much after the druid era that I was most interested in. For example, from Wikipedia
The earliest known references to the druids date to the 4th century BC. The oldest detailed description comes from Julius Caesar‘s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50s BCE). They were described by other Roman writers such as Cicero,[2] Tacitus,[3] and Pliny the Elder.[4] Following the Roman invasion of Gaul, the druid orders were suppressed by the Roman government under the 1st-century CE emperors Tiberius and Claudius, and had disappeared from the written record by the 2nd century.
In about 750 AD, the word druid appears in a poem by Blathmac, who wrote about Jesus, saying that he was “better than a prophet, more knowledgeable than every druid, a king who was a bishop and a complete sage.”[5] The druids appear in some of the medieval tales from Christianized Ireland like “Táin Bó Cúailnge“, where they are largely portrayed as sorcerers who opposed the coming of Christianity.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid
Hutton also calls out that for different personal and social / political objectives, druids resurfaced in 18/19th centuries England, Scotland and Ireland. Grifters, politicians, academics and religious types all used/abused druids in different ways to achieve different objectives and almost none of that work surfaced anything close to helping understand genuine prehistorical druids – where my interest rested.
Hutton ends with a conclusion, I paraphrase as, ‘there’s as much historical evidence that says they existed as there is that they did not exist’ … but, there is almost nothing that describes their philosophy or practices. – what we know about those, later generations made up to fit their purposes.
Wikipedia even tries to explain away all this confusion and obfuscation,
While they were reported to have been literate, they are believed to have been prevented by doctrine from recording their knowledge in written form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid
Searching for the druids, for me, is not finished. I will continue digging and posting here on the tag “druids”.
Wikipedia has a good post on Hutton, and includes a great quote from him that resonates.
“My colleagues would kill me for saying this, but historians are increasingly conscious of the fact that we can’t write history. What we can write about is the way in which people see history and think history happens.”