University of Virginia Library
BL910 K4 1927
ALD
The Druids, a study in Keltic
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ALDERMAN LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
>
THE DRUIDS

FIG. 1.-JOHN AUBREY, 1626-1697
FROM THE DRAWING IN THE ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM
THE DRUIDS
A STUDY IN KELTIC PREHISTORY
BY
T. D. KENDRICK, M.A.
DEPARTMENT OF BRITISh and mediÆVAL ANTIQUITIES,
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
WITH FIFTY-ONE ILLUSTRATIONS
R. V. COLEMAN
NATIONAL BOOK BUYERS' SERVICE
522 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
1927?-
BL
910
.K4
1927
406409
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
THIS BOOK
IS ASCRIBED TO
THE MEMORY OF
FANNY SOWTER
I
PREFACE
F it were not that I very much dislike long titles, I
would call this book An Introduction to the Study of
Ancient Druids and Ancient Druidism, for that is
what it is really intended to be. Frankly, its main purpose
is to provide a complete and well-documented summary
of the whole of the pertinent material upon which a study
of this subject should properly be based; and in order not
to mask what I hope is a sober outline of fact, I have deliber-
ately omitted various tempting discussions and elaborations
of uncertainties. Thus I have not allowed myself to deal
seriatim and fully with the many theories of the origin of
druidism; while, as for my own speculation on this matter,
I have whittled it down to a statement of opinion so brief
that it enters the field with what must be surely a minimum
of offensive and defensive armour.
I hope that the manner in which I have presented my
material will demonstrate, as the salient lesson of this book,
that an essential preliminary qualification for the study of
druids and druidism is a general knowledge of the racial
history and prehistory, and social atmosphere, of early
Gallic and British civilisation. This method of approach is
so important, that I should like to say a word about books
for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with the
literature of the subject.
To gain the necessary general information there are two
vii
viii
THE DRUIDS
works of outstanding importance to serve as guides: firstly,
Dr. Rice Holmes's Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul (2nd ed.,
Oxford, 1911), and the companion volume, Ancient Britain
and the Invasions of Julius Cæsar (Oxford, 1907); and,
secondly, the colossal Histoire de la Gaule (5º ed., Paris,
1924, especially Vols. I, II, III, and VI) by M. Camille
Jullian. These books will also introduce the reader to the
major problems affecting the religious life of the peoples
concerned, and he may then turn to the more detailed studies
of these problems. Here there are two excellent English
works easily available, namely, Dr. J. A. MacCulloch's The
Religion of the Ancient Celts (Edinburgh, 1911), and Dr.
MacBain's Celtic Mythology and Religion (Stirling, 1917).
Conjointly, he should acquaint himself with the shorter
authoritative articles on druidism, such as that by Dr.
MacCulloch in Hastings' Encyclopædia of Religion and
Ethics, that by E. C. Quiggin in the Encyclopædia Britannica,
and the sections by M. Camille Jullian and Sir Edward Anwyl
in the Cambridge Medieval History (II, chap. xv, "Keltic
Heathenism in Gaul," p. 460, and "Keltic Heathenism in
the British Isles," p. 472).
Only after a careful general preparation of this kind,
is it safe to venture into the vast and dangerous literary
quagmire that awaits the student in the single good biblio-
graphy of the subject (Druids and Druidism; A List of
References, New York Public Library, 1920). This most
useful catalogue by Dr. G. F. Black is an invaluable index
of the quantity of the writings upon our subject, but not,
of course, of their quality (though Dr. Black has very pro-
perly censured as worthless some of the material included in
his list); and it behoves the student, therefore, to make his
way circumspectly through the three hundred and more
entries. The truth is that a prodigious amount of rubbish
has been written about druidism, particularly that worst
and insidious variety that masquerades as deep and recondite
PREFACE
ix
learning. Here I have given abundant references to the
many helpful and important works that are to be consulted
on the special problems that arise in the course of our
enquiry, and I hope the reader will accept them as a general
guide to the trustworthy literature. If they are thought to
be insufficient, let him consult the fuller pages of M. Camille
Jullian.
In writing this book I have had no assistance, except for
some kindly advice from Mr. Robin Flower of the British
Museum. But I want very gratefully to acknowledge my
indebtedness to Professor H. J. Rose for some valuable
criticisms made when my manuscript was complete. Al-
though these referred principally to doubtful readings of
passages in the classical authorities, I have benefited very
considerably throughout the whole book from Professor
Rose's comments.
For permission to reproduce illustrations already pub-
lished I desire to express my best thanks to the Council of
the Wiltshire Archæological and Natural History Society
(Figs. 1 and 45); to the Trustees of the British Museum (Fig.
9 (1, 2, 7) and Fig. 25); to the Council of the Royal Irish
Academy (Figs. II and 12); to M. Ernest Leroux (Figs.
16 and 23, both from M. A. Blanchet's Traité des Monnaies
Gauloises); to the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of
Scotland (Fig. 20); to M. G. Demonmerot, on behalf of the
late M. René Gadant (Fig. 21); to the Société Éduenne
(Fig. 26); to the Council of the Royal Archæological
Institute (Fig. 35); to M. Gamber (Fig. 40, from L'Homme
Préhistorique); to Mr. R. Hansford Worth and the Council
of the Devonshire Association (Figs. 41 and 49); to the
Council of the British Archæological Association (Fig. 47);
and to the Société Polymathique du Morbihan (Fig. 50).
T. D. KENDRICK
LONDON, June, 1927
PREFACE
CHAP. I. TRADITION.
II. PREHISTORY
22
III. HISTORY
39
IV. RELIGION
V. TEMPLES
33
"3
VI. ORIGIN
CONTENTS
APPENDIX. GREEK AND LATIN TEXTS
INDEX
PAGE
vii
I
31
73
104
•
146
194
212
223
xi
FIG.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. John Aubrey, 1626-1697.
•
From the drawing in the Ashmolean Museum
2. Medal with bust of Stukeley and Stonehenge
3. Title-page of De Dis Germanis, by Schedius
4. Map of Gaul and Britain
•
5. "Frill-comb-smear" pottery found in England
Frontispiece
PAGE
ΙΟ
facing 21
33
4I
facing
42
6. Hoard of socketed bronze axes of Brittany type found at Nether
Wallop, Hants.
7. Model of destroyed temple, Odilienberg, Alsace (after Forrer)
8. Pottery vessels from Bogoudonou and Kerhon, Brittany facing
9. Examples of Keltic scroll-ornament
facing
42
42
44
10. Upper portion of vase with scroll-ornament, from Margate
11. Small urn found near Tykillen, Co. Wexford, Ireland
12. Pottery vessels from Greenhills, Tallaght, Co. Dublin
46
47
13. Map of Mediterranean basin, showing the Phoenician colonies
14. Map of Mediterranean basin, showing the Greek colonies
15. Wooden tenons and fish-tailed mortices on stone blocks, Odilien-
berg, Alsace (after Forrer)
16. Stater of Philip of Macedon, and Gallic coins made in imitation
17. Map of Italy, showing the Etruscan settlements.
·
ཱ་
48
59
61
63
63
67
18. Small votive-heads of chalk from temple-site, Halatte.
·
71
19. Wall-carving from prehistoric grotto-grave, Marne (after de Baye)
20. Stone with ogam inscription, Port St. Mary, Isle of Man
21. Fourth face (lower section) of stone altar, Mavilly
22. Inscribed stone from Killeen Cormac, Co. Kildare (after Petrie
72
99
.
facing 101
and Stokes)
facing 102
23. Coin of the Suessiones, showing pentagram on reverse
·
107
24. The Coligny calendar: the month Anagan
116
•
25. Glass beads of the Iron Age from England and Ireland
126
xiii
xiv
THE DRUIDS
FIG.
PAGE
26. Miniature votive-altar from Autun dedicated to Anvallus facing 136
27. Foundation of circular building beneath a rectangular temple to
Mercury, Trier.
28. Diagram illustrating types of tenon-and-mortice lock employed
in classical building.
29. Stonehenge: diagram illustrating position of sockets of (?) earlier
circles
30. Stonehenge: the inner temple restored (after Browne)
31. Le Trépied on the Catioroc, Guernsey
32. Plan of Le Trépied on the Catioroc, Guernsey
facing 149
•
151
•
152
·
153
159
160
•
33. Plan of Le Déhus, Guernsey (after Carey Curtis)
161
34. Plan of passage-grave on La Varde, Guernsey
162
35. Grave-group from passage-grave, La Varde, Guernsey
36. Section of contents, side-chamber D, Le Déhus, Guernsey.
37. Diagram illustrating arrangement of chambers and dummy portal
in a British long barrow
38. Kit's Coty House, near Maidstone, Kent
From a drawing by F. D. Bedford
39. Plan of Kit's Coty House.
Tortillet)
40. Plan of cist at Breuil, Seine-et-Oise (after A. de Mortillet)
41. Plan of stone circles, Burford Down and Erme Valley, Devon
42. Stone circle, Carn Llecharth, Gower (after W. Ll. Morgan)
43. Section of barrow, Ford, Northumberland
44. Plan of barrow 55, Hanging Grimston, East Yorks (after Mor-
timer)
45. A Wiltshire disc-barrow
46. Druidic victim awaiting sacrifice (after Knox)
47. Stone circle enclosing tumuli, Eskdale Moor, Cumberland .
48. Section of stone circle at Crichie, Aberdeenshire (after Anderson)
49. Plan of hut, Foales Arrishes, Devon.
50. Plan of stone circles Île d'Er Lanic, Brittany
•
51. Stone circles surrounding burials of the Early Iron Age, Bur-
gundy and Pyrenees (after Déchelette)
181
182
•
•
185
•
187
•
163
·
164
165
166
•
•
167
170
·
174
•
175
•
176
·
176
177
•
178
179
THE DRUIDS
THE
DRUIDS
T
CHAPTER I
TRADITION
HERE is little need to remark upon the inextin-
guishable affection with which the druids are still.
regarded in the popular imagination. The anti-
quary in his travels, or for that matter any curious layman,
must inevitably be aware of the renown they enjoy; for the
signs of it are constantly encountered in the narratives of
guides and guide-books, and in the place-names of the
country-side; while it is not uncommon to hear that some
of the supposed ceremonies of the druids have been re-
enacted with appropriate pomp by societies professing to
continue the ancient functions of the order. A visitor to the
Chislehurst Caves in Kent-to take one example out of the
many that offer themselves in this connection-will discover
that there is attached to these artificial galleries, which are
relatively of quite modern date, a complicated system of
legend glorifying the druids not only as the singing priests
of a subterranean chapel,¹ but also as the makers of the
prehistoric flint implements found in the neighbourhood.
In fact, it may truly be said that the unlettered public has
accepted, as a simple solution of the mysteries of very remote
antiquity, a primary division of nearly all our ancient remains
earlier than Saxon times into "Roman" and "Druidic," so
that the druids are rapidly becoming synonymous with the
Ancient Britons, that is to say, the pre-Roman population
of this country. As a counter to this, the learned from time
¹ Cf. the description of the caves in Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc.,
IX (1903), 147.
I
2
THE DRUIDS
to time assert that the current notions concerning the druids
are mistaken; but in spite of all their endeavours the priest-
hood has lost little, if any, prestige, and continues securely
enthroned in the fancy of the people.
This general faith in the druids, so widely held throughout
the country and so difficult to disturb, invites discussion at
the outset of a book dealing with the priesthood as it is
known to us in antiquity. For it may reasonably be asked
whether the popular beliefs ought not to affect the manner
whereby the problem is approached, whether they do not
place it in a sense outside the scope of a merely archæological
dissertation. In a word, is it possible that the people
possess through the agency of folk-memory a dim and
mysterious knowledge of the druids that should over-rule
any theoretical conclusions in opposition to the popular
notions ?
As a matter of fact, it cannot seriously be maintained
that such knowledge exists. Folk-memory may, of course,
be a significant factor in many of the problems in which the
antiquary is interested, but here it would be little short of
amazing if it had existed in such a precise and informative
manner over a period that is now about 2000 years in length.
For it would not be an instance of haphazard memory of
forgotten days preserved in names and customs no longer
understood, whereby one might conceivably achieve contact
with the times of the druids, but an instance of deliberate
and uninterrupted knowledge that unfortunately only made
itself manifest in quite recent times (as will soon be shown),
and that, equally unfortunately, is partly in conflict with
the archæological evidence.
The soundest argument against the possibility that such
folk-memory existed is the positive knowledge we possess of
the growth of the beliefs in question, and in the first chapter
I propose to prove their modernity. This can best be
achieved, firstly, by considering one especially deep-rooted
notion about the druids, namely, the theory that it was they
who built and used prehistoric rough stone monuments;
and, secondly, by a general study of their appearances in
popular literature.
TRADITION
3
One reason why archeologists are not very successful in
correcting the general opinion of the druids, or in showing
that some of its more extravagant implications are ridiculous,
is that it was they themselves, or rather their ancestors in
archæology, who implanted the current notions. Doubtless
the culprits did not anticipate the far-reaching results of the
magnification of an obscure priesthood, but the fact remains
that as the result of an archæological discourse the druids at
one bound came not only into their own, but into a great deal
more than their own; and it looks as though they are likely
to hold on to it.
Of course, it is not a very difficult thing to establish
eccentric ideas concerning the distant past, but as a rule
these find favour only in a strictly limited section of the
community; for a time they may be firmly believed, and
they may even be persistent, but they are only current among
a few dabblers in learning, and seldom attract any wide
notice. It is obvious, therefore, that there must be some
strong appeal to common sense, or the satisfaction of a
solution to a definite puzzle, if an idea is to be popularly
comprehended and accepted; and it is because these advan-
tages could be pleaded on behalf of the druids, that they hold
their present high place in the general estimate of our
ancient history and prehistory.
For there happened to be a focus upon which their claims
could be centred, a reason for the revived memory of them,
and this was provided by the mysterious but well-known
rough stone monuments that are still plentiful throughout
the land, chambers built of enormous slabs of stone, and
circles and alignments of massive uprights or great recum-
bent boulders. Nothing was known as to the use of these
or their origin, and when the druids were paraded as their
probable builders the attraction of priests without temples
to temples without priests proved irresistible.¹ And so it
came about that all the protests of modern learning are
1 Dr. Joseph Anderson noticed the significance of the entries for
stone circles in the early indexes to Archæologia; in 1809 it was
simply Stones, Circles of, but in 1844 this was altered to Stones,
Circles of, v. Druids.
4
THE DRUIDS
insufficient to re-name the Druids' Altars and Druids'
Temples of our country-side; they are the names bestowed
by the people at the bidding of earlier archæologists, and
they are at once explanatory and satisfying; wherefore
it is evident that dolmen, cromlech, megalithic monument,
and the like, have small chance of becoming popular
substitutes.
This widely held belief that it was the druids who built
the stone monuments is the subject that it is convenient to
discuss first of all; and to illustrate the genesis of the idea,
that is to say, the manner of the druidic revival in its archæo-
logical sense, it is necessary to consider in some detail the
historical aspect of a special problem of British archæology,
that of the famous megalithic pile, Stonehenge. Nowadays
there is nothing more druidic than Stonehenge; in fact, it
is so signally and sacredly druidic that some modern druids
think it proper that a portion of the ashes of their deceased
brethren should be buried within its precincts. It is all the
more interesting, therefore, to find that for a long while its
druidic character was absolutely unsuspected, for this must
surely rob the modern notion of all traditional value.
The first unmistakable reference to the monument occurs
in the 11th century in the writings of Henry of Hunting-
don, who was content simply to catalogue it as one of the
marvels of this island, though he remarked at the same time
that its origin was unknown. A century later, however, we
come upon the account of the building of Stonehenge related
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, an exciting legend about the
transport of the stones from Ireland by Merlin to form the
memorial erected by Aurelius Ambrosius to the victims of
Hengist's treachery in A.D. 470. This story was current for
about 500 years, and is repeated in the poetry of Alexander
Neckham (1157-1217), in Langtoft's chronicles (c. 1300), and
in the works of several much later writers. A slight varia-
tion in the legend was made by Polydore Vergil at the begin-
ning of the 16th century, for this writer affirmed that the
monument was simply the sepulchre of Ambrosius; but
the first published theory running counter to Geoffrey's
version is that of Edmund Bolton, who proposed in 1624
TRADITION
5
that Stonehenge was the tomb of Boadicea.¹ And it is
evident that the Merlin story was wellnigh forgotten about
this time, because even such an inquisitive and diligent person
as the antiquary Camden, who can be trusted to have ferreted
out any surviving folklore, was quite at a loss to explain the
monument, and had nothing better to repeat than a vague
rumour that the stones themselves had been artificially
composed of sand and glue.
Therefore, so far as tradition is concerned, all that there
is to go upon is this 12th century story recounted by
Geoffrey; and, accordingly, it becomes important to enquire
whether Merlin was supposed by the medieval historians to
have been a druid. I am not disposed to shirk the issue
by saying that Merlin was largely a creature of Geoffrey's
imagination; but to maintain that this author's account of
the origin of Stonehenge is evidence of its traditional associa-
tion with the druids seems to me, even on the most charitable
view of the tale that can be taken, to be absolutely beyond
the warrant of the facts.
Actually, the Merlin stories form a group that originally
concerned two distinct persons, one a 6th century Welsh
prince, Myrddin ab Morfryn, and the other Vortigern's
prophet, Ambrosius, who figures in the Historia Britonum
of "Nennius." Geoffrey used the name Merlinus for both
these persons, and then proceeded to combine the stories
about them as though they referred to a single individual.
The Welsh prince is certainly the hero of his later Vita
Merlini, but in the earlier Historia Regum Britanniæ it is
Ambrosius who is uppermost in his mind; in fact, in his
first work he plainly says that Ambrosius was another name
for Merlin.2
¹ The name is, I admit, indefensible, except on the grounds of
euphony and popularity. But though I am prepared to champion
most forlorn causes, I confess it seems hopeless now to substitute
the appalling, yet more correct, Boudicca or Buddug.
2 Hist. Reg. Brit., VI, 19. On this subject see J. J. Parry, The
Vita Merlini, Illinois, 1925, p. 113; Hans Matter, Englische Grün-
dungssagen von Geoffrey of Monmouth bis zur Renaissance in Anglis-
tische Forschungen, Hft. 58, Heidelberg, 1922, pp. 149 ff.; W. W.
Newell, Publications of the Modern Language Assoc. of America, XX
6
THE DRUIDS
Now there is not one word about druidical training nor
practice either in the Historia or in the Vita. In the last-
named work it is said of Merlin rex erat et vates, he was a
king and a prophet; while in the Historia he is simply a
prophet, only distinguished by his strange birth and his
superior utterances from the other magicians of Vortigern.
And these, it should be noted, share the name magi with
other wise men living outside the druidic lands, the sooth-
sayers of the Trojan settlers in Italy, for example.
In order, therefore, to give a druidic flavour to this story
about Stonehenge, we must say that the tale relates to the
Ambrosius of "Nennius," and that the dual rôle of sorcerer
and adviser played by this person at the court of Vortigern
in the 5th century suggests the degraded duties that might
have appertained to the surviving druids, if there were any
in England, at so late a date. But in "Nennius," it must
be remembered, the word magi is used for such seers, and
not druids; so that even if it be granted that this Ambrosius
was a druid in its ultimate sense of a simple magician,
Geoffrey's tale is nevertheless separated by a period of about
eight centuries from the last mention of the word druid in
Gaul. And we are even further removed from the real and
organised druidism that was flourishing in this country
before the Roman occupation, of which it is very obvious
neither Geoffrey nor "Nennius" knew anything at all.
But this is not everything. Geoffrey himself describes
his Merlin-Ambrosius person as the son of a Christian prin-
cess ¹ who had been visited by an incubus; 2 and if we go
further back for information about his birth, and what
manner of man he was, that is to say, if we enquire in the
Historia of "Nennius," we get still further away from the
druids, for it is therein related that he was sprung from
Roman parents of consular rank.
It is almost impossible, therefore, to see any trace in this
story of Geoffrey's that can reasonably be held to reflect the
(N.S. XIII), Baltimore, 1905, No. 19-Doubts Concerning the British
History attributed to Nennius, pp. 647 ff.
¹ Hist. Reg. Brit., VI, 17.
8
2 Ibid., VI, 18.
• Nennius, Hist. Brit., 42 (Stevenson, 1838).
M
"
TRADITION
7
tradition of a druidic origin of Stonehenge. Nor, in truth,
can it even be said that there is anything in the legend to
suggest that the monument was popularly connected with
the religious ceremonies of the ancient Britons; for it will
have been noticed that in the tale it is explained simply as a
memorial to dead heroes.
But whether one attaches any importance to it or not,
this story represents the only popular belief ever current, so
far as one can tell, about the monument before the begin-
ning of the 17th century. At that time King James I
became interested in Stonehenge, and the enquiries that he
caused to be made into the origin of this astonishing ruin
gave rise to a long series of theoretical disquisitions whose
purport has considerable bearing upon our special subject,
the growth of the current notion that it was the druids who
built it. The first attempt to solve the mystery was made
by Inigo Jones, the architect-general, who was ordered to
the task by the King himself. Jones prepared a treatise on
the subject that was drawn up in 1620 and published some
thirty years later. At the outset he discusses the possibility
of a druidic origin, but he does not bring this forward as a
theory favoured by others or supported by any sort of tradi-
tion; he mentions it incidentally as a supposition of his
own, and it is dismissed in a page as an exceedingly improb-
able alternative to his decided opinion that the monument
was Roman.
""
This disquisition was followed in 1663 by the admirable
essay of Dr. Charleton, a court physician, who, though
reputed to have over-valued his Parts and Perform-
ances," was nevertheless acknowledged to be a person
of great learning. He contended that the monument was
built by the Danes for the consecration of their kings, a
most popular conclusion in the days of a recently revived
monarchy :-
Nor is thy Stone-Heng a less wonder grown,
Though once a Temple thought, now prov'd a Throne.
Since we, who are so bless'd with Monarchy,
Must gladly learn from thy Discovery,
That great Respects not only have been found
Where Gods were Worshipp'd, but where Kings were Crown'd.
8
THE DRUIDS
But Dr. Charleton never even bothered his head with a
possible druidic origin; he was only at pains to disprove the
Roman theory of Inigo Jones, and quite clearly the druids
were not reckoned in his day as serious candidates for the
honour of having built Stonehenge. Nor are they as much
as mentioned in the tremendously vigorous counterblast
prepared by John Webb, a relation by marriage and former
pupil of Inigo Jones, who undertook to restore Stonehenge
to the Romans; this, I think, is really significant, because
he goes out of his way to quote Dr. Aylett Sammes as sup-
porting the theory of a Phoenician origin, Bishop Nicholson
as thinking the monument Saxon, Aubrey as believing it to
be British, and Bolton's guess that it was the tomb of
Boadicea. Aubrey, as we shall see, did believe that the
druids built Stonehenge, but his views and arguments were
unpublished, and Webb knew nothing of them; conse-
quently there is not a word for or against the druids in his
long and involved work.
The first person, then, to claim Stonehenge for the druids
was the excellent and entertaining antiquary, John Aubrey
(1626-1697), the portrait of whom is reproduced as the
frontispiece. A mere statement of his opinion was pub-
lished in Gibson's edition of Camden's Britannia in 1695,
but his celebrated disquisition upon Stonehenge and Avebury
was never given to the world, apparently because he was not
satisfied with his knowledge of the rough stone monuments
in other districts. This is a great pity, since it must have
been a refreshing and intelligent document, far pleasanter
reading than the angry and laboured arguments of Jones,
Charleton, and Webb. "I come in the rear of all," wrote
Aubrey, "by comparative arguments to give clear evidence
that these monuments (Avebury, Stonehenge, and the like)
were Pagan temples; which was not made out before; and
have also with humble submission to better judgment,
offered a probability that they were Temples of the Druids.
. . . This enquiry, I must confess, is a groping in the dark;
but although I have not brought it into clear light, yet can
I affirm that I have brought it from an utter darkness to a
thin mist, and have gone further in this essay than anyone
TRADITION
9
before me." 1 This is an admirable mood, and it is not sur-
prising to find that both in description and conjecture he
had written with care and acumen. For he was never
obsessed with his druidic theory; indeed, he seems at one
time to have decided that the monuments were merely
sepulchres, and was probably turned to his final opinion by
Camden's remarks on the name Cerrig-y-Drudion. But
what we shall notice with interest is that he himself was
clearly of the opinion that he was the very first to think that
Stonehenge was a druidic temple, for it is unlikely that we
should have had such humble talk if there had been a
scrap of folklore that could have been used as warrant for
his view.
Although it was never completely published and ex-
plained, Aubrey's conclusion seems to have had more effect
than there is controversy to show. I think there is no
doubt that he influenced Dr. Plot, the historian of Stafford-
shire; and Toland (1670-1722), who wrote a curious and
rambling history of the druids, pays a pretty tribute to him
as the only man he had met in his early days who, beside
himself, had a right notion of these matters. And so, when
the next and chief protagonist of the druids appears, there
was no longer need to prove that Stonehenge was the work
of this priesthood; instead, it is tacitly assumed. Part of
this assurance may be ascribed to the natural ebullience of
the new author; but if views other than his own held the
day, he was not the one to pass them by unchallenged, and
I am inclined to think that William Stukeley owed something
of the startling success of his writings upon the druids to
the increasingly favourable reception, just before his own
day, of Aubrey's hypothesis. Not that there can have been
direct influence, for Stukeley was but ten years old in 1697
when Aubrey died, and when his famous works upon Stone-
henge and Avebury appeared in 1740 and 1743, he makes
no acknowledgment of indebtedness to his predecessor; in-
deed, the allusions to Aubrey in Stukeley's abundant writings
are few and of the briefest sort.
1 Aubrey, Topographical Collections, ed. J. E. Jackson, Devizes,
1862, p. 317.
10
THE DRUIDS
If Aubrey was a somewhat diffident protagonist, Stukeley,
at any rate, was headstrong and whole-hearted. The druids
absorbed him. He even erected his own private druidic
temple, a sylvan one, in his garden at Grantham; and his
friends nicknamed him Chyndonax. With admirable in-
genuity he mixed together a splendid hotch-potch of inven-
tion and surmise until he had brewed the legend of a
community of all-powerful priests of an ultimate Phoenician
origin, and professing the patriarchal religion of Abraham,
who built stone temples in the form of sacred serpents;
Dracontia, he said these serpent-fanes were called, though
he had no authority at all in antiquity for the word in a


REVGVI
OB-MAR-11765
AE:81
FIG. 2.-Medal with bust of Stukeley (obverse), and Stonehenge (reverse).
temple sense. And not only did he twist words, but he is
also said to have twisted the very stones themselves to suit
his theory, when he attempted the diagrammatic recon-
struction of the remains; even Sir Richard Colt Hoare, who
followed Stukeley and accepted most of his conclusions, was
sometimes far from satisfied with the doctor's surveys and
descriptions. But it is only fair to add that although he
has been occasionally convicted of curling a tail out of a
straight line of stones, or discovering the head of a snake
where others have not been able to find anything at all, he
has nevertheless won modern approval as a field-worker, for
it is not very long ago that a particular series of measure-
ments made by him had by chance to be repeated, whereupon
TRADITION
11
the surveyors were able to record unequivocal testimony
to the accuracy of the 18th century antiquary; ¹ and
there is certain positive achievement to his credit in this
respect, for it was he who first pointed out the existence of
the avenue and the cursus at Stonehenge, and who first
grappled with the problem of the relation between the
monument and the adjacent barrows.
But even so, I imagine present-day enthusiasts for the
druids are not likely to praise over loudly the man who
so nobly furthered the renaissance of their cult, since the
imaginative doctor-clergyman is an advocate of dubious
repute, and I doubt if any modern druid would be wise to
appeal to Stukeley's archæological authority in the matter
of stone monuments; for it would not be difficult to compile
an ugly little catalogue of his mistakes, and the outspoken
aspersions of his contemporaries and successors upon his
over-confident method; and, although he must be freely
pardoned for it, it is not easy to forget that it was he who
stood sponsor for a document that later proved to be one
of the most harmful forgeries that have ever been perpe-
trated, a none too happy augury for his pet theory.
But whether he was a good or a bad antiquary hardly
matters; it is enough that he was in earnest and that he
was successful in the propagation of his doctrine; more
suddenly and completely successful than any other archæo-
logical teacher I can call to mind. No one seems to have
disputed his main conclusion, although in the instance of
Stonehenge an attempt was made to give it an astronomical
flavour in 1771 by the Glasgow vaccinator, John Smith, the
first of the exponents of the famous theory that the plan of
the monument is in deliberate relation with the movements
of heavenly bodies. This author dissented from Stukeley
on certain minor points; for instance, he did not believe
that the altar stone was used for human sacrifice, his reason
being simply that the altar would not bear fire. He tried
1 See Mr. O, G. S. Crawford's remarks in The Observer, Sept. 23,
1923.
The poet Gray, for instance, more than once refers uncom-
promisingly to Stukeley's "nonsense."
12
THE DRUIDS
a fragment of it in a crucible and found that it first of all
changed colour and then was reduced to a powder; very
unfit surely for burnt offerings!" he says.¹ And there were
other variations of Stukeley's thesis, such as that of the Bath
architect, John Wood, who hazarded that although Stone-
henge was druidical, it was really a lunar temple with Diana
as its goddess. In fact, the first directly opposed view was
not put forward until almost exactly fifty years after
Stukeley had published his book on Stonehenge; this was
the theory of John Pinkerton, a Scottish historian, who
argued that the monument was Gothic.2
It was not only in Great Britain that Stukeley's notion
found favour. Toland tells us that in his time none of the
French megalithic monuments were attributed to the druids,
but in 1805, when Cambry published his famous Monumens
Celtiques, we find that he advocates the druidic origin of all
the continental rough stone monuments. It is true that he
does not directly express his indebtedness to Stukeley, but
the reverend doctor is mentioned in such a way that there is
little doubt that his writings must have provided the main-
spring of Cambry's arguments.
If we except Pinkerton's work, we may say that Stuke-
ley's theory held the field without a rival. Certainly no one
seriously attempted to challenge the druids as builders of
Stonehenge and other monuments, and they continued in
splendid possession for wellnigh a hundred years after
Stukeley's time. And it was natural enough that during
this length of time popular fancy should adopt them as
obviously the ideal priests for the tenantless altars and
temples; thus, with leisure to work its way unopposed
throughout all the land, and with the argument of scholars
in its support, the familiar fiction was formidable indeed;
¹ Poor Stonehenge! John Evelyn found the stone so hard that
all his strength with a hammer could not detach a fragment.-Diary,
July 22, 1654.
2 Pinkerton was not really the first in the field with an alternative
opinion, for John Bryant, in his Analysis of Antient Mythology (1776),
suggests Stonehenge was much older than the druid theory implied;
but he only devoted a line or two to the subject, and can hardly be
called the champion of a rival theory.
TRADITION
13
and there is nothing remarkable in its becoming at the
beginning of the 19th century an article of general belief.
The moral of this story of the disputed origin of Stone-
henge is very obviously that the now famous druidic theory,
whether it be right or wrong, is not based on any sort of
tradition, but is merely an invention of the late 17th
century that was very successfully propagated during the
next hundred years. In fact, before this period ¹ the only
person who seems to have considered it even as remotely
likely was Inigo Jones, and he very summarily rejects it at
the outset of his enquiry. It would be possible to cite other
instances of what may be termed the pre-druidic notion of our
megalithic monuments, such as that of the celebrated Kit's
Coty House, near Maidstone in Kent. Quite recently I have
seen this once more claimed for the druids, since it has the
appearance of being the ruins of a small chamber (Fig. 38,
p. 167), the kind of thing supposed by the modern friends of
the order to have been either a sort of observatory or a
cell of initiation. But I would point out that there is at
least nothing traditional about this contention, for it differs
in toto from the popular belief of other days; this is related
to us by Camden and by Stow, and their version is to the
effect that the Coty was erected to mark the burial-place of
a British prince Catigern, who fell near the site when fighting
against the Saxons in the 5th century A.D. The druid
theory, therefore, is simply a rival and subsequent guess,
and it will later be shown that there are excellent archæo-
logical reasons proving that both guesses are wrong.
It is hardly necessary to add that there is little or no
corroborative evidence suggesting that a prolonged folk-
memory actually existed. Thus I have not been able to
discover any antique place-names embodying the notion of
1 Cf. the testimony of Schedius and of Pufendorf (p. 21) and
my remark about de Brebeuf (p. 24).
* This has, of course, been tested several times. In 1766 Pro-
fessor Garden of Aberdeen, describing the stone circles of his district,
treats the question of their origin in scientific fashion. He concludes:
"I have found nothing hitherto, either in the names of these monu-
ments or the tradition that goes about them, which doth particularly
relate to the Druids or point them out."-Archæologia, I, 341.
14
THE DRUIDS
druidic origin attached to sites of megalithic monuments.
In this connection the most notorious name is Cerrig-y-
Drudion in Denbighshire, for the second word is sometimes
mis-spelt Druidion, and an inevitable confusion with the
druids, initiated by the celebrated antiquary Camden (1551–
1623), has resulted. Actually the name means stones of the
heroes, and nothing more; the megalithic monuments to
which it refers have now disappeared, but a tradition in
respect of one of them has survived, and it has nothing
whatever to do with the druids, the legend being that it was
used as a prison for the victims of the monstress Cynric
Rwth. I have also come across Tre'r Dryw, translated
Druidstown, in Anglesey, recently quoted again as an
example, for there are said to be stone monuments near
by; but it is hardly possible to admit this instance, because
the ancient meaning of Dryw is wren, and not druid, which
is a more or less modern connotation.¹ In England we have
1 There is, however, a connection between wrens and druids, since
the wren was a prophetic bird (see Cormac's Glossary, 60; on the word
dryw see Rev. Celtique, XX, 340, and XLIII, 453). Rowland (Mona
Antiqua) spelt the name Tre'r Drew and translated it Druid's Man-
sion, claiming it was the site of the Archdruid's dwelling. The word
Drew does, of course, occur in the names of places where there are
megaliths, as at Stanton Drew, but it should be no longer necessary
to point out that it is merely a personal name, and not a variant of
druid. There are three examples, and in each instance it can be
shown that the land belonged to a family called Drew (see Rev. J. E.
Jackson in Aubrey's Topographical Coll. for Wilts, Devizes, 1862,
p. 103, for the references to all three sites; also Thurnam, in Wilts.
Arch. Mag., III (1856), 168; and Crawford, Long Barrows of the
Cotswolds, 231). The only place I know where tradition may really
keep alive the memory of a druidic place of worship is at Chartres,
and there it has nothing to do with megalithic remains. But it is
a fact that in the cathedral crypt one may visit a recess in the founda-
tion of the masonry now called the Druids' Grotto, and, more im-
portant, a stela probably of Gaulish, i.e. druidic, date. Legend has
it that in pagan times the druids worshipped here the Mother of
God (la Vierge devant enfanter or Virgo paritura), and up to the end
of the 18th century a wooden image existed that was supposed to be
the object of their adoration, though it was really of early medieval
date. Legend also places the site of this druid worship at Fermin-
court, near Dreux (Cochin, Mem. Acad. Celt., IV, 1809), and this
must surely add considerable interest to the fact that the first printed
TRADITION
15
Stoke Druid in Gloucestershire as a place-name, where mega-
lithic remains are to be found, and if it could be traced back
beyond the period of the archæological advertisement of the
druids we might see in it some evidence of folklore. But
at the moment I have not succeeded in tracing it back at
all, and I am rather impressed by the fact that it seems to
have been quite unknown to Seyer, the historian of Bristol,
who described this particular ruined structure in considerable
detail in the year 1821.
Up to this point I have only attempted to show that in
disputing the claim that the druids built the stone monu-
ments one is not adventuring against a formidable display
of folk-knowledge. There is, of course, a great deal more to
be said on the archæological aspect of the subject, and it is
possible that it may not be necessary to insist upon a com-
plete divorce of the druids from all their "temples." But
here I am concerned solely with the traditional value of the
theory of druidic origin, and it will be convenient to postpone
further discussion for a later chapter.
The next point I want to make is that the theories of
Aubrey and Stukeley, however well they may explain many
modern notions, are not wholly responsible for them. To
discover the ultimate cause of the revival of interest in these
priests, and the secret of the success of such theories, it is
essential to search further than among the pronouncements
of individuals and to take stock of the altering outlook of
the times in which they were promulgated. This, I think,
can best be appreciated after a short survey of the rôle
played by the druids in literature.
At the end of the 4th century A.D. the word druid still
survived in the general literature of Roman Gaul, for it
occurs twice in the poems of Ausonius (see p. 97) in an
adjectival form that must clearly have been intelligible at
any rate to the professors to whom the poem is addressed.
But after the decline of the Empire and the passing of
book dealing with the druids (see below, p. 18) was written by a
priest of Dreux. It must also be remembered that this is the district
wherein the ancient druids held their annual assemblies (Caesar,
B.G., VI, 13).
16
THE DRUIDS
Western Europe into the hands of the Teutonic immigrants,
the traditional history of Gaul, and the works of the classical
historians, were rapidly and completely forgotten; so that
as a result the druids do not re-appear again in any literature
for a good many hundred years.
The word finally comes to light once more in the medieval
manuscripts of Ireland, where it had in all probability never
ceased to circulate in the vulgar tongue,¹ while a supposed
variant form, derwydd, is also found in a few early poems
of the Welsh bards. In the 14th century, for example,
the Irish scribe who translated the Historia Britonum of
"Nennius" uses "druid" as the equivalent of magi, i.e.
seers or magicians, in the original; and there is no doubt
that at about that time, and before it, the word was well
known to the Irish clerks.
But in the original Historia, written about A.D. 800, the
magicians of the 5th century king Vortigern were not
called druids; the Venerable Bede did not write of them in
his Ecclesiastical History, and there is no mention of them
""
1 It is to my mind much less likely that it was merely a borrowing
by learned scribes from classical sources, or that the word was in
any sense a Gallo-Roman importation. I am quite prepared to
believe that in one form or another the name druid may have
remained current in common Keltic speech; but from the 5th cen-
tury onwards there is no evidence that it had any significant tradi-
tional association with the ancient druids; it merely referred to a
person pre-eminent for magic or poetry. The etymology of the word
is still uncertain. The orthodox view (Thurneysen, see Holder,
Altceltische Sprachschatz, s.v. druida, D'Arbois de Jubainville, Cours
de la littérature celtique, VI, 93, n. 2, and Revue Celtique, XXXI
(1908), p. 83) takes dru as a strengthening prefix and uid as know-
ing," so that a druid was a very wise man.” M. Camille Jullian,
however, remarks (Hist. de la Gaule, II, p. 85, n. 7) that one should
not exclude the possible significance of Pliny's fanciful derivation
from the Greek Spûs (see p. 89); for who knows, he asks, that the
Gauls did not use a radical sounding like Spûs as a word for oak.
Dr. R. Much is of the same opinion, and called attention (Mitt.
Anthr., Wien, XXXVIII (1908), p. 46) to the Welsh derw (= oaks)
(cf. Evans, Welsh Dict., s.v. Derwydd). On the other hand, Dr. Gold-
man suggested (Mitt. Anthr., Wien, ib., p. 47) an ingenious and not
impossible Etruscan origin for the word, that would then signify
"skilled in sacred things."
TRADITION
17
at all in any of the Saxon or early medieval chronicles and
romances. In England and on the continent, in fact, the
Teutonic invasions had effectively obliterated all common
knowledge of the ancient priesthood, and it stood little
chance of revival as long as the church, the official fount of
historical information, ignored the one possible source of
enlightenment, the early Roman historians. This state of
affairs is plainly revealed in the grossly unhistorical treat-
ment of the subject-matter of the Arthurian cycle, wherein
the druids might reasonably have found mention had the
mediæval authors consulted the classical material relating
to the periods they were describing.
.
Thus, except for the occasional use of the name in a
debased sense by the Irish schoolmen, and, more doubtfully,
by the Welsh bards, it seems safe to say that throughout a
long period from the 4th to the 16th century the original
druids of antiquity had wellnigh passed from man's memory.
At length, however, the time came that the common
classical sources of information were more frequently con-
sulted, and as an inevitable consequence the knowledge that
there had once been priests called druids gradually became
general among educated folk. And if one watches for the
early mentions of the druids in popular work, it can fairly
easily be seen that their name creeps in rather as a morsel
of this casual erudition than as a concession to vulgar
predilection.
In England the period of oblivion from the 4th century
onwards is not interrupted, to the best of my knowledge,
until the year 1509, when the druids were included in the
complement of Barclay's Ship of Fools; but they only get
in at second-hand, and four lines is their portion :-
Or as the Druydans rennyth in vayne about
In theyr mad festes upon the hylle of yde
Makynge theyr sacrafyce with furour noyse and shout
Whan theyr madnes settyth theyr wyt asyde.
On the continent they were brought once more, after
their long oblivion, to the notice of scholars by the Annales
Boiorum of Aventinus (Johann Turmaier), who completed
2
20
THE DRUIDS
As a matter of fact, at this period the only practical
interest taken in the druids seems to have been aroused by
the French antiquary Guenebauld, who claimed that he had
found the tomb of an archdruid called Chyndonax. This
discovery was a very exciting affair that attracted con-
siderable attention; it took place in 1598 on Guenebauld's
vineyard near a Roman road in the vicinity of Dijon, and
consisted of a cylindrical stone coffer, about a foot in height,
that contained a glass cinerary urn. On the base of the
coffer was a Greek inscription mentioning Mithras and also
a name interpreted by Guenebauld as Chyndonax, who,
because he was described as a chief priest, was assumed
to have been necessarily an important druid. Guenebauld
himself published this find some years later in a delightful
little book, complete with illustrations, which seems, since
it is of earlier date than Sir Thomas Browne's Hydrotaphia,
to be one of the first treatises in the history of transalpine
archæology that dealt with the problems of a single excava-
tion. The authenticity of the inscription has been ques-
tioned, although it is rather difficult to understand why,
and, needless to say, the coffer itself is now lost; but as a
Roman cemetery, whose existence was unknown to Guene-
bauld, was discovered over 200 years later on the site, the
funeral apparatus must have been genuine enough. How-
ever this may be, Chyndonax the Druid became a real person
to a great many people at the end of the 16th century and
at the beginning of the 17th; and on more than one occasion
he was saluted in verse :-
Felicem Druydam, qui tot post saecula vivit,
Quemque per ora virum fata volare jubent!
But this, as I have said, is the only instance at so early
a date where any sort of popular attention seems to have
been devoted to the druids; and even after this discovery
I daresay that outside Burgundy no one bothered about
Chyndonax except a few scholars and theological disputants.
By this time, however, the learned world was beginning
to occupy itself seriously in the problems of druidism, and
throughout the 17th century, just as in the later half

