Druid Mysteries

by Philip Carr-Gomm

  Diodorus Siculus as early as 21 BC wrote that ‘the Pythagorean doctrine prevails among them [the Gauls, whose philosophers, he states, were the Druids] teaching that the souls of men are immortal and live again for a fixed number of years inhabited in another body’. Hippolytus in the second century AD wrote ‘The Keltic Druids applied themselves thoroughly to the Pythagorean 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 the opportunity of studying the system. And the Kelts believe in their Druids as seers and prophets because they can foretell certain events by the Pythagorean reckoning and calculations.’ Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century AD called the Druids ‘members of the intimate fellowship of the Pythagorean faith’. By this time mendicant Pythagorean ascetics were roaming the Greek-speaking world teaching their founder’s doctrines. Caesar had recorded over four hundred years previously that the Druids spoke and wrote in Greek, and it seems quite plausible that there was contact between Pythagoreans and Druids at various times during the period of classical Druidry. Nevertheless, some scholars believe there was no Pythagorean influence on Druid doctrines, and that the classical accounts are flawed. In addition, Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD succeeded in confusing the picture by claiming that Pythagoras had learned his doctrines from the Druids rather than vice versa.15

  However much Druidry was informed by the influences of Greece, Thrace and Egypt through the agency of Pythagoras or his followers, by the sixth century AD it had apparently ceased to exist. Whereas the occupying Romans had tolerated local religious practices in their vast empire, the new faith of Christianity would accept no rivals. Many people still believe that Druidry simply died out with the triumph of Christianity in Europe, while other people who have heard of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revival of interest in Druidism, often known as the period of ‘romantic revival’, ask, ‘Isn’t modern-day Druidry just an invention of the Romantics?’ As we shall see, though there has been much invention over the years, the tradition did not die and the wisdom was not lost. One of the main reasons for this lay in the fact that the Bards were accepted within the new Christian dispensation, while their tales, which conveyed so much of Druid wisdom were recorded by Christian clerics. This enabled the golden thread of the essential Druid mysteries to be passed on to our own age.

  THE BARDIC COLLEGES

  * * *

  Far from being outlawed with the coming of Christianity, the bardic schools continued to function in Ireland up until the seventeenth century, and in Scotland to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Professor Stuart Piggott, writing of one of the key moments of the revival period when a Druid ceremony convened by Welshman Iolo Morganwg was held atop London’s Primrose Hill in 1792, states that the eighteenth-century Welsh bards, ‘even if somewhat fallen on evil days by 1792, were not nonsense. In the Middle Ages, as with their counterparts in Ireland, they had formed part of the traditional Celtic hierarchy with genuine roots in the ancient past of the Celts and Druids.’16

  That such a continuity of tradition should exist is impressive, and there are still other ways that show us how Druidry survived the long journey of over a thousand years from the sixth to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  CHRISTIANITY CONTRIBUTES TO DRUIDRY’S SURVIVAL

  * * *

  Although Christianity ostensibly superseded Druidry, in reality it contributed to its survival, and ultimately to its revival after more than a millennium of obscurity. It did this in at least four ways: it continued to make use of certain old sacred sites, such as holy wells; it adopted the festivals and the associated folklore of the pagan calendar; it recorded the tales of the Bards, which encoded the oral teachings of the Druids; and it allowed some of the old gods to live in the memory of the people by co-opting them into the Church as saints. That Christianity provided the vehicle for Druidry’s survival is ironic, since the Church quite clearly did not intend this to be the case.

