The Druids are the most famous and the most mysterious of all the religious specialists of the ancient Celtic world, a priestly class of extraordinary prestige and authority whose influence extended across the Celtic-speaking territories of Europe from at least the fourth century BCE until the gradual disappearance of the order under Roman and Christian pressure. To study the Druids and the priestly class is to enter a world in which the boundaries between religion, philosophy, law, and political power were blurred, in which a single class of men and women might serve as priests, judges, teachers, prophets, and advisers to kings, and in which the formal study of theology, natural philosophy, and customary law could occupy a generation of an individual’s life. As part of the larger world of Celtic religion, mythology, and spirituality, the Druids were the custodians of the sacred order of Celtic society and the principal mediators between the human and the divine.
The evidence for the Druids is unusual in the ancient world. The Druids themselves left no written texts, having, according to Caesar, expressly forbidden the practice of writing among their students. The information we have about them comes from three principal sources: the testimony of classical Greek and Roman authors, who encountered the Druids in Gaul and Britain during the late Republic and early Empire; the archaeological record of their sanctuaries, ritual equipment, and the votive deposits associated with their cults; and the medieval manuscript tradition of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, in which the memory of the older Druidic order was preserved, in transformed and often Christianized form, in the tales of the early Celtic saints and in the literary traditions of the Celtic-speaking peoples.
The Druids in Classical Sources
The principal classical source for the Druids is Julius Caesar’s account in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico, written in the 50s BCE after his conquest of Gaul. Caesar, who had ample opportunity to observe the Druids of Gaul and to consult Greek sources who had written about them, presents the Druids as a single organized priestly class with a defined hierarchy, a common doctrine, and a long period of training. According to Caesar, the Druids originated in Britain and crossed to Gaul to take up their positions, although this claim is now generally regarded as a reflection of the British reputation for being particularly conservative in religious matters rather than a literal historical account. Caesar tells us that the Druids were exempt from military service and from taxation, that they had authority to decide private and public disputes, that they could inflict penalties on those who disobeyed their judgments, and that they were responsible for the education of the young of noble families. Caesar notes that the Druids considered it improper to commit their teachings to writing, although in the course of their long training they used the Greek alphabet for some purposes, including the keeping of public and private accounts. The Druids taught that the soul was immortal and that it passed at death into another body, a doctrine that Caesar thought was designed to encourage bravery in battle but that may also reflect older Celtic beliefs about the continuity of the individual and the community beyond the grave. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, describes the Druids as philosophers and theologians who taught that the souls of men passed at death into other bodies, and he notes their practice of animal and human sacrifice. Strabo, in his Geographica, mentions the Druids and the related class of bards and vates, and he notes that the Druids were concerned with natural philosophy and moral teaching as well as with religion. Pomponius Mela, writing in the first century CE, describes the Druids of Gaul, their teaching about the immortality of the soul, and their practice of divination by the examination of the entrails of sacrificed animals. Tacitus, in his Annals, gives a famous account of the suppression of the Druids of Anglesey by the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus in 60 CE, an episode in which the Romans destroyed the sacred groves of the Druids and slaughtered the priestesses and the warriors who defended the island.
The Functions of the Druids
The functions of the Druids in Celtic society were extraordinarily wide-ranging. As priests, they performed the rituals of the religious year, officiated at sacrifices, and interpreted the will of the gods. As judges, they had authority to decide private disputes and public conflicts, and their judgments were binding on the parties. As teachers, they were responsible for the education of the young of noble families, and they instructed their students in theology, natural philosophy, astronomy, law, history, and the oral traditions of their people. As prophets, they interpreted omens, predicted the future, and advised kings and chiefs on matters of policy. As custodians of tradition, they preserved and transmitted the religious, legal, and historical knowledge of their communities, and they acted as the principal guardians of the cultural memory of the Celtic world.
The Druids also performed important public functions outside the formal religious sphere. They served as ambassadors and intermediaries between tribes, they acted as advisers to kings, and they had a role in the assemblies and political gatherings that were a regular feature of Celtic public life. The famous account in Caesar of the great assembly of the Gauls held at Bibracte, the oppidum of the Aedui, gives a vivid picture of the public role of the Druids, who sat in a privileged position at the assembly and had the right to speak first.
The Druids were not the only religious and intellectual specialists of the Celtic world. Two related classes, the vates and the bards, are mentioned in the classical sources and play important roles in the medieval Celtic literary tradition. The vates, known from continental Celtic sources, were a class of seers and diviners who were responsible for prophecy, the reading of omens, and the interpretation of natural signs. Strabo describes them as concerned with the reading of auguries and the interpretation of sacrifices, and several inscriptions from Gaul mention individual vates by name. The vates may have been a separate order from the Druids, or they may have been a specialized branch of the same priestly class, but the exact relationship between the two is not entirely clear from the surviving evidence.
The bards, of central importance in the medieval Irish and Welsh traditions, were the composers and reciters of poetry, the keepers of genealogies, and the voices of praise and satire who could bless a king or ruin a reputation with their art. The bards were organized into a hierarchy of ranks, with the filidh of Ireland, the baird of Wales, and the bàrd of Scotland each having their own distinct traditions of training, verse forms, and professional privileges. The training of a bard was long and rigorous, often lasting from seven to twelve years, and the power of the bard was real: the Celtic belief in the magical power of the spoken word, the conviction that a well-crafted verse of satire could actually inflict physical or social harm on its target, gave the bardic class a position of considerable authority in early medieval Celtic society.
