What I’ve Learned about the Ancient Druids/Celts
Celtic languages are disappearing, and disappearing with them is Celtic culture. In the last 100 years, Celts have become a popular trope in fantasy literature and New Age religion. Our perception of the Celts has suffered so much wishful thinking and poorly reinterpreted history that I have always struggled to find good sources on them. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last few months. If you have better (credible) sources, please add corrections.
The Celts Weren’t Always in the North
They were mercenaries for Sparta and Egypt.
They once occupied Thrace (now Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece).
They founded Galatia (now Turkey).
We get the word Gaelic (referring to people like the Scots) from the Greek word Galatia, which is derived from Gaul, “the territory corresponding to modern France, Belgium, the S Netherlands, Switzerland, N Italy, and Germany W of the Rhine.”
The expanding Roman Empire marginalized them.
Celtic Spirituality and Language Have Roots in Vedic Religion
Like almost all European languages, Celtic languages come from the Indo-European language group, which originated in Mesopotamia and northern India.
Celts and Hindus also had a similar caste system: educated rulers (Brahmin), warriors (Kshatriya), farmers, artisans, or business people (Vaishya), and serfs or slaves (Shudra).
Tree worship exists both in Celtic tradition and in “the agricultural tribes of India,” as “every village was positioned near a sacred grove” (Ellis 40).
The druid-poet Amairgen’s “philosophical outlook … parallels the declaration of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita” (71), with presuppositions of reincarnation and pantheism. Though the Celtic Otherworld is unique, “the Celts celebrated birth with mourning for the death in the Otherworld, and regarded death with joy for the birth in the Otherworld” (176).
Somewhat like the Kshatriya, some Celts “fought naked because they believed this would release their karma to the fullest potential, enhancing their prowess and, if killed, speeding them to their incarnation in the Otherworld” (28).
Celtic gods were not creators, but venerated ancestors.
Druids May Have Simply Been a High Caste in Celtic Society
Though druids practiced magic and resided over many religious ceremonies, druidism probably wasn’t a religion, but a caste. The fact that Rome tried to suppress the druids implies that they represented the biggest threat to Roman conquest – they were the “intelligentsia,” the educated rulers. Warrior kings deferred to them. Throughout surviving ancient lore, druids fill the roles of doctor, astronomer, poet, and philosopher. Christian scribes were the ones preoccupied with druids as wizards.
Ancient Celts Were Pretty Advanced
They were the first Europeans to use soap. Their farming communities were prosperous, their art sophisticated, and their metalwork advanced. Officials were elected and property was more or less shared.
Unlike doctors in Greece, druid doctors were provided for by the community so that they could offer the same care to everyone. Of all pre-Christian European societies, the ancient Celts seemed to have the best healthcare system, refraining from then-otherwise-widespread euthanasia. They did not tend to view illness as a judgment of the gods, although they did address some illnesses as personal beings (250). Specific druid families passed medical knowledge and medical books down through generations.
Celtic women could be druids or warrior-queens. They owned property, practiced medicine, and had the right to divorce their husbands. Although their society began slipping into patriarchy before the arrival of Christianity, Irish Celts still had many female saints and spiritual mentors long after St. Patrick’s arrival. The cultural values of Christian leaders from Rome eventually put women in a less desirable place.
Truth was highly valued in Celtic philosophy. In fact, Truth was thought to hold magical power. “The Old Irish word for truth is also the basis for linguistic concepts of holiness, righteousness, faithfulness, for religion and, above all, for justice” (169).
It is false that the ancient Celts had no written language. Rather, the druids (educated caste) refrained from writing many things down in order to maintain secrecy and, therefore, political power. After Irish druids were displaced by Christian rulers, tiny little Ireland produced so many books that it made up one third of the literature in Europe.
The Celts Have Endured Some Garbage
They were slandered and suppressed by Roman invaders, and they were often slandered or misunderstood by Greek and Roman historians.
In England, invading Germanic, Danish, and Norman tribes marginalized Celtic tribes to such a degree that they no longer exist. Invading Germanics also displaced the Celts in what is now France.
Although Ireland converted to Christianity without any wars or martyrs, St. Patrick still saw to it that hundreds of druidic manuscripts were destroyed. We have no idea what they said.
Even after the Celts converted to Christianity, other so-called Christian kingdoms rounded them up to use them as slaves (see St. Patrick’s angry Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus).
This was still happening in the 16th century, when Oliver Cromwell’s “conquest of Ireland had wiped out just over one third of the population” and the rest were “shipped off to the New World, particularly Barbados, as indentured labourers…" Slaves cost money, but “Irish ‘indentured servants’ were supplied free by the government, and there was a tendency to work such ‘servants’ to death. They could always be replaced…” (Ellis 254).
Today, of the tens of millions inhabiting formerly Celtic regions, only about two million people still speak a Celtic language. Historian Peter Berresford Ellis states, “Language is the highest form of cultural expression. The decline of the Celtic languages has been the result of a carefully established policy of brutal persecution and suppression,” and their inevitable disappearance “will be as the result of centuries of a careful policy of ethnocide” (280).
During the Enlightenment, druids became a fad, and were excessively romanticized. The “Ancient” Order of Druids was actually established in 1781, an offshoot of Freemasonry.
“…By the end of the first World War (1918) there were five different sects of Druids vying to perform their ‘sacred rites’” at Stonehenge (274). Times being what they were, these tourists did a lot of damage to the site.
Breton Neven Henaff, le Grand Druide, “tried to organize a community who would live by a set of principles which he saw as Druidic” (276). Because he actually studied Celtic sources, his Neo-druidism is probably most similar to the original religion, but he also brought a lot of his own ideas into it.
During the philosophical upheaval of the 1960s, the New Age movement incorporated a lot of the fanciful and speculative ideas that were a fad during the Enlightenment and had no basis in history.
Etymonline.com
Confessio.ie
Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the English Language
romaincrisis
snowghoul
stormborns
annaxmalina
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