ELIE SCHEDII
De
DIS GERMANIS,
Sive
Veteri GERMANORVM, GALLO
RVM, BRITANNORVM, VAN
DALORVM Religione
Syngrammata Quatuor.
Amfterodami,
Apud Ludovicum Elzevirium. Anno 1648.
FIG. 3.-TITLE-PAGE OF DE DIS GERMANIS, BY SCHEDIUS
TRADITION
21
of the 16th, a number of works appeared that dealt with
the priesthood. But books of this kind are evidence of
nothing more than an academic study of the classical his-
torians; and the manner in which the subject is approached,
at any rate in the first half of the century, makes it tolerably
clear that it was deemed to be one not as yet generally
familiar.
The first work in the new century that treated of the
druids was an oration of Francois Meinard, the Frisian, that
was printed in 1615,¹ and set forth the claims of the druidic
mistletoe to be henceforth regarded as the emblem of juris-
prudence. But much more important was the great work
De Dis Germanis, by the German youth Elias Schedius
(1615-1641), in which as many as twenty-six chapters were
devoted to a study of druidism; for Schedius believed that
the Germans had had their druids just like the Kelts. Two
chapters deal with the probable kind of altar used by the
druids, and it is important to remark, in view of the modern
superstition on this subject, that in the 17th century
turf, and not stone, was thought to be the chosen material.
This notion of a turf altar in the middle of a grove is re-stated
in an engaging pamphlet on the druids by the diplomat
Esaias Pufendorf of Chemnitz, a work written as a university
thesis, and first printed in 1650.3 Pufendorf's charming
study had the luck to be brilliantly translated in the last
century by Edmund Goldschmid, and in its English form
his little book deserves to be better known.
The next work of interest here was the Originum Galli-
carum Liber of the Dutchman, Marcus Boxhorn, that was
published at Amsterdam in 1654; the greater part of it is
philological and not directly concerned with the druids, but
it contains an appendix in the form of a long Latin poem
1 Orationes Legitimae : 1. Oratio solemnis de visco Druidarum
iurisprudentiae symbolo. Poitiers, 1615.
* Amsterdam, 1648. The earlier and gloriously illustrated book
by Cluverius, Germania Antiqua (Lugduni Batavorum, 1616), con-
tains only two or three brief references to the druids.
'It was later included in the Opuscula a iuvene lucubrata,
Halae Hermundurorum, 1699.
• Privately printed. Edinburgh, 1886.
22
THE DRUIDS
that purports to set forth a system of druidic philosophy.
A continental work of greater significance appeared two
years later; this was written by Jean Picard of Tours,¹ who
treated the problem of the druids in a severely historical
fashion, transcribing in full many of the classical references
to them. In the meantime, a short article, De Origine
Druidum, by Henry Jacob, a Fellow of Merton College, had
been published in England in the Delphi Phænicizantes
(Oxford, 1655), a work of which Edmund Dickinson claimed
to be the author; and a few years later another little book
on druidism, also in Latin, came from Oxford; it was written
by Thomas Smith of Magdalen,² and its principal interest
is that it names Camden, the 16th century antiquary, as
the pioneer in the revival of the study of the druids. There
is yet a third Oxford book to be mentioned, namely, The
Court of the Gentiles, by Theophilus Gale, for it contained a
short section on the druids, and, since it was written in
English, may well have given them some publicity.
But at this period the druids were no longer in need of
such advertisement-at any rate in this country. For the
17th century had witnessed, as well as the continued interest
of scholars, the gradual spreading in England of a vague
popular notion of the druids as the ancient poet-priests of
Britain. This recognition was not directly due to any one
scholar's work, and I am inclined to think it must be almost
wholly ascribed to the choice by Beaumont and Fletcher of
an Early British theme for a tragedy. The performance in
1618 of Bonduca must have presented a picture of the druids
in a form that could not fail to win for them a considerable
1 De Prisca Celtopaedia, Paris, 1556.
2 Syntagma de Druidum moribus ac institutis, London, 1664.
Oxford, 1669 and 1671. See Pt. II, Bk. I, Ch. V, 78-82.
There were one or two other works on the druids published in the
closing years of the century. Of these the De Philosophia Celtica of
J. C. Kuhn (1676) is a dull tract of fourteen pages; there was also
the Disputatio de Gallorum veterum Druidibus (Upsala, 1689), by
Peter Lägerlof (a work I have not seen). More interesting than
Kuhn's book, though not much longer, was the Veterum Instituta
Druidum, by Elias Eyring (1697); this includes a reading of the
suspected inscription (Orelli, 2200) from the Moselle (p. 100).
TRADITION
23
amount of popular attention, and from that date onwards
it is idle to pretend that their name could not have been
generally familiar. Thus it is possible that when Henry
Jacob wrote in the middle of the 17th century that there
was no one in whose ears their fame had not resounded,¹ he
may well have been referring to something more than their
repute in the world of scholars.
Bonduca, then, is certainly a landmark in the story of
the revival of popular interest in the druids. Of course, the
part played in it by the druids is indirectly a result of the
labours of scholars, because these had enabled Fletcher to
use the works of the classical writers, especially Tacitus, as
sources for his story; whereas Shakespeare, because he had
taken the story of his Cymbeline largely from medieval
romances, consequently did not bring the druids at all into
his play dealing with the same period.
The first scene of the third act of Bonduca is laid in a
Temple of the Druids, and begins with a solemn entry of the
druids singing; and it will be noticed that song seems to be
their principal function. "Now sing, ye Druides!" com-
mands Caratach; and in another place Bonduca exclaims-
Rise from the dust, ye relics of the dead,
Whose noble deeds our holy druids sing.
And in the first act Caratach refers to
The holy Druides composing songs,
Of everlasting life to victory.
This notion of the druids as being primarily bards gained
further currency in Milton's Lycidas (1637):-
Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep
Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas ?
For neither were ye playing on the steep,
Where your old Bards, the famous druids, ly—
and in England it remained firmly established for close upon
a hundred years.
In France, on the other hand, it is likely that a popular
knowledge of the druids was achieved more slowly, and, when
1 Loc. cit., P. 33.
24
THE DRUIDS
established, it was probably a more precise notion of them
than that obtaining in this country. The principal factor
must have been the translation of Lucan's Pharsalia by de
Brebeuf (1656), for this would render the well-known passage
describing the druids (p. 88) familiar in substance to a good
many Frenchmen. And it is interesting to note, as an
appendix to a subject already mentioned, that at this period
in the 17th century the current idea in France must still
have been that groves, and not stone temples, were the
places of worship of these priests.¹
Au milieu du silence et des bois solitaires
La Nature en secret leur ouvre ses mystères.
As a reinforcement of this view (which was already clearly
established in Pufendorf's Dissertatio, and in the earlier work
of Schedius), the same poem contains the famous and mag-
nificent description of the horrible druidic forest at Marseilles,
so fearsome a place that—
Les voisins de ce bois si sauvage et si sombre
Laissent à ses Démons son horreur et son ombre,
Et le Druide craint en abordant ces lieux
D'y voir ce qu'il adore et d'y trouver ses Dieux.
But in England, as I say, the idea of the druids as a kind
of prophetic bard prevailed for a hundred years after Milton
wrote Lycidas. It is true that at the beginning of the 18th
century Addison refers once in the Tatler 2 to the "Druid of
the family" in a context that shows he was using the word
in the sense of a priest; but William Diaper, in 1713,
returned to the more popular notion-
With sacred miselto the Druids crown'd
Sung with the Nymphs, and danced the pleasing Round.'
1 The grove-idea was always more popular in France than in
England. Courier, for instance, in one of the Censeur letters of 1819,
mentions a "M. Marcellus," who regarded his native forests as a
memorial of the druids, and would not allow a single tree to be cut.
P.-L. Courier, Lettres au redacteur du Censeur, V, Nov. 1819. For
that matter, it is still current in France and in the wooded districts
of Northern Spain (especially in Galicia, so my friend Dr. Pericot
tells me).
2 Tatler, No. 255 (1710).
• Dryades
or the Nymphs' Prophecy, London, 1713, p. 15.
TRADITION
25
And so did Thomas Coke in 1726-
and-
Thrice happy land [Kent], 'tis here the Druids sing,
He walked a God amids't th' admiring Throng,
The darling Subject of the Druids' Song.¹
In the middle of the 18th century there took place that
very remarkable revival of interests in the druids upon which
I have already commented in connection with the theories
of the origin of Stonehenge. Aubrey, who first suggested
the druids as builders of the monument, had died in 1697,
and it was not until over forty years later that Stukeley's
famous exposition appeared to achieve for this theory almost
universal acclamation and acceptance. But in the mean-
time the ground had been prepared by the publication of
several books of antiquarian argument and disquisition that
differed from those of the preceding century in that they
were intended for a wider public than the few students of
the ponderous Latin treatises of earlier days. One of the
first was Thomas Brown's dissertation on Mona that was
included in Sacheverell's Account of the Isle of Man (1702),
and another was Henry Rowland's Mona Antiqua Restaurata
(1723). In 1726 came Toland's History of the Druids, and a
year afterwards France had La religion des Gaulois tirée des
plus pures sources de l'antiquité, by Dom Martin (1727).
By the turn of the half-century there had also appeared the
important work of Frick (1744), that included reprints of
several earlier essays on druidism, Sir Thomas Carte's History
of England (1747), containing a full account of the druidic
order as it was known to the ancient writers, and Simon
Pelloutier's Histoire des Celtes, which, curiously enough, had
very little to say about druids.
A point had clearly been reached, therefore, when a
knowledge of the druids was no longer an incidental product
of historical research among the classical authors, but was
in itself the subject of a fairly general interest, a period, that
is to say, wherein most educated folk would have some know-
ledge of the ancient Keltic inhabitants of the country.
1 The Bath, Dublin, 1726, p. 3.
26
THE DRUIDS
Now within twenty years of the publication of Stukeley's
book on Avebury in 1743, Gray's famous poem, The Bard,
had appeared, Mason had published his Caractacus, and,
more important even than The Bard, Macpherson's Ossian
("Fingal," 1761) was in circulation, a work there and then
destined to compel the chiefs of literary Europe, either in
angry defiance or in triumphant delight, to an investigation
of the mythology of the ancient Keltic world.
There was nothing about druidism in Ossian, there was
nothing directly about druidism in The Bard, but they ad-
vanced the cause of the druids and promoted a popular
affection for them more thoroughly than any archæological
treatise could have done. It is, in fact, to this early romantic
poetry that we should properly attribute the astonishing
success of the laborious theories of Stukeley and other
archæologists. Such poetry was an evidence of the turning
of men's minds away from the old familiar classical mythology
and the rigours of the classical formulæ in letters and art ;
and the signal for a movement towards the freedom of
Keltic wildness, of the chill grand landscapes of the north
peopled with hoary bards and with rude chieftains, and the
mysterious haunting creatures of Keltic mythology.¹
The Romantic Movement, then, is the ultimate cause of
the revived interest in the druids that we have witnessed in
the 18th century, the secret of that strange power they have
exercised ever since over popular fancy. The string of books
concerning them, and the list of allusions to them in general
literature that followed the turning-point in the story of the
revival (1750), are much too long to be recited here. But as
evidence of their renown soon after this date, it will suffice
to mention the production at the Théâtre-Français in 1772
of a tragedy, Les Druides, by Le Blanc de Guillet (Antoine
Blanc), and of Fisher's Masque of the Druids, at Covent
Garden (1774 and 1775), and the revival of Bonduca in 1778.
Their fame, however, was destined to be even greater
1 On this subject see the excellent little book, The Celtic Revival
in English Literature, by E. D. Snyder (Cambridge, Mass., 1923).
I most gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to this work for
many of the references quoted here.
TRADITION
27
than that afforded them by the theatre. For not only was
their ancient glory recalled, but their religion also; and it
had many votaries. An important factor in the romantic
movement had been the renewed study of Welsh bardic
poetry,¹ promoted chiefly by Lewis Morris (1700-1765) and
Evan Evans (1731-1789), and it was not very long before
it was suggested that the medieval bards were the reposi-
tories and servants of an ancient and mystical religion, of
druidism, in fact. The tenets of this Bardism were formulated
in 1792 by William Owen Pugh in Llywarc Hen, but the chief
exponent of the new faith was Iolo Morganwy (1746-1826),
who not only accepted the greater part of the bardic tradi-
tions as a survival from the days of the druids, but also
claimed that he himself was directly descended from them.
3
The supposed bardic religion was eventually developed
into a system in which druidism, so far as it is discoverable
in the classical sources, and the patriarchal faith of the
Scriptures were ingeniously combined. At the beginning of
the 19th century this helio-arkite theology was most success-
fully championed by the Rev. Edward Davies,ª and after-
wards by Algernon Herbert, who gave it the name by which
it is now known, neo-druidism. But there is no need to
describe its later progress and complicated ramifications; it
will be sufficient to remark that an important general con-
sequence of the movement was the conversion of the ancient
bardic gorsedd into a druidic institution, so that the gathering
of the poets at the Eisteddfod became a full-dress ceremony
of the druids, and was, and still is, particularly effective in
keeping their memory fresh in the popular imagination.
It is necessary, however, to say a word about the basic
assumption that the mediæval Welsh bards were a direct
continuation of the druidic hierarchy, for this is not by any
means an extravagant or ridiculous belief. The druids of
old were very closely connected with the bardic profession;
much of their lore was doubtless transmitted by means of
1 The story of this revival is outlined by Sir J. Morris-Jones in
Y Cymmrodor, 28 (1918), p. 10 ff.
¹ Celtic Researches (1804); Mythology of the British Druids (1809).
• The Neo-Druidic Heresy (1838).
28
THE DRUIDS
poetry, they are more than once named together with the
bards, and it is even possible that as their sacerdotal powers
vanished they may have been to some extent merged in the
bardic class. Moreover, as Matthew Arnold pointed out,¹ the
very fact of the existence of an elaborate poetical system
right at the beginning of the mediæval literary history of
Wales seems to indicate a clear and persistent tradition of
an older poetical period, and one is irresistibly led to think
of the druidic system described by Cæsar. But such con-
siderations cannot be taken to imply that the servile Keltic
bard of the kind known to us in the Middle Ages was neces-
sarily descended from bards included in the druidic order.
For whatever the druids may have been, or may have
become, professional bardism is something recognisable and
distinct. Even in their distant past the Kelts seem to have
employed poets in a purely secular capacity, and who were
in no way concerned with the druidic functions (see p. 134);
thus it is obvious that the survival of the calling of the
professional bard is only a token of ancient Keltic custom,
and not a proof of connection with druidism.
The most that can reasonably be claimed is that some
bards of special distinction may have been possessed of the
remnants of the druidic doctrines. But even on this point
the evidence is not convincing, and it would be almost im-
possible to demonstrate that any of the mediaval Welsh
poets and poetasters were the conscious possessors of a
scrap of the ancient druidic lore. The existing manuscripts
of their poems do not date back beyond the 12th century,
and it may be safely said that there is nothing in the poetry
of that period, even in those of the pieces that have a tradi-
tional flavour of the earlier centuries, or in those that are
ascribed to 6th century bards, to warrant the belief that the
poets themselves knew anything at all about ancient druidism
as an organised religion. All that can be adduced on this
score is that in the 12th century and afterwards the bards
sometimes, not very frequently, called themselves derwyddon,
which may, or may not, be a form of druids; but, to my
1 On the Study of Keltic Literature (Works, ed. 1903, V, p. 45).
•
TRADITION
29
mind, there is not the slightest suggestion that those to
whom the term was applied enjoyed the reputation of being
members of, or even connected with, the ancient priesthood.
This question of Bardism and Druidism has already been
treated in thorough fashion by writers of much learning,¹
and I do not propose to pursue the enquiry here. But I
cannot help remarking with regret that Neo-druidism, with
all its extravagances and impostures, has rendered the
delightful study of Keltic tradition in Wales a wearisome
and ungrateful task for a student in earnest search of druidic
survival. I believe myself that bardic tradition and bardic
custom is the most important of the several fields in which
one might legitimately seek to achieve contact with real
druidism. But the blundering enthusiasm that pretends
this contact is already proved, and the consequent prejudice
of scholars against enquiry in this direction, are indeed for-
midable obstacles in the way of an ordinary examination of
the material.
In this chapter I have tried to test several methods
whereby one might forge a link, traditionally, with the druids,
and I have not been able to claim any success.
It is neces-
sary, therefore, to add that I have no special reason for
wanting to prove that such a link cannot exist. But I am
impressed by the remarkable stirring of popular opinion
engendered by Romanticism, which I believe to be directly
responsible for the many druid-cults of to-day; and this must
of necessity lead to a profound suspicion of every alleged
tradition that has become involved with the movement.
To sum up, I think it may be said that the testimony of
the druidical literature is plain enough. For England it has
shown that the Saxon invasion blotted out the memory of
the druids, leaving, so far as our records go, no trace of them
in popular tradition, either as regards sites of their former
worship or vestiges of their lore; and it has shown that a
knowledge of the former existence of the priesthood was
¹D. W. Nash, Taliesin: or the Bards and Druids of Britain,
London, 1858, esp. pp. 330 ff.; Matthew Arnold, loc. cit., pp. 26 ff.;
Jules Leflocq, Etudes de mythologie celtique, Orleans, 1869, pp. 115 ff.;
Thomas Stephens, Literature of the Kymry, London, 1876, pp. 84 ff.
30
THE DRUIDS
regained slowly and laboriously in the 16th century as a
result of the return to the study of the ancient historians.
And it has shown that the theory, now so popular, that the
druids built the megalithic monuments, was an invention of
the late 17th century, successfully promulgated, in the suc-
ceeding century, by Romanticism.
With this much achieved as a preliminary, we can pro-
ceed to a study of the druids in antiquity.
F
CHAPTER II
PREHISTORY
AROM the ancient historians we gather this much
about original druidism-that Britain was reputed
to be its fountain-head, and that its priests in Gaul
were famous as philosophers as early as the beginning of the
2nd century B.C. As a matter of fact, all that we hear
directly of the British druids is that there were priests of
that name in Anglesey in the 1st century A.D.; but there
was a great deal written about the Gallic druids, who con-
tinued to be very important persons up to the time of Cæsar,
although their power vanished soon afterwards.
To this little stock of knowledge is added the statement
that there were no druids in the lands of the Germans; and
it is also to be remarked that there is no literary evidence of
their existence either in Italy or in Spain.
Thus it may be said that the period of their greatest
ascendancy lies within the compass of the first few centuries
B.C., and that their influence was confined to Gaul and
Britain. As a corollary of this, it is usually held that they
were the priests of the Kelts, or rather of the British and
Gallic sections of the Keltic-speaking peoples. For the
period of their maximum influence corresponds reasonably
closely with that of the Keltic supremacy in Western Europe;
and the word druid itself, in related forms such as drui, drai,
draoi, and dryw, is current in modern and mediæval Keltic
tongues.
The subject of the connection between the Kelts and the
druids is of great importance as regards the origin of druidism,
and its study is certainly one of the principal interests of
31
32
THE DRUIDS
this book; but it is not one that can be directly approached.
In fact, it will be best to reserve the debate of this problem
until after the discharge of the two other tasks that confront
the student of the ancient druids. For, first of all, it is
necessary to become acquainted with the peoples who in-
habited Gaul and Britain at the time of, and before, the
druids, and at the same time to take stock of the outside
influences likely to have affected their behaviour and beliefs;
then, secondly, we must examine in detail the classical
evidence relating to the druids themselves. Only after these
preliminary investigations can we attempt to set forth our
knowledge of druidism in general terms, and to discuss its
origin in the light of the ethnological and historical material
at our command.
In this chapter I propose to deal with the first of these
matters, namely, the ancient population of the lands wherein
druidism manifested itself. But to avoid an unprofitably
long diversion from the main subject, I shall not attempt a
summary of the whole prehistory of the area; instead, I
shall take up the story at a point in the Bronze Age some-
where about 1500 B.C., that is to say, at a period after the
savage cultures of the Stone Age hunting folk had been
superseded by the higher agricultural civilisation of the
Bronze Age.
This civilisation was introduced gradually, and not
everywhere in the same manner nor by the same people.
Ultimately, it must be attributed to the influence of the
still higher civilisations of the East; but in Western Europe
it is only a faint and distant reflection of Mesopotamian,
Egyptian, and Ægean cultures, and we have no practical
interest either in this remote origin, or in the complicated
borrowings whereby it was eventually transmitted into our
northern lands.
Naturally, in Gaul and in Britain the Bronze Age was
ushered in with the inevitable disturbance and traffic con-
sequent upon so notable a cultural advance. But after the
stimulus afforded to Western European civilisation by the
initial spread of new ideas, and after the economic upheaval
caused by the propagation of a new source of wealth, there
PREHISTORY
33
བཅ» y
སང་Ú་
יוייורו
R SEINE
R.LOIRE
R. GARONNE
R-SAÔNE
FIG. 4.-Map of Gaul and Britain.
RELBE
3
34
THE DRUIDS
was gradually developed a group of agricultural peoples who
possessed the land in a prosperous and relatively unadven-
turous peace.
It is important for our purpose to understand that this
Bronze Age population of Gaul and Britain was in reality a
composite of separate cultures of varying degrees of develop-
ment. No doubt the major element in the population may
everywhere have been the descendants of the ancient Stone
Age folk; and, accordingly, it is possible that there existed
sufficiently strong racial and linguistic affinities throughout
the whole area to justify the inclusion of all its occupants
in a single Bronze Age civilisation. But a single civilisa-
tion may consist of provinces that vary according to the
different influences exerted upon each; and it is a fact
that the provinces of Bronze Age Gaul were far from being
alike.
To the west of the Seine and the Rhône the indigenous
folk had been very largely affected by the activity of the
metal trade in Spain and Portugal, and the coming and
going of traffic along the Atlantic trade-route that had united
the megalithic cultures of the Peninsula, of Western and
South-Western France, and of Britain and Ireland. To-
gether, these regions formed a western province that remained
a cultural entity throughout the Bronze Age; though to-
wards the end of the period Spanish influence lessened, as
its component cultures grew more and more self-centred,
while the cultures of Brittany and of Ireland became in-
creasingly important. But such fluctuations could not
break the link forged by the traffic and exploration of the
earlier megalithic period in the dawn of the Metal Era, and
for many centuries to come new fashions and new customs
could travel rapidly from one end of the province to the
other. Furthermore, we must not fail to observe that the
connection with Spain made all parts of it accessible to
influences from outside travelling either along the North
African coast or directly across the Mediterranean.
A second, or south-eastern, archæological province of the
Bronze Age in Gaul was the country lying between the
Rhône from Lyon to the sea and the modern French-Italian
PREHISTORY
35
frontier.¹ Here there was no trace of the great megalithic
culture that had flourished in the western province, and the
affinities of the people were directed towards the neighbouring
cultures of the Genoese Gulf and the plain of Northern Italy.
The province is, in fact, Transalpine Liguria, and its people
may be safely called Ligurians. It is they who are famous
for the extraordinary number of bronze sickles that have
been found in their territory, so notable a quantity that it
is customary to speak of them as the most industriously
agricultural people of prehistoric Europe.
The third, or eastern, province lay north of the bend of the
Rhône, and occupied the greater part of eastern and North-
Eastern France. It was not, at any rate at first, a culture
equally distributed, and many districts of this vast area, as,
for example, the Sénonais, seemed to have lagged behind in
a wretched flint-culture; but as one approaches the Rhône
and the Rhine, especially in the advanced Bronze Age, one
encounters the remains of a flourishing people whose culture
was undeniably affected both by the adjacent Ligurians and
also by the Bronze Age peoples of Eastern Germany. This
province, therefore, while it certainly possessed a virile
indigenous population (see p. 70), was the gateway into
Gaul of the transrhenan cultures, and, as such, it was destined
to play a very important part in the formation of the later
Gallic civilisation.
Our own island presents a meeting-ground of the extended
cultures of the western and the eastern provinces; for
Brittany and Ireland, on the one hand, and North-Eastern
Gaul on the other, were all instrumental in the formation
of the British Bronze Age culture. As a natural consequence
of this twofold source, the British culture is unequal, Corn-
wall, for instance, showing close affinities with Brittany,
while in East Anglia there are plainer signs of Rhineland
influence. But it is a mistake to suppose because of the
somewhat arbitrary distribution of various Bronze Age cus-
toms and small commodities that the country was overrun
1 This culture may well have extended further northwards; for
a summary of the evidence, see René Gadant, La Religion des Éduens
et le monument de Mavilly. Autun, 1922.
36
THE DRUIDS
by invasions corresponding with every change of fashion.
Thus the alteration in burial methods following the intro-
duction of cremation is simply due to the gradual spread of
the custom from Brittany and the Channel Islands,¹ and is,
at first, commonest in South-West England, where it is
impossible to correlate it with a distinct superposed culture-
complex, such as one should be able to recognise if the rite
had been introduced by an invading folk. On the other
hand, the invention of the socket for axes and other articles
was probably brought to our country along the Rhine trade-
route, just in the same way as a few of the exotic winged
axes, or occasional axes of Italian type, also travelled north.
However, of all the lands we have considered, that is to
say, of Gaul and Britain and Ireland, the district furthest
removed during the Bronze Age from the immediate invasion
of new customs, new inventions, and new philosophies, was
our own island. Whatever novelty of thought, or change
in attitude towards the sacred, came to this country from
the outer world must have been transmitted through the
medium of the adjacent cultures of Ireland and of Gaul, and
no innovation would be likely to have reached our shores
until it had first been digested by the outside Bronze Age
world. That is to say, Britain would be less susceptible to
important and revolutionary innovation during the second
millenium B.C. than any other part of the future lands of the
druids; it was, in fact, the district best suited by virtue of
its position for the formation of a specialised religion, and
its conservation throughout this period. This is a point on
which stress may reasonably be laid, seeing that Britain
happens to be the land in which, so Cæsar was told, the
druidical disciplina, or doctrine, originated.
It may be ultimately due to Alpine influence exerted along
the famous trade-route, Swiss Lakes, Pressigny (i.e. Central France),
Brittany. The leaf-shaped sword is another invasion-bogey of the
British Bronze Age, but this, having first of all been copied from
North Italian or Central European models, became the common
property of the whole of the northern provinces of Europe, and
its dissemination throughout the west seems to be a natural and
inevitable consequence of the normal Bronze Age traffic.
PREHISTORY
37
Of the other provinces, it is to be noted that many writers
have emphasized the peaceful domestic character of the
Ligurian culture, some arguing on the grounds of their
supposed religion, and others on the composition of the
bronze hoards found in their territory. In the last respect,
a famous example is the Briod (Jura) ¹ hoard of 269 pieces of
bronze, whereof 256 were sickles and only three were weapons
(one fragment of a sword and two small spearheads); and
another is the Larnaud (Jura) 2 hoard of 1485 pieces, among
which there were not more than 126 fragments of swords
and spearheads. Of course, an argument based on the
composition of these and other hoards is not entirely con-
vincing; a good deal depends on whether the axe be styled
a weapon or not, and whether the hoards compared are of
approximately equal date; nevertheless, the preponderance
of the agricultural implements in this area deserves to be
contrasted with finds in other lands like the great hoard of
over a hundred bronze swords and daggers from Huelva,4
in the south of Spain, or such British hoards as that found
at Blackmoor,5 in Hampshire, where a collection of 61 pieces
included only five objects that were not parts of swords or
spears. And if it be right to assume on these grounds that
the Ligurians were an essentially peaceful people, we may
conjecture further that they had nothing to do with the
origin of druidism. For one of the principal objects of the
druidical doctrine, so we are told, was the encouragement of
bravery in war, and we are left in no doubt about the sym-
pathy of the druids with military ideals; so that it looks as
though their religion could hardly have been developed on
Ligurian soil.
1 Congr. préhist. de France, 9 Sess. (1913), Lons-le-Saunier, p. 443.
2 Ibid., p. 451.
3 Similar hoards have been found outside the area, but they were
probably Ligurian importations. An example is the hoard of
92 sickles found at Bösel, Kr. Lüchow, in the north German plain.
• Revue Archéologique, 5, S. XVIII (1923), 222; Bol. R. Acad.
Hist. (Madrid), LXXXIII (1923), 89; Actas y Mem. Soc. Española
de Antropologia, II (1923), 37; Buttleti Assoc. Catalana d'Antro-
pologia, II (1924), 223.
Evans, Ancient Bronze Impts., London, 1881, pp. 460 and 464.
38
THE DRUIDS
The end of the Bronze Age is a notable period in the
prehistory of Gaul, because it witnessed the domination of
the transrhenan cultures not only in the Seine and Rhône
valleys, but even as far west as the valley of the Upper
Loire. This was in part the consequence of the general
community between the province of Eastern Gaul and the
Rhineland that is noticeable in the earlier stages of the
Bronze Age; but, more directly, it was the consequence of
the arrival within the area of a new folk, called the Urn-Field
People, whose distinctive culture, characterised by extensive
cemeteries of cremated burials in urns, had been developed
in that portion of Central Europe comprised by the lands of
modern South-East Germany (Thuringia, Saxony, and Prus-
sian Silesia), North-West Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, and
Hungary.
For a long time the people inhabiting this east-central
district of Europe had been in a close trade-connection with
South-West Germany and the Rhineland, and also with the
Ligurians in North Italy; but at the close of the Bronze
Age, i.e. about 1000 B.C., there was an actual progression of
the people themselves westwards. This began by a move-
ment into South-West Germany, the Rhineland, and Swit-
zerland, and into Central Gaul as far as the Loire, while at
much the same time related peoples also descended the valley
of the Rhône and settled in South-Western France and across
the Pyrenees in Catalonia.¹
The arrival of these Urn-Field folk took place at very
much the same time as the introduction of the use of iron
into Western Europe; and the cultures that resulted from
their immigration belong properly to the earliest, or Hallstatt,
division of the Iron Age. This word Hallstatt is the name of
a village in the Austrian Tyrol where a rich cemetery of the
first Iron culture has been brought to light, and it is univers-
ally applied to corresponding culture-stages everywhere
else in the west of Europe. It is simply a convenient ticket
for a particular grade of culture, and it may be freely used
if it be understood that it does not carry with it ulterior
¹ Buttleti Assoc. Catalana d'Antropologia, III (1925), 212.
PREHISTORY
39
implications either of racial affinity or even of complete
cultural identity.
The use of a new metal, and of a new name for the changed
civilisation that coincides with its introduction, sounds as
though the close of the Bronze Age in Gaul had witnessed
a wholesale revolution in the arts of life, instigated by con-
quering hordes endowed with superior equipment. In reality
nothing of the sort occurred. The first Hallstatt culture of
Gaul was simply a continuation of the Bronze Age civilisa-
tion, with the difference that the Urn-Field peoples had added
a sufficient element of East European novelty to make it an
integral part of a single early Iron Age civilisation extending
from France to Austria. But, essentially, Gaul had experi-
enced no marked ethnographical change; and in no sense
had it been overrun by a new Hallstatt folk. Instead, its
changed culture was slowly evolved from Bronze Age begin-
nings on its confines, whence it spread only gradually through-
out its extent.
On the other hand, we must take stock of an important
cultural development in North-Western Germany that be-
comes manifest about the same time as the formation of the
Hallstatt cultures in the Alpine countries, that is to say, in
the 1st and 2nd centuries of the first millennium B.C. This
was the incursion into the Lower Rhineland of a culture
seemingly developed in North and Eastern Germany that was
characterised amongst other things by a peculiar domestic
pottery, consisting chiefly of wide-mouthed vessels of coarse,
gritty ware with a frilled lip,¹ pots with the body, or lower
portion covered by comb-ornament, and big vessels with a
"smeared" or "rustic" surface. Although it was born of
1 For an account of this Harpstedt pottery, see R. Stampfuss in
Mannus, XVII (1926), 287.
""
""
* In Germany this frill-comb-smear pottery (abundantly
represented in the North German museums) belongs to the late Bronze
Age and early Iron Age. I have made a fairly thorough study of it,
and I am satisfied it is identical with certain English ceramic types;
it represents, in fact, the first pottery, since the early Bronze Age
beakers, that is sufficiently peculiar, and sufficiently alike on both
sides of the Channel, to suggest an invasion. But I wish I could
feel equally sure of its date and manner; I suggest about 600 B.C.
40
THE DRUIDS
the distinct northern Bronze Age province of Europe, it is
difficult to say whether this culture really represents a people
of separate race, as has been claimed, from the Bronze Age
population of Southern and Western Germany; but that is
a problem that need not be immediately discussed, and it is
only necessary to remark that these folk, whoever they were,
after they had subsequently absorbed something of the
Hallstatt culture in the Rhineland, adventured, or perhaps
were driven, into North-Eastern Gaul and across the sea
into this country.
The date of their arrival in force on the English shores,
if we may judge by the chronology of their expansion on
the continent, and the mixed character of their pottery in
the English settlements, cannot have been earlier than about
600 B.C.
To what extent these newcomers occupied the
country, I am not prepared to say; but as the pottery finds
showing the most striking affinities with those on the conti-
nent (Fig. 5) seem limited to the Thames valley, Kent, and
Sussex, it is possible that the invaders were forced to remain
content with a holding in the south-eastern counties. Yet
one cannot deny that after their coming fashions derived
from the Rhineland headquarters of the Western European
Iron Age civilisation influenced British cultures much further
afield.
It must be borne in mind, however, that this invasion
was not the only herald of the Iron Age in Britain. Intimate
relations with the continent had existed during the Bronze
Age, above all in the Atlantic or western province, and
importations of continental Iron Age manufactures, some of
which must have reached us before the Rhineland folk
crossed to our shores, are of regular occurrence in Britain
and Ireland. Therefore, although Rhineland types are
(above), though it may be that the invaders reached Kent very much
earlier, and that 600 B.C. was merely the time when their influence
was beginning to make itself felt inland. All the other so-called
Hallstatt" wares in this country belong either to the finer wares
associated with this "frill-comb-smear " pottery in Germany, or to
a slovenly and degenerate variety, including debased Bronze Age
forms, that was common all over North-Western Europe at the close
of the Bronze Age, and that lasted on well into the Iron Age.
"
PREHISTORY
41
clearly recognisable in other English Hallstatt settlements,
as in Hampshire and Wiltshire, the predominant types in
these districts are (in my view) more likely to have been
Iderived at second hand from the Gallic Hallstatt cultures
2
3



5
FIG. 5.-" Frill-comb-smear" pottery found in England: 1, 2, 3, 4 from
Margate; 5 from Sussex; 6 from Berkshire. (1, 2, and 3 are x:
4, 5, and 6 are x.)
by means of an already established cross-Channel traffic,
which linked the whole of Western Gaul from the Pyrenees
to the Channel Islands with Britain and Ireland, than to
have been formed by the district imposition of a Rhineland
42
THE DRUIDS
1
culture. As an instance of this traffic, one may recall the
fact that Brittany exported into England a number of the
typical Breton socketed axes with square section and straight
sides (Fig. 6); and that these implements date from a period
in the Breton prehistory when such patently Hallstatt forms
were in use as the Kerhon urn ¹ (Fig. 8), which, when found,
contained no less than 170 of them, or that from Bogoudonou
(Fig. 8) that contained over 90. Indeed, Hallstatt pottery
of this and of other kinds is by no means unusual in Brittany
and the Channel Isles, so that traffic in the western Bronze
Age province is demonstrably a probable source of part, at
any rate, of the British Iron Age culture.
It seems, then, that although the turn of the second-first
millennia B.C. is an important date for Gaul, marking, as I
say, the first real aggression of the transrhenan cultures, it
is nevertheless ethnologically much less important for this
island than is commonly supposed, though culturally, of
course, it is certainly significant as the period of the intro-
duction of socketed axes, leaf-shaped swords, and some of
the new pottery fashions of the Iron Age. But it is difficult
to give credit to the widely held view that this period about
1000 B.C. was remarkable for a great invasion of continental
pre-Iron Age folk who interrupted and altered the British
Bronze Age cultures; instead, the evidence is better read
as suggesting that our shores remained inviolate from every-
thing but the ordinary traffic of cross-Channel commerce
for another three or four hundred years after this time.2
We may say, therefore, that during the developed Bronze
¹ Bull. Soc. Polymathique du Morbihan, 1896, p. 147 ; Rev. d'École
d'Anthr., 1896, p. 452.
I admit that the cross-Channel traffic between Brittany and
Southern England may have been less peaceful than my remarks
suggest, and a reasonable amount of evidence is forthcoming to
support the notion of an invasion of Wessex about this time. But
it was a localised movement, and I have not thought it worth while
to discuss the possibility at length here (a great deal depends on the
chronology of the southern earthworks supposed to have been con-
nected with the invasion). All I am trying to do in this chapter is
to call attention to the major ethnological changes in Gaul and
Britain.

FIG. 6. HOARD OF SOCKETED BRONZE AXES OF BRITTANY TYPE
FOUND AT NETHER WALLOP, HANTS (3)

FIG. 7.-MODEL OF DESTROYED TEMPLE, ODILIENBERG, ALSACE
(AFTER FORRER)

FIG. 8.-POTTERY VESSELS FROM BOGOUDONOU (LEFT), KERHON (RIGHT), BRITTANY, FOUND CONTAINING
HOARDS OF BRONZE AXES ()
PREHISTORY
43
Age and the first half of the early Iron Age, roughly from
1500 to 500 B.C., the general distribution of the population
in Gaul and Britain remained static, and that the only move-
ments of significant importance for our special enquiry were
the arrival of the Urn-Field peoples on the confines of Gaul
about 1000 B.C., and an incursion of foreigners from the
Rhineland into England somewhere about 600 B.C.
Turning to the second half of the early Iron Age, that is
to say, the five centuries before the beginning of the Christian
era, we find ourselves already within measurable reach of
the druids themselves. This stretch of time is called the
La Tène period, the name being borrowed from that of a site
on Lake Neuchâtel, where the typical culture of these cen-
turies was first identified. The new culture is a witness to
the achievement of the complete cultural unity throughout
a single Iron Age civilisation, extending from the north of
France to Hungary, that had been begun some 500 years
earlier by the arrival of the Urn-Field people from Central
into Western Europe. It is nothing more than a natural
development from the culture of the Hallstatt folk, who had
now become part of an immense and homogeneous Central
European province; in fact, the only notable distinction
between the new culture and that of the Hallstatt folk,
apart from the inevitably altered fashions in arms and trin-
kets, was the development of a lavish scroll decoration that,
though in a slight measure influenced by details of classical
ornament, was, as a whole, conceived in an entirely bar-
barian-one might almost say oriental-spirit¹ (Fig. 9).
The most notable event in the La Tène period was the
sudden expansion of the culture beyond its homeland limits.
This certainly began as early as 500 B.C., but the beginning
""
¹ I am convinced that it is a mistake to say that the La Tène
scroll-ornament is largely a result of the influence of classical art.
It must be remembered that the borrowing of certain details from
Greek art is a minor matter, and what should be studied is the general
spirit of the art. Here the affinities are Scythian" rather than
Greek. See the remarkable essay by Bruno Brehm in Strzygowski's
Heidnisches und Christliches um das Jahr 1000, Vienna, 1926, p. 37.
I have to thank my friend Professor Alföldi for calling my attention
to this paper.
44
THE DRUIDS
4
7
5
Disin
FIG. 9.-Examples of Keltic scroll-ornament.
8
1, Terminal of gold torc, Somerset; 2, Detail of bronze mirror, Cornwall; 3, Detail of bronze shield, Thames; 4, Helmet
from Amfreville, Eure, France; 5, Detail of bronze belt, Waldalgesheim, Coblenz; 6, Openwork bronze, Ardennes;
7, Detail of bucket, Aylesford, Kent; 8, Painted frieze on pottery vase, Marne.




PREHISTORY
45
of the 3rd century B.C. was the period of the greatest move-
ment and of the furthest enterprise. From the Alpine lands
these folk poured forth in armed bands, sometimes as would-
be colonists, sometimes as homeless and vagrant wanderers.
They swept down upon the Mediterranean coast of France
and advanced into Spain; they streamed across the Alps
into Italy, capturing Rome in 390 B.C.; and in the 3rd
century others of their race advanced eastwards into the
Balkans, where they devastated Thrace, Macedonia, and
Thessaly, and pillaged Delphi (279 B.C.). Some of these
last wanderers even found their way across into Asia Minor,
where they were employed as mercenaries; and as witness
to their adventures so far afield, it is said that potsherds of
middle La Tène character have been found on the site of
the ancient Hatti (modern Boghasköj), near Angora.
Right at the beginning of the period the north of France
was very quickly occupied by the new culture, and it was
not long before this had crossed the Channel. But the
exact course of events in the north-western area is rather
hard to follow.
The Champagne district of France is thought to be the
starting-point of the English culture, for it is impossible to
remain unimpressed by the resemblance between the York-
shire chariot-burials and the fifty or more discovered in the
Marne area and east of the. Marne towards the Rhineland.
But the Marne burials are early (La Tène I), and if the culture
they represented spread suddenly northwards, as the York-
shire burials suggest, it is a curious thing that to the north
and north-west of the Marne there should be none of the
beautiful painted pottery that distinguished the earliest and,
in lesser degree, the middle La Tène culture in the Marne
area itself.
This reads as though the La Tène invasion of England-
and it is impossible to doubt that there was such an invasion
-took place after the painted pottery period. But against
this view must be set the evidence of the bronze brooches
found in this country, for there are many more of the earlier
(La Tène I) type than of the later (La Tène II) variety. Of
course, it is conceivable that such small articles as brooches
46
THE DRUIDS
were trifles acquired in the course of normal merchandise,
but the occurrence of the La Tène I type in the Yorkshire
area, where the chariot-burials were found, seems to add to
the probability that the La Tène culture was forcibly imposed
on this country during the 5th-4th centuries B.C. On this
view, it might be urged that in this country the early painted
pottery of the continent was translated into a ware with
similar curvilinear decoration that was not painted, but
outlined by grooves and filled-in by incised dashes or hatched
lines. This sort of pottery is common in Brittany and
Southern England (Fig. 10), and its technique was a familiar
decorative method of the old western province of the Bronze

FIG. 10.-Upper portion of vase with scroll-ornament, from Margate (1).
Age (though it was not, of course, the exclusive property of
this area); it certainly dates back to the time of the mega-
liths in Spain and in Brittany, and lasted throughout the
Bronze Age; while in England this technique, in a crude
form and applied to chevron and triangle patterns, was
practised at the beginning of the Iron Age, as can be seen
in the finds from the famous Wiltshire settlement at All
Cannings Cross.
But if England was invaded at this early period, Ireland
seems to have escaped until a little later, for that country
1 Unfortunately, the only dateable sherds of this ware in Britain
are late (La Tène III); but there is a good deal that is not dated,
and in Brittany it is much earlier (La Tène I).
PREHISTORY
47
has no La Tène I brooches. On the other hand, she can
show some very peculiar pottery (Fig. 11) that is unlike
anything in our own island, though allied to a series in the
Marne-Breton culture, and she possesses spearheads orna-
mented on the wings 1 in the continental fashion that are
not found in England; and added to this there are a number
of other objects, sculptured boulders and so forth, that do

FIG. 11.-Small urn found near Tykillen, Co. Wexford, Ireland (1).
not occur in the English culture. All this very much sug-
gests that the La Tène culture of Ireland was derived
directly from the continent and independently of Britain;
and such points of resemblance between the cultures of the
two islands as is afforded by the ornamental sword-scabbards
must be ascribed either to the common origin of the La Tène
style, or to commerce across St. George's Channel.
1 Proc. R. Irish Acad., XXXVIII (1910), C, 102, Fig. 2.
48
THE DRUIDS
This suggests that the La Tène culture reached England
about 400 B.C., and Ireland about 350 or 350 B.C., as inde-
pendent movements from the continent. And since nothing
has hitherto come to light in Ireland that could reasonably
be read as evidence of an invasion in the Hallstatt period,¹
it looks as though in that country the La Tène people were
the first to interrupt the original Bronze Age civilisation;
indeed, it is possible that an archæologist familiar with
Bronze Age pottery in Ireland, and the La Tène wares in
the Marne district, would be able to find some support for
this contention in a study of the pottery fashions represented


FIG. 12.-Pottery vessels from Greenhills, Tallaght, Co. Dublin (†).
by the Greenhills urns 2 (Fig. 12) from Tallaght, Co. Dublin,
for they seem to me to reveal fairly clearly a fusion between
local Bronze Age and continental La Tène forms.
There is still one more cultural change to be noted before
this hasty survey of the ethnology of the druidic lands is
complete; but it only concerns North-Eastern France and
South-Eastern England. What happened was that towards
the middle of the La Tène period the great culture of the
1 For a review of the Hallstatt material found in Ireland, see
E. C. R. Armstrong, Journ. R. Soc. Antiquaries of Ireland, LIV
(1924), P. I.
Proc. R. Irish Acad., XXI, 3 S. v, (1898-1900), 338.
PREHISTORY
49
Marne began to break up, as the cremation-burials of a new
folk appeared side by side with the accustomed inhumations
of the district; these cremations afterwards became more
and more frequent until, at about the end of the 2nd century
B.C. they altogether supplanted the older method of inter-
ment, and an altered culture possessed the area. In the
middle of the Ist century B.C. offshoots, of which this changed
civilisation of Northern France is plainly parent, made their
appearance in the south-eastern counties of England, and
have been recognised in the cremation-graves of Aylesford
and Swarling in Kent, at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, and a
number of other cemeteries in an area that includes Suffolk
and Cambridgeshire, and extends as far north as Northamp-
tonshire.¹
It is now time to attempt a re-statement in racial terms
of the story of these archæological changes, and to do this
it will be easier to follow in a reverse order the events we
have described. We may begin, therefore, in the 1st cen-
tury B.C., when the people of Gaul were divided into the
three groups that have been immortalised in the famous
generalisation of Cæsar. Probably the boundaries of these
groups were ill-defined, and there is no doubt that the folk
within them were far from being homogeneous; but, never-
theless, in essence each group represented a distinct race, or
mingling of races, and a distinct language. One such group
was a confederacy of tribes settled between the Garonne and
the Pyrenees, and known as the Aquitani; these people
presented a composite of various racial elements derived
partly from the native Bronze Age inhabitants of the area,
partly from the Iberians (a short and swarthy folk who were
themselves the children of the Spanish Bronze Age and had
lately spread across the Pyrenees into the south of Gaul),
partly from the ancient Ligurians (some of whom are known
to have moved westwards across the Rhône), and, finally,
from the invaders who had transferred the Hallstatt, and
afterwards the La Tène, culture across France into Spain.
¹ For a detailed study of this culture as represented in England,
see Reports Search Comm. Soc. Antiquaries of London, V (1925)—
"Swarling Cemetery."
4
50
THE DRUIDS
In Cæsar's time a folk akin to these last-named invaders,
and now grafted upon the native population, was established
throughout the second province of Gaul, which extended
from Liguria in the south-east throughout the plains of
Central France to the Atlantic in the north-west, and was
known by the name of the Keltæ. The third province
stretched northwards beyond the Seine and the Marne to
the Rhine, and was inhabited by the Belgæ.
The changed culture in North-Eastern France that we
have just said succeeded the famous Marne culture, which
was of a pure La Tène character, was that of the Belgæ;
they were a tall, fair people, according to the ancient his-
torians, who did not differ in any remarkable way from their
near neighbours in Gaul. But Cæsar was told¹ that they
were of German origin, and this plainly means that the early
cremation-graves noticed as unusual among the Marne
inhumations of the middle La Tène period must have been
the graves of invading Germans, and that the whole province
ultimately acquired a German character.
Now the Germans, so we are told, had no druids,2 and the
formation of the Belgic culture, and certainly its advent into
England, took place after druidism was already established,
because it was known to the Greek writer Sotion of Alexan-
dria as early as about 200 B.C.3 Therefore, although the
German incursion across the eastern frontier of Gaul, and
the subsequent sustained aggression on their part, was a
very important factor in Gallic and British early history, it
can have no bearing on the problem of druidic origins; and,
consequently, the development of the Belgic culture has no
immediate interest for us.
4
The Aquitani, too, seem as little likely to be concerned
with the origin of druidism. There were no druids, so far
as we can tell, in Italy nor in Spain, so that the Ligurian
and Iberian elements in the population suggest that Aquitania
was not a hopeful ground for the development of the druidic
religion. Moreover, the earliest reference to the druids
¹ B.G., ii, 4, I.
• See p. 74.
Cf. my earlier remark about the Ligurians (p. 37).
1
2 See p. 79.
C
1
4
PREHISTORY
51
1
assigns them to the Kelts and the Galatæ, and, in spite of
the formidable mountain of argument that has been devoted
to the elucidation of what precisely the classical writers
meant by these terms, it may be safely asserted that had
Sotion intended to convey that the druids were the philo-
sophers of people so well known in the Greek world as the
Ligurians or the Iberians, he would certainly have named
them expressly, instead of attributing them to a people who
must either have been the Keltæ of Gaul, or the related folk
representing the extended La Tène culture (Galata), which,
as we have seen, had been carried eastward into the Balkans
and Asia Minor. It is quite true that there were also Kelts
in Aquitania, and there may even have been druids there
when Sotion wrote, but I repeat that a Greek author would
not name the Kelts as representing the native Mediterranean
inhabitants of south-west Gaul; and, accordingly, their
presence can only serve to divert our interest to the Keltic
province itself.
This lies as a solid wedge driven through the old Bronze
Age provinces and destroying their unity, for the south-
eastern (Ligurian) province, and the north-eastern province
(before the formation of the Belgic culture), were both ab-
sorbed into the Keltic world, while the western province
was completely sundered. Indeed, if we add to this that
the Kelts had also penetrated southwards, that they had
crossed over into Britain and Ireland, and that they had
spread eastwards through the Balkans, we might describe
them more picturesquely as having exploded over Europe,
shattering and altering the old-established cultural provinces.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that this new
Keltic culture was carried everywhere by people of identical
race, or that it anywhere represented a pure racial type.
The most that can be said on the last score is that nearest to
the centre of expansion tallness and fairness seem to have
been predominating characteristics of the invaders, and that
a tall, fair man was certainly the classical notion of the
average Kelt; while, in addition to this, all bearers of the
name spoke the same, or variations of the same, tongue.
But every one knows that community of language is no sign
52
THE DRUIDS
of racial identity, and it may be taken for granted that in
Cæsar's time the people who called themselves Kelts were of
a very mixed character, and included a large element of
subjugated folk of a shorter and darker strain.
I have already digressed sufficiently far from our main
subject, and to proceed further in this matter of the Kelts
is to become entangled in one of the most difficult problems
of prehistoric ethnology in Europe; but, as was said at the
beginning of this chapter, the Kelts and the druids are in-
separably connected, so that we cannot well avoid a brief
reference to the probable origin of this people.
The view I take is that a correlation between language-
distribution, particularly as discoverable by means of place-
names,¹ and the distribution of archæological cultures,
justifies the general contention that the Kelts were a people
of La Tène culture who, expanding from Central Europe,
introduced the Keltic language into Gaul, Britain, and
Ireland, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, and Asia Minor. And if
this much be granted, then, on my own showing, the cradle
of the race lies somewhere between Gaul and Hungary, and
the people were a mixed folk sprung of the mixed Hallstatt
races, who were themselves products of the varied Bronze
Age folk. We are bound, therefore, to go a step further
and ask what is the specially Keltic element operating in
the formation of this culture of the La Tène period that
distinguished its bearers so decisively from other peoples
like the Germans, and that led to the development of their
own peculiar tongue ?
In all the length of the prehistoric period there seems to
be only one racial strain in this area that can explain such a
differentiation from the adjacent and cognate cultures; and
that was provided by the Urn-Field people. Their coming,
at the end of the Bronze Age, afforded a link with Central
Europe that is sufficiently strong to account for the origin
in lands nearer the Alps of what may be described as
a distinctive westernmost branch of the great family of
¹ See the instructive table in Dottin, Manuel pour servir à l'étude
de l'Antiquité Celtique, Paris (1906), p. 337.
PREHISTORY
53
peoples speaking an indo-germanic tongue. And to my
mind the notion that the Urn-Field folk were, so to speak,
the stimulus that led to the origin of the Kelts, is corro-
borated by the well-attested circumstance that the Keltic
language is more closely allied to the ancient Italian tongue
than to any other; ¹ for this affinity is of high antiquity (as
may be judged from the fact that the Latins and the Kelts
did not have the same word for iron), and must be attributed
to the close connection existing between North Italy and
East Central Europe, the home of the Urn-Field culture, at
the end of the Bronze Age. And it also seems to add to the
probability that the Kelts were cradled in the south German
plain, that is to say, between the Swiss Lakes and the
Bohemian Forest, rather than to the north between the
Rhine and the Elbe.
It may be said, then, that one peculiarity of the huge
La Tène province, that was founded on the Bronze Age and
Hallstatt civilisations and that extended from France to
Hungary, was the special local development and general use
of a language of indo-germanic character whose elements
were, I suspect, first introduced into the western districts.
of the province by the Urn-Field peoples. But this is only
half an explanation of the problem, for the Kelts were not
Keltic because they spoke an indo-germanic tongue. We
must also take into account, therefore, a second, and more
important, peculiarity of the province, and that was an
astonishingly successful consolidation within itself, whereby
it was welded into a cultural whole, a prosperous and homo-
geneous confederacy of similar tribes. Now these two
peculiarities taken together are sufficient, I think, to explain
the origin of the Kelts, which, on this view, must simply be
ascribed to the laborious achievement of interior solidarity
in a province that had first of all been stimulated by the east-
ward movement of a folk of novel culture. This does not
mean, however, that the Urn-Field people are to be called
Kelts, although their arrival in the Alpine lands was the
¹ See A. Walde, Uber älteste sprachliche Beziehungen zw Kelten u.
Italikern., Innsbruck, 1917; also Ebert's Reallexikon s.o. Kelten B
and Italiker B; but cf. J. Vendryes in Rev. Celtique, XLII, 379. :
54
THE DRUIDS
factor that made this solidarity ultimately possible; nor
even that the term can be applied to the Hallstatt folk.
These early people were only the ancestors of the Kelts, and
not the Kelts themselves; and the name should properly
be reserved for the folk of developed national and linguistic
characteristics who do not appear until the period of the
evolution of the La Tène from the Hallstatt civilisation.
The clue, therefore, to the secret of the origin of the Kelts
lies in what I have called the La Tène consolidation, and I
think it an error to search further back in antiquity in the
hope of finding them as a ready-made specialised people.
Consequently, our special interest in them does not demand
a more detailed treatment of the subject, and we may pass
immediately to another aspect of the Keltic problem that has
to be noticed here since it is so frequently stressed by writers
seeking to give a precise account of the Keltic expansion.
Linguistically, the ancient Kelts of Western Europe are
usually divided into two branches, the one (Brythonic) in-
cluding the people of Gaul and the greater part of Britain,
and the other (Goidelic) comprising the inhabitants of Ireland,
and of the Scottish Highlands, and the Isle of Man. It is
rather difficult to be certain about the other Kelts outside
Gaul, but it is supposed that both in Spain, and also in the
direction of the eastward expansion towards Greece, the
Keltic tongue was of the Goidelic, or Irish type, and it has
been shown that the speakers of the early Latin dialects
in Italy also possessed some of its most important character-
istics.
The difference between Goidelic and Brythonic speech
depends on one or two grammatical and phonetic peculiar-
ities, the principal distinction being that Goidelic is labio-
velar, and thus preserved the indo-germanic q, whereas the
tendency of Brythonic tongue was to be labial, so that this
q was generally, but not always, changed into pp or p.
1 The Kelts, and their country Keltica, seem to have been
known by name to the Greeks about 500 B.C. But we do not know
the significance of the terms at that time, so that our argument is
not affected.
The Coligny, calendar, :for instance (see p. 116), has q-forms.
On this subject see Walde, op. cit., p. 57, n. I.
PREHISTORY
55
Thus the indo-germanic root-word for horse ekňos (to take
the stock example) remains equus in Latin, is ech in Old
Irish, but became epos in Gaul. And this last modification
was characteristic not only of Keltic speech in Gaul and
Britain, but also of the Oscan and Umbrian dialects in Italy.
The main interest for us is that the Goidelic variety of
the Keltic speech was spoken in Ireland, while in Britain the
other variety was adopted. This certainly seems to add
strength to the notion already expressed that Ireland ob-
tained the Keltic culture independently from the continent;
but, in truth, one should hesitate to claim even this much
on the basis of a mere dialectical difference, and to proceed
further and to attempt to define the course of events by
invasion-series of Q-Kelts and P-Kelts is to place far too
heavy a strain on the subtle and delicate machinery of philo-
logical science.¹ It must be sufficient to say, irrespective of
the probable dates of the invasions, that the Keltic-speaking
folk who went to Ireland had been in a position to preserve,
and were able to enforce, the speech of the Keltic homeland
in a purer form than that imposed by the Keltic-speaking
people who had crossed to England.
Many factors might have operated to bring such a state
of affairs about; the geographical isolation, for instance, of
the bearers of the new tongue before their ultimate migra-
tion, or, alternatively, the opportunity of immediate com-
munication with the language-centre; or, perhaps, the
inclination of the natives who received the new language
towards particular vowel and consonantal forms, or their
disinclination from others. Obviously, therefore, utmost
care must be exercised before trying to convert such phonetic
changes into invasion-terms, and I have no intention of
interrupting this account of ancient Gaul and Britain by a
debate on the merits of this particular labiovelar-labial
variation. It is worth while, however, to recall Professor
Eoin MacNeill's warning in this very connection.
He
¹ If the reader would like an example of the permissible deduc-
tions regarding folk-movements to be obtained from philological
data, he should consult the section in the Cambridge Ancient History
(IV, 456) on the co- and no-peoples in Italy.
56
THE DRUIDS
remarks that in all the western dialects of Latin, that grew
into the romance languages, the initial w of Germanic speech
was changed into gw, and that this change took place in
Welsh and Spanish, but not in Irish. But this does not
prove, he points out, that the Welsh are more nearly akin
to the Spaniards than they are to the Irish, nor, if history
happened to be silent, would it prove that Britain after the
Roman occupation was peopled by a Spanish invasion that
did not extend to Ireland.
In studying the growth of a religious system we have to
take into account not only the cultural evolution in the pro-
vince concerned, but also the probable influences exerted
upon it by the thought and opinion of the outside world.
Thus something must be added to the foregoing story of the
early inhabitants of Gaul and Britain; for what has been
said hitherto of the increasing domination throughout the
first millennium B.C. of the transrhenan barbarians, culmina-
ting in the actual incursion of these folk into our area, is, as
it were, only the salient fact suggested by the local pre-
history of our provinces, and the sketch must be completed
by a word as to their relations with the more highly de-
veloped civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean and the
Ægean Sea.
Whatever may have been the racial origin of the later
Stone Age (neolithic) folk inhabiting North-Western Europe,
there is hardly any room for doubt that their culture, which
is now known to us chiefly in the terms of their progress in
craftsmanship, was mainly derived from the splendid civil-
isations of the near East. For Mesopotamia and Egypt are,
I am convinced, the ultimate source of all that was notable
among the changes in European culture that took place
between the close of the old Stone Age (palæolithic) and a
point when the Bronze Age was already established; and
of the innovations due to their influence I think it is fair to
name agriculture as the most remarkable example.
But to say this much does not in the least imply that
any Sumerian or Egyptian ever set foot in our area, nor
1 Phases of Irish History, Dublin, 1919, p. 46.
PREHISTORY
57
does the gradual transmission of their culture, which is
patently independent of folk-movement, imply the simul-
taneous procession of their philosophical or religious thought.
For our special enquiry, it cannot be too strongly insisted,
we are not concerned with cultural influences of this kind,
which were exerted at a distance; we have only to discover
cases of definite contact between the ancient inhabitants of
our area and the peoples of other lands. There is not, as a
matter of fact, a scrap of evidence suggesting any direct
imposition of an eastern culture upon Gaul and Britain, and
whatever cultural improvement came from such a source,
that is from Mesopotamia or from Egypt, must be attributed
not to colonisation, nor even to far-flung trade, but to the
natural and inevitable fire-bucket progress of ideas, culture-
creep, that all ages have witnessed and that can still be
observed in action to-day.
There is no need, of course, to deny all possibility of an
uncertain and shadowy connection between the ancient East
and our area after the northern Bronze Age had begun.
But it is disappointing that there should be no trace of
Egyptian or other wanderers on the south coast of France
or in Spain, where relics of them might legitimately be
expected, and that we should have no better tangible evi-
dence of their probable influence upon our civilisation than
a number of little segmented faience beads that are found in
our English barrows and are supposed to have been made
in Egypt somewhere about 1300 B.C.¹ But these beads are
never found with other Egyptian grave-furniture, so that it
is obvious they do not represent the burials of Egyptians
themselves, but were merely an easily portable merchandise;
and certainly they do not justify us entertaining the notion
that the neolithic or Bronze Age religion of Britain might
have been accepted by the natives at Egyptian dictation.
¹ It is not by any means certain that they were made in Egypt
(see British Museum Bronze Age Guide (1920), p. 89). It is a curious
thing that they do not seem to have exact parallels in Egypt, but
perhaps they were made solely for export (probably in Alexandria).
For a decided opinion as to their Egyptian origin, see Sayce,
Reminiscences, 405.
58
THE DRUIDS
A more direct outside influence than the remote and
second-hand stimulus from Asia or Africa was exerted from
the coasts and islands of the Ægean Sea; and there is little
doubt in my mind, to take a single example, that the main
inspiration of Western European Copper Age and Bronze
Age pottery was derived from the Ægean wares current in
the 3rd and 2nd millennia, B.C. This affected our area
from two directions, firstly by the medium of the Danube
valley, and secondly, but less noticeably, across the Mediter-
ranean and along the Atlantic trade-route. But here again
it would be very difficult to demonstrate in the case of Gaul
and Britain an actual intrusion of folk from the Ægean at
this early period, and the most that we can claim is that in
the Danubian area the connection with the Egean was
sufficiently intimate to have resulted in a spiritual com-
munity that might later have influenced Western European
belief at the time of the formation of the Keltic culture.
But to say even this much is to venture on dangerous ground,
for the mere copying of fashions is no proof of sympathy in
beliefs; and it will be wiser, having noticed the uncertain
chance whereby Ægean thought might be transmitted to
North-Western Europe, to proceed without further comment
to the instances of certain contact between the Western
Mediterranean and the outside world.
The first people who assuredly ventured from a distance
into the West were the Phoenicians. At the end of the
2nd millennium and the beginning of the Ist, the weak-
ness of the Egyptian and Assyrian Empires was turned to
account by the kings of Tyre, who were thereby enabled
to found a nation of considerable commercial importance,
whose colonies and trading-stations (Fig. 13) were established
in Asia Minor, on the African coast, in Cyprus, Malta, Sicily,
Sardinia, and finally in Spain. Carthage was founded by
this folk about 814 B.C., and their famous Spanish station,
Gades (Cadiz), in the 8th century; so that at the begin-
ning of the 1st millennium we meet for the first time an
incontrovertible instance of the presence of foreigners from
distant lands at the Mediterranean doorway into Gaul.
But it is wellnigh certain that Gaul was unaffected.
PREHISTORY
59
Phoenician influence in Spain is measurable and indubitable,
and it is discernible in the Balearic Isles and in Sardinia,
but the coasts of Gaul have not as yet afforded any evidence
of the visits of these newcomers to the West;
and beyond
the obvious fact that at the later period of Carthaginian
supremacy these coasts lay open to the raids of Punic pirates
or to the occasional visits of Punic traders, there is nothing
here for our comment.
I suppose a digression is still necessary in order to remark
that there is no evidence whatever that the Phoenicians
FIG. 13.-Map of Mediterranean basin, showing the Phoenician colonies.
came as far north as the Isles of Scilly or the south-west of
England; and it may be assumed that if they required
any of the produce of these northern regions in addition to
that obtainable in the rich markets of their assured colonies
and trading-stations, it would reach them only indirectly
after serial transportations. Here again it is not impossible
1 For references to finds of supposed Phoenician origin in Gaul,
see Déchelette, Manuel, II, Pt. I, p. 29, notes 1 and 2; and Jullian,
Histoire de la Gaule, I, 187. But cf. Dr. Hall's remarks, Ancient
Hist. of the Near East (6th ed., 1924), P. 523, n. I and Myres, Camb.
Anc. Hist., III, 641.
60
THE DRUIDS
that the Phoenicians themselves should have ventured so
far to the north; we can only say that after plenty of
excavation in England and in Scilly it is a fact that no
trace of them has been found, nor a trace of any culture
even remotely resembling theirs. And there is something
else to remember. Three or four centuries later when the
Phoenician thalassocracy no longer existed, and Carthage
alone represented its former might, two Punic admirals
were sent on voyages of discovery. One of them, Hanno,
went southwards to explore Africa, and the other, Himilco,
sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar northwards up the
Atlantic coast of Spain. After almost incredible delays he
at length reached the Isle of Ouessant off the Brittany
promontory, which, together with the adjacent islands, is
said to have been a native depot for the metal trade from
Cornwall. Himilco's story, so far as it is recoverable from
the verse of Avienus, with its tales of the dangers of the
long calms and the thick fogs, of the vast masses of floating
seaweed that stayed his progress, of the enormous tracts
where the waters scarcely covered the sandy floor of the
ocean, and of the giant and savage beasts that beset his
boat, demonstrates very effectively the justness of the remark
that such a voyage must have been very much the same
sort of expedition into the unknown as was the voyage of
Columbus to America, or its comparison with modern polar
exploration; and no one could reasonably pretend that
Himilco was simply supposed to be re-visiting the trading-
posts of his Phoenician ancestors.
It was not the Phoenicians who first confronted the
remote and barbarian folk of Gaul with a higher civilisation;
1 My friend, Mr. George Bonsor, who is intimately acquainted
with Phoenician problems in Spain, once came to England to conduct
a search for traces of them in Scilly and Cornwall, a search that
included numerous excavations. He found a good deal of material
he was not looking for, but nothing Phoenician!
The best text, with critical notes by Schulten, is in Fontes
Hispania Antique (Schulten and Bosch), Fasc. 1, Avieni Ora Mari-
tima.
'Jullian, Histoire de la Gaule, I, 385.
Déchelette, Manuel, II, Pt. I, 30.
PREHISTORY
61
it was the Greeks. At the end of the 8th century B.C.
the great colonising movement of the Ionian Greeks had
begun, and in the 7th century the Phocæans, following
in the wake of the famous voyage of the Samian Kolaios,¹
were already crossing to explore the markets of the West.
It was they, so Herodotus says, who first made the
Greeks acquainted with the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia (Etruria),
and with Iberia; and they remained a great sea-power
until the end of the 6th century. During this period they
not only established themselves in Spain,³ where they were
FIG. 14.—Map of the Mediterranean basin, showing the Greek colonies.
speedily involved with the Phoenician, or rather the Carth-
aginian interests, but also they founded a colony in Gaul
itself, no doubt being driven northwards to the Rhône
mouth as a result of the rivalry in the southern markets
(Fig. 14).
The foundation of the Greek colony at Massilia (Mar-
seilles) about the year 600 B.C. is the beginning of the direct
intrusion of the alien and greater outside world into the
¹ Herodotus, IV, 152.
* I, 163.
* See the instructive little book by Rhys Carpenter, The Greeks
in Spain, Bryn Mawr, 1925.
62
THE DRUIDS
lands we have termed the druidic provinces; and such a
settlement of a new people, the spread of their stations
along the Riviera, and their up-river traffic to Arles and
Avignon, is clearly an event of dramatic importance in the
story of Gaul.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the influence of
the Greeks had immediate effect throughout all Gaul, or
even that it is discernible at any great distance from the
coastal area in the first century or so after the foundation
of the colony. But, in general, the result of the arrival of
the Greeks, and of their long sojourn on these shores, was a
profound alteration of the Gallic civilisation.
Naturally, this is especially noticeable in the native arts
and crafts. Masonry, that is to say, scientific and accurate
building with squared stones of easily manageable size, was
one of the many things that the barbarians learnt. In stone-
work they had hitherto been familiar only with the clumsy
megalithic architecture of the early Bronze Age, which at the
best of times was only practicable in certain districts, and
was now but seldom employed,¹ or such simple devices as
the construction of revetments of stone slabs. But now
they were able to learn to build properly in the manner of
the Greeks, and it is an interesting fact that in their first
and simplest attempts to copy the newcomers, as in the
building of certain oppidum walls, a trick of Greek (and
Etruscan) construction has been noticed more than once,2
namely, the cutting of expanding mortices in the stone blocks
which were then held together by wooden tenons cut with
similarly expanding ends (Fig. 15). And in addition to
building, which the barbarians eventually applied to houses
and towns, another very important innovation was that they
¹ Megalithic architecture was still used occasionally for funeral
monuments in Western and Southern Gaul in the Hallstatt period.
On the other hand, I think that cyclopean building, as seen in Cata-
lonia, is largely a Greek innovation. Cf. Bosch Gimpera, Problemes
d'historia antiga i d'arqueologia Tarragonina, Butlleti Arqueologic.
Tarragona, 1925.
2 Déchelette, Manuel, II, Pt. 3, 995, and n. 1. I have seen this
mortice-style in a Greek context at Ampurias, Spain.
PREHISTORY
63
learnt after some centuries to copy and use the Greek coinage
system (Fig. 16).
Justinus has summed up the effect of Greek influence
from Massilia in a well-known passage that, though it may
3cm
29m
FIG. 15.-Wooden tenons and fish-tailed mortices on stone blocks, Odilienberg,
Alsace (after Forrer).
seem to suffer from an excess of enthusiasm, is none the less
almost exactly true. The Gauls learnt, he says,¹ a more
civilised way of life that tempered their former barbarity;
they were taught to cultivate their lands, to prune the vine