The relationship between the Druids, the vates, and the bards in the older Celtic tradition is one of the most debated questions in Celtic studies. In the early medieval period, when the older Druidic order had largely disappeared, the bards inherited much of the cultural and religious authority that the Druids had once held, and the bardic schools of Ireland and Wales became the custodians of much of the older Celtic learning.
Druidic Philosophy and Cosmology
The Druids were not simply priests and ritual specialists. They were also philosophers, and several classical sources comment on the philosophical teachings that formed an important part of Druidic education. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which Caesar describes, was the most famous of these teachings, but the Druids were also credited with a more elaborate cosmology. The second-century CE writer Diogenes Laertius even claims that the Druids taught a form of monotheism, holding that the supreme god was the object of all worship, and that the other gods were merely aspects of this single divine being. This claim is generally regarded as a reflection of Neoplatonic philosophy rather than as accurate reporting of Druidic belief.
The Druids were also credited with a knowledge of astronomy and natural philosophy. Pliny the Elder reports that the Druids of Gaul cut the mistletoe that grew on oaks with a golden sickle at a particular phase of the moon, and he describes the ritual by which two white bulls were sacrificed and the mistletoe was caught in a white cloth before it touched the ground. The oak and the mistletoe, and the ceremonies associated with them, are also attested in the medieval Irish tradition.
The Druids and Sacrifice
The practice of sacrifice was central to the religious functions of the Druids, and the classical sources devote considerable attention to it. Caesar describes a wide range of sacrificial practices, including the sacrifice of cattle, sheep, and other animals. The most famous Druidic sacrificial practice is the great wicker man, a huge effigy of wickerwork into which animals and, according to Caesar, human beings were placed and burned. Caesar reports that this was done for particularly serious occasions, when the lives of human victims were thought necessary to propitiate the gods, and he implies that the victims were often criminals or prisoners of war.
The reality of human sacrifice among the Druids has been much debated. Most modern scholars think that the accounts of classical writers were heavily exaggerated, partly through genuine misunderstanding of Celtic ritual and partly through the desire of Roman writers to portray the Celts as barbaric. The archaeological record does include a small number of cases that may be interpreted as ritual killing, including bog bodies in northern Europe that show signs of violent death. Whatever the truth of the matter, the practice of animal sacrifice was clearly central to Druidic ritual, and the meat of the sacrificed animal was usually consumed in a communal feast, an act that had important social and political as well as religious significance.
The decline of the Druids as a formal priestly class was a long and complex process, closely tied to the political and religious transformations of the Celtic world. In Gaul, the Roman conquest of the late first century BCE brought the Druidic order under direct Roman pressure. Tiberius and later emperors issued edicts suppressing Druidism, partly because of the perceived threat of Druidic political influence and partly because of the Roman distaste for practices such as human sacrifice. By the second century CE, the formal Druidic order had largely disappeared from Gaul.
In Britain, the Druids survived somewhat longer. The famous assault on the sanctuary of the Druids of Anglesey by Suetonius Paulinus in 60 CE was a major blow, but Druidic activity continued in the more remote parts of the British Isles into the second and possibly the third century CE. In Ireland, the Druidic order is mentioned in the medieval sources as a powerful and well-organized class, and the early Irish saints’ lives are full of dramatic confrontations between Christian missionaries and Druidic opponents. The most famous of these confrontations, the encounter of Saint Patrick with the Druids at the Hill of Tara, illustrates the way in which the older religious order was eventually displaced by the new Christian religion.
The ultimate fate of the Druidic order is not entirely clear. The formal class may have gradually disappeared, with its religious functions absorbed by the Christian clergy, its educational functions by the monastic schools, and its judicial and political functions by the secular authorities. But many of the older Druidic beliefs and practices survived in transformed form in the medieval Celtic world, and the figure of the filidh or court poet in Ireland, with his long training and his role as the custodian of tradition, is clearly a descendant of the older Druidic class. The later legends of Merlin in the Welsh and Arthurian traditions also preserve features of the older Druidic figure, transformed but recognizable.
The Druids in the Modern Imagination
The Druids have been a powerful presence in the modern imagination ever since the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical sources. The early modern antiquaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often presented the Druids as the original philosophers of Britain, the wise men of a pre-Christian civilization whose teachings paralleled those of the ancient philosophers. The Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its enthusiasm for ancient and “primitive” religions, transformed the Druids into idealized figures of priestly wisdom, and the modern Druid orders that began to be founded in the late eighteenth century, including the Ancient Order of Druids and the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, continue to draw on this idealized image.
The actual historical Druids, of course, were very different from the idealized figures of the Romantic and modern Druid orders. They were not the peaceful philosophers of legend but powerful religious and political leaders, deeply embedded in the social and political life of their societies. Yet the fascination they exert on the modern imagination is understandable. They were the most learned, the most powerful, and the most mysterious of all the religious specialists of the ancient Celtic world, and the survival of their memory in the medieval Celtic literary tradition, in the modern Druid orders, and in the popular imagination is a fitting tribute to the extraordinary influence they exerted on the religious and intellectual life of the Celtic world.
Related Topics
- The Celtic gods and goddesses worshipped by the Druids are examined in detail, with attention to their regional variations.
- The Celtic cosmology and the Otherworld that the Druids taught are explored through mythology and folklore.
- The sacred sites and pilgrimage traditions where the Druids performed their rites are examined in detail, with examples from across the Celtic-speaking regions.
- The medieval Celtic literary tradition preserves much of the older Druidic learning in transformed form.
- The history of the Celtic civilization places the rise and fall of the Druids in its chronological and political context.