  Long before the Romans withdrew from their occupation of Britain in AD 410, Christian missionaries had come to its shores. Over the next three hundred years the population of the rest of the British Isles gradually converted to the new faith, which persecuted the old religion of the Druids with as much vigour as it dealt with any rival faith. The Druids in their turn were determined in their opposition to the new religion. Two of the Druids, in the king’s court at Tara in Ireland, prophesied ‘that a new way of life was about to arrive from overseas, with an unheard-of and burdensome teaching, which would overthrow kingdoms, kill kings who resisted it, banish all the works of their magic craft, and reign forever’.17

  Some believe that the Druids co-operated with the Christians when they arrived in Britain, but this seems to be a myth. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Christian clerics in Ireland fell in love with their pagan past and tried to paint a picture of a harmonious integration of Druidry and Christianity. But the earlier Christian writers of the seventh and eighth centuries describe Christianity and Druidry as highly antagonistic to each other. In the 1930s the writer Eleanor Merry cited a quotation supposedly from the sixth-century Bard Taliesin, in which he says: ‘Christ, the Word from the beginning, was from the beginning our Teacher, and we never lost his teaching. Christianity in Asia was a new thing, but there never was a time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrines.’18 Ever since then, this quotation has been used as proof that the Druids had similar ideas to the Christians and that, by extension, when the Christians arrived the Druids welcomed them with open arms. The trouble is that the quotation is almost certainly not authentic. There is no trace of it before Merry’s book.

  Although the Church attempted to wipe out all traces of Druid practice – destroying stone circles, building churches on sites sacred to the Druids – not all was lost. The bardic schools, where poetry, music, story and song were taught, became accepted within the new Christian dispensation, the old stories were written down and the ancient Brehon laws of Ireland, which developed out of the Celtic Druidic culture, were recorded by clerics. Pagan sites continued to attract pilgrimage and worship – the sacred wells of the Celtic goddess Brighid simply became the holy wells of Saint Brighid, for example. And Christians turned other pagan gods and goddesses into saints with extraordinary ease.

  CHRISTIANITY BUILDS ON PAGANISM

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  Christianity seems so substantial and solid, and fundamentalists believe that it is one body of teaching handed to them by God through the Bible. But once you study Christianity, you discover that it has modelled much of its ritual, mythology and structures on the pagan religions from which it evolved. The layout of churches comes from the design of classical pagan temples. The priests’ vestments are modelled on classical pagan vestments. Even the church calendar is founded on the pagan festival cycle. The Bible suggests that Jesus was born in the spring or autumn, when shepherds in Judaea watch their flocks. And yet we celebrate his birth at Christmas. Up until the fourth century Jesus’ birth was celebrated in May or September. Then it became the custom in Rome to celebrate it at the time of the winter solstice instead. And the same thing applies to many of the other Church festivals – Easter occurs around the spring equinox, Candlemas at Imbolc, the festival of Saint John is at the time of the summer solstice and All Hallows at the time of the pagan feast of Samhuinn.

  Even the Bible cannot be seen as a single body of teaching. It has been tampered with ever since it was first put together. Different translations offer different interpretations of key doctrines, and various Church councils have removed parts of the Bible they have disagreed with.

  Even though it is not found in the Bible, one of the cornerstones of Christianity is the doctrine of the Trinity, introduced by the Gaulish Bishop Saint Hilary of Poitiers in the third century. Some scholars suggest that the saint was inspired by the Druids, who still flourished in Hilary’s third-century Brittany and who organised their ideas in
triads and worshipped Goddesses grouped in threes.

  Christian baptism was modelled on the Jewish baptism, and according to Irish texts water was used for blessing by the Druids too, way before Christianity. And the mass – which is so central to Christian worship – was already an established feature of the classical pagan mystery traditions, as a sacred feast of bread and wine. Like their festival days, the design of their temples and vestments, and even their sacred sites and some of their saints, the communion feast as a central feature of Christian ritual is not original or unique to Christianity, but existed in paganism long before the arrival of the first Christians.