MAIPPOY


FIG. 16.-Stater of Philip of Macedon (top left) and Gallic coins made in
imitation (1).
and plant the olive, and also to enclose their towns with
walls. They learnt, moreover, to live according to laws,
and such a high degree of civilisation was attained that it
seemed as though it was not Greece that had come to Gaul,
but that Gaul had been transplanted into Greece.
1 XLIII, 4.
64
THE DRUIDS
Such contact as this with a new civilisation, such evi-
dence of the understanding of its customs, is a very different
thing from the second-hand borrowing of fashions that up
to 600 B.C. had been the only method whereby the pre-
historic Gallic culture was modified from outside. Here we
see very plainly that not only were the arts and crafts of
the natives changed, but that their mental attitude must
gradually have become sympathetic with the behaviour and
social system of the more highly civilised people; or if not
sympathetic, at least it must have been stimulated to an
understanding of their manner of life. In other terms, the
barbarian morals and religion, just as much as barbarian
craftsmanship, were liable to be modified by association with
the Greeks.
Whether barbarian religion was so affected, we have no
occasion to debate here, and it is sufficient in this chapter to
emphasize the opportunity. But it will be convenient in
this place to add that so far as Keltic religion is concerned,
this opportunity is not likely to have existed earlier than
the 4th-3rd century B.C. The purely Keltic, or La Tène,
culture was, as a matter of fact, just about to become differ-
entiated from the Hallstatt cultures of the Alpine lands at
the time when the Greeks were first establishing themselves
at Massilia, so that it is rather tempting to assume that the
Massiliot Greeks played an important part in its formation.
But we must remember that at the beginning of the La Tène
period, Massilia was separated from the Keltic world by
coastal Ligurian tribes, who, although they had acquired a
Hallstatt culture, were directly descended from the Bronze
Age inhabitants of this part of Gaul. It is quite true, of
course, that these Ligurians were in constant communica-
tion with the Alpine regions; it is true that 6th century
black-figure Greek pottery has been found in Gaul as far
inland from the coast as at a Hallstatt oppidum at Salins
(Jura); and it is true that a certain number of intruders
¹ Révue Archeologique, 4 S., XIII (1909), 193. It is rather hard
to say whether this pottery came up the river valleys from Massilia,
or along an Adriatic-North Italy-Switzerland route; but I must admit
I am much impressed by the arguments of M. Piroutet (L'Anthr.,
XXIX (1918-1919), 219 ff.) in favour of a Massiliot source.
PREHISTORY
65
from the East, forerunners of the Kelts, had already made
their way to the southern coast of Gaul. But, even so, the
coastal people at this early period cannot properly be called
Keltic, and it may be safely asserted that the Kelts them-
selves did not come into complete contact with Greek cor-
porate life, as represented by a colony, until the time of their
first expansion. Consequently, it is natural to suppose that
it would not be until some time after this, as late as the
3rd century perhaps, that Greek influence, as exerted from
Massilia, would be likely to have any appreciable effect upon
Keltic thought.
However, we have already remarked on the slight, but
unmistakable influence of Greek ornament during the evolu-
tion of La Tène art, so that it looks as though there must
have been some other medium, distinct from Massilia,
whereby Greek culture could reach the future Keltic world,
whose nucleus lay north and east of the Alps, in the 6th
and 5th centuries. But this other medium was not, I
think, the trade-enterprise of the Ionic Greeks along the
Danube valley, or from the head of the Adriatic across the
North Italian plain; and its nature will be better under-
stood if we turn our attention for the moment from the
Greeks themselves, and continue our narrative of the other
adjacent peoples who might have influenced Gaul.
From the 7th century onwards Hellenic interest in
the Western Mediterranean steadily increased, and Greek
colonies were established and maintained in undiminished
vigour; but it was not long before the supremacy of the
Greek fleets and the security of the Greek traders were
challenged. With the first of the rival powers, Carthage,
we have little to do here; the early years of the 5th century
B.C. witnessed her achievement of complete domination over
the declining Phoenician colonies, and as an inevitable result
of her rise to power the same period saw the beginning of a
bitter struggle between the Carthaginians and the Greeks.
But Massilia itself was not attacked by the Punic fleets,
and there is no record of serious interference in Gallic affairs
by the Carthaginians, although Justinus records ¹ friction
1 XLIII, v. 2.
1
5
66
THE DRUIDS
between Massilia and Carthage on account of the capture
of some fishing-boats.
The other rival was the Etruscan people. They had
migrated into Italy from Asia Minor somewhere between
1000 and 800 B.C., and after two hundred years of consolida-
tion in their new home, they were strong enough to enter
the field as formidable adversaries of the Greeks. It is
difficult to say how far their civilisation concerned Gaul,¹
but it has been argued that many of the Italian importations
into Gaul, such as cordoned bronze buckets, black-figure
Greek pottery like that from Salins just mentioned, and
numerous other articles, are proof that at a very early time
the Etruscans were in direct communications with the in-
habitants of Gaul. And in addition to these finds of 5th
and 6th century date in Gaul that might be attributed to
Etruscan influence, we have to remember that at the end
of the 6th century the Etruscan nation had extended its
boundaries northwards from Etruria proper, and that its
settlements were now established right up to the valley
of the Po (Fig. 17), so that geographically their people
stood at the doorway into the Gallic world; and we can well
understand the statement of Polybius 2 that close relations
existed between Kelts and Etruscans in the 4th century.
Moreover, as we know very well, about 390 B.C. a section of
the Kelts had crossed the Po and pushed southward into
Etruria itself; while a hundred years later in the last
Samnite war another section of the same people served as
allies of the Etruscans in an attempt to stay the rising
power of Rome. It is not surprising, therefore, that Etruscan
influence should be plainly discernible in the archæology of
Gaul during the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C.; for Etruscan-
Campanian wares were freely imported, and a very interest-
ing and even more intimate sign of this connection is the
discovery in the bed of the Saône at Chalons of a bundle of
Etruscan currency-bars.³
1 On this subject see the remarks of M. René Gadant, La Re-
ligion des Éduens, Autun, 1922, pp. 15-23.
2 Hist., II, 17.
3 Déchelette, La Collection Millon, Paris, 1913, p. 228.
PREHISTORY
67
With this and other proof before them of close relation-
ship between Etruscans and Gauls, archæologists have
ventured further and have attributed to Etruscan influence
such important innovations as the introduction into Gaul
of the art of writing, of enamel-work, the use of defensive
armour, and the art of sculpture. Obviously it is but a
short step to proceed to the discovery in Gallic religion of

LOTRE
DANUBE
1
PYRENEES
0°
MASSILIA
TS
PO
ETRUSCANS
ROMA
K
FIG. 17.-Map of Italy, showing the Etruscan settlements.
points of resemblance with the Etruscan system, an example
being the comparison of that Gaulish god who bears a
hammer, with the Etruscan Charu or Charun, who has a
similar attribute.
It may well be that the earlier Italian importations into
Gaul were not so much a sign of sudden Etruscan influence
as a natural consequence of an ancient connection between
Italy and the Rhône valley, Switzerland, and the Jura.
68
THE DRUIDS
The Ligurian province of the Bronze Age afforded testimony
of such a cultural union in the distant past, and in the
succeeding centuries traffic across the Alps into Gaul,
Southern Germany, and the Danube valley, had always been
maintained; indeed, in the early Iron Age Italy was the
chief market for northern amber, great lumps of this material,
sometimes as large as the human hand, being repeatedly
used as ornaments upon the Italian brooches. If we also
take into account the similarity already mentioned between
the Keltic and the Latin tongues, we shall see that there is
reason for regarding the majority of the signs of Italian
influence in Gaul that are of a date earlier than the Keltic
migration, as a natural result of the common Central Euro-
pean-Danubian parentage of the Kelts and most of the
North Italian peoples, such as the Villanovans and the
Veneti.
But this does not dispose of the Etruscans. The Kelts,
Polybius said, just before the time of their first raid into
Italy associated much with them, so one can hardly deny
their possible influence upon Keltic thought in the 4th
century B.C., or even earlier. And in addition to this we
have to take into account the markedly Hellenic character of
the Etruscan civilisation. We know very well that by the
middle of the 6th century the Etruscans had begun to copy
Ionian metal-work on a large scale, and to import Greek
pottery in immense quantities. It is quite likely, therefore,
that the traffic between them and the people north of the
Alps would enable the influence of Greek art to make itself
felt in the Keltic province as early as the 6th century,
and to become manifest, as it certainly did, in Keltic art.
At any rate, this possibility must be added to the certain
source of Greek influence that existed at Massilia; for we
saw that it was doubtful whether the Massiliot Greeks in the
early period of the colony had much to do with the Kelts,
and we suspected that another medium would be found to
explain the earlier Greek influence for which La Tène art is,
to some extent, a witness.
In the 3rd century Rome became the dominating power
PREHISTORY
69
in the Italian peninsula, and its first decades witnessed her
struggles with the Gauls for final supremacy in the North
Italian plain. The resistance of the barbarians was strenuous
at first, but by 196 B.C. the remnant of them was in complete
submission beneath the Roman yoke, and from that time
onward Rome marched victoriously forward to her future
position as a world-power, Greece, Carthage, and Spain
falling before her conquering armies. For a while Gaul
itself escaped, but an attack by the barbarians on the colony
of Massilia resulted in an appeal by the isolated provincial
Greeks for Roman protection, and in 155 B.C. the Roman
armies went to their aid, beginning the wars that ended in
the foundation of the province of Transalpine Gaul. By
120 B.C. they were masters of the lower Rhône valley, and
the stage was set for the final conquest of all Gaul that was
achieved by Julius Cæsar.
Of the Roman occupation of Gaul we shall subsequently
have more to say. But in this chapter it does not concern
us, for the reason that before the clash of Roman and Gaul,
druidism was already in existence, and there is no occasion
to complicate at this stage a sketch, already over-burdened
with detail, of the prehistory and early history of the lands
in which druidism flourished.
To sum up, then, we noticed first of all a relatively static
Bronze Age that was divisible into distinct provinces, and
we witnessed the development across the eastern frontiers
of Gaul of the Iron Age civilisation of Western Europe, a
civilisation that contained the new element of the Urn-Field
culture from Central Europe, and that, after a Hallstatt
phase, consolidated itself into a La Tène, or Keltic, civilisa-
tion. The Hallstatt culture, we saw, spread gradually
throughout all the Bronze Age provinces, partly by means
of minor movements of people, and, principally, as a result
of the normal traffic; but the La Tène civilisation was trans-
mitted more effectively by a gigantic expansion of the Keltic-
speaking peoples themselves. And it is amongst those of
the Kelts who established themselves in Gaul and Britain
that we suppose druidism originated. Of the other races
70
THE DRUIDS
concerned, we have mentioned the Ligurians and the Iber-
ians, whom the Kelts encountered in the south of Gaul; and
the Germans, who were ever pressing upon them from the
north. And finally, taking a wider survey of the ancient
world, we have spoken of the opportunity afforded to the
Greeks and the Etruscans to influence Keltic thought in
Gaul.
One word more, and we have done. So much talk of
changes in culture, and the comings and goings of people,
may well obscure the undoubted continuity of the popula-
tion in prehistoric times, a consideration of the utmost
importance in considering so delicate a subject as the de-
velopment of a religion. I have already referred to the
favourable chances for the development of a native faith in
Bronze Age Britain, though not with complete assurance,
and I should like to give one good example of the age-long
persistance of native tradition in a single district to show
that the subject is really worth serious consideration.
For this purpose, I have deliberately chosen a district
in the north-east of France, because this is a part of the
world where, as I have already said, cultural changes of far-
reaching importance took place during the two thousand
years that our survey has covered. The Oise department of
France, to which I am now going to refer, belonged in
neolithic times to what has been very happily named the
Flint-Culture, a province embracing North-Eastern France,
Belgium, and parts of England. Its Bronze Age was little
more than a direct continuation of this same culture, altered
by the appearance of a few metal tools and weapons; and
the first change of importance was the introduction of the
Hallstatt culture. This was followed by the Keltic invasion
and the development of a peculiar local Keltic culture (the
Marne-culture), which was subsequently interrupted and
altered by the arrival of the Germans. After this came the
Roman occupation.
It is not a district in which one would expect to come
across evidence of the survival of Flint-Culture tradition, yet
I think such evidence is forthcoming. In the ruins of a
little Gallo-Roman temple in the Forest of Halatte near
PREHISTORY
71
Senlis (Oise)¹ two hundred or more ex-voto offerings were
discovered, including a number of small chalk heads that
varied in height from 4 to 10 inches. Some of these heads,
as well as many of the other ex-votos, were clumsily cut in
imitation of the Roman style of sculpture; but others of
them were not in the Roman style at all, the face being
schematically represented by a wedge-shaped nose hanging
from a curved arcade in high relief that marks the eyebrow
line (Fig. 18). Now this style, this same device for represent-
ing the face, is exactly that employed only about a hundred
kilometres away in the well-known carvings (Fig. 19) at the
entrance to the prehistoric burial-grottoes in the Petit-Morin
valley; and though these last are certainly as old as 1500 B.C.,

110
FIG. 18.-Small votive-heads of chalk from temple-site, Halatte.
if they are not older, and the little heads belong to the
Ist-3rd centuries A.D., I think the similarity in style is
sufficiently remarkable to be taken as proof of the survival
of a native artistic tradition throughout all this length of
time.2
1 Congr. Archéologique de France, LXXII (1905), Beauvais,
P. 334. The finds are better illustrated by Espérandieu, Recueil
général des Bas-Reliefs de la Gaule Romaine, V, 3864-3889.
* I have also been very much impressed by the rather remarkable
affinities in shape between the rough pottery vessels from the grottoes
and those later associated with the Marne-Culture. Twenty or more
pots from the grottoes are in the de Baye collection in the St. Germain
Museum, and an observer will probably notice how the later pedestal
and the sharp shoulder of La Tène times are foreshadowed in the
grotto-pottery; conversely, it is interesting to see how closely some
of the simpler varieties of these later pots recall the earlier grotto
fashions.
72
THE DRUIDS
And such persistence of native tradition on the scene of
so much ethnological and archæological change should warn
us that where the growth of a religion is in question, we should
not only take into account foreign incursion and the influence
of strangers, but also that we must make allowance for the
genius loci, the ancient and unalterable spirit of the country-
side that can preserve as a living force the immemorial
thought and behaviour of the humble folk born of its soil.

