23.1: The Druids (Part One)

Druids were a part of ancient celtic culture—a series of kingdoms or empires that stretched through Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Britain, and Gaul—the region of modern France as well as parts of Belgium and Italy. The Celts were distinct in each region but also shared important cultural structures and practices as well as language. Part of the challenge of recovering the druids from the fog of history is that much of their knowledge was kept strictly within an oral tradition. The Celts were by no means illiterate and had a longstanding relationship with written language but they believed, and the druids in particular believed, in memorization. Eventually Celtic tales, history, and practices were recorded by Celts but this was largely after Christianization. Historians then have to rely on the word of outsiders—mostly Romans—to make sense of who the Celts and Druids were in ancient times. But these writers often had a highly skewed view of the Celts since they were their enemies and they sought to conquer and subdue the Celts just as the Celt sought to conquer and subdue them. The Celts, after all, pillaged Rome in 387 BCE and directly threatened the Senate. All that having been said, we can get a pretty interesting if not detailed picture of the Druids by looking at these outsider accounts and the later accounts of Celtic writers. Julius Caesar has been one such source, having written on the Celtic people he encountered during his military exploits. Those accounts reveal a class of people responsible for the intellectual life of one of the most interesting cultures in the history of the Western world. They were poets, historians, judges, and magicians.