  THE VIRGIN BIRTH AND RESURRECTION

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  Accounts of the virgin birth and resurrection are found in the pre-Christian world. In the Middle East and Mediterranean basin, stories of virgin births, resurrections and sacrificed saviours were surprisingly common. In the myth of Dionysus, for example, his human mother Semele had an ‘immaculate conception’, being impregnated not by another human but by the father-god Zeus. Dionysus was born among the animals just as Christ was born in a manger, and was then crucified before descending into a world of darkness and then being reborn. A number of the religions of the Near East and the Mediterranean basin spoke of gods who died and were then reborn, Attis, Tammuz, Adonis and Osiris being among the best known.19

  The author Robert Graves suggests that the early Celtic Bards, knowing the many other stories of sacrificed gods, might have said to their early Church masters: ‘To pretend that [Jesus] was the first whom poets have ever celebrated as having performed these wonderful feats is, despite Saint Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or illiterate.’20

  All these similarities do not necessarily negate the power or value of Christianity, and it is important to distinguish between the teachings of Jesus and the institutions which have arisen to spread those teachings. Many of these institutions, with all the political and economic agendas that arise when organisations form, have borrowed, plagiarised, creatively incorporated or ruthlessly crushed many of the spiritual traditions and indigenous cultures they have met on their way. They have, sadly, been responsible for huge amounts of suffering – from the tortures of the Inquisition and the burning of heretics and witches to the bloodshed of the Crusades and countless religious wars. Nevertheless, none of these facts denies the comfort and guidance that so many people have gained from Jesus’ message.

  The power of that message, combined with the Church’s intolerance of paganism and its determination to succeed without competition, meant that from the sixth century onwards most people in Europe had become Christian, even though in remote rural areas this may have been no more than a nominal Christianity. Old habits die hard and even in the eleventh century the Church was still having to rail against ‘that most filthy habit’ of dressing up as stags.21

  AS OPEN PRACTICE DIES OUT, THE INSPIRATION LIVES ON

  * * *

  Despite the tenacity of similar customs throughout the British Isles and Ireland, and although the indigenous spirituality of Druidism had flourished openly for around a thousand years, it now had to survive another millennium in less obvious ways. The Bards were safely established as minstrels, poets and scribes under the new religion, and the Ovates, who were skilled in healing and prophecy, must have continued to practise their arts, though with more discretion and with a Christian gloss to their prayers. The Druids, once Christianity had triumphed over paganism either worked alone or converted to Christianity. Either way, they remained part of the professional élite – the scholars, lawyers, teachers and judges – and although the open practice of Druidism as a religion was extinguished, its ideas and inspiration lived on in the cultural and spiritual inheritance of successive generations, encoded in the old tales, in folklore and in the landscape itself.

  By the sixteenth century, however, Druidism had travelled across the bridge of a thousand years and was about to be reborn in the Western world.

  EXERCISE

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  Each of us carries a physical, genetic inheritance, and Druids believe we also carry a non-physical, spiritual inheritance which includes the combined experience of our previous lives. In the same way, a spiritual current such as Druidry has both physical transmissions of tradition and spiritual ones. If all books on Druidry and all its current practitioners were to be destroyed, it would still survive to appear again in some form at some time and in some place. Such things are hard for materialist historians to understand. Some psychologists and physicists might find it easier, with their knowledge of the workings of the collective unconscious and of such phenomena as ‘morphic resonance’. Things are never what they appear to be and communication can occur in non-physical ways.

  This understanding helps us to see that the Druid tradition did not die even when suppressed with the coming of Christianity, but has remained alive and has been transmitted through the centuries because Druidry, Druids and Druid practice are not simply physical. One of the most striking proofs of this lies in the experiences of isolated individuals who meet Druid teachers in their meditations or dreams. These teachers sometimes convey inspiration and practices which accord precisely with traditional Druid practice, even though the individuals concerned knew nothing of Druidry beforehand. In this way, the tree of Druidry grows from within – nourished from a supra-physical source.