FIG. 19.-Wall-carving from prehistoric grotto-grave, Marne (after de Baye).
It should warn us that the spirit of the land may prevail
over all the impositions of conquering and powerful invaders,
and that a religion carried everywhere by a single people
may acquire in certain districts native characteristics that
cause it to differ notably from the same religion in its orig-
inal home. It will explain, in fact, how it comes about that
druidism may be Keltic, and yet, because it was built up of
the prehistoric faith of certain only of the provinces wherein
the Kelts intruded, not a universal Keltic faith.
CHAPTER III
HISTORY
E derive our knowledge of the ancient druids
almost entirely from the casual mention of them by
the classical writers. But with a single exception,
all the references to them were written after the Roman
occupation of Gaul, so that only once does an allusion to
the druids, and it is a very brief one, reach back to the days
of the Greek colony at Massilia. This means that all our
other information comes directly or indirectly from Roman
sources, and it is natural enough that there should not be
any very considerable stock of information available. For
it is clear that first-hand knowledge would be exceptional,
even among the historians and geographers of the Empire,
and, consequently, we need not anticipate anything more
than rather vague allusion to this single barbarian priesthood
in the general literature of the Roman world.
But this insufficient store of positive knowledge, and the
meagreness of the subsequent comment, is also very largely
due to what, in its simplest terms, is lack of interest. Colon-
ising Rome attempted no missionary enterprise; outlanders
may have been barbarians, that is savages, but primarily
they were not in Roman eyes what we should now call
heathen; and if ultimately Jupiter, and Mars, and Mercury,
and other members of the Roman pantheon were worshipped
in far corners of the Empire, it was the result of the gradual
fusion of native with Roman gods, due to a policy of tolera-
tion, and not to direct conversion. Doubtless such a policy
was only possible because the outward observance of the
barbarian cults, and the very natures of the gods worshipped,
presented few radical differences from the rites and the
73
74
THE DRUIDS
deities to which the Romans themselves were accustomed,
no such apparent differences, that is to say, as separate the
great religious systems of the modern world. But whatever
the cause may have been, it followed that the Romans did
not study nor debate over the barbarian religions they en-
countered, nor did they make any serious attempt to com-
prehend their underlying philosophies. When, therefore,
we turn to them for enlightenment about the druids, we must
not expect to find as the centuries pass a growing, even if
purely academic, interest; indeed, it is a fact, as we shall
soon see, that the scholars of the late Empire contribute
singularly little to our poor stock of information concerning
the flourishing druidism of the days of their forefathers.
In this chapter I propose to recite the greater part of the
classical evidence relating to druidism, and this will present
us with almost the whole of the material that we have to
discuss. It would not be convenient, therefore, to deal with
all the separate items of information as we meet them, for
that would entail a continual shifting of our interest from
one aspect of druidism to another; and I think it will be
better to confine our attention at the first reading principally
to the subject of the druidic authority, that is to say, the
power and prestige of the order, and its decline in the face
of Roman hostility. We shall then be able to deal in
another chapter with its dogma and ritual.
In the extant literature the druids make their few appear-
ances, which become increasingly rare as time passes, from
about 52 B.C., when Cæsar wrote the Commentaries, to about
the year A.D. 385, when Ausonius wrote his collection of
odes to the professors of Bordeaux. But in the first half
of the 3rd century after Christ, Diogenes Laertius tells us,
in a chance remark in the preface to his Lives of the Phil-
osophers, that the druids were mentioned in two lost works,
a treatise on Magic, then ascribed to Aristotle but now
known to be apocryphal, and a big book by a Greek, Sotion
of Alexandria, that must have been written somewhere
about 200 B.C. This passage from Diogenes, therefore,
although out of the proper chronological order of our
authors, must be the starting-point. I give a translation of
HISTORY
75
the passage here; the original Greek of this, and the Greek
and Latin of the other translations quoted subsequently, is
set forth in an appendix at the end of the book.
DIOGENES LAERTIUS. Vita, intro., I
Some say that the study of philosophy was of barbarian origin.
For the Persians had their Magi, the Babylonians or the Assyrians
the Chaldeans, the Indians their Gymnosophists, while the Kelts
and the Galatæ had seers called Druids and Semnotheoi,¹ or so
Aristotle says in the " Magic," and Sotion in the twenty-third book
of his "Succession of Philosophers."
Vitæ, intro., 5
Those who think that philosophy is an invention of the bar-
barians explain the systems prevailing among each people. They
say that the Gymnosophists and Druids make their pronounce-
ments by means of riddles and dark sayings, teaching that the
gods must be worshipped, and no evil done, and manly behaviour
maintained.
This is the allusion that reaches back, as I say, behind
the period of the Roman occupation of Gaul; and there is
no doubt that it takes us back for a considerable distance
beyond this point. For to have had even this much of
reputation outside their own Keltic world in the second
century before Christ, the druids must have been already
long-established; and by the very terms of the allusion to
them it is plain that they cannot have been regarded, or
indeed have boasted themselves to be, a localised sect. It
seems likely, therefore, that as a generally recognised Keltic
institution druidism must extend backwards in antiquity
to a date, at a moderate estimate, a hundred and fifty years
before Sotion wrote. And since there was a celebrated
druids' grove near Massilia, well known in Roman times,
and even then considered to have been of great antiquity,
1 This word is not found elsewhere, and is probably corrupt;
the meaning, if any, is reverend gods, which makes nonsense here;
the tempting rendering reverencers of the gods is scarcely admissible.
For the view that the word might be a distinctive name for the
Galatian priests, see Jullian, Recherches sur la religion gauloise,
Bordeaux, 1903, p. 102.
76
THE DRUIDS
it is tempting to add that it must have been from Marseilles
that their fame was spread abroad among the Greeks. Thus
we may go so far as to say that any theory of their origin
which does not allow of druids in Southern Gaul as early,
let us say, as 350 B.C., seems to be discountenanced by this
passage.
Our next authority is Julius Cæsar, and the following
extracts from the sixth book of the Gallic War form the main-
spring of our knowledge of the early druids. It is, of course,
possible that the importance of this testimony might be
over-estimated, a natural result of thankfulness for any
information vouchsafed by one who had actually been in
prolonged contact (nine years) with the people of Gaul. For
we must remember that a campaigner is not altogether for-
tunately situated in regard to the study of normal religious
life in the theatre of his wars. It is just possible, for instance,
although we have no reason to feel sure that it was so, that
Cæsar may have been to some extent deliberately deceived
by his informants, especially in the information given him.
concerning the political power of the druids; while in the
other matters of their faith and customs, and of their origin,
in which he was not in all probability very keenly interested,
he may have been content in recording whatever surmises
were current in his army, or the ill-remembered gossip of
the Gaulish chieftains.¹ But, on the other hand, I would
urge very strongly that there is certainly no suggestion of
such practice in the account itself; for it is at once brief,
lucid, authoritative, and, in its own scale, complete. Further-
more, as we are to see later on, the Gaulish noble most likely
to have been Cæsar's chief informant on many of the details
'was himself a member of the druidic order, and also one
whose record is sufficiently well known to enable us to feel
sure that there were no intelligible motives for his telling
Cæsar anything but the truth. I think, therefore, that most
Q
¹ Cf. the aspersions of Asinius Pollio upon the trustworthiness
of Cæsar's writings: Suetonius, Div. Iul., 56, 4. But see generally
on the credibility of Cæsar's narrative St. G. Stock, De Bello Gallico,
I-VII, Oxford, 1898, p. 11, and also Rice Holmes, Casar's Conquest
of Gaul, Oxford, 1911, pp. 211-256 and 527.
HISTORY
77
reasonable people will deem material considerations such as
these to outweigh the purely hypothetical sources of error;
and, accordingly, I shall not waste any time in hesitation
over this very important document, but shall assume that
Cæsar has given us an account of the druids that, although
brief, is a considered and authentic description of the order
in so far as it had come within his experience.
CESAR. De Bello Gallico, VI, 131
Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite
account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated
almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into
counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by
debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of
the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles,
who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves.
Of the two classes above-mentioned, one consists of Druids, the
other of knights. The former are concerned with divine worship,
the due performance of sacrifices, public and private, and the inter-
pretation of ritual questions: a great number of young men gather
about them for the sake of instruction and hold them in great
honour. In fact, it is they who decide in almost all disputes,
public and private; and if any crime has been committed, or
murder done, or there is any dispute about succession or boun-
daries, they also decide it, determining rewards and penalties: if
any person or people does not abide by their decision, they ban
such from sacrifice, which is their heaviest penalty. Those that
are so banned are reckoned as impious and criminal; all men move
out of their path and shun their approach and conversation, for
fear they may get some harm from their contact, and no justice
is done if they seek it, no distinction falls to their share. Of all
these Druids one is chief, who has the highest authority among
them. At his death, either any other that is pre-eminent in posi-
tion succeeds, or, if there be several of equal standing, they strive
for the primacy by the vote of the Druids, or sometimes even with
armed force. These Druids, at a certain time of the year, meet
within the borders of the Carnutes, whose territory is reckoned as
the centre of all Gaul, and sit in conclave in a consecrated spot.
¹ The translations of this and other passages from the Gallic War
are taken unaltered from H. J. Edwards's version (Loeb Library,
1917).
78
THE DRUIDS
Thither assemble from every side all that have disputes, and they
obey the decisions and judgments of the Druids. It is believed
that their rule of life was discovered in Britain and transferred
thence to Gaul; and to-day those who would study the subject
more accurately journey, as a rule, to Britain to learn it.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 14
The Druids usually hold aloof from war, and do not pay war-
taxes with the rest; they are excused from military service and
exempt from all liabilities. Tempted by these great rewards,
many young men assemble of their own motion to receive their
training; many are sent by parents and relatives. Report says
that in the schools of the Druids they learn by heart a great number
of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under
training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utter-
ances to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their
public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I
believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons-that
they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those
who learn the rule to rely on writing and so neglect the cultivation
of the memory; and, in fact, it does usually happen that the
assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the student and
the action of the memory. The cardinal doctrine which they seek
to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to
another; and this belief, as the fear of death is thereby cast aside,
they hold to be the greatest incentive to valour. Besides this,
they have many discussions as touching the stars and their move-
ment, the size of the universe and of the earth, the order of nature,
the strength and the powers of the immortal gods, and hand down
their lore to the young men.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 16
The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observ-
ances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more
grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either
sacrifice human victims or vow so to do, employing the Druids as
ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless
for a man's life a man's life be paid, the majesty of the immortal
gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private, life they
observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind.
Others use
figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill
with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of
HISTORY
79
flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been
caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing
to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails they resort
to the execution even of the innocent.
VI, 18, 1
The Gauls affirm that they are all descended from a common
father, Dis, and say that this is the tradition of the Druids.
VI, 21, I
The Germans differ much from this manner of living. They
have no Druids to regulate divine worship, no zeal for sacrifices.
The immediate interest of Cæsar's description of the
druids lies in his emphasis on their political and judiciary
functions. Although they officiated at sacrifices and taught
the philosophy of their religion, they were a great deal more
than mere priests; for instance, at their annual meeting
near Chartres, it was not to worship nor to make sacrifices
that the people came from afar, but to present their disputes
for lawful trial. And it was not only minor quarrels that
the druids decided, for another of their functions was the
investigation of criminal charges, and the determination of
the necessary punishment. To them, therefore, was due
the awe invariably paid to judges; but, in addition to this,
larger matters of national importance, such as intertribal
quarrels, were brought to their council for adjudication.
This, together with the facts that they held national assem-
blies and acknowledged the single authority of an arch-
druid invested with supreme power, shows that their system
and their authority were conceived on a national basis and
were independent, that is to say, of ordinary intertribal
jealousy and dispute. And when we add to this political
advantage the enormous influence over educated public
opinion that was theirs by virtue of their position as the
chief instructors of the young, and, finally, the formidable
religious sanction behind their decrees, we feel that it is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that before the clash with
Rome the druids must have very largely controlled the
civil administration of Gaul.
80
THE DRUIDS
Nothing could be more apposite here than the next
reference to the druids that we have to record. It comes
from the pen of Cicero, and it is peculiarly important in
this matter of the political prestige of the druids because we
happen to know something about the particular druid to
whom Cicero refers.
CICERO. De Divinatione, I, XLI, 90
Nor is the practice of divination disregarded even among
uncivilised tribes, if indeed there are Druids in Gaul-and there
are, for I knew one of them myself, Divitiacus,¹ the Æduan, your
guest and eulogist. He claimed to have that knowledge of nature
which the Greeks call "physiologia," and he used to make pre-
dictions, sometimes by means of augury and sometimes by means
of conjecture.2
Cicero wrote the De Divinatione about eight years after
Cæsar had published the Commentaries. It is in the form
of a dialogue between himself and his brother, Quintus Cicero,
who had served in Gaul under Cæsar, and had shared with
Cæsar the friendship of Divitiacus, that noble-minded
Æduan so often mentioned in the pages of De Bello Gallico.3
The statement in this paragraph, therefore, is not one that
Tully would be likely to venture upon with anything but
complete assurance, and there can be no reasonable doubt
that Divitiacus was actually a member of the order of druids.
This, in conjunction with Cæsar's testimony, throws a flood
of light on the conditions of service in the priesthood during
the first century before Christ, and at once disposes of the
quite natural idea that all its members were secluded and
mysterious ancients, holding aloof from the common world
in a gloomy atmosphere of esoteric ritual and priestly taboos.
For Divitiacus was a man of affairs, acknowledged ruler of
the Ædui, and a politician and diplomatist of established
reputation throughout the whole of Gaul; it was, in fact,
1 The correct spelling of this name is probably Diviciacus.
• The translation is from Judge Falconer's version (Loeb Library,
London, 1922).
3 I, 3, 5; 19, 2; 20, 2; 31, 9; 41, 4; etc. Divitiacus is still a
popular figure; there is a life-sized bronze statue of him in the
Promenade des Marbres, Autun.
HISTORY
81
an important diplomatic mission that took him to Rome on
the occasion when he was the guest of Quintus Cicero and
discussed divination with Tully. Moreover, he was, as no
druid of our accustomed picturing could be, a warm sym-
pathiser with Roman ideals and an unswerving adherent to
the cause of the conquerors in Gaul. Cæsar's own account 1
describes a trusted Keltic nobleman, sagacious in strategy
and eloquent in debate, who was incessantly occupied in the
difficult domestic problems of Gaul; and when we add to this
picture Cicero's testimony as to his religious calling and to his
knowledge of druidic lore and methods of augury, we seem
to find ourselves confronted in this man with a forerunner
of the great political priests of history. At any rate, we are
compelled to enlarge our ideas of the druidic functions, so as
to include the practical administration of government with
the necessary complete liberty of movement and freedom
from priestly duties.
But once the Romans came to Gaul, the political signifi-
cance of the druids was short-lived. Their organisation, as
I have said, was proof against ordinary intertribal dissension,
yet it was not long before a situation arose in the face of
which it was impossible to maintain cohesion in the order.
In 52 B.C. took place the famous rebellion of Vercingetorix,
and throughout a whole year Cæsar was engaged in a long
and difficult struggle, while Gaul, led by the brilliant, tragic
young Arvernian, made its last resistance against the Roman
power. The disaffected tribes were chiefly those situated in
central Gaul between the Seine and the Garonne, so that a
very large part of the country was involved in war with the
Romans; but at no time were the rebels able to command
the one essential for success, namely, that all Gaul should
respond to their call to arms. Despite the best endeavours
of Vercingetorix to rouse the whole country, large sections
of the populace took no part in the struggle, while some tribes,
who had experienced the advantages of friendship with the
¹ Cæsar himself does not say that Divitiacus was a druid; it has
been suggested therefore that Cicero is misleading us, and that he
was really only a layman who had been educated by druids. But
see Rice Holmes, Conquest of Gaul, p. 526 n.
6
82
THE DRUIDS
Romans, definitely declared themselves against him and
entered the field as allies of Cæsar. Corporate druidism
was therefore helpless; the order was divided against
itself; united action was impossible.
The blow to their prestige was irreparable. Plainly the
national gods cannot take both sides in a struggle fraught
with such significance, and the division of their priests into
hostile camps spelt ruin. The authority of the archdruid
was at an end; the national assembly could no longer meet,
and there was nothing left for the druids to do but to give
such local encouragement or advice as opportunity afforded.
But their power was gone; and this disruption of corporate
druidism is beyond all doubt the turning-point in their story.
It was a disaster from which their authority as a national
clergy never recovered, and henceforward their political
significance was at an end. That is why, when we turn to
our next author, Diodorus Siculus, who wrote somewhere
about 8 B.C., we see at once that their influence was over,
and that by this time they were simply regarded in the eyes
of the outside world as seers.
DIODORUS SICULUS. Histories, V, 28, 6
The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among them (the Gauls),
teaching that the souls of men are immortal and live again for a
fixed number of years inhabited in another body.
Histories, V, 31, 2-5
And there are among them (the Gauls) composers of verses
whom they call Bards; these singing to instruments similar to a
lyre, applaud some, while they vituperate others.
They have philosophers and theologians who are held in much
honour and are called Druids; they have sooth-sayers too of great
renown who tell the future by watching the flights of birds and by
observation of the entrails of victims; and every one waits upon
their word. When they attempt divination upon important
matters they practice a strange and incredible custom, for they
kill a man by a knife-stab in the region above the midriff, and
after his fall they foretell the future by the convulsions of his
limbs and the pouring of his blood, a form of divination in which
they have full confidence, as it is of old tradition. It is a custom
HISTORY
83
of the Gauls that no one performs a sacrifice without the assistance
of a philosopher, for they say that offerings to the gods ought only
to be made through the mediation of these men, who are learned
in the divine nature and, so to speak, familiar with it, and it is
through their agency that the blessings of the gods should properly
be sought. It is not only in times of peace, but in war also, that
these seers have authority, and the incantations of the bards have
effect on friends and foes alike. Often when the combatants are
ranged face to face, and swords are drawn and spears bristling,
these men come between the armies and stay the battle, just as
wild beasts are sometimes held spellbound. Thus even among the
most savage barbarians anger yields to wisdom, and Mars is shamed
before the Muses.
This so very closely resembles the contemporary testi-
mony of Strabo that the germane passages from the Geo-
graphica must follow immediately.
STRABO. Geographica, IV, 4, c. 197, 4¹
1
Among all the Gallic peoples, generally speaking, there are
three sets of men who are held in exceptional honour: the Bards,
the Vates, and the Druids. The Bards are singers and poets; the
Vates, diviners and natural philosophers; while the Druids, in
addition to natural philosophy, study also moral philosophy. The
Druids are considered the most just of men, and on this account
they are entrusted with the decision, not only of the private dis-
putes, but of the public disputes as well; so that, in former times,
they even arbitrated cases of war and made the opponents stop
when they were about to line up for battle, and the murder cases
in particular, had been turned over to them for decision. Further,
when there is a big yield (of criminals for sacrifice) from these
cases, there is forthcoming a big yield from the land too, as they
think. However, not only the Druids, but others as well, say
that men's souls, and also the universe, are indestructible, although
both fire and water will at some time or other prevail over them.
Geographica, IV, 4, c. 198, 5
But the Romans put a stop to these customs, as well as to all
those connected with the sacrifices and divinations that are opposed
to our usages. They used to strike a human being, whom they had
¹ The translations are from the version by H. L. Jones (Loeb
Library, 1917).
84
THE DRUIDS
devoted to death, in the back with a sabre, and then divine from
his death-struggle. But they would not sacrifice without the
Druids. We are told of still other kinds of human sacrifices; for
example, they would shoot victims to death with arrows, or impale
them in the temples, or having devised a colossus of straw and wood,
throw into the colossus cattle and wild animals of all sorts and
human beings, and then make a burnt offering of the whole thing.
Strabo is the first to give the name of the Vates, or
diviners, but in other respects he adds little to the statement
of Diodorus, although he has obviously incorporated con-
siderable borrowings from Cæsar. Even so, we can detect
the fallen estate of the druids in his reference to some of their
political functions as belonging to the past, a circumstance
that is partly explained by the additional information that
they already come into conflict with the Romans on account
of their cruel customs.
There is another item of testimony that must belong
to the same period, if its author, Timagenes, is correctly
identified with the rhetorician and historian who practised
at Rome in the time of Pompey, and afterwards under
Augustus. The following extracts from his lost account of
the Gauls are given by Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth
century, A.D. :—
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, XV, 9, 4
According to the Druids, a part of the population (of Gaul) was
indigenous, but some of the people came from outlying islands and
lands beyond the Rhine, driven from their homes by repeated wars
and by the inroads of the sea.
XV, 9, 8
In these regions, as the people gradually became civilised,
attention to the gentler arts became commoner, a study intro-
duced by the Bards, and the Euhages, and the Druids. It was the
custom of the Bards to celebrate the brave deeds of their famous
men in epic verse accompanied by the sweet strains of the lyre,
while the Euhages strove to explain the high mysteries of nature.
Between them came the Druids, men of greater talent, members of
the intimate fellowship of the Pythagorean faith; they were up-
lifted by searchings into secret and sublime things, and with grand
contempt for mortal lot they professed the immortality of the soul.
HISTORY
85
This does not make much advance upon the information
already given by Diodorus, and, generally, it seems clear
enough that at about the beginning of the Christian era,
although the outside world had at least learnt of the triple
division of the order, the reputation of the Keltic priests
depended on a charitable interpretation of the pre-existing
notions about them, rather than upon any new and sub-
stantial witness to their increased wisdom and authority.
More and more, we find the emphasis falling on single items
of Cæsar's original statement, together with a certain elab-
oration of the details of their ritual and divinations, seem-
ingly introduced as examples of superstitious barbarism.
There is a gap of nearly fifty years before we come to
our next authority, Pomponius Mela. During that time
considerable progress was made with the Romanisation of
Gaul; a census of the natives was taken and the methods
of local government reorganised; also the encouragement of
the cult of Divi Imperatores and the Genius of the reigning
emperor, with its official priests (augustales), and the institu-
tion of the annual religious assembly at Lyons around the
altar of Rome, was intended to consolidate the normal
Roman observances in the province at the expense of the
native ritual. This would, of course, tend to weaken what-
ever remained of the secular and religious power of the
druids, even supposing their co-operation was invited, for
their former political duties would be usurped, their cere-
monies supplanted, and their own annual assembly eclipsed.
Moreover, the establishment of Roman schools would con-
siderably affect their position as teachers. It was almost
inevitable, therefore, that they should have resisted this
Romanising process,¹ and that, as a consequence, they
should have incurred official repudiation. As a matter of
fact, three distinct movements against their prestige were
1 That is to say, the followers of the anti-Roman druids in the
great rebellion, who were doubtless trying to preserve their tradi-
tional dogma and ceremonies. The pro-Roman druids probably
taught the official religion, and were not regarded as a hostile native
clergy; it is possible that they had already ceased to call themselves
druids.
86
THE DRUIDS
made by the Romans during this period. Pliny and Sue-
tonius are the sources of our information, and the short
passage in which the last-named author refers to the sub-
ject, written somewhere about A.D. 120, may conveniently
be interpolated here.
SUETONIUS. Claudius, 25
He (the Emperor Claudius) very thoroughly suppressed the
barbarous and inhuman religion of the Druids in Gaul, which in
the time of Augustus had merely been forbidden to Roman citizens.
We learn, then, that at the very beginning of the first
century after Christ Roman citizens, a term that must refer
here to those of the Gauls who claimed the advantages con-
ferred by the title of citizenship, were forbidden to practise
the druidic rites. This was neither suppression nor persecu-
tion, but it was an emphatic declaration that there was
some element in druidism out of accord with the ideals of
the Empire, and that impeded the accustomed policy of
Roman toleration. Strabo has already told us that they
practised rites repugnant to Latin usage, and there can be
little doubt that this irreconcilable factor was human sacri-
fice; for we know that in Carthage, too, the Romans set
themselves to abolish this same custom. The reference to
the next official action against the druids is in agreement
with this hypothesis, for when Pliny tells us, in a passage
quoted below (p. 90), that in the reign of Tiberius (A.D.
14-37) a decree of the senate was issued against these priests,
the context of his disquisition on magic suggests, as Fustel
de Coulanges observed,¹ that this severity was really inspired
by the abominable practices of the order, and was not
primarily directed against the druidic beliefs or doctrinal
system. At any rate, we do know, on Mela's showing, that
1" Comment le Druidisme a disparu," in Nouvelles Recherches
sur quelques problèmes d'histoire, Paris, 1891, p. 187. On this subject
and the fall of the druids generally, see also Duruy, C.R. de l'Academie
des Sciences Morales et Politiques, n.s. XIII (1880), p. 896 (reprinted
Revue Archeologique, n.s. XXXIX (1880), p. 247); for a different
view see D'Arbois de Jubainville, Rev. Arch., n.s. XXXVIII (1897),
P. 374.
HISTORY
87
at about this time the ritual of human sacrifice, as described
by Diodorus and Strabo, was modified into a procedure in
which the actual killing was omitted.
The third official movement was the suppression under
Claudius (A.D. 41-54), and this time it certainly seems to
have been a thorough attempt to eradicate all the druidic
observances. But we have no means of judging how
severely it was prosecuted; we can only note that it was
not successful if it aimed at the extermination of the order,
for we shall soon see that there were druids in Gaul long
after this date.
Pomponius Mela wrote at about the period of the Claudian
suppression, and we might therefore expect some fresh, if
not particularly creditable, details concerning the druids.
This makes it rather disappointing to find that his state-
ment, except for the information about the mock sacrifice,
is almost entirely based on that of Cæsar. He does, never-
theless, introduce the notion of the druids meeting in secret
and remote places, and although this may easily be a mere
rhetorical flourish on his part, it is interesting all the same
as a possible result of the contemporary persecution.
POMPONIUS MELA. De Situ Orbis, III, 2, 18 and 19
There still remain traces of atrocious customs no longer
practised, and although they now refrain from outright slaughter,
yet they still draw blood from the victims led to the altar. They
have, however, their own kind of eloquence, and teachers of wisdom
called Druids. These 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. They teach many things to the nobles of Gaul in a
course of instruction lasting as long as twenty years, meeting in
secret either in a cave or in secluded dales. One of their dogmas
has come to common knowledge, namely, that souls are eternal
and that there is another life in the infernal regions, and this has
been permitted manifestly because it makes the multitude readier
for war.
And it is for this reason too that they burn or bury with
their dead, things appropriate to them in life, and that in times
1 Compare the 4th century testimony of Victor Aurelius, De
Cæsaribus, IV, 2: "Denique bonis auctoribus compressa per eum
vitia ac per Galliam Drysadarum famosæ superstitiones."
88
THE DRUIDS
past they even used to defer the completion of business and the
payment of debts until their arrival in another world. Indeed,
there were some of them who flung themselves willingly on the
funeral piles of their relatives in order to share the new life with
them.
A few years later, during the reign of Nero (A.D. 54-68),
we find this same picture drawn with the grand emphasis of
Lucan's verse; and, incidentally, probably as a sort of poetical
flourish, we have the groves mentioned for the first time as
the haunts of the druids.
LUCAN. Pharsalia, I, 450-8
And you, O Druids, now that the clash of battle is stilled, once
more have you returned to your barbarous ceremonies and to the
savage usage of your holy rites. To you alone it is given to know
the truth about the gods and deities of the sky, or else you alone
are ignorant of this truth.¹ The innermost groves of far-off forests
are your abodes. And it is you who say that the shades of the dead
seek not the silent land of Erebus and the pale halls of Pluto;
rather, you tell us that the same spirit has a body again elsewhere,
and that death, if what you sing is true, is but the mid-point of
long life.
We depart, however, from this traditional account of the
druids when we come to the Natural History of the elder
Pliny, published about A.D. 77, for this work includes a
generous parcel of new information as to the ritual and
superstitions of the order. But the salient item of his testi-
mony is that at this period the druids had degenerated into
rather disreputable magicians, still retaining certain priestly
functions perhaps, yet apparently without any vestige of
the civil authority they had enjoyed in the time of Cæsar.
PLINY. Nat. Hist., XVI, 249
Here we must mention the awe felt for this plant by the Gauls.
The Druids-for so their magicians are called-held nothing more
sacred than the mistletoe and the tree that bears it, always sup-
posing that tree to be the oak. But they choose groves formed of
¹ Lucan means that druidic teaching is so unusual that either
they alone know the truth, or else they are ignorant of a truth that
is the common property of the rest of mankind.
HISTORY
89
oaks for the sake of the tree alone, and they never perform any of
their rites except in the presence of a branch of it; so that it seems
probable that the priests themselves may derive their name from
the Greek word for that tree. In fact, they think that everything
that grows on it has been sent from heaven and is a proof that the
tree was chosen by the god himself. The mistletoe, however, is
found but rarely upon the oak; and when found, is gathered with
due religious ceremony, if possible on the sixth day of the moon
(for it is by the moon that they measure their months and years,
and also their ages of thirty years). They choose this day because
the moon, though not yet in the middle of her course, has already
considerable influence. They call the mistletoe by a name meaning,
in their language, the all-healing. Having made preparation for
sacrifice and a banquet beneath the trees, they bring thither two
white bulls, whose horns are bound then for the first time. Clad
in a white robe, the priest ascends the tree and cuts the mistletoe
with a golden sickle, and it is received by others in a white cloak.
Then they kill the victims, praying that God will render this gift
of his propitious to those to whom he has granted it. They believe
that the mistletoe, taken in drink, imparts fecundity to barren
animals, and that it is an antidote for all poisons. Such are the
religious feelings that are entertained towards trifling things by
many peoples.
Nat. Hist., XXIV, 103
Similar to savin is the plant called selago. It is gathered without
using iron and by passing the right hand through the left sleeve of
the tunic, as though in the act of committing a theft. The clothing
must be white, the feet washed and bare, and an offering of wine
and bread made before the gathering. The Druids of Gaul say
that the plant should be carried as a charm against every kind of
evil, and that the smoke of it is good for diseases of the eyes.
Nat. Hist., XXIV, 104
The Druids, also, use a certain marsh-plant that they call
samolus, this must be gathered with the left hand, when fasting,
and is a charm against the diseases of cattle. But the gatherer
must not look behind him, nor lay the plant anywhere except in
the drinking-troughs.
Nat. Hist., XXIX, 52
There is also another kind of egg, of much renown in the Gallic
provinces, but ignored by the Greeks. In the summer, numberless
90
THE DRUIDS
snakes entwine themselves into a ball, held together by a secretion
from their bodies and by their spittle. This is called anguinum.
The Druids say that hissing serpents throw this up into the air,
and that it must be caught in a cloak, and not allowed to touch
the ground; and that one must instantly take to flight on horse-
back, as the serpents will pursue until some stream cuts them off.
It may be tested, they say, by seeing if it floats against the current
of a river, even though it be set in gold. But as it is the way of
magicians to cast a cunning veil about their frauds, they pretend
that these eggs can only be taken on a certain day of the moon, as
though it rested with mankind to make the moon and the serpents
accord as to the moment of the operation. I myself, however,
have seen one of these eggs; it was round, and about as large as a
smallish apple; the shell was cartalaginous, and pocked like the
arms of a polypus. The Druids esteem it highly. It is said to
ensure success in law-suits and a favourable reception with princes;
but this is false, because a man of the Vocontii, who was also a
Roman knight, kept one of these eggs in his bosom during a trial,
and was put to death by the Emperor Claudius, as far as I can see,
for that reason alone.
Nat. Hist., XXX, 13
It (magic) flourished in the Gallic provinces, too, even down to
a period within our memory; for it was in the time of the Emperor
Tiberius that a decree was issued against their Druids and the
whole tribe of diviners and physicians. But why mention all this
about a practice that has even crossed the ocean and penetrated
to the utmost parts of the earth? At the present day, Britannia
is still fascinated by magic, and performs its rites with so much
ceremony that it almost seems as though it was she who had
imparted the cult to the Persians. To such a degree do peoples
throughout the whole world, although unlike and quite unknown
to one another, agree upon this one point. Therefore we cannot
too highly appreciate our debt to the Romans for having put an
end to this monstrous cult, whereby to murder a man was an act
of the greatest devoutness, and to eat his flesh most beneficial.
Pliny gives us the only detailed account that we have
of an actual druidic office. But his picture is probably in-
complete by reason of his failure to explain the underlying
significance of the mistletoe rite; for all this ceremony can
hardly have been occasioned by the mere magical or medical
HISTORY
91
properties of the plant, and it is probable that the perfor-
mance he describes was the manifestation of some belief
dependent on an ancient form of tree-worship.¹ But at the
moment, however, we are not so much interested in the
druidic cults as in the status of the priests themselves.
We have said that Pliny's testimony is far from flattering,
but we must notice that although Roman opinion, following
upon an official suppression, treated the druids simply as
wizards, they must nevertheless have retained in their
religious capacity a certain dignity and impressiveness; or
so, at least, the tale of the sacrificial bulls, the white robe,
and the golden sickle, suggests. Moreover, this view is
emphasized by Pliny's comment upon the particularly
august ceremonies of the magic art in Britain.
It is interesting, therefore, to turn immediately to our
next author, Tacitus, who, in the first of the two passages
quoted below, supplies the only well-founded and informa-
tive statement that we possess concerning the early druids
in Great Britain. The event he is describing is the raid on
the Isle of Anglesey by Suetonius Paulinus in A.D. 60, and
even though Tacitus was patently unsympathetic with the
unfortunate defenders, it does not look as though there could
have been anything very august about their druids; indeed,
so far from possessing that authority in time of battle claimed
for the order by Cæsar, the Anglesey druids seem to have been
little better than a pack of howling dervishes.
But this was probably the result of their wellnigh hope-
less circumstances, and we are able to find some confirmation
of Pliny's general estimate in our second passage from Tacitus,
wherein, in reference to the burning of the Capitol in A.D. 70,
we rather surprisingly come upon the suggestion that the
continental druids were occasionally, even at this date, of
some political importance. The explanation must be that
there were partial and local revivals of the druidic activities,
following upon the attempt at their suppression, wherever
there was a temporary weakening of the Roman power, as,
indeed, there was in Gaul at this time. We have to admit,
1 On this point see MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts,
p. 162.
92
THE DRUIDS
therefore, that although the first century after Christ un-
doubtedly saw the rapid decline of the power of the druids
in the Roman provinces, there are nevertheless unmistak-
able signs that they did remain an effective factor in Keltic
national life. In a word, the Romanisation of the Kelts
had not by any means divested druidism of all its ancient
significance as a beneficent religion, even though its practice
was now officially considered as antisocial and black magic.
As regards druidism in Britain, however, it is, I think
significant that Tacitus does not even mention them in the
Agricola, a biography that is principally concerned with the
events of a seven years' administration of the island. He
knew, of course, that the British faith was much the same
as that of their kinsfolk on the continent,¹ and, accordingly,
he may not have felt himself under any obligation to attempt
a minute description of the national customs in this respect;
but it is astonishing, nevertheless, when we think of his
remarkable opportunities of hearing every detail of those
seven years from his father-in-law, that the druids were
of such little account in the ordinary domestic and mili-
tary affairs of the province that their name does not once
occur in the record of a long and busy administration.
It certainly looks as though there cannot have been any
concerted action on their part, or any discipline within the
group under a powerful arch-druid, and it is very unlikely
that there were any important annual gatherings at Stone-
henge or anywhere else. In fact, there is no reason to sup-
pose that our estimate of the status of the British druids
during the second half of the first century, based on the
Anglesey passage, was overstated, and we must conclude
that at any rate in those districts where Roman rule was
established druidism was completely ineffective and mori-
bund.
TACITUS. Annals, XIV, 302
On the shore stood the opposing army with its dense array of
armed warriors, while between the ranks dashed women in black
1 Cf. Agricola, XI, 4.
2 From the translation by Church and Brodribb, London, 1876.
HISTORY
93
attire like the Furies, with hair dishevelled, waving brands. All
around, the Druids, lifting up their hands to heaven and pouring
forth dreadful imprecations, scared our soldiers by the unfamiliar
sight, so that, as if their limbs were paralysed, they stood motion-
less and exposed to wounds. Then urged by their general's appeal
and mutual encouragements not to quail before a troup of frenzied
women, they bore the standards onwards, smote down all resistance,
and wrapped the foe in the flames of his own brands. A force was
next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman
superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it, indeed, a duty to
cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their
deities through human entrails.
Histories, IV, 54¹
The Gauls, they remembered, had captured the city in former
days, but, as the abode of Jupiter was uninjured, the Empire had
survived; whereas now the Druids declared, with the prophetic
utterances of an idle superstition, that this fatal conflagration (of
the Capitol) was a sign of the anger of heaven, and portended
universal empire for the Transalpine nations.
The evidence of Dion Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed
orator, dates from about A.D. 100, and it seems to be, at
first sight, in rather marked disagreement with the opinion
we have just formed.
DION CHRYSOSTOM. Orations, XLIX (Teub., 1919, pp. 123, 124)
"
The Persians, I think, have men called Magi the Egyp-
tians, their priests . and the Indians, their Brahmins. On the
other hand, the Kelts have men called Druids, who concern them-
selves with divination and all branches of wisdom. And without
their advice even kings dared not resolve upon nor execute any
plan, so that in truth it was they who ruled, while the kings, who
sat on golden thrones and fared sumptuously in their palaces,
became mere ministers of the Druids' will.
But Dion had not travelled in Gaul; and he was an orator,
not an historian; so that all this may fairly be discounted
as a rhetorical elaboration of some one else's earlier state-
ment of the former power of the druids. At any rate, that
1 From the translation by Church and Brodribb, London, 1873.
94
THE DRUIDS
is what the talk of golden thrones will suggest to most people,
and it is plain that we should have had very different
accounts from Tacitus and Pliny had the druids still pos-
sessed the power with which they are credited in this passage.
Moreover, it may well be that all Dion's remark really means
is that no civil action was undertaken without the consent
of the gods, an enterprise being abandoned if the druids
declared the omens unfavourable. If so, this is no more
than the state of affairs obtaining in early Rome itself, and it
is only the exaggerated language of the orator that suggests
that the druids maintained more than the ordinary power
of priests and wise men.
On the other hand, there is no need to under-estimate
the possible power of individual members of the order,
wherever druids survived, over those of the native princes
who had still little love for the Romans, and who were able
to raise these traditional councillors to temporarily important
positions. We shall see that at a later period the Irish druids
certainly had an authority of the kind described by Dion,
and there is even an instance of something of the sort in
England (p. 98). But, all things considered, I think that
so far as the Roman Empire is concerned there is nothing
very much in this particular passage to increase materially
the prestige of the order.
The next references to the druids, following the chrono-
logical order of authors, date from the 3rd century, and
are contained in the works of Clement of Alexandria and
Hippolytus. The extracts, however, are solely concerned
with the historical aspects of druidic belief, and their evi-
dence may for the moment be postponed. I shall therefore
pass immediately to that dubious and uncertain compilation,
the Historia Augusta, and quote the testimony of Lampridius
and of Vopiscus, writers (or one writer?) who flourished about
A.D. 300, in order to set forth what little is known about the
survival of druidism in Gaul after more than two centuries of
Roman rule. The first passage relates to the year A.D. 235,
when Alexander Severus was starting on an expedition to
free Gaul from the Germans.
HISTORY
95
LAMPRIDIUS. Alex. Severus, LIX, 5.
While he (Alexander Severus) was on his way, a Druidess cried
out to him in the Gallic tongue, "Go forward, but hope not for
victory, nor put trust in thy soldiers."
Vopiscus also refers to the prophecy of a druidess in the
second half of the 3rd century.
VOPISCUS. Numerianus, XIV
When Diocletian, so my grandfather told me, was sojourning
in a tavern in the land of the Tongri in Gaul, at the time when he
was still of humble rank in the army, and had occasion to settle
the daily account for his keep with a certain druidess, this woman
said to him, "You are far too greedy and far too economical, O
Diocletian." Whereto he replied, jestingly, "I will be more liberal
when I am emperor," to which the druidess answered, "Laugh
not, Diocletian, for when you have killed The Boar, you will indeed
be emperor."
After this Diocletian coveted the purple and never missed
the chance of killing a boar when out hunting; but Aurelian,
and Probus and Tacitus, and then Carus, were all emperors
before him, so that he was moved to exclaim, "I kill the
boars, but it is always another who reaps the reward!" At
last, however, he killed the præfect Arrius, surnamed The
Boar, and then the prophecy of the druidess was fulfilled,
and he ascended to the imperial throne.
Vopiscus also relates another druidical prophecy that
was made in the reign of Aurelian (A.D. 270-275).
VOPISCUS. Aurelianus, XLIII, 4 and 5
He (Asclepiodotus) used to say that on a certain occasion
Aurelian consulted the Gaulish druidesses to find out whether his
descendants would remain in possession of the imperial crown.
These women told him that no name would become more illustrious
in the state annals than that of the line of Claudius. It is true, of
course, that the present Emperor Constantius is of the same stock,
and I think that his descendants will assuredly attain to the glory
foretold by the druidesses.
One asks, of course, whether this reference to dryades,
or druidesses, really constitutes legitimate evidence of the
96
THE DRUIDS
survival of druids and druidism in the 3rd century. All
that we know about these women is that they were fortune-
tellers, such as we might find among many peoples, and it is
possible that the name dryades, or some form of name like
it, was bestowed on them by these two authors through a
misapprehension based on an imperfect knowledge of the
status and functions of the true druids. They might have
represented, in fact, to the uncritical eyes of the biographers
of the emperors, the remaining Keltic exponents of a known
druidic practice of earlier times, that is divination; and so
might have been called druidesses, regardless of the question
of their actual connection with the real druidic order.
A more serious consideration is that there is some slight
evidence of the existence among the continental Kelts of
priestesses in the proper sense of the word (p. 140), and these
were not, to our knowledge, called druids or druidesses.
We cannot assume, therefore, that anyone performing a
religious rite, or practising divination, in the Keltic lands
was a member of the druidic order; in England, for example,
it seems that Boadicea herself exercised certain priestly
functions, and no one has yet thought of calling her a
druidess. This freedom of action in the performance of
religious observances by those who were not druids, increases
the likelihood of the existence of an independent class of
male and female soothsayers and fortune-tellers, so that we
have good reason for some hesitation in the matter of the
women mentioned by Lampridius and Vopiscus, before we
accept the mention of them as proof of the survival of
druidism in their time.
On the other hand, we do know that diviners or fortune-
tellers were, in the earlier centuries, a sub-order of the
druids, so that I think it must be admitted that on the whole
the chances are that these women, by continuing the func-
tions of the Vates, were invested with a traditional authority
that entitles them to be regarded as corporate members of
the old priestly system. We have heard from Tacitus of
the association of women with the druids in Anglesey; and,
in addition, we know that there were female diviners in
Ireland (ban-filid or ban-fáthi) who were popularly grouped
HISTORY
97
with the druids, and were sometimes actually called druid-
esses (bandrui) by the medieval scribes.¹ There is nothing,
therefore, inherently unlikely in women usurping the druidic
reputation in Gaul, though the conjunction of their pro-
fessional fortune-telling with an inn-keeper's life, as related
in the first extract from Vopiscus, is an obvious index of the
very low estate into which druidism had fallen.
That such continuity between the Vates and the women
fortune-tellers is reasonable, is suggested by the fact that at
the end of the 4th century we find that a pedigree reaching
back to the druids themselves was still a boast of honourable
ancestry. This is illustrated by two passages from Ausonius,
and, although it does not by any means decide the question
of the pretensions of the 3rd century diviners to the title of
druids, at least it provides evidence of the continued memory
of the order a hundred years later.
AUSONIUS. Commem. professorum, IV, 7-10
If report does not lie, you were sprung from the stock of the
druids of Bayeux, and traced your hallowed line from the temple
of Belenus.
X, 22-30
Nor must I leave unmentioned the old man Phoebicius, who,
though keeper of Belenus's temple, got no profit thereby. Yet he,
sprung, as rumour goes, from the stock of the druids of Armorica
(i.e. Brittany), obtained a chair at Bordeaux by his son's help.
Finally, we have to take into account a scrap of evidence
telling of the survival of Keltic wise men, or magi, in Eng-
land in the first half of the 5th century. Their interest here
is that they were obviously of the same character as the
Gaulish wise women, or druidesses, that Vopiscus tells us
were consulted by Aurelian. The passage is from "Nennius,"
a work that dates from about A.D. 800, but there is a faint
possibility that in this particular extract, since it quotes
¹ The word is not found frequently. See the Rennes Dinnsenchas
(Revue Celtique, XVI (1895), 34, and cf. XV (1894), 326); E. Win-
disch, Die altirische Heldensage Táin Bó Cualgne, Leipzig, 1905, 331;
also the "Siege of Druim Damhghaire (Revue Celtique, XLIII (1926),
57, 79, 104).
7
98
THE DRUIDS
Roman consul-names as authority for the dates, the source
may have been a lost contemporary history of the events
described.¹ The extract refers to the British king Vorti-
gern at the time when the discovery of his incestuous
marriage had brought down upon him the utmost wrath
of St. Germanus.
NENNIUS. Historia Britonum, 40
After this, the king summoned his magicians in order that he
might enquire of them what he ought to do.
*
An Irish version of the Historia Britonum was made in
the 14th century, and the word magos was therein translated
druids. This naturally does not prove that Vortigern's
magi called themselves by that name, but it illustrates
rather well the survival of functions and office that may have
been a direct heritage from druidism in decay.
We have now reached the end of the literary evidence
bearing upon ancient druidism. The outstanding fact is
that only once, in the account given by Cæsar, are we
vouchsafed any information about druids and druidism in
the days of their power. All the succeeding references to
them belong to the period when their power was gone and
when their organisation was smashed. And this means
that we must be very much on our guard against under-
estimating their earlier significance in the Keltic world.
But so far as this classical opinion is concerned, the
story suggested by all these extracts is a simple one. We
know that the druids had a reputation outside Gaul as early
as the 2nd century B.C., and that in Cæsar's time they were
an organised and powerful body having important educa-
tional, judicial, political, as well as religious, functions; more-
over, the order included various kinds of officials, priests and
¹ See Liebermann, Essays in Medieval History presented to
T. F. Tout, Manchester, 1925, P. 40.
2 Unless, as Professor Rose suggests to me, the passages from
Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Dion Chrysostom have enough in
common to show that they are borrowing from an earlier account,
perhaps by Poseidonius; if so, they may refer back to the period of
Gallic independence.
HISTORY
99
prophets and poets, while we gather that some of its members
were free to devote themselves entirely to the duties of
government and international affairs. The rebellion of
Vercingetorix, however, seems to have
spelt ruin for the order as a corporate
society, and henceforward the preserva-
tion of traditional druidism was in the
hands of a minority of individual anti-
Roman members. At the beginning of
the Christian era, the cruel sacrificial
rites of their religion brought them into
direct conflict with Rome, and this ended
in their complete exclusion from recog-
nised Gallic religion. At the end of the
Ist century their status in the eyes of
the outside world had sunk to that of
mere magicians, though it is nevertheless
possible that druidism was still to some
extent a current faith and capable of oc-
casional revival wherever Roman power
was temporarily weakened. In the 2nd
century there is no direct reference to
druids or druidism, and after this we
learn nothing more than that there were
female fortune-tellers called dryades in
Gaul in the 3rd century, and that in
the 4th century there were still certain
people who could boast of druidic de-
scent.
FIG. 20.-Stone with
ogam inscription, Port
St. Mary, Isle of Man.
The bulk of the evidence quoted
refers, of course, to Gaul in particular.
We have no knowledge from these
sources of the ancient druidism in Ire-
land, and all that we have been able to
produce for the whole of Britain is one brief mention of the
druids in Anglesey. So far as England is concerned, there
is no reference to druids at all, and it seems obvious that
in this country they were of negligible importance as an
organised body after the Claudian conquest.
100
THE DRUIDS
It is alleged, however, that the existence of druids in the
Isle of Man can be proved by means of a stone found near
Port St. Mary in the parish of Rushen.¹ This was a sand-
stone slab (Fig. 20) nearly 4 feet high, bearing an inscription
in ogam characters that has been read as
DOVAIDONA MAQI DROATA
Droata, said Sir John Rhys, is the genitive of the early
Goidelic form of the word for druid; and although druada
was put forward as an alternative reading, it seems to have
been generally accepted that druid is the meaning of the
third word. Accordingly, if Keltic scholars have made up
their minds that it cannot be a proper name, and their
interpretation
[THE STONE] OF DOVAIDONA, SON OF THE DRUID
be accepted, we can at least say that there were druids (in
the Irish sense) in Man as late as the 5th or 6th century, for
the inscription itself is not likely to be older than that.
But clearly this is very little advance upon the knowledge
we already possess.
At this point, it will be best to say a word about the
other inscriptions and sculptures that have been thought to
name or to depict the druids; but I may remark in advance
that the information to be gained from this source is negli-
gible.
In ancient Gaul the word druid does not appear in any
inscription at all, no doubt because the name had ceased
to be an honourable title in the eyes of the Romanising
Gauls by the time they had learnt to set up inscribed monu-
ments of their own. One example, however, is alleged to
have existed in the Mosel country; but the stone is now lost,
and so formidable a chorus of condemnation has assailed
the surviving transcriptions that we are compelled to treat
them as worthless, and I do not propose to perpetuate error
by a fresh notice of them.2
1 The Academy, 1890, 954, P. 134; 955, p. 154; 957, p. 201.
P. M. C. Kermode, Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., XLV (1911), 437.
"The inscription is given as SILVANO | SACR ET NYMPHIS LOCI |
ARETE DRVIS | ANTISTITA SOMNO MONITA | D, by J. C. von Orelli,

FIG. 21.-FOURTH FACE (LOWER SECTION) OF STONE ALTAR, MAVILLY
HISTORY
101
・
Just as Gallo-Roman inscriptions ignore the druids, so
do Gallo-Roman sculptures. Of course, it is tempting
wherever one comes across the representation of a venerable
and nameless person, to say that he may have been a druid,
but I do not know a single example that can be recommended
with full confidence. The ingenious suggestion of Borlase ¹
that the elders on the Montmorillon sculptures were druids
is ruled out because the work is really of mediæval date,
and not Gallo-Roman at all; and I can only say that the
most promising instance that has come to my notice is one
of the reliefs on the altar of Mavilly, near Beaune (Fig. 21).
The group, which is about 3 feet high, consists of a dignified
seated personage, accompanied by a dog and a bird, behind
whom stands a man holding his hands over his eyes; and
the natural interpretation is that the scene represents the
healing of a blind man. Now Pliny makes it clear that the
druids possessed considerable medical lore, and he even
mentions that they had a particular remedy for diseases of
the eye; and the dignity of the figure suggests a priest;
hence the supposition that the seated person is a native
· physician-priest, a druid in fact. It may be so; but I am
not impressed. However, M. René Gadant, who has de-
scribed the monument in a most instructive study,2 points
out that there is nothing typically Roman about its form,
and that its inspiration is rather Greco-Asiatic than Roman;
wherefore, he thinks, it may be a much more valuable docu-
ment of native religion than most people suppose. But I
confess I find it difficult to share this view. The monu-
ment was erected by the Ædui, the people who were proud
to style themselves friends of the Romans; and, to take a
single instance ready to hand, the two heads in this very
group seem to me to be obviously executed in the Roman
Inscriptionum Latinarum selectarum amplissima collectio, Turici, 1828,
I, 2200. For a discussion see Charles Robert, Épigraphie gallo-rom.
de la Moselle, Paris, 1873.
1
¹ Antiquities of Cornwall, London, 1769, pp. 104 ff., and Pl. (p. 53).
I do not know the altar he mentions on pp. 153, 157.
2 René Gadant, La Religion des Éduens et le monument de Mavilly,
Autun, 1922; Espérandieu, Recueil général des bas-reliefs .. de la
Gaule Romaine (22), III, 2067.
.
•
102
THE DRUIDS
1
manner. I cannot see, therefore, why this priest, if he is a
priest, could not have been a minister of the official Roman
version of the native faith, and no more representative of
original druidism than an English Protestant is representa-
tive of the Roman Church. Moreover, there is an entirely
different interpretation of this sculpture in the field, for
M. Salomon Reinach has argued that the twelve figures on
the altar represent the twelve Roman gods known as the Dii
consentes; and he recognises amongst them Jupiter, Neptune,
Vulcan, Mars, Mercury, Apollo, Venus, Ceres, Diana, and
Minerva. And when we come to this particular group we
find that instead of a druid healing the blind, he discovers a
seated figure of Juno with her eagle, and behind her the
Roman goddess Vesta, who, as protector of the hearth, is
shown shielding her eyes from the smoke.
Passing from Gaul to Ireland, we find there is one single
monument (Fig. 22) deserving of mention. It is a stone in
the Killeen Cormac cemetery, County Kildare,² that has
bilingual inscriptions: one,
1
IVVENE DRVVIDES
and the other, in ogam characters, translated
DUFTANO SAFEI SAHATTOS
that is,
[THE STONE] OF DUFTAN, THE WISE SAGE
The Latin inscription, being highly unusual in many
respects, has been under suspicion; and Hübner, for instance,
decided against it. But although every one is alive to
the possibility of druidic advertisement at the time when
druidism became a fashionable antiquity, that is to say,
after the Romantic Movement, there is a good deal to be
1 Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Paris, 1908, III, p. 191.
G. Petrie and M. Stokes, Christian Inscriptions in the Irish Lan-
guage, Dublin, 1878, II, p. 2, and Pl. I.
E. Hübner, Inscriptiones Britanniæ Christianæ, Berlin and
London, 1876, p. xviii.

I WEALD RVVIDTO
4++++
+
UITI
FIG. 22. INSCRIBED STONE FROM KILLEEN CORMAC, CO. KILDARE
(AFTER PETRIE AND STOKES)
1
HISTORY
103
said on the other side,¹ and I think it would be unfair to
ignore this stone. But elsewhere in Ireland stones do not
bear the name druid, even in native characters; and its
occurrence in Latin suggests it must have been the work of
some clerk who chose the word from his classical lore as
homage to a learned young man, who, in his Keltic epitaph
was not called a druid. It suggests, in fact, that the scholar's
notion of a druid at the time this monument was erected,
in the second half of the Ist millennium A.D., was derived
from book-learning, and was not that of the Keltic druid;
him they called merely a magician, magus. Thus, it may
be that this word here on the Killeen Cormac stone is only
an ignorant and ill-cut Latinist compliment to a person who
was definitely not what the Kelts themselves would call a
druid.
¹ See H. Gaidoz, Notice sur les inscriptions latines de l'Irlande,
Melanges publiées par l'Ecole des Hautes Études, Paris, 1878,
PP. 124 ff.
CHAPTER IV
RELIGION
E pass on now to an account of druidism itself.
The passages in ancient literature that have just
been quoted do not give us as much information as
we should like to have upon this subject, and it is natural
that we should try to add to the picture by recourse to
later Keltic literature and folk-lore.
But in this book I want to distinguish very clearly
between our positive knowledge of the druids and of druidism,
and inferences concerning them that are not based upon this
knowledge; so we ought continually to keep in mind the
simple proposition that because druidism was associated
with certain of the Keltic-speaking peoples, it does not follow
that all phenomena of ancient Keltic religion are to be taken
as evidence of the nature of druidism. That is to say, as we
can only guess how far druidism was based upon, or included,
pre-Keltic belief, how far it was represented in later Keltic
religion, and how far druidism corresponded with Keltic
belief in the non-druidic provinces, we must be very cautious
in admitting any evidence depending upon such premises.
In this chapter, therefore, I intend to give only a minimum
account of druidism, instead of one that is extravagantly
complete.
The subject suggests itself for consideration under various
headings, and I propose to treat them in serial form. Thus
I shall discuss (1) the druidic doctrine of immortality;
(2) druidic theology, ethics, philosophy, and lore; (3) pro-
cedure; and (4) the organisation of the order.
(1) THE DOCTRINE OF IMMORTALITY
Cæsar's statement is undoubtedly the most important
contribution towards a knowledge of the druidic belief in
104
RELIGION
105
this matter. The druids taught, he says, the immortality
of the human soul, and maintained that it passed into other
bodies after death.
The first thing that we have to note is that this belief,
probably known to other writers only in the terms of Cæsar's
report, was identified by Diodorus Siculus with the Pytha-
gorean doctrine, according to which the souls of men proceed,
after death, to fulfil expiatory existences in animal or other
tenements. Such an identification was upheld, as we have
seen, at the beginning of the Christian era by Timagenes,
and also by Hippolytus, who wrote the following passage in
the 3rd century :-
HIPPOLYTUS. Philosophumena, I, xxv 1
The Keltic Druids applied themselves thoroughly to the Pytha-
gorean philosophy, being urged to this pursuit by Zamolxis, the
slave of Pythagoras, a Thracian by birth, who came to those parts
after the death of Pythagoras, and gave them opportunity of study-
ing the system. And the Kelts believe in their Druids as seers and
prophets because they can foretell certain events by the Pytha-
gorean reckoning and calculations. We will not pass over the
origins of their learning in silence, since some have presumed to
make distinct schools of the philosophies of these peoples. Indeed,
the Druids also practice the magic arts.
Shortly before this was written, Clement of Alexandria
had also made a brief reference to the subject; in this he
seems to suggest that he considered druidism to be the
older system.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. Stromata, I, xv, 70, I
Alexander, in his book "On the Pythagorean Symbols," relates
that Pythagoras was a pupil of Nazaratus the Assyrian . . . and
will have it that, in addition to these, Pythagoras was a hearer of
the Galatæ and the Brahmins.
1 Cf. Philosophumena, I, ii, 17. Origen also refers to the druids
in Contra Celsum, I, 16, so does Cyril of Alexandria, Contra Iulianum,
IV, 133.
106
THE DRUIDS
Stromata, I, xv, 71, 31
Thus philosophy, a science of the highest utility, flourished in
antiquity among the barbarians, shedding its light over the nations.
And afterwards it came to Greece. First in its ranks were the pro-
phets of the Egyptians; and the Chaldeans among the Assyrians;
and the Druids among the Gauls; and the Samanæans among the
Bactrians; and the philosophers of the Kelts; and the Magi of
the Persians. . . .
The same identification of the druidic belief in immortality
with the Pythagorean teaching was made by Valerius Maxi-
mus in the early part of the 1st century.
VALERIUS MAXIMUS, II, 6, 10
Having done with the description of the town (Marseilles), an
old custom of the Gauls may now be mentioned; for it is said that
they lend to each other sums that are repayable in the next world,
so firmly are they convinced that the souls of men are immortal.
And I would call them foolish indeed, if it were not for the fact that
what these trousered barbarians believe is the very faith of Greek
Pythagoras himself.
There is a considerable conflict of opinion as to whether
this identification is justifiable or not. In order to test its
likelihood the first thing to be ascertained is whether it is
at all probable that Pythagoras ever came into contact with
the Kelts. It is true, of course, that the legends of the
travels of Pythagoras are not by any means invention of
his later biographers, but there is certainly a tendency to
widen their extent in the more recent accounts. Thus the
original tradition confined his journeys to Egypt, Chaldea,
and Persia, and there is no authority of any kind for the
subsequent assertions that he visited Arabia, and India, and
Gaul. In so far as concerns this last country, we have only
the statement of Alexander Polyhistor, cited by Clement,
and it is of no historical value, being rejected as early as the
3rd century A.D. by Diogenes Laertius. Nor is the remark
of Hippolytus about the rôle played by Zamolxis of any
1 ¹ Cf., as probable source, the first passage from Diogenes
Laertius (p. 75).
RELIGION
107
practical significance. Although the legend that Zamolxis
was the slave of Pythagoras dates back at least to the 5th
century B.C., we find that Herodotus, who reports it,¹ him-
self believed that Zamolxis belonged to a much earlier age
than that of Pythagoras, and was, in fact, a Getan deity.
This was the true position; but because the Geta were
notable in the ancient world on account of their claim to
immortality, it is easy to understand how a fancied coin-
cidence of ideas on this subject with the creed of the Pyth-
agoreans suggested the tale circulated at a later date that
Pythagoras and Zamolxis were really master and slave. It
is equally obvious that the fable of the influence of Zamolxis
as an apostle of the Pythagorean system would be ex-
panded, as in the instance of the Gauls related by Hip-
polytus, wherever this supposed coincidence of religious
ideas was observed.
There is accordingly no assured record of any intercourse
between Pythagoras and the Kelts, and if we choose to
believe, in spite of this, that a direct connection did exist,
all that can be said in favour of it is that by their colonising
activities, as we have seen, the Greeks had certainly ren-
dered the requisite passage of philosophical ideas possible;
and, that as the Greek towns of Italy were the real strong-
hold of developed Pythagoreanism, the school was advan-
tageously placed for propagation in the direction of Gaul."
But there are one or two considerations that seem to
weigh heavily against the possibility of Pythagorean influence
2 Ibid., 93.
1 Herodotus, IV, 96.
It is claimed, too, that the occasional occurrence of the penta-
gram, which Lucian (ed. Jacobitz, I, 330) says was a Pythagorean
symbol, on Gallic and British coins
(Fig. 23) is a proof that Gaul ab-
sorbed some of the tenets of Pytha-
goreanism. But I am inclined to
doubt this, for the copying of a
symbol used by Pythagorus no
more proves a knowledge of his
teaching than the copying of the
head of Philip of Macedon, so fre-
quent in Gallic coinage, proves a knowledge of, or obedience to, this
monarch's decrees. But see Rice Holmes, Gaul, p. 34.
FIG. 23.-Coin of the Suessiones,
showing pentagram on reverse.
108
THE DRUIDS
in Gaul. In the first place, I very much doubt whether
Pythagoreanism ever spread anywhere far afield outside a
limited world of educated Greeks; for it was essentially
esoteric and exclusive, admission to the school only being
accorded to the privileged few; that is to say, I do not
think it was the kind of faith likely to have been paraded
before barbarians. Moreover, as an active cult it was not
long-lived; it arose in the 6th century, flourished in Magna
Græcia in the 5th century, and was then, rather suddenly,
suppressed. As a result of this suppression, its philosophy
enjoyed a short vogue in Hellas proper, but by the middle
of the 4th century the school had ceased to exist.
And there are two other points. Firstly, the recorded
instances of resemblances between the druidic and Pyth-
agorean systems are not sufficiently remarkable to justify a
claim for their intimate relationship; and secondly, in each
case the growth of the systems can be explained in local
terms without recourse to such distant borrowings.
It is at once noticeable in the testimony of Valerius
Maximus that the Gallic custom he describes, that of the
repayment of debts after death, does not really conform with
the Pythagorean doctrine. And this divergent view upon
the soul's immortality is also emphasized by Mela who told
us that the Gauls burnt or buried with their dead such things
as they would normally need in life, while sometimes the sur-
vivors were even willing to kill themselves in order to share
the new life with their beloved dead. Such practices show
that the Gauls did not by any means appreciate or profess
Pythagoras's teaching, according to which such continued
enjoyment of one's belongings, or the transaction of post-
poned affairs, after death was impossible. They could not
have believed, it is clear, in an instant metempsychosis, per-
haps into animal as well as into other human bodies, but
rather in the survival of the identity of the deceased in its
recognisable form, apparently in the first instance in or about
the grave, and, later on, in another region.¹ Moreover, the
idea of justice, so far as we can tell, was absent from the
1 The expression orbe alio in Lucan does not mean in another
world. See Reinach, Revue Celtique, XXII (1901), 447.
RELIGION
109
faith of the Kelts: for they do not seem to have distin-
guished between the fate of the good and the fate of the evil,
and they are not likely, therefore, to have had any notion
of an expiatory succession of lives, whereby the soul is
prisoned in a chain of earthly bodies, that is the essential of
the Pythagorean creed. In fact, the kernel of the simple
druidic belief, as it is now known to us, seems to have been
summed up by Lucan: “The same spirit has a body again
elsewhere, and death is but the mid-point of long life."
The doctrine of metempsychosis was not, of course,
invented by Pythagoras; but there is, nevertheless, not the
slightest reason to suppose that he founded his system upon
Gaulish teaching. For a long time it was believed that he
had borrowed his notions from Egypt, but the correct view
is undoubtedly that his sources were the dogmas of the
Orphic religion 1 that was first developed in the semi-bar-
barous frontiers of Thrace. It is allowable, then, that there
may have been a substratum of elemental barbaric belief
common to both druidism and Pythagoreanism, but this is
very far from admitting that there was any actual com-
munity between the schools in their developed forms.
It is an interesting point, however, because it shows that
there is also very little likelihood of druidism owing anything
to Pythagoreanism, quite apart from the outstanding im-
probability that the Kelts would adopt such radical beliefs
at foreign instigation. For, in reality, their doctrine of
immortality and the reincarnation of the soul, as taught by
the druids, was simply the expression of a frequently occur-
ring savage belief with which the ethnographer is perfectly
familiar; and, accordingly, there is no need to go out of
the way to attribute such a faith, when we meet it in the
Keltic world, to the influence of Greek thought. Even such
wild folk as the aborigines of Central Australia, for example,
believe that human personality survives death in the form
of a spirit that may be re-born into the world, and a large
number of kindred notions held by other primitive societies
1 For the relation of Orphism to Pythagoreanism see Cornford,
From Religion to Philosophy, London, 1912, 198; and Eisler, Wellen-
mantel und Himmelszelt, Munich, 1910, 679 f.
110
THE DRUIDS
have been recorded.¹ Perhaps a parallel creed in this
respect with that of druidism is the belief of the Mandingo
people of West Africa who hold, according to M. Delafosse,²
that every living person has a soul (niama), or dynamic
force, that is free after death to reside where it will, either
in the corpse, in the home, in a sacred object, or in the body
of a living being.
We conclude, therefore, that there is very little to be
said in favour of the identification of druidism and Pyth-
agoreanism suggested by the Romans; and, in truth, the
confusion of the two may properly be attributed to the
accident that the doctrine of transmigration was a strange
and remarkable thing in Roman eyes. To a people with
their own gloomy notions of the future estate, such a theory
of immortality could not fail to attract their especial notice,
and consequently they would be liable to identify any two
religious systems known to them in which this doctrine was
taught. Therefore, I think we may be reasonably content
with the view that the druidic teaching of the re-birth of
the soul was part of the natural religion of a primitive
society, and owed nothing to contact with the Greeks.
We must now try to formulate some statement of the
real druidic belief on this subject, and, in order to do so, we
must first obtain, if it is possible, a little more information
than that given by the classical writers. If it was true, as
we are told by them, that the certainty of immortality, in
whatever terms it may have been stated, was sufficiently
powerful to rob death of its terrors for the common people,
then we are fully justified in searching later Keltic lore and
legend for some reflection of the actual form of the belief
so generally and firmly held, whether it was actual trans-
migration, or some other doctrine.
As a matter of fact, in Keltic literature there is very little
sign of a common belief in metempsychosis, but there are
"
¹ In general, see Frazer, The Belief in Immortality, London, 1912
(for the Australians, I, p. 92 f.); see also article, "Transmigration'
in Hastings' Encycl. of Religion and Ethics, and A. Bertholet, The
Transmigration of Souls, London, 1909.
2 Haut-Senegal, Niger, Paris, 1912, III, 165 f.
RELIGION
111
three or four well-known stories in the Irish sagas of the
re-birth of individual persons.¹ For example, the goddess
Etain, the wife of the chieftain Mider, was changed by a
jealous rival into an insect, and whirled hither and thither
over Ireland until finally she fell into a wine-cup in the
house of the Ulster chief Etar, where she was swallowed by
his wife and in due course re-born, retaining the same name
and identity, though no memory of her former life. There
is also a version of the birth-story of the hero Cúchulainn,
according to which he was a reincarnation of the god Lug,
who had committed himself in the form of a child to the
care of Dechtire and had then died, and passed into her in
the guise of a little animal while she was drinking. Both of
these stories date back to the Book of the Dun Cow, that
is the early 11th century, and, taken on their merits, they
are obviously antique legends of the primitive, i.e. pre-
Christian, Kelts.
There is also a tale in the Voyage of Bran to the effect
that the 7th century king Mongan, son of the supernatural
Manannan, was really the dead Finn, son of Cumal, "though
he would not let it be told." Again, there is the story of
Túan Mac Cairill, one of the fabulous immigrants into Ire-
land from Spain, who after a long life was changed succes-
sively into a stag, a boar, a hawk, and a salmon, all the
while preserving his identity, though each metamorphosis
lasted many years; finally, in the fish-form, he was eaten
by the wife of Cairill and then re-born.
Welsh romance gives another example of a re-birth in
the story of the famous 6th century bard Taliessin. In
manuscript this does not approach anything like the anti-
quity of the Irish texts, but that does not necessarily lessen
the folklore value of its component elements, and as, in this
instance, we find an episode of re-birth after being eaten of
the same kind as that related of Etain and Cúchulainn.
there need be no serious doubt of its equal antiquity. The
¹ See the essay by Alfred Nutt," The Celtic Doctrine of Rebirth," |
appended to Kuno Meyer's edition of the Voyage of Bran, London,
1895-1897. The reader will find here a full and excellent discussion
of the whole subject of druidic belief in immortality.
112
THE DRUIDS
story goes that a woman Cerridwen was pursuing Gwion, and
that the two embarked upon a transformation combat at
the end of which Gwion turned himself into a grain of wheat,
whereupon Cerridwen, changing into a black hen, instantly
devoured him. She bore him nine months in her womb,
and when she was delivered of him she could not bring her-
self to kill him because of his great beauty, so she exposed
him to the sea; but he was rescued and became Taliessin,
the marvellous bard.
We cannot pretend that such scraps of Keltic mythology
are a certain index of the content of primitive Keltic
religion, but at least it can be said that the comparative
rarity of these tales, and the fact that in each case they are
invariably attached either to divinities or to heroes, make it
plain enough that the privilege of metamorphosis and re-
birth was not thought to be within the reach of ordinary
mortals. Moreover, there is not, from beginning to end,
even the faintest suggestion that the chain of successive
lives was a method of religious or ethical purification, or
that it was determined by a doctrine of moral retribution
and that liberation of the soul was the ultimate hope. This
is the essential of a developed creed in transmigration, and
the absence of such notions in Keltic legend is a proof that
the stories of re-birth are not the outcome of a religious
philosophy, but are a sequel to normal primitive speculation.
Thus it is likely that such simple Keltic folklore as the
belief of some of the islanders in the Hebrides that the soul
resides in a bird after death, or that of the Kerry peasants
who will not eat hares because they think that they contain
the souls of their grandmothers, is independent of any
settled theory of transmigration, and is merely an example
of primitive thought of a kind that can be studied in most
isolated and simple societies.
We cannot claim, therefore, that the druids professed
the doctrine of transmigration in its final form, that is to
say, in the classical terms by which it was understood by the
Greeks or by the Indians. All that the evidence seems to
show is that they believed in the continued existence of the
same soul in a new but recognisable body after death. This
RELIGION
113
is in accord with many stories in the Irish sagas of the return
of the dead in their familiar living form, such as the re-
appearance of Cúchulainn before St. Patrick. And it is
entirely in agreement with the custom of placing food-
offerings, and equipment for fighting or hunting or domestic
pursuits, in the grave by the side of the corpse.
(2) DRUIDIC THEOLOGY, ETHICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND LORE
There is very little to be said as to the general theo-
logical system of the druids, for it is hardly possible to claim
on the strength of the available information that they pro-
fessed a faith distinct from that of the ordinary Keltic
pantheism. The subject is, of course, part of a larger
question, and it will be found that the hypotheses relating
to a special druidic theology, or to druidic customs and
doctrines at variance with those generally held in the Keltic
world, are nearly all the incidental machinery of a particu-
lar theory of druidic origins. It is true that Pliny speaks
of their worshipping one single god, but the context makes
it clear that he is referring to the special deity associated
with the oak-tree cult and mistletoe ceremonies that he is
describing. At any rate, Diodorus, Mela, Lucan, and Tacitus
all speak of their revering a plurality of gods, and there is
no hint either of a selective theology or of monotheism.
Cæsar tells us that the Gauls, following the druidic teaching,
claimed descent from a particular god corresponding to Dis
in the Latin pantheon, whom they perhaps regarded as a
Supreme Being; and in a well-known passage ¹ he adds that
they worshipped Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Min-
erva, and had much the same notions about these deities
as the rest of the world. Keltic pantheism was, in fact,
fundamentally the same as the ancient pantheism of Italy,
and Cæsar's remarks imply that there was nothing in the
druidic creed, apart from the doctrine of immortality, that
made their faith extraordinary. In short, we must be pre-.
pared to believe that druidism professed, or was in sympathy
with, all the known tenets of ancient Keltic religion, and the
1 De Bello Gallico, VI, 17.
1
8
114
THE DRUIDS
gods of the druids were the familiar and multifarious deities
of the Keltic pantheon.
Similarly, there is very little to say about the ethical
teaching of the druids. The little triad of instruction re-
ported by Diogenes Laertius (p. 75) “Worship the Gods,
Do no evil, Be Manly," is also a summary of an Indian system
and so may not have been an actual pronouncement of the
druids, though it probably describes fairly accurately their
attitude on the subject of behaviour; but it is couched in
such vague terms that its translation into Greek has robbed
it of nearly all its practical significance. We can only ob-
serve that the judicial functions reported by Cæsar imply
a fairly well-defined code enforcing the sanctity of human
life and of personal and public property, and we know that
bravery was encouraged by an insistence on the doctrine of
immortality. There is, as a matter of fact, very little re-
flection of this in early Keltic literature, but that is no reason
for refusing to credit the druids with the giving of such
simple moral instruction, for, after all, an ethical system
such as is implied in these terms is hardly an advance on
that of societies in a very low stage of organisation, and
even the high-sounding judiciary activities described by
Cæsar can be paralleled among very lowly folk.¹
As philosophers the druids have enjoyed very consider-
able prestige, both in ancient days and in our own times,
but the actual extent of their learning was by no means as
great as its reputation warranted. Their boasted astronomy
and geography, if it is fair to judge by the almost contempt-
ible ignorance of these sciences betrayed by the later Kelts,
was doubtless a mixture of astrology and mythical cos-
mogony, the crude speculation of nearly every primitive
people. It is true that the very first mention we have of
the druids is a reference to them as philosophers, but it
belongs to a period when it was fashionable to extol the
barbarians as the ultimate source of all Greek learning and
probably means nothing more than that they were the local
wise men or wizards; at any rate, no classical writer ever
¹ See the chapter, "Law and Justice," in Morals in Evolution,
by L. T. Hobhouse, London, 1915.
RELIGION
115
ventured to define the druidic philosophical system, and
there is no trace of its influence outside the Keltic world.
So far as the later authors are concerned, the outside reputa-
tion of the druids as philosophers was plainly a repercussion
of the wrong identification of their creed with that of Pyth-
agoras, and we observe that the Romans, after they had had
a close acquaintance with the order, ceased to regard its
members as anything but magicians; for example, Pliny
had evidently come to the conclusion that their vaunted
knowledge was little else than a bundle of dark superstitions.
A practical knowledge of stellar, lunar, and solar move-
ments for the purpose of time-reckoning is possessed by
very simple societies, so that we cannot count the druids as
especially remarkable because of their studies in this direc-
tion. The lunar year is a wellnigh universal primitive
calendar; and we are told that such folk as the Hottentots
and Bushmen have a developed star-lore, some of them even
being able to recognise the planets, while the Polynesians
understood the use of the stars for navigation purposes;
and in another part of the world we have the Eskimos accu-
rately observing the summer solstice. Again, we find that
there are regular astronomer-priests whose duty it is to
watch the movements of heavenly bodies in order to measure
time in places like Borneo and Java, and also in some of
the native tribes of Africa.¹ Therefore, if the druids are to
have a greater renown as astronomers, we ought to be able
to point to some additional achievement; but it is not by
any means easy to do this. We are told that they had ages
of thirty years' duration, and this is certainly an advance
upon the systems of the folk mentioned above, so that there
is excuse for pushing the enquiry a little further and asking
whether the druidic calendar might not have been more
highly developed than is suggested in the remaining state-
ments of Cæsar and Pliny to the effect that its year was
lunar and was counted by nights and not by days, a fact
that is well attested in Irish literature.2
It may be said at once that if there really were anything
1 Nilsson, Primitive Time-reckoning, Lund, 1920.
* See Loth in Revue Celtique, XXV (1904), p. 115 f.
116
THE DRUIDS
particularly ingenious about the druidic calendar, we should
surely have been told something about it by so great an
expert in calendrial science as the author of the Julian reform,
especially as Cæsar does actually mention the subject of
their time-reckoning. But we cannot dispose of the subject
quite so simply, because there is an ancient calendar, usually
MANAGAN ANM
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XII
MD
RIVRI Y
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YI
MANAGANAN
N
RIVRO
OCIOMV RIVRI
INIS
ONI
OGRONI
OGRONI
ONI
YII
VIII
Villi
MB
X
XI
XB
ATENOVX
AM
XII
XIII
XY
booooooooo
兰
​ATENOVX
+11
AMB
AMB
INIS R
INIS R
AMB
INIS R
1+1
AMB OGRONS
I+IND
QVTI OGRON
D
OGRON AMB
INIS R
X
NS DS
XI
XII
AMB
XI
XII
XII
AMB
XIII
Oxu
DIVORTOMY
Q Xill
X
wwwwww
AMB
AMB
DIVIRTOMV
FIG. 24. The Coligny calendar: the month Anagan (2nd and 4th year).
called Keltic, actually available for study. In 1897 the
fragments of a massive bronze panel engraved with a calen-
drial table (Fig. 24), now in the Palais des Arts at Lyons,
were found at Coligny in the Ain department, close to the
Swiss frontier. The language of the calendar,¹ chiefly
expressed in hitherto unknown single words and abbrevia-
¹ See Dottin, Manuel, Paris, 1906, p. 79; for the calendar itself
see Seymour de Ricci, Revue Celtique, XXI (1900), 10 and 427 (two
RELIGION
117
tions, is still untranslatable; but it has definitely a Keltic
flavour, and there can be no doubt that it represents a
system of reckoning intended for native use, so that it is
proper to examine it as a possible index to the system
employed by the druids.
It is drawn up in sixteen columns of months covering a
period of five years, each month being divided into two
blocks of days by the word ATENOUX; in the first block are
15 days, and in the second block are either 14 or 15 days
bearing a new, not a continued, enumeration. This is the
regular usage of a lunar calendar in which the month is
cut into two periods corresponding with the waxing and the
waning of the moon; but the important point about the
Coligny calendar is that its real basis is not only lunar, but
luni-solar, since an attempt had been made to square the
system of lunar months with the solar year. The lunar year
of the calendar had only 355 days, and the annual loss of 10
days from the true solar year of 365 days was restored by
the insertion of an intercalary month of 30 days, occupying a
double mensual space in the column, once in every 2 years.
This gives a total of 1835 days at the end of the 5 years, so
that the table ends in excess of solar time, which should be
just over 1826 days; but it is none the less a very creditable
scheme, and if it were the work of the druids we should
certainly have to allow them much more credit as calendar-
makers than we have suggested is their due. For scientific
intercalation of this nature is quite beyond the scope of
those primitive methods of measuring time with which we
have compared the druidic calendrial system as described by
Cæsar and Pliny.
But is the Coligny calendar druidic? It was written in
Roman characters, and it was found close to a Roman road,
together with fragments, separately smashed, of a bronze
statue of Apollo that is thought to date from the 1st
century A.D. And the calendar itself is cognate with the
Roman system in use before the Julian reform whereby
plates with Ésperandieu's reconstruction); Rhys, Proc. Brit. Acad.,
1909-10, 207; 1911-12, 339; also Prof. Eoin MacNeill, Erin, X,
Pt. I, 1.
1 The statue is now labelled Mars.
118
THE DRUIDS
biennial intercalation adjusted a lunar year of 355 days.¹
Moreover, its arrangement is very like that of the Roman
calendrial tables, and although the days are indicated by a
number sequence only, instead of a letter sequence with or
without a number sequence, they are followed by note that
one suspects must be of much the same character as those
explaining the nature of the days on the Fasti; thus we
find NSDS on the Coligny calendar which looks as though it
must signify a nefastus dies of the Romans, a day during
which it was wrong to transact legal business.2
Considerations of this kind suggest a comparison between
the calendar and Roman inscriptions on bronze that were
intended for Romanised natives, such as the military
diplomas. In respect of the technical achievement in the
work and of the style of the lettering there is a rather marked
agreement, and one is accordingly tempted to assume that
the calendar, like the diplomas, is a product of local metal-
workers who were following Roman instructions. In fact,
the calendar is an achievement of metal-work no less re-
markable than the huge and celebrated table containing a
decree of Claudius that was found in Lyon in 1528, and that
measures about 4 feet in height, and whose two plates are
together about 6 feet broad. But in this instance the local
founders were inscribing not a Roman text, but a modified
version of the Roman calendar, omitting the difficulties of
the Roman system, such as the backward count from the
Calends and the Nones and the Ides, and ignoring the com-
plications of Cæsar's reform, the whole scheme being forced
into a conformity with the native system and expressed in
the native idiom by means of Latin letters. The conjunc-
tion of the tablet with a statue of Apollo suggests, though it
1 See A. Philip, The Calendar, Cambs., 1921, pp. 10-11.
* But see Thurneysen in Zeitschrift f. Celtische Philologie, Halle,
1899, II, p. 528; for the latinity of the calendar, see Nicholson,
Sequanian, London, 1898. Prof. MacNeill, on the other hand, claims
that the mechanical apparatus of the calendar is borrowed from Greek
culture (see his interesting note on the peg-holes against the date
numerals, loc. cit. p. 62, and cf. Proc. Brit. Acad., 1911-12, p. 355).
Musée de Lyon. Inscriptions antiques: Allmer et Dissard, I
(1888), 58 f.
RELIGION
119
is far from proving, that the find was made on a temple-site,
and that the purpose of the calendar was primarily religious;
if this was really the case, it may well have represented
a part of the deliberate Romanisation of native religion
attempted by Augustus, a consolidation of the system of
native festivals and of unlucky days into an organised cult
of the Roman pantheon. It is clear enough that such
speculation brings us no nearer to the end of the discussion
of the origin and purpose of the calendar, but at least it
demonstrates that it would be improper to accept it un-
hesitatingly as the direct offspring of druidic time-reckoning,
or to use it as evidence of their astronomical and mathe-
matical ability.
We must also remember that there is no evidence that
the druids had sufficient skill to tabulate the results of their
enquiries in calendar form; certainly, no other inscriptions
hitherto discovered hints that the natives were capable of a
sustained effort of this kind. It is reported by Cæsar that
some of the druids knew how to use the Greek alphabet,
and there are enough Keltic inscriptions in Latin characters
to show that after the Conquest the Roman alphabet was
also fairly general; but this is very far from proving the
druids capable of a complicated composition, particularly
as we are told that it was not their custom to commit their
lore to writing.¹ The rather improbable nature of the
alleged reasons why they refrained from writing down their
verses and spells might almost be taken as an additional
proof that they were in fact unable to do so; for a dread
of an unrestricted publication of their tenets is hardly a
plausible excuse, seeing that few outside the number of their
chosen pupils could have read a word of their writings; and
it is also quite incredible that they were really swayed by
the consideration that the use of manuscripts would lessen
their students' powers of application, as though they had
It is true that there is a legend in the Tripartite Life of St.
Patrick (Whitley Stokes ed., II, 284) suggesting that the Irish druids
had books, but this rather dubious hint does not materially affect
the question of the scholastic attainments of the earlier members of
the order in Gaul.
120
THE DRUIDS
actually experimented with written records and then aban-
doned them. It seems very likely that both these reasons
are charitable fictions either invented by Cæsar or suggested
to him by Divitiacus, and that in reality the druids were
compelled to depend on purely oral teaching simply because
they were unable to make written records of the necessary
extent. Even if they were possessed of an alphabet, as
Cæsar says, and knew how to keep tallies and accounts,
they may not have advanced beyond the most laborious
methods of writing on wood and stone; and, accordingly,
the production of anything in the nature of a book or a fully
annotated calendar may well have been altogether outside
their power.
But although they may have been limited in this direc-
tion, there is no doubt that as teachers the druids had a real
importance, and, at any rate until the Romans attempted
the establishment of schools in Gaul, they must have exer-
cised considerable influence on all phases of native thought.
That the actual learning imparted may not have been of
much account does not affect their possible power in this
respect, for it was not only neophytes of the order who
attended for instruction, but also, according to Mela, the
high-born Gauls. Thus, later on in Ireland, as well as
teaching druidecht, the lore of druidism, to large classes, we
find that there are also stories of the druids instructing royal
ladies, and even great heroes like Cúchulainn; ¹ and we may
imagine that newcomers to the Keltic lands trying to intro-
duce altered manners would be confronted by an organised
hostile opinion. This is probably the real secret of the early
respect shown by the classical world for the druids, their
reputation resting not on their creed, nor on their philosophy
nor general lore, but on their ability to control the popular
mind by concerted action as a teaching body. Such a state
of affairs no doubt soon came to an end in Gaul after the
arrival of the Romans, while the corporate nature of the
instruction seems to have been of little or no significance in
Ireland; but, taken in conjunction with the early judicial
1 Cf. Tripart. Life, 103.
RELIGION
121
powers of the druids, it must, nevertheless, be regarded as
the most impressive basis that we can find for a statement
of their worth in Keltic life.
(3) PROCEDURE
As diviners there is no need to rate the druids over
highly. All the records of the omens that impressed the
Kelts, such as the flight of birds and the course of the clouds,
are no more than the elementary superstitions of simple
folk; even the divining rod and the wheel of the Irish druids,
though they are more specialised methods of telling the
future, are in no way remarkable. Haruspicy or hiero-
mancy are also methods employed in very primitive societies,
and peoples like the Nagas of Assam and the natives of
Borneo are accustomed to divine by the observation of the
death-struggles of a fowl; but, on the other hand, the
druidic use of a human victim for this purpose, anthro-
pomancy, attested by Strabo and Tacitus, is a very unusual
procedure, and could only occur in highly organised religion.
This is also true to a certain extent of human sacrifice
itself. Here we have to choose between the standard of the
peoples of Polynesia, such as the inhabitants of Tahiti and
the Marquesas or the Maori of New Zealand, who only offered
human beings to the gods on occasions of extreme urgency
or of the greatest importance, or that of certain higher
civilisations in which human sacrifice had been raised to a
systematised routine of continued slaughter. If we judge
the druids by the standards of the Roman writers, who had
learnt to detest a rite practised by their own fore-bears, we
are compelled to assume that the Kelts, too, had made human
sacrifice a regular and reckless affair of the last-mentioned
kind, and we find ourselves thinking of it in the terms
of the wholesale slaughters of ancient Mexico, or of the
Phoenicians and Carthaginians. It is certainly very difficult
to minimise the revolting nature of the holocausts in the
wicker cages, or of such episodes as the cruel slaughter of
her female captives by Boadicea, in honour of Adraste; ¹
1 Dion Cassius, Hist. Rom., LXII, 7.
122
THE DRUIDS
but we must remember Diodorus hints that the victims of
the wicker cages were malefactors,¹ and that most of the
other tales of wholesale offerings of human beings refer to
prisoners of war, so we must admit the possibility that
these Keltic sacrifices were to some extent governed by the
factor of economic expedience, and were not entirely matters
of religious observance. It is significant that there is very
little indication in the Irish texts that human sacrifice was
a widespread and frequent practice, and this is a notable
thing in a Keltic land that had not experienced the Roman
suppression of this barbarism, particularly as the Christian
writers would not be likely to have glossed over any sur-
vivals of, or even memories of, so favourable a count against
paganism. It is a curious thing, however, that it is only in
Irish literature that we come across a reference to a form of
human sacrifice among the Kelts that was anti-social and
therefore a purely religious institution, namely, the ritual
killing of the first-born. This is to be found in the 12th
century Book of Leinster, where it is said that the Irish used
to offer the first-born of their children to the great stone
idol, Mag Slecht; but as it is the only legend relating to this
form of sacrifice, and is of so late a date, it is permissible to
doubt its worth as a testimony of original druidic practice.3
Cæsar's remark that in Gaul fathers did not see their
children until they were grown up has been taken as evi-
dence of this same custom in ancient times, on the grounds
that the mothers must have hidden their children for fear
lest they should be sacrificed; but the custom may also be
read as a survival of primitive taboo, so it does not seem
necessary on this account to go out of our way to charge
the druids with a regularised slaughter of children, and on
the whole we may incline to the view that their share in
4
1 Diodorus Siculus, Hist., V, 32.
""
2 See article, Sacrifice (Celtic)," by Sir E. Anwyl, in Hastings'
Encycl. of Religion and Ethics.
This is not the view of Alfred Nutt. See The Voyage of Bran,
II, 147 f.; on the subject of human sacrifice in Ireland see also
F. N. Robinson, Anniversary Papers-G. L. Kittredge, Boston, 1913,
Pp. 185 ff.
4
De Bello Gallico, VI, 18.
RELIGION
123
1
the human sacrifices of the Kelts was rather by way of being
assistance in occasional national purging ¹ than the result
of the special inspiration of their own particular creed. It is
certainly true that the classical writers emphasize the occa-
sional nature of the human offerings made by the druids,
suggesting that they took place only in times of a great
danger or when for any reason the emotions of the people
were deeply stirred, and, accordingly, we have no need to
assume that they formed part of the regular routine of
druidism. On the other hand, it is not fair to claim that
Keltic sacrifice was in all its aspects non-religious; in
Strabo's account, as also in the Irish story of the rites at
Mag Slecht, we are told that the purpose of the sacrifice
was to ensure a generous measure of the earth's bounty,
and, if that be so, it cannot be denied that the druids adminis-
tered the ritual killing as a definite function of their creed.
The only point that can be justly made is that there is no
evidence that they were directly responsible for all the
wholesale slaughter of which the continental Kelts were
guilty, and nothing to justify us in ranking druidism among
the particularly bloodthirsty religions of which we have
record.
The one druidical ritual that has been described for us in
some detail is the ceremonial gathering of the mistletoe.
This is a remarkable plant, both because of the appearance
of its downward-turned and evergreen leaves, and because
of the parasitical nature of its growth, so that it is not
surprising that it has attracted the attention of simple
superstitious folk outside as well as inside the Keltic lands,
even as far away as the Torres Straits, or among the Ainos
of Japan; and if we knew nothing more than that the
druids respected it on account of its magical and medical
properties there would be very little reason for comment.
But we know, not only from Pliny's account, but also on
the express testimony of the Greek rhetorician Maximus of
Tyre,³ that the oak was a sacred tree to the Kelts, and it is
1 Cf. Frazer, Golden Bough, XI, 41.
2 Ibid., 79.
3 Dissertations, VIII, 8.
124
THE DRUIDS
clear, therefore, that the culling of the mistletoe was a
definite function of the druidic religion, and not merely the
collecting of a potent charm. Not only did the druids choose
their groves of oak trees and insist that a branch of the sacred
tree should be present at all the ceremonies they performed,
but they identified the tree itself with a god, so that its cult
was undoubtedly a very important factor in their religious
observances.
It is probable that this was also true of the druids out-
side Gaul. We do not know definitely that the Irish druids
performed their rites in oak-groves, but it has been argued
that this may be inferred from the fact that on the intro-
duction of Christianity churches and monasteries were some-
times built in oak-groves or near solitary oaks, as though
the choice of the site was determined by the immemorial
sanctity of the tree. And it is a curious thing that
there is evidence that the oak, and perhaps the mistletoe
too, was of peculiar significance in England at a very early
period, for in a tumulus at Gristhorpe, near Scarborough,
excavated in 1834,2 there was found an oak coffin, covered
with oak branches, in which was an old man's skeleton,
accompanied by a bronze dagger and flint implements,
together with a large quantity of vegetable material that
was then identified as mistletoe. This, if the identification
1 Golden Bough, II, 242 and 363.
2 Gents. Mag., 1834, II, 632 f.
The mistletoe identification was repeated as late as 1865 by
Davis and Thurnam, Crania Britannica. It was originally due to
Professor W. C. Williamson (see a pamphlet, The Discovery of a
Tumulus . . . at Gristhorpe, Scarborough, 1834, and 2nd ed., 1836) ;
but the professor was then a very young man, and I am obliged to
my friend, Mr. Elgee, of the Dorman Memorial Museum, Middles-
brough, for pointing out to me that in a much later (1872) and com-
pletely revised edition of this pamphlet Professor Williamson, at
that time an honoured and distinguished botanist, omits all mention
of mistletoe in connection with the vegetable matter in the coffin;
and I note that he also refrains from naming the mistletoe in the
Reminiscences of a Yorkshire Naturalist, London, 1896, p. 44 f.,
where he refers once more to the Gristhorpe find. This certainly
looks as though the Professor had come to the conclusion that the
substance was not really mistletoe, but it is strange that he does not
expressly say so.
RELIGION
125
of the mistletoe is correct, is a very interesting discovery,
as the burial dates from the Bronze Age. Something of
the same sort is also recorded in Brittany, where in many
of the megalithic tombs the funeral deposits were laid on
a bedding of oak leaves.
The most usual habitat of the mistletoe is on apple-
trees, poplars, and willows, and it is only rarely that it is
found on the oak. Its occasional occurrence on the sacred
tree, therefore, would obviously encourage the belief, as
Pliny suggests, that the tree was marked with the sign of
an especial favour of the god, so that the gathered shrub
would, of course, be invested with peculiar sanctity. Per-
haps its evergreen character constituted it as a symbol of
immortality, or, since Maximus says that the oak was
worshipped by the Kelts as a symbol of Zeus, that is to say,
a god of the heavens or thunder-god, it may have been
accepted as an embodiment of the lightning fallen from the
sky, or it may even have been thought to have contained
the life, or divine essence, of the tree. After a consideration
of all the evidence, Sir James Frazer has suggested ¹ a link,
in addition to that of language, between the Kelts and the
early inhabitants of Italy; for he observes that the white
steers sacrificed on the Alban Mount and in the Capitol at
Rome invite comparison with the white bulls that the
druids sacrificed under the holy oak when they cut the
mistletoe; and this comparison is rendered the closer since
evidence can be adduced that the Latins themselves orig-
inally worshipped Jupiter in oak-groves. Such a coincidence
of language and of religious ideas must either betoken a
common inheritance or a direct intrusion of peoples, and we
must return to the subject again when we deal with the
question of the origin of druidism.
1
The ritual performance in securing the serpents'-egg, de-
scribed for us by Pliny, is based on an elementary and wide-
spread faith in talismans and charms; and we cannot even
say with certainty that this particular form of the super-
stition was the especial property of the druids, as an example
1 Golden Bough, II, 189.
126
THE DRUIDS
of a somewhat similar belief in the potency of so-called
snake-stones has been found in Ceylon.¹ Nevertheless, it is
in the Keltic lands that the folklorist has discovered the
most remarkable instances of its survival,2 and we find that
a version of the druidic account of the formation of the eggs
from the saliva of serpents was still repeated in recent times
by the peasant folk in our own island, while the old faith in
its marvellous medical properties exists in almost unabated
strength.
Naturally there has been considerable speculation as to
the real nature of this mysterious egg that Pliny said he
himself had actually handled. Probably many different
objects have been known as snake-stones in the course of
time,³ and amongst them are prehistoric beads of blue and
green glass of a kind that are sometimes embellished with
1
3
FIG. 25.-Glass beads of the Iron Age from England and Ireland.
protruding bosses and with streaks and bands of white
paste (Fig. 25). Such beads were called snake-stones in
Cornwall and Wales and Scotland, and it is said that in
Wales and in Ireland they were also sometimes called
"Druids' Glass," so that it is not surprising that many
writers have assumed that they must have been the original
serpents'-eggs of the druids. This was not the view of
Edward Lhuyd," who was the first to call attention to the
1
¹ Journ. R. Anthrop. Inst., XXXVIII (1908), 188 and 200.
2 See Skeat in Folklore, XXIII (1912), 45 f., and Golden Bough,
X, 15 f.
See, for instance, Mary Trevelyan, Folklore and Folkstories of
Wales, London, 1909, p. 170. On this subject generally, see
W. R. Halliday, Folklore Studies, Ancient and Modern, London, 1924,
P. 146 ff.
•
Golden Bough, X, 16. Cf. N. Owen, Hist. of Anglesey, London,
1775, P. 45.
Rowlands, Mona Antiqua Restaurata, London, 1766, p. 318;
and Camden, Britannia (Gough, 1789, II, 571).
RELIGION
127
2
1
glass talismans of this type, but the identification was
adopted by Borlase ¹ in the 18th century and by Thomas
Pennant, who gives an illustration of three such snake-
stones from his own collection, and, more recently, by
Sir James Frazer. However, many of these beads date
from the first two or three centuries before the Christian
era,³ and the druids must have been perfectly familiar with
them in necklaces, even if they were not actually aware of
the secrets of their manufacture; it is hardly likely, there-
fore, that they could have imagined them to be natural
formations, nor even that they could have pretended that
they thought so, seeing that the Kelts were craftsmen of
considerable ability in enamel-work, and could scarcely have
been deceived by a simple glass ornament of this kind.
Still less is it likely that Pliny would have been deluded;
in fact, he makes it almost certain that the original serpents'-
egg was not a glass bead, by telling us that the object he
examined was about the size of an apple, and that its shell
was cartilaginous and covered with little cavities.
The only possible alternative to the beads is a fossil,
for as we have to discount the absurd story of how
the egg was obtained, we can also overlook the state-
ment that it could float in water. Edward Lhuyd thought
that the fossil in question must be an echinus; but the
ammonite is a rival choice, since it is commonly called a
snake-stone by peasants, who sometimes add to it a clumsily
carved serpent's head in order to increase the likeness of the
fossil to a coiled serpent. It is, notwithstanding, rather
improbable that in their simple form these fossils would have
deceived Pliny 5 any more than the glass beads, and it may
be that the object he actually examined was something more
complicated and less common, perhaps a conglomeration of
4
¹ Antiquities of Cornwall, London, 1769, p. 142.
2 British Zoology, 1812, III, Pl. 42.
'Those figured by Pennant, for example. On the other hand,
the Anglesey beads described by Owen (loc. cit.) sound as though
they might be Saxon or Viking.
4 Sowerby, Mineral Conchology, II, Pl. 107, 2, and p. 10.
Cf. Conybeare, Roman Britain, London, 1911, p. 70.
128
THE DRUIDS
tiny ammonites, one of the echinoidea with spines attached,
or even a coral formation. But no doubt the simple fossils
would easily have satisfied the Kelts as a product of the
summer assemblies of the snakes; and we have ample
proof of an interest taken in such objects in early times,
witness the remarkable burial on Dunstable Downs where a
ring of more than two hundred fossil echini surrounded the
skeletons of a woman and child.¹
The survival until modern times of the fabulous story
of the formation of this egg, repeated in almost the very
words of Pliny, and the continued belief in its magico-
medical potency, encourages some further enquiry in this
matter of existing folk-custom as a reflection of ancient
druidic practice. We have already seen that the lore of
the serpents'-egg is not an isolated instance of such a sur-
vival of primitive ideas; faith in the medical efficacy of the
mistletoe is still strong in many parts of Europe, and we
even hear of the persistence of details of the ancient gathering-
ceremony, as in the instance of those Swiss peasants who
always take care to catch the falling bough in the left hand.²
Of more interest to our special search is the strange fact that
the druidic holocausts in the wicker cages were represented
in France not very long ago by the burning of wickerwork
giants, or, more vividly, by the actual burning of live animals
in wickerwork frames. Even in England there may be
traces of the persistent practice of ancient sacrifices, for there
are records of the burnt-offerings of calves conducted surrep-
titiously by country-folk who were anxious to avert a cattle
plague.4
But there will be little profit in searching those lands
alone where we know that there once were druids for any
survival of special lore or ritual that we could attribute to
the influence of these priests, and we must be content with
a procedure on broader lines, trying merely to enlarge our
ideas of the actual druidic faith by demonstrating its com-
munity in the larger Keltic religion. For we cannot hope
to satisfy ourselves with any particular instance of an actual
1 W. G. Smith, Man the Primeval Savage, London, 1894, p. 337 f.
Golden Bough, XI, 82. • Ibid., 38.
• Ibid., X, 300.
RELIGION
129
folk-memory of the druids, and we must be very careful to
distinguish between, on the one hand, such localised tradi-
tions vouched for by modern, or comparatively modern,
historians, and, on the other hand, the general and incon-
testible evidence of the survival of ancient beliefs and
customs over wide areas. This last constitutes a scientific
basis for the reconstruction of pagan religious ideas, while,
contrarily, the local traditions as to the sites of druidic
worship or to druidic customs have little more than a cumu-
lative value as confirmatory material and invite a critical
examination in each instance. This is a caution especially
necessary where druid-associations are concerned, for our
studies are complicated by the extraordinary revival of
interest in these priests in the 18th and 19th centuries, a
revival that brought in its wake so many imaginary attribu-
tions to them, both of sanctuaries and of ceremonies, that
we are compelled to deal very warily with traditions that
were not set down in writing before the revival began.
An agreement between druidic observances and wide-
spread Keltic customs is suggested by an examination of
the pagan festival days that are still, or were until recently,
celebrated in France and Great Britain by the lighting of
bonfires and kindred demonstrations. This is a task already
accomplished, for in the Golden Bough we shall find all the
relevant matter set forth in systematic array and interpreted
by a master in the modern study of folklore; from Sir James
Frazer's survey it becomes clear that both within the area
of druidic influence and outside it, the Kelts observed two
principal festivals, one on May Day or the evening before
it, called Beltane, and another on 1st November, or on
the evening before (the modern Hallowe'en), that was called
in Ireland, Samhain.¹ There is ample evidence of the ob-
servance of these two festivals in France, England, Wales,
Scotland, and Ireland, and it is exceedingly interesting to
find that in Scotland and in Ireland there are also instances
of a very ancient tradition that the ceremonial fires were lit
1 For a study of the Keltic festivals see also MacCulloch, Religion
of the Ancient Celts, Edinburgh, 1911, 256 f.
9
130
THE DRUIDS
on ground associated with the druids, or actually by the
druids themselves. Thus the Irish historian, Dr. Geoffrey
Keating,¹ who was born in the 16th century, speaks of
druidic sacrifice on the occasion of the Samhain bonfire, and
in Cormac's Glossary, a 9th century compilation preserved
in 14th century and later texts, we read that on Beltane the
druids used to make two fires, accompanying the preparations
with solemn incantation, and that they used to drive cattle
between the two fires as a safeguard against diseases; while
in Scotland we are told by an 18th century writer that
Beltane fires were lit on an artificial mound, surrounded by
a low circular wall and surmounted by an upright stone,
that was traditionally a site of druidic worship, and that
was afterwards chosen as a place for holding courts of justice.
The interest of this primary division of the year into two
halves, beginning on 1st May and 1st November, is that it
does not in any way depend on the principal events of the
solar calendar, that is to say, the solstices and the equinoxes.
Nor does it correspond with the ordinary divisions of the
agricultural year, the times of sowing and of reaping, but
rather, as Sir James Frazer observes, with the behaviour of
a pastoral people originally governed by the necessity of
moving herds to and from their summer feeding-grounds.
A similar division of the year can be traced in Central
Europe, so that it is evident that we are here in touch with
the primitive Keltic system of reckoning time, and it is a
very important consideration, as we shall see later on, that
we are thus able to say that the druids in these outlying
corners of the Keltic world were its ministers.
Of course, side by side with the Beltane and Samhain
celebrations we find, as was the case throughout Europe
generally, that there was a festival coincident with the
principal event of the solar year, Midsummer Day. But
1 History of Ireland, ed. Irish Text Soc., II, 246.
2 Trans. by O'Donovan and ed. by W. Stokes, Calcutta, 1868,
s.v. Belltaine.
• Scotland and Scotsmen in the 18th Century. MSS. of John Ram-
say of Ochtertyre, ed. by A. Allardyce, London and Edinburgh,
1888, II, 444.
RELIGION
131
here we are dealing with an almost universal stage in cul-
tural progress that is characteristic of many different peoples
who have learnt to depend upon agriculture for a livelihood.
For, apart from such celebrations of the summer solstice
throughout the whole extent of Europe, we find that this
date was ceremoniously observed in distant parts of the
world, as, for example, among the Incas of Peru, or the
Zuñi Indians of New Mexico.¹ It is not to be expected, then,
that the Kelts should have been throughout all their history
different in this respect from their Continental neighbours,
and the evidence of the observance of the midsummer
festival, slight, indeed, in comparison with that betokening
the observance of Beltane and Samhain, in no wise detracts
from the significance that has been attributed to these major
events in the Keltic world. It is a reasonable conjecture,
in fact, that the adoption of agricultural pursuits following
upon the extensive migrations of the Kelts is a sufficient
explanation of the inclusion of the midsummer festival in
the rota of annual observances.
(4) ORGANISATION
We are vouchsafed some information upon the subject
of the organisation of the druidic order, but it is, neverthe-
less, far from easy to present any confident statement of its
original character. In Gaul there is said to have been an
arch-druid as the single and all-powerful head of a corporate
body, a sign that there was a more highly developed sense
of nationality among the Kelts than other evidence would
incline us to suspect. We cannot reasonably doubt Cæsar's
assertion, for he goes on to describe the manner of the arch-
druid's election, and it is obvious that the existence of such
a supreme authority was within the powers of any body
capable of organising annual national assemblies like those
held by the druids. It is, in fact, additional proof of the
achievement that we have said most of all entitles them to
our respect, namely, a capacity for controlled and system-
atised behaviour.
We do not, however, find much evidence of an equal
1 Golden Bough, X, 132.
132
THE DRUIDS
organisation of the druids in Ireland, for there are very
few signs here of concerted action on their part, or that any
one druid was supreme over the others. But in all ques-
tions affecting the status of Irish druids, we must bear in
mind that our information relates principally to druidism in
the period of its decline and disintegration following upon
the introduction of Christianity. When we recall the fact
that there most certainly were important assemblies held in
Ireland,¹ taking place at fixed intervals and attended by
delegates from distant parts, it will be seen that we cannot
fairly assume that Irish druidism lacked that co-ordination
of its members such as obtained in Gaul. Moreover, we
hear once of a "chief poet of the Gael," 2 so that we cannot
ignore the possibility that formerly there may also have been
a chief druid.
From Mela's testimony, and from our knowledge of the
life of the druid Divitiacus, we can conclude that in Gaul
the order was mainly recruited from the high-born Kelts,
and that members of the order were in nowise excluded
from the possession of wealth, or from marrying, or from a
political life. They were, it is true, exempt from military
service, but this did not mean that they were prohibited
from accompanying or controlling armies, or from warfare
itself, and we know that bravery in battle was one of the
main points of their teaching. Although we have less
positive information at our disposal, all this seems to have
been true of the Irish druids as well, who certainly fought,³
and also married, so that in matters of general conduct there
are no marked distinctions to be drawn, and, taking every-
thing into consideration that we have mentioned with
regard to belief, behaviour, and organisation, it seems safe
to say that there are no good reasons for disputing the
essential sameness of druidism as represented in Gaul and
in Ireland.
1 Joyce, Social History, II, 436; see also T. J. Westropp in Proc.
R. Irish Acad., XXXV, 363.
""
2 Book of Rights, Dublin, 1847, P. 33; but cf. Rev. Celtique, XLIII,
299, where two chief druids are mentioned; this suggests chief "
merely means "locally pre-eminent ".
* See, for instance, Rev. Celtique, XLIII, 25, 39.
RELIGION
133
In addition to fulfilling the offices of sacrifice and of the
dispensation of justice, the Gallic druids had also to act
both as prophets and as poets; that is to say, they prac-
tised the art of divination, and were also employed in the
composition of epics and spells. So much is clear from Cæsar,
and it seems certain that those who were especially concerned
with these secondary functions, and were distinguished by
the later writers as vates (in Greek ovάreus), or bards, were
all members of the corporate druidic order. It is very likely,
in spite of the testimony of Diodorus, Strabo, and Timagenes,
that these names were originally synonymous and referred
to a single class of person, a druid whose priestly and poli-
tical functions were allowed to lapse in favour of the duties
of divining or of composing verses; for, from the first,
natural talent would inevitably lead to specialisation in
these directions, and it is more probable that the prophets
and the poets would develop into separate officials from
within the priestly body than that they should be a subsidiary
and specially recruited non-priestly class. No doubt as the
political and religious power of the druids declined, as it did
very rapidly, the secondary functions would assume an
increasing importance; and we can readily understand the
attempt of writers after Cæsar's time to rank those druids
distinguished for their gift of divination or versification as
a distinct class of Keltic official, only vaguely connected
with the native religious life. But the truth is that what-
ever distinction time may have brought about, the classical
writers did not understand it, and it is of little avail to try
to remedy matters now; for it will be seen from the extracts
we have quoted that the functions of druid, diviner, and bard,
are inextricably mixed.¹ Thus, while Cæsar suggests that
it was the druids who performed all the various functions,
Strabo distinguishes three orders, druids, diviners, and
bards, but he admits at the same time that druids and
diviners were both concerned with natural philosophy;
moreover, he adds that the druids conducted the sacrifices,
1 See MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts, Edinburgh, 1911,
p. 299.
134
THE DRUIDS
1
whereas Diodorus suggests it was the diviners who sacri-
ficed. Divitiacus, according to Cicero, was both a druid
and a diviner, and Tacitus also describes the druids as
prophets. Lucan only apostrophises bards and druids, but
in addressing the bards he uses the word vates, which is
the equivalent of Strabo's name for the diviners, and can
mean prophet as well as poet. Finally, we see that Pliny
altogether ignores the bards when he condemns the druids
as a band of wizards and physicians.
But if we cannot deduce from this confusion of officials
and their functions an original and systematic organisation,
we can at least say that its existence confirms the supposi-
tion that the three classes of functionary mentioned in the
classical references to druidism represented one corporate
body. And we may proceed to the reasonable claim that
from the subsequent wreck of druidism the bards would be
likely to survive with honour in their capacity of recorders
of the prowess of the Keltic peoples, while the diviners would
be equally likely to persist in obscurity as surreptitious
purveyors of native wizardry.
This opinion that the bards and diviners were druids.
must, to some extent, however, be qualified by the admission
that the Kelts may also have employed secular bards who
were not members of the order. This seems to be warranted
by the early testimony of Poseidonios, who speaks of pro-
fessional poets in the service of Keltic princelings accom-
panying armies during a campaign, and also of a poet
being rewarded for his eloquence by a bag of gold thrown
to him by one of these chieftains. In addition to this, there
is a story in the History of Rome by Appian ¹about a musician
who accompanied an envoy in order to extol the prowess of
his countryfolk to the Romans; and in all these instances it
is implied that the persons concerned were men of inferior
3
¹ Pharsalia, I, 447-449, three lines preceding the passage quoted
above, p. 88.
2 Athenæus, VI, 49. In the latter part of the passage Poseidonios
refers to bards by name, but I cannot read that he distinguishes
them from the company of the parasitical musicians.
Athenæus, IV, 37.
• Keltika, 12.
RELIGION
135
rank attached to the households of the great, and that they
were not invested with the dignity of the priestly calling.
It is obvious that the existence of secular bards of this kind
need occasion no surprise, since it must have been the well-
nigh inevitable outcome of the Keltic talent in this
direction, and it need not lead to any alteration of our view
concerning the bards mentioned by Strabo and others; for
this must not be taken to mean that the druids either
invented versification and declamation, or monopolised
their employment.
Very much the same state of affairs seems to have ob-
tained among the ancient Irish. We hear of three classes
of officials corresponding with those named by Strabo, that
is to say, druids, prophets (fáthi), and poets (filid), and we
find traces of the same confusion of their functions, and
signs that the various offices, in particular those of the
druids and the prophets, were occasionally administered by
single individuals. And side by side with the Filid, or
learned poets who composed according to strict rules and
were possessed of a profound and special lore, there existed
rhymsters of inferior status like the itinerant or sycophantic
poetasters of Gaul.
The difficult problem of the origin of druidism would
be easier of approach if we could determine whether it
monopolised the religious activities of the Kelts in Gaul,
or whether it existed side by side with the remnants of a
pre-druidic organisation. Unfortunately, our present know-
ledge does not justify any confident answer to this question,
and the most that we can say is that there was one class of
priest seemingly distinguished by name from the druids, and
that there were also certain religious confraternities alto-
gether unconnected with the druidic system.
The priests were called gutuatri. As we only hear of
them in four inscriptions and in a passage from the eighth
Book of the Gallic War, by Hirtius, it will be possible to
define the extent of our information with some precision.
1 The latinised form of the singular is gutuater. For the ety-
mology, see Loth, Revue Celtique, XXVIII (1907), 119; and Holder,
Alt-celtischer Sprachshatz, s.v. gutuatros.
136
THE DRUIDS
Two of the inscriptions, one a tiny Roman altar (Fig: 26),
and the other a marble slab, are at Autun,¹ and were set
up respectively by Narboneius Thallus and Gaius Secondius
Vitalis Appa, each of whom is described as a gutuater, in
honour of Augustus and of a local god Anvallus. Another
inscription, now lost, was set up at Mâcon and commem-
orated Gaius Sulpicius Gallus, a magistrate and flamen
augustalis, who was also the priest of a god Moltinus and a
gutuater of Mars. The fourth is at Le Puy, and was
erected by a præfect of the colony, apparently an official
of the iron-mines, who likewise describes himself as gutuater.
In all these inscriptions, both as regards the names of
the holder of the office and the other functions that he per-
formed, the gutuater appears as a very much Romanised
person whose services to the emperor-god and to the empire
took precedence over his duties as the priest of a local
divinity. Since the druids, at any rate in their priestly
capacity, resisted Romanisation, even to the length of in-
curring deliberate suppression, it looks as though the gutuater
of the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. were not druids, and we
may imagine that their office was largely a Roman institu-
tion, based, of course, upon existing native practice, but
definitely intended to assist the fusion of the Gallic religion
with that of the conquerors. These minor priests were only
the servants of local shrines, so that there is nothing un-
reasonable in suggesting that they were a class apart from
the druids; but, nevertheless, to affirm that the two kinds
of priest were never originally connected is a good deal more
than the evidence warrants. Moreover, we must take into
account the fact that the druids, before the coming of the
1 Mem. Soc. éduenne, N.S., XXVIII (1900), 353.
2 In the paper referred to above it is suggested that the word
Appa is an abbreviation for apparator, or magistrate, and not a
fourth name; but see Jullian, Revue des Études Anciennes, II (1900),
411.
3 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, XIII, 2585.
One reading is "six times gutuater of Mars," but probably
MART(IS) VI is really MART (IS) VL, i.e. ult (oris), as suggested by
Hirschfeld, or MART (IS) VI[C(TORIS)] as suggested by Reiner.
$ C.I.L., XIII, 1577.
1