  After reading this, spend a few moments forgetting all that you have read. Make yourself comfortable and allow yourself to come to a sense of inner centredness and calm. Close your eyes and feel all concerns fall away from you. Focus for a while on your breathing, and then slowly imagine that you are seated on the ground close to an ancient sacred site of the Druids. Touch the earth, smell the air and just let the land and this special place speak to you. You may get specific ideas or thoughts, or you may simply feel or see images. There is a saying in Druidry, ‘the Ancients wrote it in the earth’. Imagine you can read this ‘writing’ – hear it in the wind, feel it in the land. Listen to its messages, then, when you are ready, become aware of being fully yourself again. Feel full of vitality and strength. Become conscious of your physical body and surroundings, and when you feel ready, open your eyes. Do not stand up quickly – stretch a little before standing up or continuing with the next chapter.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  RENAISSANCE:

  THE REBIRTH OF DRUIDRY IN MODERN TIMES

  The Gods have returned to Eri and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains and blow the fires through the country. They have been seen by several in vision. They will awaken the magical instinct everywhere and the universal heart of the people will turn to the old Druidic beliefs.

  George Russell (‘AE’), in a letter to W. B. Yeats, 1896

  THE REBIRTH OF Druidry in the modern world can be traced to the time of the Renaissance, when the forgotten classical texts of Tacitus, Julius Caesar, Diogenes Laertius and others dealing with the Druids were rediscovered and eventually printed. By the sixteenth century virtually all of these texts were available to scholars.

  As the British, French and Germans became intrigued by their pre-Christian ancestry, the discovery of America revealed native people who seemed to be living in a way similar to that of their own ancestors, as described by these classical authors. Opinions about the nature of the Native Americans were divided: some saw them as bloodthirsty and living in ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death . . . [a life] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and shorte’.22 Others found that they ‘seem to live in that golden worlde of whiche the old writers speake so much . . . the golden worlde without toyle’. In 1584 Arthur Barlowe found the Virginian Indians ‘most gentle, loving and faithfull, void of all guile, and treason, and such as lived after the manner of the golden age’. A related opposition of views prevailed with regard to Druidry. Some saw the Druids as evil and primitive human sacrificers, while others saw them as peace-making sages and philosophers – presiding over a body of teachings as dignified as that
of the Greeks or the Brahmins.

  This polarisation of views continues to this day. Ask a friend what comes to mind when they think of Druids and some will tell you that they think of wise men, guardians of inner wisdom, while others will tell you that they think of virgins being sacrificed by Druids on the ‘slaughter stone’ of Stonehenge. These divergent views owe their origin to the reports of the classical authors themselves, who conveyed both images to our present-day minds.

  Despite this, in Germany and France the availability of the classical texts resulted in a vision of their pre-Roman past that was noble rather than savage. The deep-seated urge to honour one’s origins manifested itself in a patriotic pride in these countries, and from 1514 onwards, a series of eulogistic accounts of both Gaulish and German Druids appeared on the Continent.

  JOHN AUBREY

  * * *

  In Britain, it was another century before Druids became topics of popular interest. They appeared on stage for the first time in Fletcher’s Bonduca of 1618 and mention was made of Druids in works such as Drayton’s Polyolbion of 1622 and Milton’s Lycidas of 1637. Then, in the 1690s, the Druid Revival began in earnest when John Aubrey, the writer and antiquarian, turned his attention to the stone monuments of Wiltshire.

  Aubrey, having studied the classical references to Druidry, carried out pioneering fieldwork at the great monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge. Many of his contemporaries regarded them as of Roman or of later date, but Aubrey realised they were far more ancient and that they were ceremonial centres. He concluded that they were probably used by the Druids. He began work on a book, originally entitled Templa Druidum but later changed as its scope widened to Monumenta Britannica. Although only excerpts were ever published, the effect of his work was to forge an association between Stonehenge and the Druids which lives in the minds of most people to this day. In Chapter 2 we saw how the latest research makes this association perfectly legitimate. But as recently as the mid 1960s many academics deemed it spurious, prompting Stuart Piggott to write in The Druids: ‘In Aubrey’s tentative association of Stonehenge and other prehistoric stone circles with the Druids was the germ of an idea which was to run like lunatic wildfire through all popular and much learned thought, and particularly emotive feeling, until modern times.’