DEOAN
VALEN P
BANETVS
THALIVS
GVTVAE
FIG. 26.-MINIATURE VOTIVE-ALTAR FROM AUTUN, DEDICATED
TO ANVALLUS (1)
1
#
RELIGION
137
Romans, were extraordinarily powerful in Gaul, so that it
is difficult to conceive of them as tolerating another and
distinct body of religious officials who were sufficiently
firmly established to persist where they themselves failed.
The only scrap of direct evidence upon this point is the
passage where Ausonius describes the keeper of the temple
of Belenus, who was doubtless a gutuater (or his 4th century
equivalent), as coming of druidic stock; but, unfortunately,
this testimony is of much too late a date to have practical
value.
There is some additional information available that would
be very precious, since it refers to the actual period of the
Roman conquest, if only it did not depend on a rather
obscure question of textual criticism. This concerns a
passage wherein Aulus Hirtius,¹ who wrote the eighth Book
of the Commentaries, gives Gutuatrus as the proper name
of a Gaul put to death by Cæsar, doubtless the rebel Cotuatus.³
It is usually held that his use of the word was mistaken, and
that he merely intended to convey that Cotuatus held the
sacerdotal title of gutuater. If this view is correct, it is
interesting to recall that Cotuatus was a turbulent member
of the Carnutes, presumably a person of some local standing,
who was one of the ringleaders of the massacre of the Romans
at Cenabum. Cæsar, not unnaturally, calls him a desperado,
and the fact that he was later hunted down and delivered
to Roman justice by his own people shows that whatever
office he formerly held was not sufficient to invest him with
lifelong sanctity. This last consideration does not mean
very much, but it seems to be a fair inference that the man
was not a druid; for though we can easily understand that
neither Cæsar nor Hirtius knew precisely what a gutuater
was, they certainly knew a good deal about druids; yet
the rebel is not called a druid, nor even sacerdos. If, then,
1 B.G., VIII, 38.
* There are many variants in the MSS., such as gutruatrus, and
even maturatus.
B.G., VII, 3, I.
4 Naturally the whole subject is controversial. See Rice Holmes,
Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul, Oxford, 1911, p. 831.
138
THE DRUIDS
he really was a gutuater, we must admit that even in the
Ist century B.C. these priests were apparently distinct from
the druidic priesthood, and that the office was, in its sacer-
dotal aspect, of so lowly a character that it was not important
enough for Cæsar's notice. If only we could be quite sure
that Hirtius meant to imply that the man was a gutuater,
we might proceed to argue that this insignificance of the
office explains the difficulty that has just been raised of the
druidic toleration of its existence, and that it might, after
all, be a pre-druidic priesthood that only received a revived
respect under later Roman encouragement, and simultane-
ously with the decline of the druids. This is an attractive
hypothesis, and a useful one, but it is obvious that it depends
on little better than a bundle of guesses.
On two or three other occasions the classical writers
mention Keltic priests who, though they are not named as
gutuatri, seem to be local officials of the same kind. Lucan,¹
for example, speaks of the priest (sacerdos) of the sacred
forest near Marseilles; similarly, Livy describes the
antistites templi of the Boii in Cisalpine Gaul, whom he dis-
tinguishes from the ordinary sacerdotal brotherhood; and
Ausonius salutes Phoebicius, the keeper of the temple of
Belenus. There is also an inscription of Ist century date
at Agen in which an antistes records his gift of a marble
basin to the Genius Loci, but as his name was Silvinus, son
of Scipio, it may be that his office was not a Keltic one.
The possibility of the independence of the gutuatri and
antistites from the druidic organisation is measurably in-
creased by the consideration that there certainly were non-
druidic religious organisations in Gaul. Foremost among
these is that of the famous nine virgins of the Isle of Sein,
off Pont du Raz on the western coast of Brittany. These
1 Pharsalia, III, 424.
See above, p. 97.
2 XXIII, 24, 12.
4 C.I.L., XIII, 919. I take it that the priests (sacerdotes) men-
tioned by Cæsar (B.G., VII, 33, 3) were probably druids; at least,
there is no reason to suppose that they were not. See generally on
this subject of non-druidic religious functionaries, Jullian, Recherches
sur la religion gauloise, Bordeaux, 1903, p. 99 f.
RELIGION
139
women, described by Mela,¹ were possessed of marvellous
magical powers, and might be approached by those who
set sail especially to consult them. There was also another
community of women, devoted to orgiastic cults, established
on an island near the mouth of the Loire 2 whereon no man
was allowed to set foot. The historicity of these stories of
Mela and Strabo has been questioned, but although it is
quite possible the authors were tempted to interpret the
reputed existence of Keltic island-communities in the terms
of classical mythology, with its tales of the Isle of Circe and
so on, yet, since there is abundant evidence that the Gauls,
like many other ancient peoples, felt that some peculiar
holiness was attached to lonely islands, it is an almost
inevitable consequence that the quality of sacredness should
be translated to those who lived upon them. Thus we are
expressly told in one of Plutarch's essays that some of the
small and desolate islands near Britain were called Isles of
Demons or of Demi-Gods, and that when one of these islands
was visited, it was found that its inhabitants were few in
number, but all regarded as sacred and inviolate. Then
there was also an island near Britain where sacrifices were
conducted that Poseidonios explains resembled those offered
to Demeter and Persephone at Samothrace. The Germans,
too, had a holy grove on an island, and perhaps we can
detect an inherent respect for their sanctity in the choice of
small islands, such as Alderney and Herm in the Channel
Islands, or of Er Lanic in the Morbihan Gulf, as important
cemeteries of prehistoric folk, thus making them veritable
Isles of the Departed. This last is rather an interesting
point in that the graves take us back to pre-Keltic peoples
and, therefore, encourage the belief that the island-cults
represented a deeply rooted faith of the indigenous folk and
¹ Chorogr., III, 6, 48.
5
2 Strabo, IV, 4, 6. M. Jullian suggests the island was Le Croisic
(Hist. de la Gaule, I, 145).
S. Reinach in Revue Celtique, 1897, 1; and Cultes, Mythes,
Religions, Paris, 1905, I, 195.
Moralia: De defectu oraculorum, XVIII.
Strabo, IV, 4, 6.
• Tacitus, Germania, XL.
140
THE DRUIDS
were not necessarily of Keltic origin. Indeed, if we accept
the stories of these communities of women, we can scarcely
avoid admitting at the same time that they probably
existed in addition to, and not as part of, the druidic religious
system, and thus must have continued the observances of a
pre-druidic faith.
Apart from the instances of the island-communities, the
existence of holy women in early Europe is well attested,
and is in accord with our general knowledge of women in
the barbarian lands. Among the Galatæ we know that the
wife of Sinatos was a priestess,¹ while in Gaul an inscription
at Antibes 2 records a flaminica sacerdos of the goddess
Thucolis, and two other inscriptions at Arles 3 commem-
orate women described respectively as antistita deæ and
antistis. In our own country Boadicea exercised priestly
functions; and perhaps the behaviour of the black-clothed
women of Anglesey before the battle with the Romans may
be taken as suggesting their influence in spiritual matters.5
In Ireland, moreover, there were ban-fáthi or divineresses;
and it is just possible that we can detect a relic of former
communities of women-devotees of a pagan cult, just like
those of Gaul, in the custom of the nuns of St. Brigit, who
tended a perpetual holy fire at Kildare right up to the time
of the suppression of the monasteries under Henry VIII; 6
the same custom of tending a holy fire in Britain being
mentioned as far back as the 3rd century by Solinus," who
says that one was kept up in honour of a goddess identified
with Minerva. Thus we see that there is nothing improb-
able in the stories of the islands with the holy women dwelling
upon them; and, furthermore, that there is a good deal to
be said in favour of the hypothesis that these women might
have continued to practice, altogether independently of
druids and druidism, the immemorial religious rites of the
land.
The question whether there ever were druidesses is quite
6
¹ Plutarch, Moralia: Virtutes Mulierum, XX.
2 C.I.L., XII,
5724, and P. 862.
• Dion Cassius, LXII, 6 and 7.
• Frazer, Golden Bough, II, 240.
'C.I.L., XII, 703 and 708.
Tacitus, see above, p. 93.
'XXII, 10.
RELIGION
141
another matter, and I have already said something on this
subject (p. 96). It is plain that in the 1st century B.C.,
when druidism was flourishing, there is no reason to believe
that women were admitted into the order. But, as we have
seen, in the 3rd century A.D. both Lampridius and Vopiscus
describe female fortune-tellers in Gaul as dryades, a term
which it is naturally assumed denotes druidesses; and this
might be read as a hint that some of the priestesses just
mentioned were also members of the corporate druidic
system. We must remember, however, that these authors
were not talking about religion or religious functions at all,
and that at the time when they wrote Gallic druidism was
discredited and moribund; so that it is probable that the
word druidess was applied to wise women, without any
other significance than that the women were native prophet-
esses who performed functions included amongst those once
attributed to a priestly order whose fame and whose name
was well known by reason of the earlier writings of Cæsar
and others. In the same way, it would be difficult to prove
that the occasional use of the word bandrui in late Irish
literature adds anything to our knowledge of original druidic
organisation.
I observed at the beginning of this chapter that I intended
to give only a minimum account of druidic religion, an in-
tention that I hope will explain the disjointed and incomplete
nature of the series of remarks that followed. I very much
wish it were possible to give a more adequate summary of
druidism, and I should like to persuade myself that it is fair
to make Keltic literature, especially the usual material of
mediæval bardic rigmarole and Christian invective, respon-
sible for a fuller account of this special pagan faith. But I
am far from convinced of the validity of such evidence, and
since in these chapters I am trying to present nothing but
the basic facts about the druids, I shall avoid a fanciful
embroidery of the few certainties, even at the risk of de-
priving my subject of much of its superficial interest.
What, then, can I add? I see no reason to suppose that
the druids had developed a special sun-worship, or a mono-
theistic religion. I do not see much evidence that they
142
THE DRUIDS
possessed any remarkable learning, astronomical or other-
wise.
But we naturally ask ourselves whom they worshipped;
and if we take a general survey of the manifestations of
Keltic religion as a whole we shall quickly find the most
probable answer. In the eyes of the ancient Kelt the land
was peopled with spirits. Doubtless many of them were of
primitive and pre-Keltic origin; but the Kelt was himself
a primitive, and the native spirits of the trees and the wells
and the fountains and the streams were familiar to him in
whatever land he trod. He had passed, however, beyond
this stage of simple animism, and in addition to these homely
spirits inhabiting the well-known features of the surrounding
landscape, had learnt to worship the great natural forces
that controlled his world, the moon, the sun, the sea, and the
wind. Of these by far the most important was the moon,¹
while the sun, so often supposed to be the focus of druidic
worship, was demonstrably of less account; thus, the Keltic
year was lunar, time-reckoning was lunar, festivals began
with the rising of the moon, on what we should now call
their eve, and many agricultural operations were controlled
by its wax and wane. But the Kelt had likewise passed
beyond the stage of mere nature-worship, and he had come
to believe in the existence of higher deities, the local tutelary
gods of his townlet and his tribe, and, above these, a whole
pantheon of divinities presiding over his various interests;
such were the gods of agriculture and of commerce, of healing
and of speech, gods of war, gods of the Earth and the Under-
Earth, and goddesses of fertility and of plenty. These dwelt
in Elysium, a blessed region of the world; and because of
their intimate correspondence with the deities of the Greek
and Latin pantheons, which were both conceived on the
same primitive system, they were very easily identified,
after the Roman conquest, with the Roman gods; and
Cæsar was able to write that the Gauls worshipped Mercury,
Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and the rest.
¹ See MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts, Edinburgh,
1911, pp. 175 ff.
RELIGION
143
I think it is hardly possible to doubt that the druids
were the special servants of this higher Keltic pantheon,
emphasising, perhaps, the divinity of its members at the
expense of the local spirits of the trees and the fountains
and other natural phenomena; for this is the tendency of
development in religion, to proceed from the awe of the
merely supernatural to the service and placation of the divine.
I do not see that there are any valid arguments to support the
contention that druidism had lagged behind in a stage either
of animism or of nature-worship. Such primitive beliefs
had survived into their day, they were still a part of prac-
tical Keltic faith, and long remained so; but that they
constituted the major creed of druidism is unthinkable.
Indeed, it is in direct conflict with Cæsar's statement that the
druids claimed the Gauls were descended from Dis, the god
of the Under-Earth; and we can state positively that the
druids were abreast with, nay leaders of, developed Keltic
theology.
They served the ordinary Keltic pantheon, then; and
they believed in the immortality of the soul. To this I can
only add that they doubtless conceived the future estate as
continued and similar existence in the Under-Earth. But
there is nothing to show that they had any notion of moral
retribution in the after-life, that the good were happier than
the wicked. Had that notion existed we should have to
credit them with something higher than a simple and
primitive philosophy.
It remains to say a word as to whether these gods were
worshipped directly, or through the medium of idols.
Cæsar said of the Gauls that they revered especially the god
Mercury huius sunt plurima simulacra, of whom there are
many images; and Lucan also says that there were
simulacra in the famous druidic grove near Marseilles.2 The
existence of effigies of gods and goddesses would be in no way
remarkable at the Keltic stage of religious development;
for, to take an example from a parallel culture of those early
days, it will be recalled that Tacitus described how the
1 De Bello Gallico, VI, 17.
• Pharsalia, III, 412.
144
THE DRUIDS
worship of the Earth-Mother among some of the northern
German tribes included a festival in which the goddess, that
is to say, an effigy of her, was carried around in honour
among the people.¹ There are, moreover, so many refer-
ences to idols and images in early Irish literature 2 that we
cannot discount them all as Christian invention; and, on
the whole, there seems to be a strong probability that the
Kelts believed that the divine essence of their gods was
focussed in or resident in certain objects, which were there-
fore revered as idols.
I take it that the statements of Cæsar and Lucan are
sufficient to show that the Gallic druids did not dissociate
themselves from this worship of idols. But the question
arises as to what these simulacra really were. At a first
glance, one supposes that a Roman author would not use
this word except for recognisable anthropomorphic effigies;
but it will be seen that Lucan has made it clear that even
in such a context as the passage in Cæsar it might have a
very different significance. In the druidic grove, he says,
simulacraque maesta deorum
Arte carent caesisque extant informia truncis.
Roughly carved tree-trunk images must have been idols
of the crudest kind; and the legends of the Irish idols,
suggesting stones or posts ornamented with metal plates
(p. 191), confirm the general suspicion that the visible divini-
ties of the druids were natural objects, either left in their
original form or distinguished only by some simple shaping
or ornament. The Kelts, said Maximus Tyrius, worshipped
Zeus in the form of a tall oak, and I daresay that all their
idols were survivals of the primitive notion that a divinity
often selects some familiar object, a stone, or tree, or what
not, as his abode.
However, I do not think that as a class simple menhirs,
that is to say artificially erected standing stones, were likely
to have been idols of the druids, though no doubt one or two
¹ Germania, 40.
2 Cf. Cormac's Glossary, p. 95, s.v. idol.
Philosophumena, II, 8.
RELIGION
145
of them may have been so. It is sometimes argued that as
a statuette of Mercury was found under one,¹ and as Mercury
is one of the four deities carved upon another, it looks
as though the exceedingly numerous menhirs must be the
plurima simulacra of which Cæsar speaks. But, for myself,
I do not consider it even probable that any one would bury
a statuette of the god under the very stone that was his
idol, nor carve the presentiments of three other deities
thereon. Moreover, if, as seems likely, many of these stones
were boundary-marks, then in Roman days they would
have needed the special protection of Mercury, and this
seems to me to be a much better explanation of the presence
of the statuette and the carving.
Contact with Greece and Rome introduced Gaul as a
whole to naturalistic sculpture, and it was not long before
there was a large output of native anthropomorphic carvings
of many kinds. Some of these were frankly imitations of
the altars and other accessories of Greek and Roman cults,
but it is always possible that a few of the uncouth single
figures may have served as idols for native worship. How-
ever, I myself am inclined to believe M. Reinach is right in
imagining that the large body of conservative druidism that
stood aloof from Roman innovations was definitely hostile
to anthropomorphism; ³ and, as a working rule, I think it
is safe to assume that naturalistic carving, however crude,
represents the Romanisation of Gallic religion."
3
¹ Near Péronne, Somme (Revue Celtique, XII (1891), p. 484).
2
Formerly at Kernuz, Finistère (Revue Arch., N.S., I (1879),
PP. 104, 129, and Pl. III-V).
For M. Reinach's celebrated paper on this subject, see Revue
Celtique, XIII (1892), 189, and cf. XI, 224.
'An exception is, perhaps, the St. Martin's statue-menhir in
Guernsey; but I shall deal with this remarkable carving in my
forthcoming book on Channel Island archæology.
10
I
CHAPTER V
TEMPLES
T seems to be a general rule that the building of elab-
orate places of worship is not characteristic of primitive
people whose religion is in about the same stage of
development as druidism. For such folk the ritual of wor-
ship is itself sufficient to lend adequate sanctity to whatever
spot is chosen; and, although tradition very often demands
the choice of the same spot, it is rare to find that its suit-
ability is controlled, or rendered permanent, by building.
It is true that many exceedingly simple savage folk
reserve a portion of the large communal living-huts as re-
positories for their idols, so that these shut-off spaces
become, in a sense, sanctuaries. But mere store-rooms for
gods are not temples according to the meaning of the word
I am using in this chapter, that is to say, artificially con-
structed places of public worship; and to find these we have
to turn to more highly civilised folk, like certain of the
Polynesians who built truncated pyramids of stone as
platforms on which to conduct their religious rites, or like
the natives of Bali, who assembled for worship in a temple
consisting of three open courts that were bounded by low
walls.
The Maori of New Zealand afford a rather interesting
example here. They are as fully civilised as their ancestors,
the pyramid builders of Eastern Polynesia, and their religion
is in every respect as advanced as druidism. Thus their
notion of immortality closely resembled that of the ancient
Kelts; they believed in Io, a supreme being from whom all
things originated, and who seems to correspond, therefore,
with the druidic notion about Dis Pater; and they wor-
146
TEMPLES
147
shipped a similar system of tutelary and tribal gods. But
the Maori never erected anything in the form of a temple,¹
his places of worship were little clearings in the bush, gene-
rally in some secluded district, which were either left
unmarked, or distinguished by one or more unworked
standing-stones, or perhaps a wooden post. Occasionally
a small platform was set up to receive offerings, but there
was no other attempt to add impressiveness to the place by
ornament or building of any kind.
It cannot be maintained, therefore, that druidism was a
religion so developed that its priests must have worshipped
in temples made by hands. And it is a fact that there is
plenty of evidence to show that the druids were likewise
content with the opportunities afforded by nature, and that
the forests, especially the oak-groves, were the favourite
scene of their ritual. Lucan plainly said that groves were
their haunts, and in a famous passage he described a par-
ticular grove near Massilia. It was Pliny who added that
the druids preferred the oak-forests above all others.
2
3
Dion
Cassius tells of sacrifices and orgies in the grove of Andate
that followed the initial successes of the rebels under Boa-
dicea; 5 and Tacitus mentioned the woods of Anglesey
that were devoted to cruel superstitions.
8
6
Nor are there wanting tokens of the long survival of the
memory of the sacred grove. The expression fid-nemed
(sacred grove) occurs in the Senchus Mor, an ancient code
of Irish law; and in the 8th century Capitulatio de partibus
Saxonie a fine is threatened against those who still honour
fountains, trees, or groves. It is a small wonder, then, that
the scholiast on Lucan, and others down to Schedius in the
17th century, should have asserted unanimously that the
druids worshipped in groves; indeed, until Aubrey's time
(p. 8), it never occurred to anyone to suppose that they
worshipped elsewhere.
¹ Elsdon Best, The Maori, Wellington, N.Z., 1924, I, 2888.
2 P. 88, above.
3 Pharsalia, III, 399 ff.
4 P. 89, above.
' LXII, 7.
'Ancient Laws of Ireland, Dublin, 1865, I, 164.
P.
93, above.
• Cited by Holder, Altceltische Sprachschatz, II, 712, s.v. nemeton.
• Teubner Series, I, 451.
148
THE DRUIDS
On the other hand, we have to remember in this question
of temples that when the Kelts had been for some time
in contact with the Greek and Roman world, the religious
practices of those who were nearest to the new influence
would be profoundly affected. They would be introduced to
the grand temples built to the gods of the classical pantheon,
and it is natural that once they had learnt to build for
themselves, certain of them should desire to erect more
dignified places of worship, temples that would be recognised
as such by their neighbours. Thus, in the 3rd century B.C.,
the Boii, according to Livy,¹ had a temple in which the spoils
of war were stored; and the Insubres, so Polybius says,2
had a temple dedicated to Athena. I see no reason to
suppose that these temples were not built of stone and
according to the classical model; and I imagine that not
only in Italy, but in Gaul also were such holy places erected.
Cæsar, it is true, speaks simply of consecrated places in Gaul;
but Diodorus Siculus refers both to sacred places and to
temples, and Plutarch mentions the temple of the Arverni.ª
It is probable, however, that in Gaul the temples built of
stone were entirely a Roman innovation, and that, at the
outset, they were only erected by the pro-Roman tribes.
Nothing suggests that druidism, as a distinct native faith,
ever abandoned the groves for artificial places of worship;
in fact, I feel sure that the first building of these temples
was coincident with the collapse of organised druidism, and
that afterwards, its remaining adherents nursed their re-
sentment away from Roman eyes in the seclusion of their
ancient forest-haunts.
At any rate, archæology has afforded singularly little
evidence of artificial places of native worship that were not
built exactly on the Roman model. But there is one good
example that I have seen that I should like to mention.
In the little Altbach valley at Trier (Trèves), which lies just
across the railway line opposite the celebrated Kaiserther-
men, Professor Loeschcke has recently excavated an ancient
SV, 27.
1 XXIII, 24.
2 Hist., II, 32, 6.
• Cæsar, 26. Generally, on this subject, see Jacob Grimm,
Teutonic Mythology, London, 1880, I, ch. iv.

FIG. 27.-FOUNDATION OF CIRCULAR BUILDING BENEATH A RECTANGULAR TEMPLE TO
MERCURY, TRIER
TEMPLES
149
holy-ground on which lay the foundations of no less than
nine temples and chapels. One of these was a tiny square
building dedicated to Mercury, and under this was the cir-
cular floor (Fig. 27) of an older building, roughly about
16 feet in diameter; it was bounded by the foot of a sub-
stantial wall in which are sunk the sockets that held the
pillars of what must have been an imposing superstructure.¹
This is very reasonably assumed to be an example of the
native architecture of the Treveri ; 2 and since its circular
plan distinguishes it absolutely from the superimposed and
adjacent rectangular Roman buildings, it can be claimed
that this must be the indigenous temple-form translated
into stone.
Of course, Trier (which, like Autun, was a town founded
by Augustus) did not come into existence until 16 or 13
B.C.; and it is commonly held that until they were brought
down into the new city by the Romans, the natives dwelt
on the highlands on the opposite side of the Mosel, just as
the Gauls lived upon Mont Beuvray before they moved into
Augustodunum in the plain. And as the holy-ground, or
temple-area, in the Altbach valley is within the town walls
of Trier, there is an obvious probability that all the build-
ings on this site, being in the compass of the town, must date
from the time of the Roman occupation.
But it is not a certainty that the sacredness of the site
is of such recent date. For, although it is said that nothing
1 I have to thank Professor Loeschcke for the photo that I repro-
duce here, and also for much information about this site. The ex-
cavations are not yet complete, but the following publications have
appeared: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Arch. Inst., 1925, Anzeiger, 375;
Hannoverscher Kurier, 23 June, 1926, and 25 Nov., 1926; Leipziger
Illustrierte Zeitung, 4241, 24 June, 1926; and Loeschcke and Koehler,
Trier und Umgebung, p. 64. An illustrated guide is in preparation.
It is uncertain whether the Treveri were, strictly speaking,
Kelts, and some believe that they were a semi-German (Belgic) folk.
See Rice Holmes, Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul, 394.
A circular temple is, nevertheless, common in Roman architec-
ture, and it is supposed that the form was derived from a primitive
Italian hut. Professor Loeschcke tells me that two other circular
foundations have been found in the Altbach temple area, one 35 feet,
and the second 9 feet, in diameter.
150
THE DRUIDS
pre-Roman is found on the site of the town, and that before
the coming of the Romans the Treveri lived on the other
side of the river, it happens that a polished stone axe was
discovered in the temple-area itself. Its presence may,
of course, be due to accident; but, on the other hand, it
betokens the visits of early man to this spot, so that we
cannot altogether dismiss the notion that the place may
have been a pre-Roman religious centre. And this means
that there is a possibility that the little round temple, which
was doubtless erected after the first contact with the Romans,
represents an attempt to give Roman dignity to an accus-
tomed place of worship, an attempt, in fact, to erect an
artificial grove.
Perhaps the pillars, whose sockets still remain, stood in
place of the tree-trunks. It is a conjecture that is not
entirely fantastic, because there has recently been dis-
covered in England the foundations of a structure that I
cannot help believing must have been an artificial grove of
the days of druidism in Britain. At present the site has
not been completely excavated, and it is rash to begin
guessing before the work has been completed; but the place
is so interesting that I feel I must call attention to the
description already given by Mrs. Cunnington in the first
number of Antiquity. The site, which is close to Amesbury
in Wiltshire, has been given the name Woodhenge, because
the structure that once stood upon it seems to have been a
kind of wooden version of its famous neighbour Stonehenge.
It consists of a wide circular ditch enclosing an area of
about 250 feet in diameter, within which were six roughly
concentric rings of holes that once held wooden posts (or
tree-trunks, says Mrs. Cunnington) varying from one foot
to three feet in diameter. A wooden structure of this kind
can never have been expected to have had an immeasurably
long life, and therefore fails in the first requirement of
a memorial, so that I do not think it is likely that it was
erected to mark a grave-place; indeed, its appearance, if
we reconstruct it in our minds, is against such a supposition.
Of course, the ground upon which it stood may have been
the scene of occasional burials, the site may even have been
TEMPLES
151
hallowed by ancient tradition through the former existence
of a stone circle, barrow, or what not; but this will not
make me believe the wooden jungle itself was a funeral
monument, nor will any analogy that has so far been
adduced; and, that being so, I can think of no other
way to explain Woodhenge than as a druidic grove of the
La Tène period.
I am going to discuss megalithic monuments presently,
FIG. 28.-Diagram illustrating types of tenon-and-mortice lock employed
in classical building.
the so-called "Druids' Temples" and "Druids' Altars"
with which every one is familiar. But before I begin a list
of various antiquities that were certainly not places of
druidical worship, I must take this opportunity of stating
my conviction that there is one building that may very
fairly be called a temple of druidism, and that is Stonehenge
itself.
The place (Fig. 29), of course, had been a famous circle-
site ever since the beginning of the Bronze Age, the time
152
THE DRUIDS
when, I imagine, the temple began its existence as a rough
sarsen circle, or system of concentric circles, surrounded at
a distance by a ditch and a bank; that is to say, the time
when it was probably a humble version of the giant rings
at Avebury. But, during the Bronze Age, and not very
long after its erection, it was altered by the introduction of
an outer circle of about sixty foreign stones, chiefly dolerites
from the Prescelly mountains in Pembrokeshire.¹ As the
100 10
YARDS
FIG. 29. Stonehenge : diagram illustrating position of sockets of (?) earlier
circles.
eastern portion of these mountains, the source of the stone,
is a notable megalithic area, where the remains of stone
circles are still very numerous, it is clear that the laborious
transport of material from there to Stonehenge was a direct
contribution of part of the traditional sanctity of the Welsh
area; and so the Wiltshire site thenceforward became a
place of worship invested not only with tribal, but with
national, significance. Such significance it never lost; and
1 Antiquaries' Journal, III, 239.
TEMPLES
153
1
though the people who thronged its area changed, the sacred
character of the site remained a fixed point in the prehistoric
religion of the island. A surprising amount of British and
Romano-British pottery has been collected from the excava-
tions made within its compass,¹ and I do not think it is
possible to doubt the continued visits of people to the site
right up to the time of, and during, the Roman occupation;
thus, it is obvious that it must have been frequented by
those professing the druidic religion.
Now, if we consider the existing monument, leaving

FIG. 30.-Stonehenge: the inner temple restored (after Browne).
aside the antique foreign stones that have been included in
the plan as inner rings to the circle and horseshoe of trili-
thons, we cannot fail to observe that this grand structure
(Fig. 30) is about as different from an ordinary stone circle
as a modern mansion is different from a prehistoric beehive
hut. It is true that the construction of some of the larger
megalithic chambers represent engineering problems as
formidable as that successfully solved upon Salisbury Plain,
but nevertheless we have, in the present version of Stone-
henge, an architectural achievement that is completely
¹ See Colonel Hawley's reports of the recent excavations, Ant.
Journ., passim.
154
THE DRUIDS
beyond anything hitherto attempted in the ordinary
megalithic tradition; indeed, the only other structure that
was in the least like it, was a temple (Fig. 7) now destroyed,
on the Odilienberg in Alsace.¹ The spirit of the work is
different; the rugged and lumbering boulder-masses are
succeeded by a severe precision of outline; clumsy weight
is transformed into balanced stateliness; the area of the
enclosure is sacrificed to increase the height and dignity of
the pillars; a novel horseshoe plan was invented for the
central court. But apart from the careful dressing of the
stone, the builders employed a new device unknown in the
megalithic architecture of Europe; for the cross-pieces of
the trilithons are secured on to the uprights by means of a
peg-and-socket lock, a trick which I think they could only
have learnt at second-hand from those who had some know-
ledge of the temple-masonry of Greece and Rome. It is, in
principle, the ordinary classical method of assembling the
members of a column (Fig. 28), though at Stonehenge
the tenon is only a stone projection on the top of the up-
rights. The builders, of course, had not mastered the trick
of a double socket and a movable metal tenon, but the
shift they adopted is easy to understand, for it is clearly
an economy of labour in the special circumstances, since it
is far easier to carve out two stumps fairly close together on
a short length of stone, than it is to carve them at a greater
distance apart on the longer cross-pieces. And here I
think it is interesting to add that the temple on the Odilien-
berg (Fig. 7) stood in a remarkable temple-area, whose
major importance dates from the La Tène period, and which
happens to be the very area wherein, as I have said, a curious
Greek building-trick was detected (p. 62). I know that
stone and bronze implements were also found in the neigh-
bourhood, but this, I think, does not lessen the significance
of the fact that in both of the only monuments of this
kind in Europe, we find ourselves thinking of the influence
of classical building.
A "fool's bolt" is soon shot at Stonehenge; and usually
1 R. Forrer, Reallexikon, s.v. Odilienberg.
TEMPLES
155
misses its noble target! I very properly feel, therefore,
that in the face of the vast literature dealing with the age
of the monument, and the mass of modern expert opinion,
it is almost an impertinence to aim anew. But since
archæology, and also astronomy, have failed to provide any
significant information concerning the date of the erection
of the existing monument, I cannot help thinking we are
still at liberty to make the most of such considerations that
occur to us. I repeat, therefore, that the mortice and tenon
betray the indirect influence of classical architecture, and
bring the date of the monument down to the La Tène
period.
And here is another point. If Stonehenge was not a
temple of druidism, then it must have been a disused ruin
in the La Tène period when druidism was the religion of the
land. But does all the British and Romano-British pottery,
and the actual burial of a La Tène man within its area,¹
really suggest the visit of trippers to look at a ruin? I
think not. And I would ask what was the religion of this
La Tène man, this early Briton who was buried there, if it
was not druidism? And if it was druidism, is it not more
likely that a believer would be laid to rest in the temple-
precincts of his own faith than in the ruined sanctuary of a
forgotten religion ?
My view, then, is that the Kelticised population of Wessex
took advantage of the ancient national sanctity of the old
circle-site on Salisbury Plain to construct thereon a temple
for their faith that should serve as a rallying-point, and more
than that a stimulus, for druidism after the beginning of
the failure of the order in Gaul, that is to say, in the Ist
century B.C. And in the final effort to assert the national
faith in the face of the distant rumours of Roman aggres-
sion, the Britains tried to build for themselves, though
preserving the ancient circle- and grove-tradition, as grand
1
¹ Antiquaries' Journal, V, 31. It might be argued that there is
also mediæval, as well as British and Romano-British, material at
Stonehenge. But if I am asked whether the medieval folk were
worshippers or trippers, the answer is trippers. For, so far as I can
find out, the mediaval material is relatively negligible.
156
THE DRUIDS
a temple as those the refugee druids from Gaul had seen
erected by the Greeks and the Romans.
The so-called "Druids' Altars" and "Druids' Temples
of our islands are very primitive kinds of monuments,
being simply chambers, circles, alignments, and so forth,
built of massive blocks of stone, that are sometimes wholly
or partially" faced," but more often mere unhewn boulders.
The name rough stone monuments provides, on the whole,
a perfectly accurate description of these remains, and we
can think of them as displaying in a material of very large
slabs of stone the exceedingly simple kinds of architecture
we employ in building with a pack of cards. For, in essence,
megalithic construction is nothing more than the erection
either of lines of stones, or of stone boxes roofed by one or
more horizontal slabs. It is, of course, a fact that now and
again a wall of little stones, and sometimes even a cor-
belled roof of quite small slabs, may occur in a particular
structure, together with the large blocks; but it is, never-
theless, clear enough that the real and original megalithic
architecture of our area depends, as the name implies, upon
the use of enormous and massive stones as the building-
unit.
In these remarks I am naturally thinking principally of
the megalithic structures of the druid-area, that is to say,
the north-western corner of Europe. But it is very important
to remember that megalith-building is a custom of almost
world-wide distribution. In fact, the first and the most
obvious objection to the theory of the druidic origin of these
remains (a point which never seems to have entered anyone's
head until well on in the last century) is that similar temples
and altars occur in many countries where quite obviously
there never could have been any druids at all. We cannot
perhaps expect Stukeley and his followers to have been fully
acquainted with the actual distribution of these monuments
throughout the old world from Sweden to Japan, but it was
not very long after his day that their wide range was noted.
Quite apart, therefore, from questions of relative chron-
ology, and without emphasising the fact that some Asiatic
folk are still building such structures for humble and entirely
TEMPLES
157
non-druidic purposes of their own, it follows at once from
the mere fact of the distribution that the theory that our
own megalithic monuments were the work of the druids
posits an origin for the minority that could not possibly be
true for the majority.
I cannot find, however, that the early writers saw the
point of this objection, although one or two attempted
curiously unreasonable explanations of the existence of
megaliths in far distant lands. Thus, in 1805, Cambry
suggests that most of these monuments outside the druid-
area were simply imitations, by other races and made at
various times, of the temples set up by the druids; and he
tried to prove this by a study of comparative religions,
which he hoped would demonstrate that our northern
druidism was a system of tremendous and far-reaching
importance, a really extraordinary claim considering that
there is nowhere any direct evidence suggesting that the
druids had any considerable reputation outside of their own
little corner of Europe.
""
However, because megaliths in India and in the Pacific
and in Japan cannot be druidic, it does not result that ours
in England are not. It will be worth while, therefore, to
consider our own monuments in some detail; and to make
the enquiry simpler, I am going to treat first of the
altars" and to deal with the "temples" separately, or,
to put this in more exact language, for the moment I am
going to distinguish the stone chambers from the stone
circles. Of course, the popular terms altar and temple are
bestowed with considerable freedom, and most people may
think that they are more or less interchangeable; this is,
indeed, a fact, and I must hasten to admit that there are
many instances where a chamber, or the remains of one, is
surrounded by a stone circle, so that together they make
up a single monument. But I am going to include struc-
tures of this kind in the "altar" class, and all that my
distinction really means is that I am reserving my remarks
¹ Cambry, Monumens Celtiques, Paris, 1805, p. 271, and cf.
p. 281 (bottom).
158
THE DRUIDS
upon the stone circles without central chambers, that is to
say, circles that are monuments in themselves, and not
merely an adjunct to another structure, until I have finished
with the chamber group.
""
Although I daresay they may be sometimes called
temples," these chambers are as a general rule called
"altars" because they have the appearance, especially if
they are partly ruined, of being a primitive sort of table..
In reality they were little rooms, walled and roofed with
stone slabs, and I do not think anyone is likely to dispute
the statement that they were used as tombs,¹ and that many
of them are far, far, older than the druidic system of the
Early Britons or the Gauls in the form in which it was
known to Cæsar. I do not feel that there is any need for
me to prove their sepulchral nature, for no one who has any
knowledge at all of archæological record can possibly doubt
it. In North-Western Europe, to say nothing of other parts
of the world, literally hundreds of megalithic chambers have
been excavated, and in every instance where the contents
could be recovered they have turned out to be funeral
deposits of human bones or ashes with accompanying grave-
furniture. Naturally, when we say that all such chambers
were graves we depend on analogy, for, in our country
especially, many of them were despoiled of their contents
long before the archæologists came to investigate them;
but the analogy is one of overwhelming strength, and the
continental evidence is strong enough to permit us to cite
for every empty English chamber a score or more of similar
structures elsewhere that have been proved to be tombs.
There should not be any need to labour this point, but
I notice that some of the modern adherents to the druidic
theory of their origin seem to be quite unaware of archæo-
logical discovery in this respect, so that it may not be amiss
to give one or two instances of the nature of the finds
1 Probably there are one or two exceptions. For example, if
Mr. Hadrian Allcroft's theory is correct, as I am inclined to believe,
the peculiar "chamber" at Arradet in the mainland of Shetland is
simply the focus-point of the ceremonies (Bo@pós) in a Danish
"Ting." See Arch. Journ., LXXVIII, p. 352.
TEMPLES
159
made in these megalithic chambers. I have chosen my
first examples from the stone monuments of the Channel
Islands, because I happen to know this group of remains
best of all; but it would be perfectly easy to demonstrate
in any other district the sepulchral use of this kind of
structure. I think, however, that Le Trépied on the Catioroc,
a flat-topped hillock close to the northern coast-line of
Guernsey, is an excellent example of the so-called "Druids'
Altars" (Fig. 31), and it will serve to show the kind of archæo-
logical data that are available. But first of all I must point
out that this little monument provides another illustration
wherein the popular belief attached to a megalithic struc-
ture shows no recognition of druidic origin; for Le Trépied
has long been of great renown in the folklore of the island,
but only as a notorious meeting-place for Guernsey witches,

FIG. 31.-Le Trépied on the Catioroc, Guernsey.
their "sabbats" at this spot, according to local legend,
being sufficiently important to be attended by the Devil
himself; whereas there is nothing at all to be heard of the
druids until we come across the name Druids' Altar" on
a 19th-century map.
""
Le Trépied is a small, straight-sided chamber about
18 feet long (Fig. 32); it was excavated in 1840 after it had
been lying for centuries exposed and partly in ruins, and it
was not to be expected, therefore, that any undisturbed
deposits should be found therein; in fact, all that came to
light were some scraps of pottery, a few human bones, two
flint arrowheads and some flint flakes, distributed at random
in the earthen floor. There was nothing, then, to be learnt
from the manner of their arrangement as to their sepulchral
nature, and if we had no comparative material to help us
form an opinion it might perfectly well be supposed that
160
THE DRUIDS
these little bits of pottery, bone, and stone represented the
debris of some heathen sacrifice perhaps dating from druidic
times. But archæological studies are sufficiently advanced
to make us quite certain that in reality they were nothing
of the sort; for the potsherds are for the most part easily
recognisable fragments of vessels of a well-known ceramic
type called "beakers" that were a special and not very
long-lived pottery fashion in vogue right at the beginning
FEET
---
FIG. 32. Plan of Le Trépied on the Catioroc, Guernsey.
of the Metal Era, roughly about 2500 to 2000 B.C. And
the archaeologist knows that these beakers were usually
made to accompany funeral deposits, and on this point he
speaks with proper authority, for he is acquainted with
great numbers of them that have been found in single
graves, as well as the large series of them that has come
from bigger structures of the "altar" kind. There is an
example close at hand. Across the island of Guernsey in
the Vale parish, at the big passage-grave called Le Déhus,
(Fig. 33) we find the beakers again in company with remains
TEMPLES
161
that were not so seriously disturbed, and here is the account
of the excavation which was made in 1837.¹
""
After removing the superficial rubbish covering the
contents of the main chamber we arrived at an enormous
heap of limpet shells; after clearing away several bushels
of these shells, human bones were turned up. These were
unburnt and lay mixed with the shells. In the centre. .
two skeletons were found, one of an adult, the other of a
child; a third skeleton was found under the third (cap-)
stone. . . . On sinking a spade or two deeper through a
bed of nothing but limpet shells, human bones again ap-
peared in abundance, lying irregularly, some embedded in
limpet shells only, though some had a little mould around
تاريخ
FEET
FIG. 33.-Plan of Le Déhus, Guernsey (after Carey Curtis).
them." In this layer and accompanying the bones were
fragments of beakers and other vessels, "the whole resting
upon the alluvial soil of this part of the coast."
I think it would be rather difficult to argue that these
bones are simply the relics of often-repeated sacrifice, but
I will give another and more decisive example of the contents
of these great stone chambers, also from Guernsey. And I
want to mention this because it happens to be the very
monument that first suggested to Mr. F. C. Lukis, the
Guernsey archæologist who excavated it, that these struc-
tures were really sepulchres and not "altars," as he had
originally supposed. When he started his excavations as
a young man in the thirties of the last century, he was
¹ Lukis MSS., Guernsey.
II
162
THE DRUIDS
naturally impressed with the altar notion, for it was at that
time undisputed; but the examination of this and a few
other megalithic remains quickly changed his opinion and
led to the publication of a famous paper proclaiming the re-
discovery of their sepulchral nature.¹
The monument in question is known as La Varde, from
the hillock on which it stands, and it is a very fine example
of a bottle-shaped passage grave (Fig. 34), being about
40 feet long and still roofed by nearly all its capstones.

FECT
FIG. 34. Plan of passage-grave on La Varde, Guernsey.
He found that the contents were distributed in the following
order, starting from the top and working downwards :-
I
Black soil, 6 inches thick.
H
G
F
E
Loose white sand, 2 feet thick.
Compact brown sand, 2 to 3 feet thick.
Animal bones and stone rubbish.
Dark earth containing limpet shells, unburnt human
bones, pottery, stone implements, and burnt
animal bones.
1 Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., IV (1849), 323. Cf. Arch. Journ., I
(1844), 142 and 222, and Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., III (1848), 342.
TEMPLES
163
D
AU
C
B
Pavement of granite flags.
Yellow clay containing urns, burnt and unburnt
human bones, stone implements, and pebbles.
Pavement of granite flags.
A Natural earthen floor.
In the stratum C the human remains were very curiously
arranged. Most of the bones were grouped together in
small heaps, generally accompanied by an urn and sur-
rounded by a ring of smooth flat pebbles (Fig. 35); over
thirty such heaps were found in the eastern part of the
chamber alone, and there were traces of many others else-
where. This left no doubt in Mr. Lukis' mind that he had

FIG. 35.-Grave-group from passage-grave, La Varde, Guernsey.
found not the debris of sacrificial ceremonies, but formal
funeral deposits; and I do not see how anyone can suppose
him wrong. For in this instance, it must be remembered,
the structure is not one that could conceivably have served
as a table for sacrifices (although it has, of course, been
called a Druids' Altar), but is simply a very large subter-
ranean stone chamber that must have been built for the
reception of deposits in the interior, and not for exterior
ritual.
Before I leave the Channel Islands I must return to the
monument Le Déhus, because we find there, attached to the
larger chamber, four small cells built against its outer walls.
164
THE DRUIDS
In works on the druids I have seen all sorts of fanciful uses
ascribed to these side-chambers, so it may be worth while
to describe the excavation of one of them in order to show
that they are simply little supplementary tombs. For my
example I take the side-chamber D on the plan; it is a
small cell 4 feet 6 inches deep and just under 5 feet in width
and breadth; it was excavated carefully, and the following
is an abridged version of the original account of the pro-
ceedings. Passing first of all through a mixture of dry
LIMPET SHELLS AND EARTH
LIMPET SHELLS
LIMPET SHELLS
LIMPET SHELLS
GRAVEL BED
earth and limpet shells
to a depth of 2 feet,
several distinct heaps of
bones were found lying
on a pavement of flat
2'6 slabs of granite; under
this pavement were more
limpet shells and earth
covering a fresh series
of human bones placed
in heaps as in the layer
above. These rested on
a second pavement I foot
below the first. On
taking up these slabs
and digging lower it was
found that there was
another 2 feet of lim-
pet shells and earth
piled upon the original
gravel floor of the cham-
ber; on this floor in the
•
FIG. 36.-Section of contents, side-chamber
D, Le Déhus, Guernsey.
south-east corner was a skeleton buried in a crouching posi-
tion, and on the western side of the chamber was another.
At the base of one of the props on the north side there was a
pottery bowl resting in an inverted position on three narrow
pieces of stone placed in a triangular fashion and covering a
few fragments of bone (Fig. 36).
I cannot leave this subject without saying a word or two
about the English "altars." It is quite true that many of
TEMPLES
165
them, particularly some of the best known, have long ago
been rifled of their contents, so that we can only prove that
they were tombs by means of analogy; but, for all that,
there is plenty of direct evidence of the sepulchral nature of
this kind of monument in our own island. Take, for instance,
the chambers that were originally encased in those great
mounds called long barrows, for quite often these are fairly
simple cells (Fig. 37), and in the instances where the sur-
rounding tumulus have been partially levelled we are left
with splendid examples of the "altar" class of megalithic
remains. Twenty-eight of these chambered long barrows,
clustered in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and Somerset, were
10 20 30 FEET
FIG. 37.-Diagram illustrating arrangement of chambers and dummy portal in
a British long barrow.
examined in the middle of the last century by the cele-
brated antiquary Dr. Thurnam, and in his report he tells
us that while in the chambers of ten of them nothing at
all was found, as their contents had long since been dis-
persed, in all the other eighteen human bones were found,
in some the skeletons of as many as fifteen, twenty-five, or
even thirty individuals. I will just give one example, and
that is the Belas Knap long barrow in Gloucestershire, where
there are two small chambers, only about 6 feet square, set
one in either side of the mound. These contained respec-
tively fourteen and twelve human skeletons placed in a
squatting position against the walls, so that for whatever
purpose some people may suppose these cells to have been
used, we do at least know that they were once filled with
166
THE DRUIDS
corpses, filled so completely that at that period they could
not possibly have been anything else than burial-places.
I have no intention of wasting any further space upon
this matter, and my few instances, chosen at random, must
suffice for the hundreds and hundreds that are known;
indeed, I rather run the risk of weakening my case by giving
particular examples, so I must repeat that the sepulchral
usage of these stone chambers is a commonplace fact of
archæology that needs no debate at all. All I have tried to
do is to show the kind of evidence that, by being multiplied,
as can easily be done, enables us to be quite sure, when we

...
...
FIG. 38.-Kit's Coty House, near Maidstone, Kent.
are pointed out a ruined and free-standing stone chamber,
now called an "altar," that it was once a grave partly or
wholly covered in a funeral mound.
I ought, however, to say that in addition to the contents,
the morphology of the monuments also helps us to link
isolated ruins with the great group of acknowledged burial-
places. Thus the shape and character of the covering mound,
if it survives, often furnishes a sure indication; or struc-
tural details, such as the occasional window or porthole-
entrance, the curving revetment of dry-walling at the door-
way, may betray the makers just as plainly as a bone or a
TEMPLES
167
I
potsherd or a flint implement. There is a good example of
this use of form, where excavation itself can tell us nothing,
at Kit's Coty House in Kent. This, as I have said, has
been claimed for the druids as a temple-cell or what not,
and in its present state it certainly looks as though the
Coty had once been part of some box-like structure (Fig.
39). But, as a matter of fact, old plans of the site ¹ show
that the remaining stones of this supposed chamber once
stood at the head of a long mound, and their arrange-
ment makes it quite plain, as I think Mr. O. G. S. Craw-
ford was the first to point out, that they represent a
feature still to be observed in a few
of our west-country long barrows,
namely, a sort of dummy entrance
to the mound. This is a curious
architectural survival that was doubt-
less intended by the builders to sug-
gest the door of the principal gangway
into the mound; for this was an im-
portant element in the construction of
earlier kinds of long barrows wherein
the funeral chambers were made, not
as in these later instances just within
the sides of the tumulus, but in its very heart. Therefore,
if the archæological case is sound, and I do not think it
can seriously be contested, in Kit's Coty House the druids
are claiming for their temple-purposes what was originally
a mere external and functionless accessory of an ancient
funeral barrow of pretty much the same age as those
others of their "altars" that can be proved, as at Belas
Knap (where there was also a dummy entrance), to have
been the tombs of a pre-druidic folk.
FLET
FIG. 39.-Plan of Kit's
Coty House.
Even so, we have not disposed entirely of these "altars,"
and there are still two further, and perfectly legitimate,
questions to be considered. In the first place, it may be
urged that although these monuments may be the tombs of
¹ See Ordnance Survey, Professional Papers, N.S., 8, Pt. 2
(Sheet 12).
168
THE DRUIDS
an early prehistoric people, yet they may also have been
utilised subsequently as sacred places by the druids; and,
secondly, it may have been noticed that I have been careful
only to say that most of them are of high antiquity, so that
I shall naturally be asked whether all are really as old as I
have suggested. Might not some, in effect, be the tombs of
people of druidic days?
To the first query I cannot give any satisfactory answer.
I can only say that there is no evidence at all that the druids
cared for, or worshipped at, these graves. We do know that
some later people were interested in them; the Romans, for
example, seem actually to have excavated one or two of
these funeral piles, and now and then they even used the
chambers therein for the burial of their own dead. But
there is no recognisable sign that the druids performed any
ceremonies there.
Of course, the "altar " idea is sometimes encouraged by
the discovery of naturally produced cups and channels on
the top of the roof-stone that are supposed to have held the
blood of the wretched creatures sacrificed thereon, but these
do not merit any attention. On the other hand, as is well
known, we do also occasionally find artificially made cup-
marks and other queer symbols carved upon these stone
chambers. To my mind, however, these do not in any way
attest the druidic use of the tombs; for, first of all, the mark-
ings are nearly always on the walls and the underside of the
roof-stones, where they could not possibly have functioned
as a gutter or collecting-place for blood (at the moment I
can only think of two instances where cup-marks occur on
the top of the roof); and, secondly, it is obviously impossible
to prove the carvings are the work of the druids. What-
ever their purpose may have been, it is certain that markings
of the same kind were made over a very wide area, in-
cluding many non-druidic lands, at many different times,
while in our own area it is equally certain that some of
them date back to the earliest period of the building of
megaliths. Indeed, we know that the idea is older even than
this, for examples have been found in France that belong
to the Mousterian division of the palæolithic Cave Period.
TEMPLES
169
When we come to the second question concerning the
possible continued use of the megalithic chambers in the
days of the druids, I must readily admit that I do not believe
that all these great stone burial-places had altogether passed
from living memory by the time the druidic system was
established. It may be that they were thus forgotten in
certain regions, in Britain it is at the best doubtful, but in
France I think it may be taken for granted that many of
the tombs were still known and occasionally used right up
to the time of the Roman occupation. There is abundant
evidence of this in Brittany; in fact, I have found out for
myself that some of the Breton tombs contain such a medley
of the remains of all the different cultures succeeding that
of the original builders, that it seems obvious that the later
interments could not be due to a merely haphazard utilisation
of ancient burial-places (although they are thickly enough
distributed in the Morbihan to make this a reasonable
hypothesis), but to a deliberate prolongation of their exist-
ence as sacred and honourable graves. Indeed, I will admit
that in this region it seems to me that the very building of
these great chambers may have been continued until within
reach of druidic times, although in general much smaller
and humbler single graves superseded them as the centuries
passed.
1
The point very clearly affects the whole subject of the
connection of the druids with the rough stone monuments,
so I must show with rather more detail the kind of thing
I have in mind. As a beginning I may point out that in
Brittany there is so much pottery that is likely to be of
druidic date in the megalithic tombs, that it has been
seriously argued by M. Edouard Fourdrignier ¹ that some of
the structures must have been built during the Gaulish
period, and that it is only because taboos enforced what was
more or less a Stone Age ritual that we do not find in them
an abundance of iron implements and other datable furni-
ture of this advanced epoch. As a single example of the
many discoveries of this kind, I will cite a small handful of
1 Congrès Préhist. de France, Vannes, 1906, pp. 304 ff.
170
THE DRUIDS
pottery fragments, now in the British Museum, from a large
megalithic grave in the Mendon commune of the Morbihan.
These sherds represent at least three pots of a fabric with a
brilliant black surface produced by the application of graphite
or black lead, a ceramic fashion that certainly does not
belong to the early megalithic period two thousand years or
so before our era, but that dates from the first few centuries
before Christ.
I will next give an example of a rather different kind
from North-Eastern France. Near Breuil,¹ in the Seine-et-
Oise Département, there is a large rectangular stone chamber
over 40 feet long (Fig. 40) that was obviously built at an
early date and contained two layers of human bones sepa-
S←
N
14.
E
N
13
FIG. 40.-Plan of cist at Breuil, Mantes, Seine-et-Oise (after
A. de Mortillet).
rated by a stone pavement, the normal contents of these
cists in the Paris neighbourhood. But in the excavation of
this great tomb, it was found that lying upon the top layer
of bones there was a hearth of the Gaulish period containing
pottery fragments and a coin, and above this there was
another hearth in which were Roman potsherds and coins;
so that it seems to be quite clear that this particular struc-
ture was known to the common people right up to historic
times.
I must digress for a moment to point out that this cist
at Breuil had acquired the name of Autel des Druides,
apparently because a part of it, seemingly separated from
¹ L'Homme Préhistorique, Paris, 1911, p. 77, and cf. 1927, p. 49.
TEMPLES
171
the rest, occupied the centre of a circle about 30 feet in
diameter formed by a ring of lime trees. But although
archæology agrees in this instance that the druids may very
well have had knowledge of this structure, the excavators
observe that the circle of trees, that probably suggested the
name, cannot be more than a hundred years old, while it is
known that the structure was also called by the ancient and
more familiar popular names of the French megaliths whereby
they are connected in folklore with the fairies, that is Grotte,
Cave, or Maison, des Fées.
Not only were some megalithic structures retained in use
throughout the early Iron Age, but, as I have already said,
a few may even have been built in druid times. I find it
rather hard to give an example of this unmistakably late con-
struction in Northern Europe, but I will mention what I
myself think to be an instance of the sort that I know of in
the Channel Islands. This is La Hougue Boëte, in the north
of the island of Jersey, a magnificent earthen tumulus over
30 feet in height and probably originally about 100 feet in
diameter; it was excavated in 1911 and found to contain
a rectangular stone chamber, about 7 feet long and 4 feet
in height, that was closed on all sides and without any ap-
proaching passage from the outside of the mound. Within
this chamber were human bones, presumed to belong to a
single skeleton, horse teeth, and pottery fragments; and
judging by this accompanying pottery I feel certain that the
whole represents an interment of the Gaulish period just
about or before the time of the Roman occupation; and,
because the tomb is sealed, and admitted no approach for
secondary burial, I conclude that it was purposely built
for that one interment.¹
Brittany supplies also an example of the erection of a
megalithic monument at a late date, although it is not an
'altar" that I have in mind, but merely a standing-stone
1 ¹ Although it was in principle just a rectangular stone box, it
was really rather a complicated structure with double walls and other
unusual features. This, perhaps, accords with the date I have sug-
gested, but I ought, perhaps, to add that with the Gaulish pottery
were a few scraps of rough, badly fired, and very gritty ware.
172
THE DRUIDS
or menhir. This is La Blanche Pierre, near Guérande, in
the Loire-Inférieure,' an upright block of quartz over 6 feet
in height, at the foot of which rests a flat granite slab. I
will not describe the excavation under these stones in detail,
but it proved clearly enough that they belonged to two
different epochs; the recumbent slab, which had cup-
markings upon it, was evidently a relic of the ancient mega-
lithic period, but the quartz menhir (a most unusual material
for a monument in this granite district) was resting upon,
and steadied by, pieces of Roman brick, while in the ground
immediately behind it were many fragments of Roman tile;
on the other hand, under the slab there was nothing but the
dark earth and flint chips that are so well known under the
older megalithic remains. This is, I think, an undoubted
instance of the erection of a stone monument as late as the
time of the Roman occupation of Brittany, and, though I
should not like to have to guess for what purpose it was
set up, it lends force to my remarks upon the long survival
of this primitive style of architecture.
But even if this be granted it does not to any very great
extent invalidate our claim that the majority of the " altars
are the tombs of a much earlier civilisation than that of the
druids. For so far as these stone chambers are concerned,
it is only from France and the Channel Islands that we
produce this evidence of their prolonged use, and we are
without any grounds for supposing that the same state of
affairs obtained in England, Wales, or Ireland. Therefore,
it may be said generally of this whole class of megalithic
monuments in the druidic area that they undoubtedly re-
present the work of a pre-druidic folk; and as additional
warrant for such opinion we must take into account the
significant fact that we are able to point out the less pre-
tentious burial-places of the succeeding people,—the humbler
round barrows of the Bronze Age, for example, covering
little stone coffers or pit-graves for single interments, or the
crowded cemeteries of the Early Iron Age. It is clear
enough, then, that the Cæsarean druids are separated from
¹ Bull. Soc. Arch. de Nantes, T. 39 (1898), 1º sem., p. 46.
TEMPLES
173
the main period of the building of almost all the great tombs
by the duration of one, if not more, distinct civilisations,
wherein the erection of such tombs were no longer the
fashion, and wherein the druids, so far as we can tell, were
as yet unheard of; this is a gap that, even if represented
by the Bronze Age alone, must mean an hiatus of at
least a thousand years. All the evidence I have adduced
apparently running counter to this assertion shows nothing
more than that in one particular area of the druidic lands,
namely Northern France, many of these big tombs were
still known to the people in the druid period; and I repeat
that, even so, there is not a scrap of information to suggest
that these priests themselves were in any way connected
with their alleged "altars."
Although it has not been difficult to show that the altars
are really tombs, in most instances of a very early date,
one cannot adopt quite the same measure of assurance in
dealing with the temples, or stone circles.
Some of these, it is true, we can fairly dismiss as having
been originally the encircling rings of the tumuli covering
the stone burial-chambers, and, therefore, simple accessories
of these graves and of equal date. Small circles of this sort
are very common, and two plans (Fig. 41) of Devonshire
structures will show the kind of monument I have in mind.¹
When the covering stone of the cist remains, we are left with
what seems to be a table inside the circle; and this, of course,
immediately suggests druidic sacrifice to those who do not
take the trouble to find out that this central table was
really a little grave. One of the best examples of the bigger
stone circles that seem to have been of this nature stands on
Mynydd Carn Llecharth in the Gower peninsula of Wales,
a ring of stones 60 feet in diameter still surrounding a central
cist (Fig 42). The component stones of this circle are
1 Trans. Devon Assoc., 1917, XLIX, p. 79; 1921, LIII, p. 84. I
have to thank Mr. R. Hansford Worth for much information concern-
ing the Devonshire circles; both the plans reproduced here are sur-
veys made by him.
2 R. E. M. Wheeler, Prehistoric and Roman Wales, Oxford, 1925,
p. 105.
174
14
THE DRUIDS
།
2 3 4 5
7
-
9
SCALE OF FEET.
FIG. 41. Plan of stone circles, Burford Down and Erme Valley, Devon.
TEMPLES
175
flat slabs set upright; but in places they overlap one another,
and they are occasionally somewhat pressed outwards, as
though forced from the perpendicular by the weight of an
earthen mound, or a cairn of smaller stones, since dis-
FILO
Scale
20 FEET
FIG. 42.-Stone circle, Carn Llecharth, Gower (after W. LI. Morgan).
appeared, for which they must have acted as a retaining
wall.
The section (Fig. 43) of a barrow at Ford in Northum-
berland better demonstrates the original function of this
type of stone ring, and it will be seen how it is possible,
when through various accidents the grave itself and the
mound have vanished, that a stone boundary, or revet-
176
THE DRUIDS
ment, may finally appear as an independent and free-
standing circle. This is not so unlikely as it might at
first sight seem, because of the occasional custom (as in
FEET
FIG. 43.-Section of barrow, Ford, Northumberland.
this instance) of allowing the edge of the mound to overlap
the stones of the circle, so that they are actually hidden
from view and may escape notice when the stones of the
N
6
E
B
W
0
B
FIG. 44. Plan of barrow 55, Hanging Grimston, East Yorks
(after Mortimer).
chamber are taken, as so often happens, for building pur-
poses. As another example of this feature in barrow-building,
I give the plan (Fig. 44) of barrow 55 at Hanging Grimston,
in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where the circle, which
TEMPLES
177
enclosed eight interments, was completely covered over by
the mound.¹
In addition to those circles that were simply adjuncts of
funeral mounds, a good many that were not part of mound-
structures may also have been sepulchral in the sense that
they were the boundaries of an area containing a grave or
graves. They may be monuments, in a word, constructed
on a plan like that of the Wiltshire disc-barrows that consist
of a low earthen ring circumscribing an area in which an
interment has been placed (Fig. 45). There was once a
very good example of a transitional stage between the stone
circle and the earthen ring to be seen on Danby Rigg in
Eskdale, in the North Riding, though now only a single
2

""
FIG. 45.-A Wiltshire disc-barrow.
isolated stone, about 6 feet in height (of course, called a
Druid" stone) remains. Originally this monument was
a circular wall about 40 feet in diameter, and between 3 and
4 feet in height, built of earth and rubble, and incorporating
at least four large upright boulders such as are typical
of numbers of stone circles elsewhere; and in the centre
of the enclosed area were two pottery vases placed in an
inverted position over a burial after cremation. There are
scores of small funerary barrows of the Bronze Age in the
immediate neighbourhood, so that there is nothing sur-
prising in the fact that the two vessels (now in the British
Museum), just like the urns found in disc-barrows, are of a
1 J. R. Mortimer, Forty Years' Researches, London, 1905, p. 100.
For an example in another part of the country, see Trans. Cumberland
and Westmorland Ant. and Arch. Soc., N.S., I (1900-1901), p. 295.
Gents. Mag., May, 1861, p. 506; April, 1863, p. 440.
12
178
THE DRUIDS
late Bronze Age type known as cinerary urns; thus we are
in a position to prove that in this instance a single upright
boulder, now popularly dubbed a "Druid" stone, was
really part of a funeral ring built probably somewhere about
1000 B.C.
1
It is quite likely, therefore, that other stone circles may
be kindred monuments, especially the smaller rings. In the
same district, in fact, there is another stone circle ¹ with a
diameter of 21 feet in which fragments of urns were found,
and yet another 2 that seems to have enclosed a central
cist.
FIG. 46. Druidic victim awaiting sacrifice (after Knox).
But it is not only the small circles that may have func-
tioned as grave-boundaries. The Eskdale Moor circle in
Cumberland, an irregular oval about 100 feet across, en-
closes five distinct funeral barrows (Fig. 47), each with its
own protecting stone circle around its circumference; and
¹ At Cloughton, Newlands, near Scarborough. See Robert Knox,
Descriptions in Eastern Yorkshire, London, 1855, p. 160. According
to Knox, some mysterious clay objects, perhaps hand-bricks, were
also found in the area of this circle.
On Standing Stone Rigg, N.R., Yorks (Knox, ibid., p. 168). I
have to thank Mr. Frank Elgee of the Dorman Memorial Museum,
Middlesbrough, for calling my attention to these two circles.
3
³ Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., XXXIV (1878), p. 35.
TEMPLES
179
it is said that there were four other circles on the same moor
likewise enclosing tumuli. We have no means of declaring
the date of these barrows with certainty, for all that we are
told in the account of their excavation ¹ is that they covered
interments after cremation, accompanied by some animal
bones; but the analogy with the disc-barrow system of
13
N. 48°W.
89ft from centre of circle.
FIG. 47. Stone circle enclosing tumuli, Eskdale Moor, Cumberland.
burial is strong enough to suggest that we have here the
work of much the same period, that is to say, funeral monu-
ments well out of the reach of druid times. Another circle
in the same county, the Keswick Circle, seems to be a
similar funeral place, for within the stone ring, which was
1 Proc. Soc. Ant., London, 1st S., III, p. 225.
2 Journ. Brit. Arch. Assoc., XXXIV (1878), p. 33.
180
THE DRUIDS
about the same size as the big circle on Eskdale, there was a
rectangular enclosure of stones on the eastern side, and also
a shallow cup-shaped depression, 13 feet in diameter, that
was very likely the site of a barrow. The stone enclosure
may likewise have been the peristalith of a tumulus, and the
results of its excavation, though providing no definite in-
formation, are at least in accord with this supposition.
As another and very important instance of the same
kind of burial ring in this district, I may mention that both
Camden¹ and Dugdale vouch for the existence in their
day of two rubble tumuli within the area of that famous
circle near Penrith, which, with the adjacent menhir or
standing-stone, is known as Long Meg and Her Daughters.
Yet another good example is a funerary circle on Leacet
Hill, near Clifton, Westmorland. This was 37 feet in dia-
meter, and in its centre at a depth of 3 feet was found a mass
of charcoal interspersed with fragments of calcined bones
and burnt stone, presumably the remains of a pyre; and
in addition to this four pottery cinerary urns, a food-vessel,
and an incense-cup were found with cremated bones at the
bases of various stones of the circle.³
In Scotland there are abundant indications of the sepul-
chral nature of many of the stone circles, and, better still,
there is evidence of the date when they were set up. From
a wealth of examples I select three to show the kind of
archæological information that is available. The first is one
of a group of several similar monuments on Manchrie Moor,
in the Island of Arran, and is a little circle 21 feet in
diameter. In the centre was a stone cist 3 feet long that was
buried deep in the ground, and which was found to contain
¹ Britannia (Gough, 1806), III, p. 426. But note that Gibson,
in his edition (1772, II, 176), dismisses these as mere dumps of stones
from the arable land around.
2 Quoted by Aubrey, Monumenta Britannica MS., Pt. 1. Stuke-
ley seems to have noticed the sites of these cairns (Itinerarium
Curiosum, 1776, Cent. II, p. 47).
3
8 Trans. Cumberland and Westmorland Ant. and Art. Soc., V
(1880-81), p. 76.
J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times, Edinburgh, 1886;
Bronze and Stone Ages, p. 97.
TEMPLES
181
a Bronze Age food-vessel, some bone fragments, and a small
bronze awl. There was no sign that there had ever been a
cairn or mound piled up on the surface, either here or in
the other adjacent monuments, so that the circle was simply
the boundary of a grave-place and nothing else. The second
is at Tuack, near Kintore,¹ in Aberdeenshire; here there were
seven interments within the area of a circle 24 feet in dia-
meter. Four of these were simply deposits of incinerated
human bones in small pits arranged around the central
point of the circle, while the other three, placed near its
perimeter, were similar deposits covered by inverted cinerary
urns of Bronze Age, one of them including a small fragment
of bronze with the bones. The third example is at Crichie,'

FIG. 48.-Section of stone circle at Crichie, Aberdeenshire
(after Anderson).
in the same neighbourhood; here, within a broad encom-
passing ditch, was a stone circle 35 feet in diameter, and in
the centre of this, its position marked by an upright stone,
was a deep pit with a cist at the bottom (Fig. 48); the
cist contained an unburnt skeleton and also some calcined
bones under an inverted cinerary urn. At the base of a
second stone was a similar burial, and near this last was
a simple deposit of burnt bones; between the two was
found a polished stone axe-hammer of the Bronze Age.
Several other funeral deposits were discovered in different
parts of the circle.
There is no need for me to cite any other instances of
circles that were probably sepulchral, and we may take it
as established that many of these monuments may well be
Bronze Age burial-places. But while I am dealing with
2 Ibid., p. 104.
1 Anderson, loc. cit., p. 101.
182
THE DRUIDS
those of the circles that were evidently not built as temples,
I ought, perhaps, to mention yet a third possibility concern-
ing these rings; for in addition to being the surroundings
of funeral barrows, or funeral places in themselves, it is just
possible that some of them may be the ruins of the outer
walls of habitation sites. As an example of a circle incor-
porated in the structure of a dwelling-place, I reproduce a
plan (Fig. 49) of one of the Foales Arrishes huts 1 on Black-
slade Common in Devonshire; the ring forming the wall of
this hut is 30 feet in diameter, so that it is big enough to

& Nave fond Worth
1796.
PAVITRANCE
FIG. 49.-Plan of hut, Foales Arrishes, Devon.
make it quite likely that other circles of respectable size
may also have been features of domestic architecture.
But even if we keep these three possibilities in mind,
there remain a great many stone circles that I am quite sure
cannot be accounted for under any of these headings; and
their number and size compel us to accord them rather more
respect than was paid to those ransacked megalithic chambers
that yielded no clue as to their original purpose. For the
examples we have adduced of sepulchral and other circles
cannot be said to form a convincing analogy for all the
1 Trans. Devon. Assoc., XXIX (1897), and V.C.H., Devon, I, 354.
TEMPLES
183
monuments of the circle class; and this time, it must be
remembered, we cannot fall back upon that convincing mass
of continental evidence that encouraged us to assert that
all the chambers were burial-places.
The "Stripple Stones" on the Bodmin Moors in Corn-
wall form a circle of just over 146 feet in diameter, surrounded
by a vallum and a fosse, and having in the centre of the ring
a tall upright stone. But there is no evidence that any
burial was made within its area; and after a careful excava-
tion it was definitely decided that sepulture was not the
object of the circle.¹ And there are many other large
circles that, when examined, give similar results. Prob-
ably one of the earliest to be tested was the ring of the
famous Rollright Stones, that was searched in vain for
relics in the 17th century. Accordingly, we find ourselves
confronted with a series of stone rings, generally very big
ones, about which we have no positive information at all,
and we must now turn our attention to the very difficult
problem these unexplained circles present.
2
As to their date, there is little to be said, for it remains
one of the outstanding uncertainties of prehistory in Great
Britain. Nevertheless, there are a few hints that may
serve to guide our opinion; and, as a beginning, we may
note that one or two of these circles seem to be connected
with tumuli that, as a result of excavation, or by inference,
are believed to be of the Bronze Age. In Cornwall, for
example, the "Nine Maidens" of Boskeduan,3 in the Gulval
Parish, is a stone circle just under 70 feet in diameter,
whose circumference is interrupted by the edge of a cairn
containing a little stone cist, and the arrangement suggests
that the circle was built first. The cist had been rifled, but
when the cairn, which is exactly like the scores of other
Bronze Age cairns in the same county, was excavated,
fragments of a Bronze Age cinerary urn were found about
1 Archæologia, LXI, 24.
2 Plot, Nat. Hist., Oxfordshire, 1677, p. 338.
3 Lukis, Prehistoric Stone Monuments, Cornwall, London, 1885,
Pl. IV; for the excavation of the cairn, see Borlase, Nania Cornubiæ,
London, 1872, p. 281.
184
THE DRUIDS
4 feet away from the cist; so that all together there is a
strong probability that the circle is at least as old as the
Bronze Age. A better example is the circle at Arbor Low
in Derbyshire, where there is a tumulus, I think unmistak-
ably of the Bronze Age,¹ adjoining the outer face of the
surrounding vallum, and partly resting upon it. It is natural
to suppose that the circle, vallum, and fosse, were constructed
at a single operation, and if this be so, it follows that the
circle must have been built before or during the Bronze
Age; and this conclusion is confirmed by the discovery at
the bottom of the fosse of a tanged and barbed flint arrow-
head of a type now generally recognised as belonging to
that Age. Moreover, low down against the wall of the fosse
was found a second arrowhead of the earlier leaf-shaped
variety, so that it is indisputable that this ditch had already
been dug right at the very beginning of the Metal Era.
2
There is some general evidence, too, on this head. In
several instances where these circles of unknown age occur, it
is found that they tend to be associated with groups of tumuli;
and this suggests, though perhaps rather vaguely, that the
circles belong to the barrow-period. Since we cannot as
yet speak too confidently of the factors governing the dis-
tribution of prehistoric populations, I do not want to over-
emphasize this point; but I will mention one instance that
seems to me to be instructive. I have said that excavation
yielded no information as to the date of the well-known
Rollright circle; yet if we examine a map of the prehistoric
remains on the Cotswolds, we shall be struck by the fact
that this circle is set among a small group of barrows (the
Whispering Knights is a chamber of one of these) in a very
small and quite isolated area at the end of a chain of barrows
extending across Gloucestershire. We must ask ourselves,
therefore, whether it is not more likely that all the remains
1 The barrow was excavated by Bateman; it covered a cist
containing cremated bones, bone pins, pyrites and flint, and two
pottery vessels now in the Sheffield Museum. For an illustration of
these last, see Bateman, Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire,
London, 1848, p. 64; and (better) Archæologia, LVIII, 467.
2 Ibid., 471.
TEMPLES
185

N
100
5570
He d'Er Lanic
(Morbihan).
Metres
GOLFE
DU
MORBIHAN
FIG. 50.-Plan of stone circles, Île d'Er Lanic, Brittany.
186
THE DRUIDS
in this tiny stretch of land, less than half a mile in length,
are the work of one civilisation at more or less the same time,
than that druidic circle-builders, many centuries later, should
happen to choose out this particular little piece of ground.
Such general argument as to the date of the big circles
does not, I know, amount to very much, though it deserves
mention because of its possible cumulative value. Unfor-
tunately, there is not very much left for me to add in the
way of precise archæological information. We know some-
thing, however, about the age of Avebury, the largest and
the grandest circle in Britain; but the value of the evidence
depends on what is, after all, the perfectly natural assump-
tion that the giant stone circle is as old as the great fosse
surrounding it. This ditch was originally as much as
30 feet deep, and when it was excavated ¹ it was found that
the filling contained here and there, in descending order,
mediæval, Romano-British, and Bronze Age pottery (in-
cluding beaker fragments) and the so-called Neolithic ware;
the beaker and neolithic sherds occurred for the most part
about half-way down in the accumulated silting, a circum-
stance very definitely suggesting that this circle, like Arbor
Low, must be at least as old as the early Bronze Age.
There are several circles in Gaul that I ought to mention
because of the information that is available about their
chronology, but I shall content myself with a brief reference
to a single and very interesting instance. This is the circle
on the tiny Île d'Er Lanic in the Morbihan Gulf (Fig. 50);
it is quite large, being about 180 feet in diameter, and was
originally one of a pair of circles, but the second, as well
as half of the first, is now submerged. The extraordinary
thing about it is that its area, or rather the half of its area,
that now remains on dry land, instead of being barren like
our English circles, was crowded with a pell-mell mass of
archæological material. Pots, axes, hammer-stones, flints,
and even great stone hand-mills, had been piled upon the
site; and most of them, including the toughest of the axes,
had been ritually broken, while a great many pieces of these
1 See St. G. Gray, Brit. Assoc. Reports, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1922;
especially 1909, p. 283; 1911, p. 150; 1922, p. 330.
TEMPLES
187
8m
3m
11m

FIG. 51.-Stone circles surrounding burials of the Early Iron Age, Burgundy
and Pyrenees (after Déchelette).
188
THE DRUIDS
smashed stones and pots showed signs of burning as well.
Although there were few human remains, my own belief is
that all this debris represents funeral rites after the crema-
tion of the dead; but that is not the immediately important
point, for what I want to observe is that the finds made it
quite clear that the period when the circle was in use was
the beginning of the Bronze Age. No doubt it may have
remained in use for a good many centuries, but there is no
certain evidence of Iron Age occupation,¹ and none what-
ever of visits from Gallo-Roman folk.2 The circle on Er
Lanic, therefore, was not a druidic temple.
The building of stone circles was, however, common in
Gaul in Hallstatt times; but such Iron Age circles were
nearly all the appanage of places of burial. Of this kind
are the exceedingly numerous rings surrounding Hallstatt
graves in southern and central France (Fig. 51); but in
Britain I do not think that I know any circle that can be
proved to be of so late a date. And, even when we have
made allowance for the Hallstatt burial-circles of France,
the general probability is plainly that the bulk of the stone
circles in the druid area were erected many hundreds of
years before the druids themselves were heard of. But this
does not by any means dispose of the subject, and we must
not suggest without further reflection that these priests had
nothing whatever to do with their so-called temples.
First as to function. We have said that some circles
may be burial-places, but we have not been able to claim
that all the larger circles were so employed; indeed, it
seems reasonably certain that they were not. Arbor Low,
it is true, contained a central interment in a ruined cist or
dolmen; 3 but in the "Stripple Stones" there was only a
¹ A few of the sherds would probably be dated as Hallstatt in
England, but in Brittany I think it is more likely that they belong
to the Bronze Age.
* In all this bulk of material the only intruder that is later than
the Bronze Age is a single sherd of about the 4th-5th century A.D.
This, with a very interesting series from the circle, is now in the
British Museum.
It is usually dismissed, I admit it seems to me without ade-
quate reason, as a secondary burial. See Archæologia, LVIII, 481.
TEMPLES
189
single upright stone in the centre without any trace of a
burial beneath or near it, and the excavators were con-
vinced that sepulture was not the object of the circle. The
Rollright circle was searched in vain for funeral remains, no
interments have been found in the Avebury rings, and the
same is true of many other of the principal British circles.
We have to ask ourselves, therefore, whether it is not possible
that in spite of their great antiquity some of these circles
may have survived as places of druidic worship.
Two modern views seem to run counter to this. For it
has been argued, first of all, that the circles were Keltic
folk-moots, that is, ceremonial places of debate, and,
secondly, that they were observatory posts for determining
by the movements of heavenly bodies the more important
dates in the year's cycle. On general grounds, I think both
these views are reasonable; modern primitive man cer-
tainly uses stone circles for solemn conference, so that
there is nothing unlikely in the supposition that some of the
ancient circles were so employed. Again, the obvious im-
portance of the turn of the seasons to an agricultural people
makes it quite possible that exceedingly elaborate measures
should be taken to ascertain the exact time of the solstices
and so forth, such as arranging stone circles as the foci of
sight-lines. But neither of these views, as we have surely
seen, admit of universal application, and they are commonly
pressed to absurdity. The folk-moot theory, for instance,
¹I once made a survey of the megalithic monuments in the
Channel Islands, and I was told that, whether I believed or not all
the remains represented observatories, I ought at least to provide
adequate data concerning their celestial orientation. Accordingly
I received instruction in method, and equipped myself with the neces-
sary instruments. Nothing could have been more auspicious than
my beginnings, but presently doubts arose. One magnificent obser-
vatory, perched on a headland, had a duplicate, set in low shelving
ground surrounded by hills, that miserably failed to observe anything;
and presently I came to another set absolutely at the foot of a hill
and observing directly into the hillside. After this I contented myself
with recording the usual vague orientation to which the archeologist
is well accustomed. These Channel Island monuments, I ought to
say, were not circles; however, I have also tried my luck in one
190
THE DRUIDS
cannot be applied to a big circle like that at Keswick, whose
area contained several tumuli; nor is it easy to believe that
this same circle was an observatory.
And on this last score,
I would observe that there is no ethnographical warrant
that primitive man of the culture-level represented by the
circles was capable of elaborate astronomical measurements
of this kind; and this seems to me to be an objection of
some force against the supposition that the circles provided
an accurate record of the movements of celestial bodies, in
as much as I have not yet found any other operation of
primitive man in Europe that is not also a practice of his
modern representatives. But as a more pertinent comment,
I shall merely repeat Dr. Mortimer Wheeler's opinion ¹ that
no Welsh circle is adapted precisely for any convincing
astronomical observation.
I do not intend to discuss these theories, even though
there may be a modicum of truth in both, for I do not
believe that they can explain all the stone circles; and my
present purpose is simply to see whether the druids can
have had anything to do with them.
I remarked in the first chapter of this book that there
was no ground for supposing that the country-people were
exerting, either consciously or unconsciously, their folk-
memory, when they called the stone circles Druids' Temples ;
there was, we saw, another and a better explanation why
this name appears so frequently. But though folk-memory
be set aside, it is not fair to ignore any isolated instances
of legend that bear expressly upon this subject of the con-
nection between druids and stone circles, and I must now
say a word upon that aspect of the problem.
There is, as might be expected, very little material worth
considering. The most important story that I can think of
is to be found in the Tripartite Life of St. Patrick, which is
thought to be a 9th century compilation preserved in an
2
or two English circles, and I am equally impressed by the superb
ease in finding celestial orientations, and the immense difficulty in
crediting primitive man with having created them intentionally.
¹ Prehistoric and Roman Wales, p. 106.
2
* Whitley Stokes, Trip. Life, London, 1887, p. 91.
TEMPLES
191
11th century MS.; and it concerns an event said to have
taken place about A.D. 435, when the Saint arrived in the
Plain of Slecht, near the modern Ballymagauran, in County
Cavan.¹ It was the place in which stood the chief idol of
Ireland, known as Cromm Cruaich, something, whatever it
was, that was richly adorned with gold and silver, and
around which stood twelve other idols covered with bronze
ornaments. These smaller idols in a ring, and Cromm
Cruaich in the centre, suggest that, stripped of their metal
adornments, this Irish holy of holies was subsequently
thought to have been nothing other than a stone circle
with a central monolith, of the same type as the Stripple
Stones" in Cornwall. In early medieval times, therefore,
this circle-site was described as a scene of pagan worship;
and, according to the legend, it was the scene of a mighty
conflict between the Saint and heathendom; for, on his
arrival, Patrick threatened the main idol so effectively that
it was permanently branded with the mark of his stave,
and at the same time he caused the twelve lesser idols to be
swallowed up in the earth as far as their heads, in which
position they remained ever afterwards as a token of the
miracle.
""
The Reverend Dr. Healy thought the actual boulders
could be recognised at Edentinny, between Fenagh and
Ballinamore; 2 but whether this identification be right or
wrong, I think it can hardly be doubted that the story of
the ring of idols whose heads alone were showing is an
ætiological myth to account for an ordinary stone circle.
And it is clear, therefore, that in the 9th century it was
believed by some that these remains were connected with
pagan worship, and, moreover, with the magicians or druids,
who were the chief opponents of Patrick's mission.
This is the only instance I know where there seems to be
any legendary contact between the druids and the stone
circles, and I do not want to lay undue emphasis upon it,
¹ See J. P. Dalton in Proc. R. Irish Acad., XXXVI (1921-24),
C. 23.
Healy, Life and Writings of St. Patrick, Dublin, 1905, p. 184.
192
THE DRUIDS
because, of course, it may have been completely an inven-
tion on the part of the compiler of the Life. But I would
point out that it is not only in Ireland that there is some
evidence of a tradition of former worship at these places.
Professor Garden of Aberdeen, who made, in 1692, a study
of the famous and peculiar group of circles in his neighbour-
hood, reported ¹ that the general tradition throughout Scot-
land concerning such monuments was that they were temples
for worship and sacrifice in heathen times. He adds,
however, that he cannot trace any connection with druidical
worship, unless (he adds) the name of the priests survived
in two place-names that he cites; but we cannot rule out the
possibility that the worship remembered in the tradition was
Keltic worship, and so was administered by the druids.
And it is worth noting that these same circles, with their
principal peculiarity accurately described, are attributed by
Hector Boece in 1526-27 to a legendary pre-Roman king
called Mainus, who built them in order that the worship of
the gods might be stimulated by the performance of new
ceremonies in new places; so that a druidic connection does
seem to be inferred. I am not prepared to debate whether
this last story is or is not a wholesale invention of the
ingenious 16th century scholar, but it is at least in Boece's
favour that he seems to have had an intimate knowledge
of the monuments themselves.
So far as this enquiry has gone, it has been shown that
the temples of the druids were natural groves, except in
the occasional instances where either a lack of an adequate
natural site, or the gradual influence of Roman civilisation,
prompted them to translate the groves into buildings.
Stonehenge has been named as the most notable example
of their achievements as temple-architects, but I do not
know that there is any reason to suppose that the druids
ever built a stone circle of the ordinary kind. In fact, so
far as megaliths are in question, the position is that the
so-called altars are really tombs, nearly all the work of a
1 Archæologia, I, 339.
xvi.
Hector Boethius, Scotorum Historia, Paris, 1526, Lib. II, fol.
TEMPLES
193
much earlier civilisation; while some of the stone circles,
or temples, were also burial-places of the same people, or
structures seemingly erected by them for purposes now
unknown to us.
Notwithstanding, we have seen that it is almost certain
that some of the megalithic graves and some of the circles
were known to the druids because of their continued use by
the native population right into the Iron Age. And if that
is so, there is a reasonable chance that the druids them-
selves may have appropriated certain circles for their own
ceremonies. This, I think, is the utmost that can be said
in support of the popular notion about our megalithic remains.
I shall not, however, discuss the significance of this conclu-
sion here, for it will be better understood in the course of
the next and last chapter.
13
A
CHAPTER VI
ORIGIN
CONSIDERABLE preparation, five chapters long,
has fitted us for the final enquiry as to the origin
of the druids and of druidism. But though we
are packed for the journey, I confess I am tempted to delay
the start. For, to begin with, it is clear that we are dis-
cussing a very elusive substance, and are not likely to
make much headway unless we define our objective with
some precision.
Many centuries of antiquarian interest and popular
renown have invested the word druidism with an undeserved
significance, and it is important to remember that in reality
it denotes a very ordinary primitive faith, and not one that
is remarkable either for an advanced philosophy or an un-
usual theology. Indeed, it is plain, as M. Camille Jullian
has observed,¹ that if it were not for the chance that its
priests had a special name, the prestige of their religion
would be sensibly diminished, and (I would add) a whole
library of books discussing its origin would never have been
written. For if the classical authors had referred to priests
only, and if druidism had escaped its present renown, I can-
not see that it would be possible to imagine anything else than
that these priests represented a purely Keltic organisation
developed principally by the Gaelic, British, and perhaps
Italian Kelts after the period of their wanderings. Re-
read, for instance, Cæsar's testimony, substituting the word
priest for druid, and consider whether it is conceivable that
the all-powerful caste he describes, dominant spiritually and
1 Histoire de la Gaule (5me ed., 1924), p. 87.
194
ORIGIN
195
politically, could have consisted of any but the Kelts them-
selves. And as for the opinion that their religion was
derived from Britain, would it not be assumed that their
faith had both naturally and intentionally come to include
so much of the autochthonous religious tradition, that ulti-
mately its origin was obscured, and was attributed to a
region where that native faith was known to persist in its
least altered state?
For my part, I want to make it clear that when I talk of
the origin of druidism I divest the word of all its later signi-
ficance, and refer to the only expression of early druidism
of which we have any definite knowledge, that is the clergy
and faith of the Gauls in the 1st century B.C. Accordingly,
druidism in Britain and Ireland must be explained incident-
ally in the terms of whatever solution we arrive at for the
main problem; and I defend this attitude on the grounds
that in these last countries druidism is too nebulous and
uncertain a thing to allow a reasonable basis for discussion.
The kernel of the matter is this. How can we reconcile
the ascendancy of this priesthood and the religion among
the ruling Keltic-speaking folk in Gaul with the belief,
mentioned by Cæsar, that it originated in a country into
which the Kelts only penetrated after their arrival in Gaul?
Normally, one expects to trace a religion back to the ancient
home of its devotees; but, here, it is said to have originated
in a remote outpost of the Keltic world.
Let us deal with the reported origin first. Cæsar said
of druidism that its discipline, by which he meant either its
doctrine or its constitution, or both,¹ is believed to have
been discovered in Britain and imported thence into Gaul.
What he recorded, then, was not a statement of fact, but an
opinion; yet it was far from being an idle guess, because it
was added that those who wanted to study its principles
closely went to Britain for instruction.
1 The context suggests Cæsar referred to druidic organisation,
but I think he meant doctrine. Druidism was well organised in
Gaul, and there would be little need for British instruction. And
surely the one thing of which Cæsar might ask the origin would be
the druidic doctrine of immortality.
196
THE DRUIDS
I do not think that the subsequent remark of Pliny ¹ has
any bearing here. Magic, he said (and by magic he meant
druidism in this instance) was practised in Gaul and had
penetrated even to so remote a spot as Britain, where it was
invested with such august ceremonies that one might almost
suppose that it was from this far-off isle that the cult had
spread to the Persians. This means simply that Pliny, who
was generalising on the subject of magic, wished to point
out that a form of it, well known in Gaul, also flourished to
an extraordinary degree in Britain; but he no more suggests
as his considered opinion that British magic was derived
from Gaul, than he seriously asserts that there were direct
relations between Persia and Britain. The passage, there-
fore, in no wise detracts from the significance of the opinion
recorded by Cæsar.2
The implications of this are important. Obviously, in
order that druidism should have this reputation of a British
origin, it must have been established in Britain for a long
time before Cæsar wrote. But the Gallic druids were
already known to the outside world by about 200 B.C.;
in all probability, therefore, they were established in Gaul
for a century or so before that date, and British druidism
(but not British druids) accordingly must be of an even
higher antiquity. That is to say, if we accept the statement
of Cæsar's informant as an expression of a genuine belief, it
is difficult to resist the conclusion that at the beginning of
the La Tène period, at the time of the first Keltic traffic
with England, there existed in our country some novel
religious element that after the Keltic invasion was grafted
upon Keltic faith and spread throughout Gaul, giving rise
to what thenceforward was termed druidism.
Is it possible, however, to name this British element
in druidism? Was it the priesthood itself, or was it druidic
theology or dogma?
¹ N.H., XXX, 1, 4 (p. 90, above); the phrase ut dedisse Persis
videri posse might be turned so as to suggest the possibility that
Britain had learnt its magic directly from the Persians; but I cannot
accept this reading.
2 The best destructive criticism of this passage in Cæsar is by
Mr. W. F. Tamblyn, American Historical Review, XV (1909-10), p. 23.
ORIGIN
197
Prima facie it is not likely to have been the first, for
when we remember how thoroughly this clergy dominated
life in Gaul in every one of its most important aspects, it
seems inconceivable that such a complete reorganisation of
Keltic religion, involving the absolute subjugation of the
Kelts beneath the priestly caste, should have been achieved
by the priests of the defeated natives in an outlying and
lately conquered province. We might, of course, pretend
that the Kelts had no priests, and so impressed a few of
them into their service, whereupon these opportunists event-
ually founded a Keltic corporation of druids. But this
would be a very unsatisfactory explanation, if there were
nothing else to be adduced in favour of the notion that the
druidic priesthood was a British innovation.
There is, as a matter of fact, something more to be said;
because it is sometimes argued that priests of the druidic
type are not characteristic of the indogermanic folk, and so
could not have been originally Keltic. On this view, the
Kelts, like the Greeks and the Latins of old, and the Germans,
were ruled by kings and princes invested with a spiritual
as well as a temporal authority, and who performed the
ordinary functions of the priest such as sacrifice and com-
munion with the gods. If one believes that the Kelts did
not differ in any remarkable way from the indogermanic
neighbours, especially those on much the same cultural
level, it would follow that in this early period of their
expansion they did not have an organised clergy, and thus
the druids as a priesthood would be of non-Keltic origin.
Keltic legend in Ireland certainly reflects an ancient belief
in the divinity of kings, so that there is justification for the
notion that when the Kelts reached Ireland their religious
affairs were managed by their chieftains. And here we are
appositely reminded that Brennus, the leader of the Kelts
who sacked Delphi, had no priests nor augurs with his band.¹
1 Pausanias, X, 21, I. If the passage really does imply this.
The historian records that the over-confident and vain-glorious
chieftain had no Greek soothsayers with him and consulted no
sacrificial omens; and he goes on to express a doubt whether the
Kelts knew the art of divination. That is to say, the statement is to
198
THE DRUIDS
But none the less, we must not accept without further
questioning the implication that the druids themselves were
originally strangers who intruded into Keltic life and usurped
the priestly functions of the Keltic kings. It is, I am sure,
an overstatement to say that because the Kelts belonged
to the indogermanic linguistic family, they were therefore
unlikely to have had priests of their own. After all, the
notion of the divine king represents only one stage in moral
evolution, and there must have been a tendency, even at
that early period, to distribute between kings and others
the temporal and spiritual functions that had hitherto de-
volved upon the king alone, and so to pass into the stage
in which the conduct of religious affairs is entrusted to those
who were purely and simply priests. Indeed, the transition
was in operation: the Latins, for example, had priests;
and the Germans, who had no clergy when Cæsar wrote,
are credited with priests by Tacitus. And as for the general
contention that a powerful and complicated priesthood is
foreign to indogermanic temperament, here are the Kelts
with their druids; and in India, there are the Hindoos with
their Brahmans.
It seems impossible, then, to name a period before which
the Kelts could not have had priests, even though we admit,
as I readily do, that a Keltic divine king preceded in point
of time the Keltic priest pure and simple.
And let us consider another point. If the Kelts stole
the idea of their priesthood from Britain, ought we not to
find therein some evidence of the existence of a clergy as
famous as that in Gaul? It is strange that the next con-
querors of our island, when they crossed the channel, seem
to have been unimpressed, even though Keltic authority
(according to this theory) had by that time been added to
the native sacerdotal class. In fact, all the Romans troubled
to record was that there were some wild creatures called
the effect that Brennus was too arrogant to use soothsayers; and the
significance of even this much is diminished by the next remark,
which shows that the writer knew nothing at all about Keltic religion.
The point, therefore, is, if Brennus had had druids with him, would
the Greek historian have been thus ignorant ?
ORIGIN
199
druids once seen exciting the defenders of Anglesey to a
final resistance.¹ And nothing more is said of them, not
even at the time of the rebellion; indeed, Boadicea seems
to have conducted sacrifices herself without the aid of
priests.
On the other hand, it is conceivable that a pre-Keltic
priesthood of the requisite authority existed in Ireland.
Legend, on the whole, presents the Irish druids as a less
highly organised class than the druids of Gaul, lacking, it
seems, a single arch-druid at their head; and it presents
them rather as potent magicians than priests of the altar.
But I am alive to the possibility that legend, winnowed by
disapproving Christianity, may have left us with a very
imperfect residue of fact. Therefore I will only say that
we have no knowledge that suggests the Irish priests as the
society upon which was modelled the powerful Gallic clergy.
Instead, the evidence hints the other way; for surely it is
significant that the druids of Ireland were servants of the
primitive Keltic festival-system in its central European
form. This last is a point that goes to the very heart of
the problem, for I think it well-nigh incredible that if these
Irish druids were pre-Keltic, they should have been at once
strong enough to impose themselves and their organisation
upon their conquerors, and yet so feeble that they accepted
for their principal ceremonies the two antique Keltic festi-
vals of the old pastoral year.
But here Dr. Julius Pokorny intervenes with his argu-
ment of the oak.2 The cult of this tree, he observes, is
well attested as a general element of indogermanic religion,
and the Gallic druids were known to be its priests. There-
fore, if the Kelts already had druids when they crossed to
the British Isles, they would certainly have brought the
oak-cult with them, for there are plenty of oaks to worship
in that country. But, strange though it may seem, the oak
1 See p. 91.
P. 44.
2 Mitteilungen der anthrop. gesell. in Wien, XXXVIII (1908),
This justly famous paper by Pokorny has been translated
into English, Ann. Report, Smithsonian Institution, 1910, p. 83, and
Celtic Review, V (1908-09), p. 1.
200
THE DRUIDS
is rarely mentioned in the rich literature of early Ireland,
no superstitions are connected with the oak, nor were the
druids ever associated with it; instead, their sacred tree
was the mountain ash. There was no oak-worship, there-
fore, in Ireland, says Dr. Pokorny, and this can only be
explained by the assumption that the druids in Ireland were
originally priests of a people who did not know the oak-
cult. That is to say, the Gallic druids were oak-worshippers
merely because the Gauls among whom they lived were less
under the influence of the pre-Keltic inhabitants of the
British Isles than the conquerors of Britain and Ireland,
and therefore preserved together with the new druidic
doctrine this custom of their indogermanic ancestors. And
if the druids were once the priests of a people that did not
know the oak-cult, and the Kelts were oak-worshippers, as
it is certain they were, then it follows that the druids cannot
have been in the beginning a Keltic priesthood.
In archæology it is seldom that we can prove a point
with argument so slick and simple as this, and it becomes us
to be suspicious. But I myself have no new criticism to
add to those that have already been made. For Dr. Much,
in discussing Dr. Pokorny's paper, immediately remarked ¹
that the absence of signs of oak-worship in a particular
country was not an infallible proof of the former absence of
the cult, because this absence might result easily from the loss
of the oak's sacred character due to the plentifulness of the
tree, on the principle, that is, that familiarity breeds contempt.
And Dr. Goldman went further 2 and denied the premises,
saying that there were, after all, some signs of the oak-cult
in Ireland, such as the oak of St. Brigit, and the "churches
of the oak" that may stand on the site of an earlier sacred
grove. While as for England, I am tempted to ask, are
not the boughs of oak strewn over the oaken coffin in the
Bronze Age burial at Gristhorpe also admissible as signs of
a special, and here pre-Keltic, reverence for the tree? And,
finally, that most formidable of critics, Dr. Rice Holmes,
completed the attack by remarking that the conclusion is
1 Mitt. anthr., Wien, XXXVIII (1908), p. 46.
2 Ibid., p. 47.
3
P. 124, above.
• Cæsar's Conquest of Gaul, Oxford, 1911, p. 524, n. 2.
ORIGIN
201
unsound, even supposing the facts were correct; for the
most that can be proved from them is that the Keltic in-
vaders of Ireland, who undoubtedly were oak-worshippers,
were unable or unwilling to impose oak-worship upon the
Irish aborigines.
Another point sometimes made is that if the druids were
Keltic priests, then there should be druids wherever there
were Kelts, instead of in one corner only of the Keltic world.
I am prepared to grant that it is virtually certain that
some of the Kelts did not have druids, even though some
writers have contested this. In my view, Cæsar's con-
sidered statement on druidism is a sufficient authority for
the common belief that the druids were confined to Gaul
and the British Isles; for if Cæsar knew that there were
druids in Cisalpine Gaul, where they would be already well
known to the Romans, he would surely have omitted or
reduced his own circumstantial account of them, because
this seems to me to be intended for readers who knew
nothing at all about the druids. Moreover, if there were
druids in Italy and the Danube valley and in Spain, there
would be several sources of information about these priests,
and not one only, available for other writers who chose to
make mention of them; yet although seventeen authors,
beside Cæsar, did so, not one of them can be shown to have
availed himself of the rival sources, nor to hint that there
were druids outside Gaul and Britain.
But it will be asked whether it is conceivable that druids
could be of Keltic origin, and yet confined to certain of the
Kelts and not the common property of them all. I think
myself that it is not only conceivable that this should be so,
but that it would be very astonishing if it were otherwise.
The original Keltic province was the enormous tract between
Switzerland and Hungary in which the La Tène culture was
consolidated, and the people therein, although united by the
bond of a common language and a common art, were far
from being a homogeneous race. In the period of expan-
sion of these Keltic-speaking folk, who were sprung from
¹ See, for instance, MacCulloch, Religion of the Ancient Celts,
P. 297.
202
THE DRUIDS
mixed racial stocks, it is clear that there was a probability
of a rapid divergence in customs as the various separate
communities spread abroad; and this not only in virtue of
the varying tendencies in each party that were due to a
lack of racial homogeneity, but also because of the new and
varying influences to which each party was subject. In view
of this potential disintegration of Keltic unity, it would be
expecting too much of this people to demand universal
identity in the organisation of their religion, and we can
readily understand how the easy progress from the stage of
the divine king to the stage wherein there was a distinct
priesthood should have been achieved at different times and
in different ways by the various sections of the Kelts.
There is nothing for it, therefore, but to allow common
sense one of its rare victories by declaring our opinion that
the complicated and powerful druidic priesthood in Gaul
must have been of Keltic origin. And I repeat the simplest
and most effective reason in favour of this opinion, namely,
that the Gauls in one of the proudest moments of their
history would never have tolerated, nor welcomed, the im-
position of a foreign priestly caste able so thoroughly to
dominate both their civil and religious life.
But doctrines and theology are another matter, and we
must now consider the possibility of Keltic borrowings here.
It has been argued, for example, that there is much in druid-
ism, as known to us in the pages of the classical authors,
that is opposed to Aryan or indogermanic sentiment. A
great deal has been written upon the subject, but for my
part, I am inclined to treat it cursorily and declare that I
do not know a single item of druidic belief that was not
also known to one or another of the indogermanic peoples.¹
¹ Human sacrifice, of course, will not do; and the best example
I know is the doctrine of the redemption of one life by another.
Dr. Pokorny (loc. cit.) adds that traces of cannibalism, matriarchy,
and the couvade in legend and folklore are additional signs of the
non-indogermanic religion in the British Isles from which druidism
is derived. As a matter of fact, they are all three open to objections
(see the discussion following the paper), but even if Dr. Pokorny
were right and they do represent a pre-Keltic religion, what of it?
No one disputes that there was a pre-Keltic religion. We do not
ORIGIN
203
The problem is difficult to discuss except at considerable
length, since parallel customs are sometimes open to the
rebuke that they followed, instead of preceded, the intro-
duction of the same custom into the indogermanic world by
the druids. But I feel very strongly that we do not know
enough about primitive indogermanic thought to enable us
to announce of any of the doctrines fully accepted by the
Kelts of Gaul and Britain, as were all the druidic doctrines,
that it was foreign to primitive Keltic sentiment, and so
must have been taken over by them from a non-Keltic
folk. Moreover, if it was foreign to the sentiment of the
Kelts, why should they, being the then lords of western
Europe, accept it?
In what we have left us recorded of druidism, wrote
Professor MacBain,¹ there is absolutely nothing that can be
pointed to as non-Aryan. And he went on to say that the
strong priestly caste, divided off from the nobles and the
commons, can be paralleled in the Hinduism of India with
its rigid caste of Brahmans, who monopolised all religious
rites. Further, the human sacrifices of the druids can be
matched, in some degree, by actual instances of such, or by
rites which pointed to them as previously existent, among
other Aryan nations, including those of Greece and Rome;
while the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul is a
tenet of both Brahmans and Buddhists of Aryan India, and
found its classical development in the views of Pythagoras.
There is not, therefore, much encouragement for enquiry
on these lines, and the time has come to attempt another
method of approach. But I should be false to the aim of
this book if I attempted to disguise the nature of this other
method, and I will say at once that it is merely a hypothetical
reconstruction of events based on the little knowledge of the
period that we have won. Rational reconstruction is a
pretty name for the process; but I fear that guesswork is
another.
know that these items were included in druidism, and the point is, is
there anything in druidism that must come from the pre-Keltic
faith?
1 Celtic Mythology and Religion, Stirling, 1917.
204
THE DRUIDS
Let us reconsider for a moment the picture of prehistoric
Gaul and Britain that was presented to us in the second
chapter. It was shown that in the Bronze Age, although
we could identify various provinces in this great area, there
was a general cultural unity achieved during a long period of
relatively unadventurous prosperity. And the chief lesson
of archæology is that there existed extraordinarily intimate
trade-relations throughout the whole area of the three
provinces of Gaul and the British Isles. Now, among such
primitive societies we can reasonably suppose that the re-
ligion of one group must have been very nearly identical
with that of its neighbours, and it is likely, therefore, that
there would arise between those areas most intimately con-
nected by the traffic of commerce a consciousness of unity
in religious ideas. We can speak, therefore, of prehistoric
provinces of religious unity.
One province would be western Gaul, Ireland, and
western and south-western England. But a more impor-
tant one was northern Gaul and south-eastern and eastern
England. The cultural unity here goes right back to the
Stone Age, for the districts together formed the "Flint-
culture" that still lasted on in the Bronze Age, and the
common religious bond was, therefore, one of high antiquity.
In the Bronze Age itself, the Gaulish portion of this
province was affected by the Ligurian and the East German
cultures, but the English portion was concerned to a much
lesser degree. And also at the beginning of the Iron Age
England was relatively more secluded from the new influences
that were changing the face of Continental civilisation.
Britain, therefore (and here I may speak for the western
province too), was better enabled to maintain its ancient
faith in an unaltered form, and as intercourse within the
provinces was uninterrupted, it would automatically tend
to acquire on the Continent a religious distinction because
of its advantages in this respect. Moreover, we must add
something on the score of native enterprise in an island, to
which the prodigious development of the stone circles in
the Stone and Bronze Ages bears witness.
Then the Kelts arrived in Eastern and North-Eastern
ORIGIN
205
France. They were not merely raiders; they settled in their
new homes and became identified with the land itself; and
a great and special development of their La Tène civilisation
was achieved in the Marne area. Therefore, whatever may
have happened in the first conflict between native and
Keltic religion, the result seems plain: in the end there was
one pantheon and one faith.
Now, I have already given (p. 70) what I think is a very
remarkable instance in this Marne area of the preservation
of artistic tradition lasting from the Stone Ages through
the Keltic period into the centuries of Roman rule; and
I suggested, and I now repeat, that there is an equal
probability of the persistence of native religious tradition.
Therefore, after the passing of a few generations of the
first La Tène culture here the inhabitants would be as
much conscious of the native faith of the land as they
would be of the superposed elements of Keltic belief, if
these differed, as I see no reason to suppose they did, in
any notable way from the tenets of the local system. In
a word, Keltic faith in the Marne area would be built upon
native faith.
Then followed the invasion of England. But the Kelts
who crossed to our shores were not the wanderers who had
come from the Alpine lands into Northern France; on the
contrary, they were simply the Keltic-speaking descendants
of these wanderers and the native Marne population. The
advent into England of these mixed Keltic-Marne folk,
therefore, would merely bring them into contact with what
was recognised as the ancient faith of the Marne area in its
unaltered form. The newcomers settled in England, and
I venture to think they would unhesitatingly incorporate
the native faith in their own, thus adding the authority of
conquerors to a religion already celebrated as the purest
source of the native element included in their own belief.
Centuries passed, Keltic blood was thinning in the native/
veins, the antique religion still possessed the province,
and the fame of Britain as the scene of its purest worship
persisted. Small wonder, then, that when Cæsar asked
the origin of Gallic faith or druidism, he was answered
206
THE DRUIDS
Disciplina in Britannia reperta atque inde in Galliam trans-
lata existimatur.
But here is talk of the origin of druidism without a word
of the druids themselves! How and when did they make
their appearance? If I had any reason to suppose I could
answer that question to my own, or to anybody else's,
complete satisfaction, I would print what I have to say in
red ink. As it is, I have nothing to offer but another
hypothesis.
One method of finding out the origin of this priesthood
is to seek the condition most favourable for its formation,
and that is the line of enquiry I propose to follow. As I
see it, there are two main factors controlling this condition,
the first being peace, and the second example. That is to
say, the Kelts would not normally be likely to evolve a
priesthood in times of movement, war, or acute national
emergency; but they would be likely to do so whenever,
as a settled and peaceful society, they found themselves
confronted with an efficient organised clergy of another and
more highly civilised people.
The first thing to consider, then, is whether there is a
probability that their priesthood was evolved in the old
Keltic home in the Alp lands and Central Europe before the
expansion period. One requirement is filled here, for the
origin of the La Tène or Keltic civilisation is one of slow
measured growth from Hallstatt beginnings, betokening
a period of long and tranquil prosperity; and the second
factor is not by any means a negligible quantity, for Greece
was already in contact with the Keltic world in the 5th
century B.C., so that some of the Kelts may therefore have
been acquainted with the priest-idea. But I imagine that
only the southern fringe of the Keltic folk would be appreci-
ably affected by such influence. I conclude that in the
early stage of Keltic history, although the conception of a
priest and his function may have been familiar to some at
any rate of them, yet the generality of the Kelts had not
organised a priestly caste of their own at the time when
they were still concentrated within their ancient home.
Now, of all the Keltic-speaking peoples who set forth
ORIGIN
207
on the great wanderings that eventually carried the La Tène
culture from Scotland to Asia Minor, those who were soonest
settled in their new territories were the first Keltic invaders
of France and Italy. But of these, the French Kelts were,
so far as we know, undisputed lords of the land they occupied,
while the Italian Kelts, when at length they attempted to
consolidate themselves in the northern plain, were perpet-
ually engaged in the struggle to defend their precarious foot-
hold against the jealous rivals pressing upon them from the
south and east. Moreover, the French Kelts were soon
familiar with a very high form of Greek corporate life, that
of the colony of Massilia; whereas nearly all that their
Italian neighbours saw of higher civilisation was the battle
array of Etruscans and Carthaginians. From this I con-
clude that opportunity, both as regards a settled life and
conspicuous example, favoured the development of a priestly
caste, the druidic hierarchy in other words, in Gaul.
It is no help to any hypothesis to pack it with corro-
borative detail, and although there is more that I should
like to say here, I am content, if I have made my principal
reasons clear, to say at once that I believe that the druids,
as Keltic priests, originated in Gaul, and, therefore, that the
druidic system was not common to all the Kelts. But by
this I do not mean that the Kelts in Gaul specifically re-
organised their society with the intention of creating a new
caste of new officials; on the contrary, I believe that the
double opportunity of settled life and of example merely
completed a gradual process inherent in this social life, a
process whereby the functions of political chief and priest,
hitherto united, became henceforward dissociated and rele-
gated to separate individuals. The new priests, therefore,
were new only in virtue of their specialised functions, so
that they were invested, even at the period of their origin,
with an ancient authority. Like the princes they too
were the heirs of primitive patriarchal dynasties. There-
fore, although we may say that the hierarchy was first of
all established as late as the 4th, or even the 3rd, century
B.C., the druids of the Kelts held in Greek eyes offices of
high antiquity. What the druids now performed, Keltic
208
THE DRUIDS
kings had performed before them. And that is why so
late a date for the origin of this clergy is consistent with
their renown in the Greek world as early as 200 B.C.
This has led to what I hope will be the chief feature
of this chapter, namely, the discovery that the origin of
druidism and the origin of the druids are different events
due to different causes. Druidism in Gaul is Keltic religion
after its consolidation in the Gallic settlements and after
the amalgamation with native faith that took place therein;
druidism in Britain is the inclusion in this Kelticised native
faith of an autochthonous British religion that was in itself
an unaltered expression of the Continental native element
in druidism. Druidism, therefore, may properly be said
to be Keltic, but it is only Keltic in as much as it is a
welding under a new Keltic influence of the older Gallo-
British religious unity.
On the other hand, the druids, as an organised hier-
archy, were only subsequent Keltic servants of the Kelti-
cised native faith in Gaul, a separate and accidental
phenomenon of Gallic (not British) druidism.
Now let us try to understand the significance of this
distinction. At the time when the druidic clergy was formed
in Gaul, the mixed Keltic-native faith, i.e. druidism, was
already established; and in virtue of its partly (and I
myself believe chiefly) indigenous character, it could only
have been regarded as the universal religion of the land.
Therefore, there is nothing surprising in that its newly-
professed ministers ultimately attained to an extraordinary
degree of authority; nor is it remarkable that the priests
should have taken advantage of the fact that a common
religion lessened the significance of Keltic tribal divisions
in the eyes of the merely Kelticised natives and their descen-
dants, for they were thereby enabled to organise their
system on an intertribal basis, and thus to secure for them-
selves, at any rate by the time of Cæsar, an undisputed
control of the religious, as well as much of the civil, affairs
of Keltic Gaul.
But the druids had not always dominated druidism.
And at the time of the first Kelticisation of Britain, the time,
ORIGIN
209
that is to say, of the introduction of druidism into this
country, I do not suppose that the migrating Keltic-speaking
folk knew anything at all about the druids. Nor do I think
that the rise of the druidic class in Gaul meant that hence-
forward British druidism was either administered by the
Gallic college of druids, or controlled by an organisation of
its own modelled on similar lines. As I read the evidence,
I see no sign whatever of a corporate body of druids in this
country; but on the contrary, a definite suggestion that the
ritual of druidism in this island was always in the hands of
those who had hitherto exercised the priestly functions,
namely, the chieftains and kings. There would no doubt be
minor changes; Gallic druids are said to have come to
Britain for instruction in the original dogma of the island,
and it is possible that the word druid would be introduced;
more than that, it is possible that groups of British elders,
who had constituted themselves the special repositories of
the prized native lore, might call themselves by that name.
But, for all that, there seems to have been no attempt at
the inter-tribal organisation of a British clergy, and what-
ever tendency there may have been towards the formation
of an effective national priesthood was abruptly terminated
by the shattering blows of the Belgic occupation and the
coming of the Romans. And thenceforward those who
called themselves druids were only the magicians and sooth-
sayers of a fugitive and desperate people.
It will be seen, then, that there may have been places
of druidical worship in Britain, although the worship and
sacrifices performed there were not conducted by druids in
the Gallic sense of an organised and distinct priesthood.
And for want of evidence to the contrary, therefore, I am
disposed to dispossess the "ancient druids" of Britain in
favour of the tribal leaders. That is to say, although I
agree that the present temple at Stonehenge is druidic, in the
sense that it was consecrated to druidism, I am not prepared
to grant that the worship there was conducted by the white-
robed druids of our accustomed imagining. The priests at
Stonehenge were more probably the temporal rulers and the
lesser chieftains of the great plain upon which it stands.
14
210
THE DRUIDS
To revert once more to the question of the megaliths.
Druidism, in Britain, if the name is to mean anything at
all, is a form of religion not older than the Kelticisation of
this island, and, accordingly, no temple site, be it stone
circle or what not, can be fairly called druidic unless there
is a probability that its use was continued after this Keltic-
isation. The present Stonehenge, I believe myself, was
built during the dominion of druidism, but even this much
will be challenged by most archæologists of to-day; and, as
regards the stone circles, I freely admit it is quite beyond
my power, and I suspect anyone else's, to prove for any one
of them that it was still used as a temple after druidism
was established. I can only say that, for my part, I think
it is highly probable that some of them were so used, and
that to this small extent popular opinion may be justified.
But we must perforce rest content with this probability,
without over-emphasising it or excluding it.
As for Ireland, it seems to me that the Kelticisation
here is of sufficiently late date to make it probable that the
branch of the Keltic-speaking folk responsible, and it was
a branch quite distinct from those who had already crossed
to England, may have already known something, before
this migration, of the organised priestly caste in Gaul. It
is reasonable, therefore, that although we should properly
think of the introduction of druidism into Ireland in the
terms of its introduction into England, that is as the com-
pletion of the Kelticisation of native religion in that pro-
vince which included Gaul, South-Western England, and
perhaps Wales and Ireland, yet we should add the differ-
ence that the Kelts in Ireland may have attempted to impose
some kind of clergy upon the ancient faith. It seems likely,
however, that the druidic caste in Ireland was never any-
thing but a very faint reflection of the Gallic system, and
one that speedily became isolated and degenerate. On these
grounds, it is just a little more probable that some circle-
sites in Ireland might truly have been places of worship of
the ancient druids, though I would observe with all my
force that the same uncertainty is present, and the same
precaution necessary in adopting such a view.
ORIGIN
211
And now I have done. I have dealt perhaps unsym-
pathetically with theories of the origin of druidism that
have won popular and academic approval, and instead I
have been able to offer nothing better than what I know
to be surmise. But I have written according to my lights.
Long ago a young German scholar, Esaias Pufendorf, wrote
a book on the same subject as this, and he begged the
indulgence" of those who are distinguished for superior
sagacity in antiquarian investigation" if he fell into error,
because, he said, his way was difficult "by reason of the
unrelieved darkness with which on various sides we are
beset." Nearly three hundred years have passed, the lamps
of many scholars have been turned upon these blank walls
of obscurity, but still we are groping feebly and uncertain
in the gloom. I repeat his plea. And I conclude in his
words: "Now, if anyone votes in favour of these views we
object not, nor do we object if he black-balls them, seeing
that it is doubtful whether they can be confirmed by trust-
worthy evidence. And so here end our brief dissertation
upon the druids." 1
¹ Edmund Goldschmid's translation of E. Pufendorf's Dissertation
on the Druids, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 61.
APPENDIX
PASSAGES RELATING TO THE DRUIDS AND DRUIDISM
IN THE WORKS OF GREEK AND LATIN AUTHORS
OF WHICH ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS ARE GIVEN IN
CHAPTER III
DIOGENES LAERTIUS. Vita, Intro. I
τὸ τῆς φιλοσοφίας ἔργον ἔνιοί φασιν ἀπὸ βαρβάρων ἄρξαι. γεγενῆσθαι
γὰρ παρὰ μὲν Πέρσαις Μάγους, παρὰ δὲ Βαβυλωνίοις ἢ Ασσυρίοις Χαλ-
δαίους, καὶ Γυμνοσοφιστὰς παρ᾽ Ἰνδοῖς, παρά τε Κελτοῖς καὶ Γαλάταις
τοὺς καλουμένους Δρυίδας καὶ Σεμνοθέους, καθάφησιν ᾿Αριστοτέλης ἐν τῷ
Μαγικῷ καὶ Σωτίων ἐν τῷ εἰκοστῷ τρίτῳ τῆς Διαδοχής.
Vitæ, Intro. 5
οἱ δὲ φάσκοντες ἀπὸ βαρβάρων ἄρξαι φιλοσοφίαν καὶ τὸν τρόπον παρ'
ἑκάστοις αὐτῆς ἐκτίθενται· καὶ φασι τοὺς μὲν Γυμνοσοφιστὰς καί Δρυίδας
αἰνιγματωδῶς ἀποφθεγγομένους φιλοσοφῆσαι σέβειν θεοὺς καὶ μηδὲν κακὸν
δρᾶν καὶ ἀνδρείαν ἀσκεῖν.
CESAR. Be Bello Gallico, VI, 13
In omni Gallia eorum hominum qui aliquo sunt numero atque
honore genera sunt duo. Nam plebes paene servorum habetur loco,
quae nihil audet per se, nulli adhibetur consilio. . . . Sed de his
duobus generibus alterum est druidum, alterum equitum. Illi
rebus divinis intersunt, sacrificia publica ac privata procurant,
religiones interpretantur; ad hos magnus adulescentium numerus
disciplinae causa concurrit, magnoque hi sunt apud eos honore.
Nam fere de omnibus controversiis publicis privatisque constituunt,
et si quod est facinus admissum, si caedes facta, si de hereditate,
de finibus controversia est, idem decernunt, praemia poenasque
constituunt; si qui aut privatis aut populus eorum decreto non
stetit, sacrificiis interdicunt. Haec poena apud eos est gravissima.
Quibus ita est interdictum, hi numero impiorum ac scelera-
212
APPENDIX
213
torum habentur, his omnes decedunt, aditum sermonemque de-
fugiunt, ne quid ex contagione in commodi accipiant, neque iis
petentibus ius redditur neque honos ullus communicatur. His
autem omnibus druidibus praeest unus, qui summam inter eos
habet auctoritatem. Hoc mortuo aut si qui ex reliquis excellit
dignitate succedit, aut, si sunt plures pares, suffragio druidum, non-
numquam etiam armis de principatu contendunt. Hi certo anni
tempore in finibus Carnutum, quae regio totius Galliae media
habetur, considunt in loco consecrato. Huc omnes undique qui
controversias habent, conveniunt eorumque decretis iudiciisque
parent. Disciplina in Britannia reperta atque inde in Galliam
translata existimatur, et nunc qui diligentius eam rem cognoscere
volunt plerumque illo discendi causa proficiscuntur.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 14
Druides a bello abesse consuerunt neque tributa una cum reliquis
pendunt; militiae vacationem omniumque rerum habent immuni-
tatem. Tantis excitati praemiis et sua sponte multi in disciplinam
conveniunt et a parentibus propinquisque mittuntur. Magnum
ibix numerum versuum ediscere dicuntur. Itaque annos non nulli
vicenos in disciplina permanent. Neque fas esse existimant ea
litteris mandare, cum in reliquis fere rebus, publicis privatisque
rationibus, Graecis litteris utantur. Id mihi duabus de causis
instituisse videntur, quod neque in vulgus disciplinam effere velint
neque eos qui discant litteris confisos minus memoriae studere;
quod fere plerisque accidit ut praesidio litterarum diligentiam in
perdiscendo ac memoriam remittant. In primis hoc volunt per-
suadere, non interire animas, sed ab aliis post mortem transire ad
alios, atque hoc maxime ad virtutem excitari putant metu mortis
neglecto. Multa praeterea de sideribus atque eorum motu, de
mundi ac terrarum magnitudine, de rerum natura, de deorum
immortalium vi ac potestate disputant et iuventuti tradunt.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 16
Natio est omnis Gallorum admodum dedita religionibus, atque
ob eam causam qui sunt adfecti gravioribus morbis quique in proeliis
periculisque versantur aut pro victimis homines immolant aut se
immolaturos vovent, administrisque ad ea sacrificia druidibus
utuntur, quod, pro vita hominis nisi hominis vita reddatur,
non posse deorum immortalium numen placari arbitrantur, pub-
liceque eiusdem generis habent instituta sacrificia. Alii immani
214
THE DRUIDS
magnitudine simulacra habent, quorum contexta viminibus
membra vivis hominibus complent; quibus succensis circumventi
flamma exanimantur homines.¹ Supplicia eorum, qui in furto aut
in latrocinio aut aliqua noxia sint comprehensi, gratiora dis im-
mortalibus esse arbitrantur; sed, cum eius generis copia defecit,
etiam ad innocentium supplicia descendunt.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 18, 1
Galli se omnes ab Dito patre prognatus praedicant idque ab
druidibus proditum dicunt.
De Bello Gallico, VI, 21, 1
Germani multum ab hac consuetudine differunt. Namque
neque Druides habent, qui rebus divinis praesint, neque sacrificiis
student.
CICERO. De Divinatione, I, xli, 90
Eaque divinationum ratio ne in barbaris quidem gentibus
neglecta est, siquidem et in Gallia Druidae sunt, quibus ipse Divi-
tiacum Aeduum, hospitem tuum laudatoremque, cognovi, qui et
naturae rationem quam φυσιολογίαν Graeci appellant, notam esse
sibi profitebatur et partim auguriis, partim coniectura, quae essent
futura, dicebat.
DIODORUS SICULUS. Histories, V, 28, 6
Ενισχύει γὰρ παρ' αὐτοῖς ὁ Πυθαγόρου λογος, ὅτι τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν
ἀνθρώπων ἀθανάτους εἶναι συμβέβηκε, καὶ δι᾽ ἐτῶν, ὡρισμένων πάλιν βιοῦν
εἰς ἕτερον σῶμα τῆς ψυχῆς εἰσδυομένης.
V, 31, 2-5
εἰσὶ δὲ παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς καὶ ποιηταὶ μελῶν, οὓς βάρδους ὀνομάζουσιν. οὗτοι
δὲ μετ᾿ ὀργάνων ταῖς λύραις ὁμοίων ᾄδοντες οὓς μὲν ὑμνοῦσιν, οὓς δὲ
βλασφημοῦσι.
φιλόσοφοί τέ τινές εἰσι καὶ θεολόγοι περιττῶς τιμώμενοι, οὓς δρουίδας
ὀνομάζουσι. χρῶνται δὲ καὶ μάντεσιν, ἀποδοχῆς μεγάλης ἀξιοῦντες αὐτούς·
οὗτοι δὲ διά τε τῆς οἰωνοσκοπίας καὶ διὰ τῆς τῶν ἱερείων θυσίας τὰ μέλλοντα
προλέγουσι, καὶ πᾶν τὸ πλῆθος ἐχουσιν ὑπήκοον. μάλιστα δ᾽ ὅταν περί
τινων μεγάλων ἐπι σκέπτωνται, παράδοξον καὶ ἄπιστον ἔχουσι νόμιμον·
ἄνθρωπον γὰρ κατασπείσαντες τύπτουσι μαχαίρᾳ κατὰ τὸν ὑπὲρ τὸ διά-
APPENDIX
215
φραγμα τόπον, καὶ πεσόντος τοῦ πληγέντος ἐκ τῆς πτώσεως καὶ τοῦ
σπαραγμοῦ τῶν μελῶν, ἔτι δὲ τῆς τοῦ αἵματος ῥυσεως τὸ μέλλον νόοῦσι,
παλαιᾷ τινι καὶ πολυχρονίῳ παρατηρήσει περὶ τούτων πεπιστευκότες. ἔθος
δ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἐστι μηδένα θυσίαν ποιεῖν ἄνευ φιλοσόφου· διὰ γὰρ τῶν ἐμπείρων
τῆς θείας φύσεως ὡσπερεί τινων ὁμοφώνων τὰ χαριστήρια τοῖς θεοῖς φασι
δεῖν προσφέρειν, καὶ διὰ τούτων οἴονται δεῖν τάγαθὰ αἰτεῖσθαι. οὐ μόνον
δ᾽ ἔν ταῖς εἰρηνικαῖς χρείαις, ἀλλὰ καὶ κατὰ τοὺς πολέμους τούτοις μάλιστα
πείθονται καὶ τοῖς μελῳδοῦσι ποιηταῖς, οὐ μόνον οἱ φίλοι, ἀλλὰ καὶ οἱ
πολέμιοι· πολλάκις δ᾽ ἐν ταῖς παρατάξεσι πλησιαζόντων ἀλλήλοις τῶν
στρατοπέδων καὶ τοῖς ξίφεσιν ἀνατεταμένοις καὶ ταῖς λόγχαις προβεβλη-
μέναις, εἰς τὸ μέσον οὗτοι προελθόντες παύουσιν αὐτούς, ὥσπερ τινὰ θηρία
κατεπάσαντες. οὕτω καὶ παρὰ τοῖς ἀγριώτατοις βαρβάροις ὁ θυμὸς εἴκει
τῇ σοφίᾳ καὶ ὁ ᾿Αρης αἰδεῖται τὰς Μούσας.
STRABO. Geographica, IV, 4, c. 197, 4
παρὰ πᾶσι δ᾽ ὡς ἐπίπαν τρία φῦλα τῶν τιμωμένων διαφερόντως ἐστί,
βάρδοι τε καὶ οὐάτεις καὶ δρυίδαι· βάρδοὶ μὲν ὑμνηταὶ καὶ ποιηταί, οὐάτεις
δὲ ἱεροποιοὶ καὶ φυσιολόγοι, δρυίδαι δὲ πρὸς τῇ φυσιολογίᾳ καὶ τὴν ἠθικὴν
φιλοσοφίαν ἀσκοῦσι· δικαιότατοι δὲ νομίζονται καὶ διὰ τοῦτο πιστεύονται
τάς τε ἰδιωτικὰς κρίσεις καὶ τὰς κοινάς, ὥστε καὶ πολέμους διῄτων πρότερον
καὶ παρατάττεσθαι μέλλοντας ἔπαυον, τὰς δὲ φονικὰς δίκας μάλιστα τούτοις
ἐπετέτραπτο δικάζειν. ὅταν τε φορὰ τούτων ᾖ, φορὰν καὶ τῆς χώρας νομί-
ζουσιν ὑπάρχειν. ἀφθάρτους δὲ λέγουσι καὶ οὗτοι καὶ ἄλλοι τὰς ψυχὰς
καὶ τον κόσμον, ἐπικρατήσειν δέ ποτε καὶ πῦρ καὶ ὕδωρ.
Geographica, IV, 4, c. 198, 5
καὶ τούτων δ᾽ ἔπαυσαν αὐτοὺς Ῥωμαῖοι, καὶ τῶν κατὰ τὰς θυσίας καὶ
μαντείας ὑπεναντίων τοῖς παρ' ἡμῖν νομίμοις.
ἄνθρωπον γὰρ κατεσπεισμένον παίσαντες εἰς νῶτον μαχαίρᾳ ἐμαντεύοντο
ἐκ τοῦ σφαδασμοῦ. ἔθυον δὲ οὐκ ἄνευ δρυιδῶν. καὶ ἄλλα δὲ ἀνθρω-
ποθυσιῶν εἴδη λέγεται· καὶ γὰρ κατετόξευόν τινας καὶ ἀνεσταύρουν ἐν τοῖς
ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευάσαντες κολοσσὸν χόρτου καὶ ξύλων, ἐμβαλόντες εἰς
τοῦτον βοσκήματα καὶ θηρία παντοῖα καὶ ἀνθρώπους ὡλοκαύτουν.
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, XV, 9, 4
Drasidae memorant revera fuisse populi partem indigenam, sed
alios quoque ab insulis extimis confluxisse et tractibus trans-
rhenanis, crebritate bellorum et adluvione fervidi maris sedibus
suis expulsos.
216
THE DRUIDS
AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS, XV, 9, 8
Per haec loca hominibus paulatim excultis viguere studia
laudabilium doctrinarum, inchoata per bardos et euhagis et drasidas.
Et bardi quidem fortia virorum illustrium facta heroicis composita
versibus cum dulcibus lyrae modulis cantitarunt, euhages vero
scrutantes seriem et sublimia naturae pandere conabantur. Inter
eos dryaridae ingeniis celsiores, ut auctoritas Pythagorae decrevit,
sodaliciis adstricti consortiis, quaestionibus occultarum rerum
altarumque erecti sunt et depectantes humana pronuntiarunt
animas immortales.
SUETONIUS. Claudius, 25
Druidarum religionem apud Gallos dirae immanitatis et tantum
civibus sub Augusto interdictam penitus abolevit.
POMPONIUS MELA. De Situ Orbis, III, 2, 18 and 19
Manent vestigia feritatis iam abolitae, atque ut ab ultimis
caedibus temperant, ita nihilominus, ubi devotos altaribus admo-
vere, delibant. Habent tamen et facundiam suam, magistrosque
sapientiae druidas. Hi terrae mundique magnitudinem et for-
mam, motus caeli ac siderum, et quid dii velint scire profitentur.
Docent multa nobilissimos gentis clam et diu vicenis annis, aut in
specu aut in abditis saltibus. Unum ex his quae praecipiunt in
vulgus effluxit, videlicet ut forent ad bella meliores, aeternas esse
animas vitamque alteram ad Manes. Itaque cum mortuis cremant
ac defodiunt apta viventibus. Olim negotiorum ratio etiam et
exactio crediti deferebatur ad inferos: erantque qui se in rogos
suorum velut una victuri libenter immitterent.
LUCAN. Pharsalia, I, 450-8
Et vos barbaricos ritus moremque sinistrum
sacrorum, Druidae, positis repetistis ab armis.
solis nosse deos et caeli numina vobis
aut solis nescire datum: nemora alta remotis
incolitis lucis: vobis auctoribus umbrae
non tacitas Erebi sedes Ditisque profundi
pallida regna petunt: regit idem spiritus artus
orbe alio longae-canitis si cognita-vitae.
mors media est.
APPENDIX
217
PLINY. Nat. Hist., XVI, 249.
Nihil
Non est omittenda in hac re et Galliarum admiratio.
habent Druidae (ita suos appellant magos) visco et arbore, in qua
gignatur, si modo sit robur, sacratius. Iam per se roburum eligunt
lucos, nec ulla sacra sine earum fronde conficiunt, ut inde appellati
quoque interpretatione Graeca possint Druidae videri. Enimvero
quidquid adnascatur illis e caelo missum putant signumque esse
electae ab ipso deo arboris. Est autem id rarum admodum inventu
et repertum magna religione petitur et ante omnia sexta luna,
quae principia mensum annorumque his facit et saeculi post tri-
cesimum annum, quia iam virium abunde habeat nec sit sui dimidia.
Omnia sanantem appellant suo vocabulo. Sacrificio epulisque rite
sub arbore comparatis, duos admovent candidi coloris tauros,
quorum cornua tum primum vinciantur. Sacerdos candida veste
cultus arborem scandit, falce aurea demetit, candido id excipitur
sago. Tum deinde victimas immolant precantes, suum donum
deus prosperum faciat iis quibus dederit. Fecunditatem eo poto
dari cuicumque animalium sterili arbitrantur, contra venena
omnia esse remedio. Tanta gentium in rebus frivolis plerumque
religio est.
Nat. Hist., XXIV, 103-104
Similis herbae huic Sabinae est selago appellata. Legitur sine
ferro dextra manu per tunicam qua sinistra exuitur velut a furante
candida veste vestito pureque lautis nudis pedibus, sacro facto
prius quam legatur pane vinoque. Fertur in mappa nova. Hanc
contra perniciem omnem habendam prodidere Druidae Gallorum
et contra omnia oculorum vitia fumum eius prodesse Iidem samo-
lum herbam nominavere nascentem in umidis, et hanc sinistra
manu legi a ieiunis contra morbos suum boumque, nec respicere
legentem, nec alibi quam in canali deponere, ibique continere
poturis.
Nat. Hist., XXIX, 52
Praeterea est ovorum genus in magna fama Galliarum omissum
Graecis. Angues innumeri aestate convoluti salivis faucium
corporumque spumis artifici conplexu glomerant, anguinum ap-
pellatur. Druidae sibilis id dicunt in sublime iactari, sagoque
oportere intercipi ne tellurem attingat. Profugere raptorem equo,
serpentis enim insequi donec arceantur amnis alicuius interventu.
218
THE DRUIDS
Experimentum eius esse, si contra aquas fluitet vel auro vinctum.
Atque, ut est Magorum sollertis occultandis fraudibus sagax, certa
luna capiendum censent, tanquam congruere operationem eam ser-
pentium, humani sit arbitri. Vidi equidem id ovom mali orbiculati
modici magnitudine, crusta cartalaginis, velut acetabulis bracchi-
orum polypi crebris, insigne Druidis. Ad victorias litium ac regum
aditus mire laudatur, tantae vanitatis ut habentem id in lite in
sinu equitem Romanum e Vocontiis a divo Claudio principe inter-
emptum non ob aliud sciam.
PLINY. Nat. Hist., XXX, 13
Gallias utique possedit, et quidem ad nostram memoriam.
Namque Tiberi Caesaris principatus sustulit Druidas eorum et hoc
genus vatum medicorumque per senatus-consultum. Quid ego
haec commemorem in arte oceanum quoque transgressa et ad
naturae inane pervecta? Britannia hodieque eam attonita celebrat
tantis caerimoniis ut dedisse Persis videri possit. Adeo ista toto
mundo consensere quamquam discordi et sibi ignoto. Nec satis
aestimari potest quantum Romanis debeatur, qui sustulere monstra,
quibus hominem occidere religiosissimum erat, mandi vero etiam
saluberrimum.
TACITUS. Annals, XIV, 30
Stabat pro litore diversa acies, densa armis virisque, intercurs-
antibus feminis; in modum Furiarum veste ferali, crinibus deiectis
faces praeferebant; Druidaeque circum, preces diras sublatis ad
caelum manibus fundentes, novitate aspectus perculere militem, ut
quasi haerentibus membris immobile corpus vulneribus praeberent.
dein cohortationibus ducis et se ipsi stimulantes ne muliebre et
fanaticum agmen pavescerent, inferunt signa sternuntque obvios
et igni suo involvunt. praesidium posthac inpositum victis ex-
cisique luci saevis superstitionibus sacri : nam cruore captivo
adolere aras et hominum fibris consulere deos fas habebant.
Histories, IV, 54
Captam olim a Gallis urbem, sed integra Iovis sede mansisse
imperium fatali nunc igne signum caelestis irae datum et poses-
sionem rerum humanarum Transalpinis gentibus portendi super-
itione vana Druidae canebant.
APPENDIX
219
DION CHRYSOSTOM. Orations, XLIX (Teub., 1919, pp. 123, 124)
Πέρσαι μὲν οἶμαι τοὺς καλουμένους παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς μάγους . . . Αἰγύπτιοι
δὲ τοὺς ἱερέας . . . Ἰνδοὶ δὲ βραχμάνας .
Ἰνδοὶ δὲ βραχμᾶνας . . . Κελτοὶ δὲ οὓς ὀνομάζουσι
Δρυίδας, καὶ τούτους περὶ μαντικὴν ὄντας καὶ τὴν ἄλλην σοφίαν. ὧν ἄνευ
τοῖς βασιλεῦσιν οὐδὲν ἐξῆν πράττειν οὐδὲ βουλεύεσθαι, ὥστε τὸ μὲν ἀληθὲς
ἐκείνους ἄρχειν, τοὺς δὲ βασιλέας αὐτῶν ὑπηρέτας καὶ διακόνους γίγνεσθαι
τῆς γνώμης ἐν θρόνοις χρυσοῖς καθημένους καὶ οἰκίας μεγάλας οἰκοῦντας καὶ
πολυτελῶς εὐωχουμένους.
LAMPRIDIUS. Alex. Severus, LIX, 5
Mulier Dryas eunti exclamavit Gallico sermone, "Vadas, nec
victoriam speres, nec te militi tuo credas."
VOPISCUS. Numerianus, XIV
Cum (inquit) Diocletianus apud Tungros in Gallia quadam in
caupona moraretur, in minoribus adhuc locis militans, et cum
dryde quadam muliere rationem convictus sui cotidiani faceret,
at illa diceret, "Diocletiane, nimium avarus, nimium parcus es."
Ioco non serio Diocletianus respondisse fertur, "Tunc ero largus,
quum imperator fuero.” Post quod verbum dryas dixisse fertur,
Diocletiane, iocari noli: nam imperator eris cum Aprum occi-
64
deris."
Aurelianus, XLIII, 4 and 5
Dicebat enim, quodam tempore Aurelianum Gallicanas consul-
uisse druidas, sciscitantem utrum apud eius posteros imperium
permaneret: tum illas respondisse dixit nullius clarius in republica
nomen quam Claudii posterorum futurum. Et est quidem iam
Constantius imperator eiusdem vir sanguinis, cuius puto posteros
ad eam gloriam quae a dryadibus praenuntiata sit, pervenire.
AUSONIUS. Commen. professorum, IV, 7-10
Tu Baiocassi stirpe Druidarum satus,
Si fama non fallit fidem,
Beleni sacratum ducis e templo genus,
Et inde vobis nomina.
220
THE DRUIDS
AUSONIUS. Commen. professorum, X, 22-30
Nec reticebo senem
Nomine Phoebicium,
Qui Beleni aedituus
Nil opis inde tulit;
Set tamen, ut placitum,
Stirpe satus Druidum
Gentis Aremoricae,
Burdigalae cathedram
Nati opera obtinuit.
NENNIUS. Historia Britonum, 40
Et postea rex ad se invitavit magos suos, ut quid faceret, ab
eis interrogaret.
HIPPOLYTUS. Philosophumena (Refutatio Omnium Haeresium),
I, xxv
Δρυίδαι οἱ ἐν Κελτοῖς τῇ Πυθαγορείῳ φιλοσοφίᾳ κατ᾿ ἄκρον ἐγκύψαντες,
αἰτίου αὐτοῖς γενομένου ταύτης τῆς ἀσκήσεως Ζαμόλξιδος δούλου Πυθαγόρου,
γένει θρακίου· ὅς μετὰ τὴν Πυθαγόρου τελευτὴν ἐκεῖ χωρήσας αἴτιος τούτοις
ταύτης τῆς φιλοσοφίας ἐγένετο. τούτοις Κελτοὶ ὡς προφήτας καὶ προ-
γνωστικοὺς δοξάζουσιν, διὰ τὸ ἐκ ψήφων καὶ ἀριθμῶν Πυθαγορικῇ τέχνῃ
προαγορεύειν αὐτοῖς τινα, ἧς καὶ αὐτῆς τέχνης τὰς ἐφόδους οὐ σιωπήσομεν
ἐπεὶ καὶ ἐκ τούτων τινὲς αἱρέσεις παρεισάγειν ἐτόλμησαν. χρῶνται δὲ
δρυίδαι καὶ μαγείαις.
CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. Stromata, I, xv, 70, 1
᾿Αλέξανδρος δὲ ἐν τῷ Περὶ Πυθαγορικῶν συμβόλων Ζαράτῳ τῷ ᾿Ασσυρίῳ
μαθητεῦσαι ἱστορεῖ τὸν Πυθαγόραν . . . ἀκηκοέναι τε πρὸς τούτοις Γαλατῶν
καὶ Βραχμάνων τὸν Πυθαγόραν βούλεται.
Stromata, I, xv, 71, 3
φιλοσοφία τοίνυν πολυωφελές τε χρῆμα πάλαι μὲν ἧκμασε παρὰ βαρ-
βάροις κατὰ τὰ ἔθνη διαλάμψασα, ὕστερον δὲ καὶ εἰς Ἕλληνας κατῆλθεν.
προέστησαν δ' αὐτῆς Αἰγυπτίων τε οἱ προφῆται καὶ ᾿Ασσυρίων οἱ Χαλδαίοι
καὶ Γαλατῶν οἱ Δρυίδαι καὶ Σαμαναῖοι Βάκτρον καὶ Κελτῶν οἱ φιλοσοφή-
σαντες καὶ Περσῶν οἱ Μάγοι . .
APPENDIX
221
VALERIUS MAXIMUS, II, 6, 10
Horum moenia egressis vetus ille mos Gallorum ocurrit, quos
memoria proditum est pecunias mutuas, quae his apud inferos
redderentur, dare, quia persuasum habuerint animas hominum
immortales esse. Dicerem stultos, nisi idem bracati sensissent,
quod palliatus Pythagoras credidit.
1
ADDISON, Joseph, 24.
Edui, 80, 10I.
Ægean, 58.
Agricola, 92.
Alderney, 139.
Alexander Polyhistor, 106.
Alföldi, Prof. Andreas, 43.
All Cannings Cross, 46.
Allcroft, Hadrian, 158.
Amber, 68.
Ambrosius, Aurelius, 4, 5.
INDEX
Ammianus Marcellinus, 84, 215, 216.
Ampurias, 62.
Anderson, Dr. Joseph, 3, 180, 181.
Anglesey, 31, 91, 92, 96, 140, 147, 199.
Anwyl, Sir E., viii, 122.
Appian, 134.
Aquitani, 49, 50.
Arbow Low, 184, 188.
Aristotle, 74, 212.
Armstrong, E. C. R., 48.
Arnold, Matthew, 28, 29.
Art, tradition in, 71, 72.
Bede, Venerable, 16.
Belas Knap, 165, 167.
Belgæ, 50.
Beltain, 129, 130, 131.
Bertholet, A., IIO.
Best, Elsdon, 147.
Black, Dr. G. F., viii.
Blackmoor hoard, 37.
Blanc, Antoine, 26.
Boadicea, 5, 96, 121, 140, 147.
Boece, Hector, 192.
Bogoudonou hoard, 42.
Boii, 148.
Bolton, Edmund, 4, 8.
Bonduca, 22, 23, 26.
Bonsor, George, 60.
Borlase, William, 101, 127.
Borlase, W. C., 143.
Bosch Gimpera, P., 60, 62.
Bösel hoard, 37.
Boskeduan, 183.
Boudicca, 5 (and see Boadicea).
Asinius Pollo, 76.
Boxhorn, Marcus, 21.
Brehm, Bruno, 43.
Aubrey, John, frontispiece, 8-10, 15, 25, Brennus, 197, 198.
147, 180.
Aurelius, Victor, 87.
Breuil, 170.
Briod hoard, 37.
Ausonius, 15, 74, 97, 137, 138, 219, 220. Brown, Thomas, 25.
Autun, 80, 136, 149.
Avebury, 152, 186, 189.
Aventinus, 17, 18.
Avienus, 60.
Aylesford, 49.
BANDRUI, 97, 141.
Ban-fathi, 140.
Barckley, Sir R., 19.
Barclay, Alex., 17.
Bard, The, 26.
Bardism, 27-29.
Bards, 16, 27-29, 82, 83, 84, 133, 134,
135.
Bateman, Thomas, 184.
Beads, 57, 127.
Beakers, 160, 186.
Beaumont, F., 22.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 20.
Bryant, John, 12.
Brythonic speech, 54.
Buddug, 5 (and see Boadicea).
Burford Down, 174.
Bushmen, 115.
Casar, Julius, 76-79, 194-196, 212-214
(and passim).
Calendar, 115-120.
Cambry, J. de, 12, 157.
Camden, William, 5, 8, 9, 13, 14, 22,
126, 180.
Cannabalism, 202.
Caractacus, 26.
Carnutes, 77, 213.
Carpenter, Rhys, 61.
Carte, Sir Thomas, 25.
223
224
THE DRUIDS
Carthage, 58-60, 65, 69, 86.
Catigern, 13.
Cerridwen, 112.
Cerrig-y-Drudion, 9, 14.
Ceylon, 126.
Chalons, 66.
Diviners, 83-85, 96, 97, 133, 134, 140.
Divitiacus, 80, 81, 120, 132, 134.
Dottin, G., 52, 116.
Dovaidona, 100.
Dracontia, Io.
Dreux, 14, 15, 18.
36, 139, 145, 159-164, Druidesses, 95, 96, 140, 141.
Channel Islands,
171, 189.
Charleton, Dr., 7, 8.
Chartres, 14, 79.
Charun, 67.
Chislehurst Caves, I.
Chyndonax, 10, 20.
Cicero, 80, 134, 214.
Circles, stone, 173-193, 210.
Claudius, Decree of, 118.
Clement of Alexandria, 94, 105, 220.
Clifton, 180.
Cloughton, 178.
Cluverius, 21.
Cochin, J. M. F., 14, 18.
Coinage, 63, 107.
Coke, Thomas, 25.
Coligny Calendar, 54, 116-119.
Conybeare, J. W. E., 127.
Cormac, 14, 130, 144.
Cornford, F. M., 109.
Courier, P. L, 24.
Couvade, 202.
Crawford, O. G. S., 11, 14, 167.
Crichie, 181.
Cromm, Cruaich, 191.
Cúchulainn, III, 113.
Cunnington, Mrs., 150.
Cup-marks, 168, 169.
Cymbeline, 23.
Cyril of Alexandria, 105.
DALTON, J. P., 191.
Danby Rigg, 177.
D'Arbois de Jubainville, 16, 86.
Davies, Rev. E., 27.
De Baye, Marquis, 71, 72.
De Brebeuf, G., 13, 24.
De Coulanges, Fustel, 86.
De Ricci, Seymour, 116.
De Tontry, Picard, 19.
Déchelette, J., 59, 60, 62, 66, 187.
Delafosse, Maurice, 110.
Derwydd, 16, 28.
Diaper, William, 24.
Dickinson, Edmund, 22.
Diodorus Siculus, 82, 85, 98, 105, 113,
122, 133, 134, 148, 214-215.
Diogenes Laertius, 74, 75, 106, 212.
Dion Cassius, 121, 140, 147.
Dion Chrysostom, 93, 94, 98, 219.
Dis, 75, 113, 143.
Disc-barrows, 177.
Divi Imperatores, 85.
Druidism-doctrine of immortality, 104-
113; confused with Pythagoreanism,
105-110; theology, 113, 114, 142,
143; dogma, 114; philosophy, 114,
115; ritual, 121-131; idols, 143-145;
temples, 146-156.
Druidsbibliography, viii; folk-
memory of, 2; connected with mega-
lithic monuments, 3, 4, 15, 151, 156-
193; in place-names, 14; in litera-
ture, 15-27; etymology of name, 16;
in classical literature, 31, 74-98, 212-
221; first mention of, 75; Cæsar's
account of, 76-80; downfall of, 81;
suppression of, 85-87; organisation of,
76-98, 131-141; as teachers, 114, 120;
as philosophers, 115; as astronomers,
115-119; as diviners, 121; origin of,
194-210.
Dryades, 95, 96, 99, 141, 219.
Dryaridæ, 216.
Dryas, see Dryades.
Drysada, 87, 215, 216.
Dryw, 14.
Dugdale, Sir W., 180.
Duruy, V., 86.
EDWARDS, H. J., 77.
Egg, see Serpents' Egg.
Egypt, 32, 56, 57.
Eisler, Robert, 109.
Elgee, Frank, 124, 178.
Er Lanic, 139, 185, 186, 188.
Erme Valley, 174.
Eskdale, N.R. Yorks, 177.
Eskdale Moor, Cumberland, 178, 179,
180.
Eskimos, 115.
Esperandieu, E., 71, 117.
Etain, III.
Etruscans, 66, 207.
Euhages, 84.
Evans, Evan, 27.
Evelyn, John, 12.
Eyring, Elias, 22.
FAIENCE beads, 57.
Falconer, Judge, 80.
Fathi, 135.
Festivals, 129-131.
Filid, 135.
Fisher, J. A., 26.
Fletcher, J., 22.
INDEX
225
3/
Flint-Culture, 70, 204.
Flower, Robin, ix.
Foales Arrishes, 182.
Folk-memory, 2, 13.
Forcadel, E., 19.
Ford, 175.
Forrer, R., 154.
Fourdrignier, E., 169.
Holder, 135, 147.
Holmes, Dr. T. Rice, viii, 76, 81, 137,
149, 200.
Hottentots, 115.
Hübner, E., 102.
Huelva hoard, 37.
Huntingdon, Henry of, 4.
Frazer, Sir James, 110, 123, 125, 127, IDOLS, 143-145.
129, 130.
Frick, J. G., 25.
GADANT, René, 35, 66, 101.
Gaidoz, H., 103.
Galatæ, 51, 140.
Gale, Theophilus, 22.
Garden, Prof. James, 13, 192.
Gaul, Bronze Age provinces, 34, 35,
38; Hallstatt culture in, 39, 42; La
Tène culture in, 43, 50, 51;
Phoenician settlements in, 59; Greeks
in, 61-65; Roman occupation of, 69.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, 4-6, 19.
Germans, 50, 70, 197, 198.
Getæ, 107.
Gibson, E., 180.
Goidelic speech, 54.
Goldman, Dr., 16, 200.
Goldschmid, E., 21, 211.
Gorsedd, 27.
Gray, St. G., 186.
Gray, Thomas, 11, 26.
Greeks, 61-65, 107.
Greenhills, 48.
Grimm, Jacob, 148.
Gristhorpe, 124, 200.
Grove, 147.
Guenebauld, Jean, 20.
Guérande, 172.
Guernsey, 145, 159-164.
Gutuatri, 135-138.
Gwion, 112.
HALATTE, 70, 71.
Hall, Dr. H. R., 59.
Halliday, W. R., 126.
Hallstatt circles, 187, 188.
Hallstatt culture, 38, 64, 69.
Hanging Grimston, 176.
Hanno, 60.
Harpstedt pottery, 39.
Hawley, Colonel W., 153.
Healy, Dr. J., 191.
Herbert, Algernon, 27.
Herm, Isle of, 139.
Herodotus, 61, 107.
Himilco, 60.
Hippolytus, 94, 105, 220.
Hirtius, Aulus, 135, 137, 138.
Hobhouse, L. T., 114.
no
Immortality doctrine of, 104-113.
Ireland-La Tène invasion of, 46-48;
female diviners in, 96, 97; druidic
inscribed stone, 102, 103; doctrine
of metempsychcosis in, III; of re-
incarnation, 112, 113; druids and
druidism in, 16, 99, 102, 120, 130,
132, 135, 191, 199-201, 210.
Irenicus, Franciscus, 18.
Islands, as sacred places, 138-140.
JACKSON, Rev. J. E., 14.
Jacob, Henry, 22, 23.
James I., 7.
Jersey, 171.
Jones, H. L., 83.
Jones, Inigo, 7, 8, 13.
Joyce, P. W., 132.
Jullian, Camille, viii, ix, 16, 19, 75, 136,
138, 139, 194.
Justinus, 63, 65.
KEATING, Dr. Geoffrey, 130.
Keltæ, 50.
Kelts-expansion of, 43, 45, 51, 204,
205; as a racial type, 51; origin of,
52-54; language of, 52-56; relations
with Greeks, 64, 65; relations with
Etruscans, 66, 67, 68; religion of,
142, 143; and origin of druids and
druidism, 31, 194-210.
Kerhon hoard, 42.
Kermode, P. M. C., 100.
Keswick, stone circle, 179, 190.
Killeen Cormac, 102.
Kit's Coty House, 13, 166, 167.
Knox, Robert, 178.
Kuhn, J. C., 22.
LA BLANCHE PIERRE, 172.
Lägerlof, Peter, 22.
La Hougue Boëte, 171.
Lampridius, 94, 95, 96, 141, 219.
Langtoft, P., 4.
Larnaud hoard, 37.
La Tène period, 43-54, 69.
La Varde passage-grave, 162, 163.
Leacet Hill stone circle, 180.
Le Déhus passage-grave, 160, 163, 164.
Le Febure, Jean, 18.
Leflocq, Jules, 29.
15
226
THE DRUIDS
Leland, J., 19.
Le Trépied, 159, 160.
Lhuyd, Edward, 126, 127.
Liebermann, F., 98.
Ligurians, 35, 37, 68.
Livy, 138, 148.
Llwyd, Humphrey, 19.
Loeschcke, Prof. S., 148, 149.
Long Barrows, 165.
Long Meg and Her Daughters, 180.
Loth, J., 115, 135.
Lucan, 24, 88, 108, 113, 134, 138, 143,
144, 147, 216.
Lucian, 107.
Lukis, F. C., 161, 163.
Lukis, W. C., 183.
Lyons, 85, 116.
MACBAIN, Prof. A., viii, 203.
MacCulloch, Dr. J. A., viii, 91,
129,
133, 142, 201.
MacNeill, Prof. Eoin, 55, 117, 118.
Macpherson, James, 26.
Mag Slecht, 122, 123, 191.
Magi, 6, 97, 98.
Man, Isle of, 100.
Manchrie Moor, 180.
Mandingo, 110.
Maori, 121, 146, 147.
Margate, 41, 46.
Marne Culture, 45-50, 70, 71, 205.
Marne grottoes, 71.
Martin, Dom, 25.
Mason, William, 26.
Mosel, 22, 100, 149.
Much, Dr. R., 16, 200.
Mynydd Carn Llecharth, 173.
Myres, Prof. J. L., 59.
NAGAS, 121.
Nash, D. W., 29.
Neckham, Alexander, 4.
Nennius, 5, 6, 16, 97, 98, 220.
Neo-Druidism, 27.
Newell, W. W., 5.
Newlands, 178.
Nether Wallop, facing p. 42.
Nicholson, Bishop, 8.
Nicholson, E. W. B., 118.
Nilsson, N. M. P., 115.
Nine Maidens, 183.
Nutt, Alfred, III, 122.
OAK, 89, 123-125, 199, 200.
Odilienberg, 63, 154.
Orelli, J. C. von, 22, 100.
Orientation, celestial, 189.
Origen, 105.
Orphicism, 109.
Owen, N., 126, 127.
PARRY, J. J., 5.
Pausanias, 197.
Pelloutier, Simon, 25.
Pennant, Thomas, 127.
Penrith, 180.
Pentagram, 107.
Massilia, 61, 63, 64, 65, 68, 73, 75, 143, Pericot, Dr. Luis, 24.
Matriarchy, 202.
147, 207.
Matter, Hans, 5.
Mavilly altar, IOI.
Maximus of Tyre, 123, 125, 144.
Megalithic monuments, 3, 151, 156-193.
Meinard, François, 21.
Mela, Pomponius, 85, 86, 87, 108, 113,
132, 139, 216.
Menhirs, 144, 145, 172.
Merlin, 4-6, 19.
Mesopotamia, 32, 56, 57.
Metempsychosis, 108-112.
Meyer, Kuno, III.
Milton, John, 23, 24.
Mistletoe, 89, 90, 123-125.
Mongan, III.
Monmouth, Geoffrey of, 4-6, 19.
Montmorillon sculptures, 101.
Morgan, W. Ll., 175.
Morganwy, Iolo, 27.
Morris, Lewis, 27.
Morris-Jones, Sir J., 27.
Mortice, fish-tailed, 62.
Mortimer, J. R., 177.
Petit-Morin, 71.
Petrie, G., 102.
Philip, A., 118.
Philip of Macedon, 63, 107.
Phoenicians, 58-60.
Picard, Jean, 22.
Piroutet, M., 64.
Pinkerton, John, 12.
Pliny, 86, 88-91, 101, 113, 115, 117, 123,
125-128, 134, 147, 196, 217-218.
Plot, Dr. R., 9, 183.
Plutarch, 139, 140, 148.
Pokorny, Dr. J., 199, 200, 202.
Polybius, 66, 68, 148.
Polynesians, 115.
Port St. Mary, 100.-
Poseidonios, 98, 134, 139.
Prescelly, 152.
Priestesses, 96.
Pufendorf, E., 13, 21, 24, 2II.
Pugh, W. Owen, 27.
Pythagoreanism, 82, 84, 105-109, 115.
QUIGGIN, E. C., viii.
INDEX
227
200
173
RABELAIS, 18.
Ramsay, John, 130.
Reinach, Salomon, 102, 108, 139, 145.
Re-incarnation, 108-112.
Rhys, Sir John, 100.
Robert, Charles, 101.
Robinson, F. N., 122.
Rollright Stones, 183, 184.
Romantic Movement, 26, 29, 30.
Rose, Prof. H. J., ix, 98.
Rowland, Henry, 14, 25, 126.
Rushen, 100.
SACHEVERELL, William, 25.
Sacrifice, human, 121-123, 202.
St. Brigit, 140, 200.
St. Germain Museum, 71.
St. Germanus, 98.
St. Martin's, Guernsey, 145.
St. Patrick, 190, 191.
Salins, Jura, 64, 66.
Samhain, 129, 130, 131.
Sammes, Dr. Aylett, 8.
Samolus, 89,
Sayce, Prof. A. H., 57.
Schedius, E., 13, 21, 24, 147.
Schulten, Prof. A., 60.
Scilly, Isles of, 59-60.
Sein, Isle of, 138.
Selago, 89.
Semnotheoi, 75.
Senchus Mor, 147.
Serpents' Egg, 90, 125-128.
Seyer, S., 15.
Shakespeare, William, 23.
Skeat, W. W., 126.
Smith, John, II.
Smith, Thomas, 22.
Smith, W. G., 128.
Snyder, E. D., 26.
Solinus, 140.
Sotion of Alexandria, 50, 74, 75.
Sowerby, James, 127.
Stampfuss, R., 39.
Standing Stone Rigg, 178.
Stanton Drew, 14.
Statue-Menhir, 145.
Stephens, Thomas, 29.
Stock, St. G., 76.
Stoke Druid, 15.
Stokes, M., 102.
Stokes, Whitley, 119, 130, 190.
Stonehenge, 4-13, 150, 151-156, 209,
210.
Stow, J., 13.
Strabo, 83, 86, 98, 121, 133, 139, 215.
Stripple Stones, 183, 188, 191.
Stukeley, William, 9-12, 15, 26, 156,
180.
Suetonius, 76, 86, 216.
Swarling, 49.
TACITUS, 91, 92, 93, 94, 113, 121, 134,
139, 140, 143, 147, 198, 217.
Taillepied, Noel, 19.
Taliessin, III.
Tamblyn, W. F., 196.
Thurnam, John, 14, 124, 165.
Thurneysen, R., 16, 118.
Timagenes, 84, 105, 133.
Toland, John, 9, 12, 25.
Transmigration, 105-112.
Tre'r Dryw, 14.
Trevelyan, Mary, 126.
Treveri, 149.
Trêves, see Trier.
Trier, 148-150.
Tuack, 181.
Tuan Mac Cairill, III.
Turmaier, Johann, see Aventinus.
URN-FIELD people, 38, 39, 43, 52, 53, 69.
VALERIUS MAXIMUS, 106, 108, 221.
Vates, 83, 84, 96, 97, 133, 134.
Vendryes, J., 53.
Veneti, 68.
Vercingetorix, 81, 99.
Vergil, Polydore, 4.
Villanovans, 68.
Vopiscus, 94, 95, 96, 97, 133, 134.
Vortigern, 5, 6, 16, 98.
WALDE, A., 53, 54.
Webb, John, 8.
Welwyn, 49.
Westropp, T. J., 132.
Wheeler, R. E. Mortimer, 173, 190.
Whispering Knights, 184.
Williamson, Prof. W. C., 124.
Women, as priests, 96.
Women as soothsayers, 96, 97.
Wood, John, 12.
Woodhenge, 150, 151.
Worth, R. Hansford, 173.
Writing, 119, 120.
ZAMOLXIS, 105-107.
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